WESTERN LIBERIA	113
prepared for disappointment.  It was the first time,
too, that I was not disappointed.
New Country
Coming into Riga three years before, I had
deceived myself into thinking I was on the verge of
a relationship with something new and lovely and
happy as the train came out from the Lithuanian
flats, where the peasants were ploughing in bathing-
slips, pushing the wooden plough through the stiff
dry earth, into the shining evening light beside the
Latvian river. I had left Berlin in the hard wooden
carriage at midnight; I hadn't slept and I'd eaten
nothing all day. There was a Polish Jew in the
carriage who had been turned out of Germany; he
couldn't speak any English and I could speak no
German, but a little stout Esthonian girl who had
been a servant in London could speak both. She was
an Esthonian patriot, she hadn't a good word for
Riga, she regarded the grey spires beyond the river
with firm peasant contempt.
And there was something decayed, Tarisian',
rather shocking in an old-fashioned way about the
place. One could see why someone so fresh and un-
spoiled was disgusted. The old bearded droshky
drivers and their bony haggard horses at the station
were like the illustrations to a very early translation
of Anna Karenina; they were like crude and foxed
wood engravings. They must have dated back to the
days when Riga was a pleasure resort for Grand
Dukes, a kind of aristocratic Brighton to which one
slipped away from a duchess's bed with someone