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Updated: June 7, 2025
The walls and counters were of white grey-lined marble; polished mahogany desks and burnished brass railings glistened everywhere. Through waiting-rooms and offices he passed to his private office. It was a plain room, richly carpeted, soft leather chairs, a big table on which were only a few papers; a telephone stood on the right-hand side of the blotter.
At the same time no one could be sure of his affairs being settled out of hand unless he could get at the governor himself. Business hours were now over; the anxiety caused both by the delay in the rising of the Nile and by the advent of the comet had filled the waiting-rooms with more petitioners than usual.
The ticket-collector on duty at the entrance of the two waiting-rooms was a long way off, and could not hear them even if he understood English, which was improbable. There were so many other languages at this meeting-place of East and West which it was essential for him to comprehend. The room was absolutely bare; not so much as a dog could be concealed in it.
These railways, from all that could be seen, were doing much to improve the countries traversed, and extend a knowledge of English comforts; for it must always be borne in mind that the railway system, with its locomotives, carriages, waiting-rooms, commodious and cheap transit, and other matters, is essentially English.
We came at length to regard the door of the third-class refreshment room as "home," and to feel a thrill of joy when, in the course of our weary wanderings through far-off waiting-rooms and lost-luggage bureaus and lamp depots, we saw its old familiar handle shining in the distance, and knew that there, beside it, we should find our loved and lost one.
When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of a Mæcenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their objections, their control, then we get things that look like war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons. It was not always so?
It is a good thing we have Yosoji with us, for certainly we could never have discovered the name of the station for ourselves. We see a long scroll covered with Chinese characters, and other smaller scrolls ornamented in the same way, these are, of course, the name of the station and the inscriptions on various waiting-rooms, but they leave us none the wiser.
As one man the twoscore turned and ran for the broad street beyond the passenger station, were swallowed up in the gap between the express and baggage sheds and the passenger waiting-rooms, and could be heard shouting loudly beyond the high board fence a chorus of cheers that seemed to start near the main entrance and went travelling on the wings of the wind westward up the lively street.
Within this one-mile radius of the A.S.C. headquarters at the Base are some twenty military hospitals improvised out of hotels, gaming-houses, and railway waiting-rooms. For the Base is the great Clearing House for the sick and wounded, and its register of patients is a kind of barometer of the state of affairs at the Front.
Humanity is not in the vocabulary of our police of Russia when dealing with political suspects, so many of whom are entirely innocent persons who have proved themselves obnoxious to the corrupt bureaucracy. We had two hours to wait in Petrograd, locked in one of the waiting-rooms where we were at last given a hunk of bread and a piece of cold meat.
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