am-coloured
"woolly," a waterproof, and a wretched cheap collar of fur. Once she
never stepped out of her house but into a car. Now in weather-beaten
thin old boots she must tramp from place to place over the cobbles,
living in one room with her family, washes the clothes herself, scrubs
the floor, has no money. The women have won the unbounded admiration
of the British in Constantinople. For pluck these Russian women would
be hard to rival. But what a destiny! They spend their money, they
sell their jewels and rings, they sell their clothes, they take out
trays of chocolates to sell in the streets and shiver at the
street-corners; to feed their children they sell more clothes.
Hundreds of cases have been discovered in which the women are confined
to their rooms, having sold almost all their wearing apparel, and
having nothing in which to appear on the streets.
The refugee peasantry and working class are mostly confined in
barbed-wire internment camps outside the city, and guarded by
Sengalese. Twenty per cent get permission to go into the city each
day. The seventy or eighty thousand indigent Russians in
Constantinople belong mostly to the upper classes. Very many belong to
Petrograd society, and are people who fled to the Crimea and the
Caucasus, were caught up in the Deniken or Wrangel panic, and
transported hither. They are well-educated people, speaking English
and French, and well-read and accomplished. But how little are those
modern accomplishments when it comes to the elemental realities of
life. A beautiful young countess is employed in a bakery to sell
bread, and is lucky. An erstwhile lion and ex-general has a job in a
laundry. Pride intervenes only to stop them begging. How few are the
beggars! But you see the nicest of girls with pinched white faces
trying to sell _loukoum_. Even hard Scotsmen passing by are fain to
give them money and take nothing in return.
You see the strangest vendors--children standing at a street corner
trying to sell a blouse and a pair of boots, tatterdemalions trying to
dispose of unsaleable rags, ex-students with heaps of textbooks trying
to sell to those students who, despite everything, are still carrying
on.
When new boat-loads of refugees arrive, the street-selling is naturally
augmented by a more hopeful crowd, and it was possible to see one day
little bears with scarlet ribbons round their necks being offered for
sale on the pavement, tiny baby-bears
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