We were going farther and farther from San Francisco down a road that ran along the ocean. The day before we had been at the University of California. We had seen the professor of Russian literature, Mr. Alexander Kaun, and he, holding in his hands a book of Leo Tolstoy's stories in the Tatar language, told his students about the U.S.S.R. policy of nationalities, about the culture and development of the minority nations. Small, grey, and elegant, the professor interspersed his lecture with witticisms, while a hundred-odd students listened attentively to his speech about a distant land with a new and amazing tenor of life. We spent the evening in the professor's house on the shores of San Francisco Bay, near Berkeley. Mr. Kaun had invited about fifteen of his best students. The fireplace glowed, the young men and girls sat on the floor, chattered, cracked Chinese nuts. From the bookshelf loomed the bronze head of Maxim Gorky, made by Valeria Kaun from life, while her husband was working on Gorky's biography at Sorrento. One of the girls rose, went somewhere, and about ten minutes later returned, her hair wet and flowing, like a naiad's. She had been swimming in the bay. In a large wooden box in the kitchen slept six newborn puppies. The professor would go there frequently and, his hands folded touchingly, look at the puppies. Then we went to the shore of the bay, and, under the light of the moon, wandered along the sandy beach. The

young men arranged themselves in a circle and sang several student songs in chorus. They began by rendering their fighting song, "Our Sturdy Golden Bear," directed against Stanford students, sworn enemies of the University of California in the football field. The students of the University of California call themselves "Bears." Having sung their fill (they sang quite tunefully but rather weakly—the voice of one Molokan could have drowned them all out), they told us that a student eighty-four years old was enrolled at the University of California. He is moved not merely by an extraordinary love of knowledge. There is still another consideration. Long long ago, when this exceedingly old student was a youth, he received a bequest from an uncle. According to the literal meaning of the will, the beneficiary might utilize the income from the enormous capital so long as he did not graduate from the University. After that the inheritance was to pass to charity. Thus the businessman uncle wanted to kill two rabbits with one shot—give his nephew an education and placate before God his sins, which were inescapably connected with rapid enrichment. But the nephew proved to be no less a businessman than his uncle. He enrolled at the University and ever since then he has been listed as a student, enjoying the income from the capital. This outrage has been going on now for sixty-five years, and the departed businessman of an uncle still cannot move from Hades to Paradise. In a word, an amusing incident in the history of the University of California.

All of that was yesterday. But today, blown by the ocean wind, we raced down the length of the Golden State toward Los Angeles. Passing the town of Monterey, we saw near one wooden house a memorable sign: "Here lived Robert Louis Stevenson during the second half of the year 1879." We drove on a road which was not only comfortable and beautiful, but even somewhat flamboyant. The bright bungalows and the palms, their leaves gleaming as if covered with green enamel, and the sky, so clear that any expectation of the flimsiest cloudlet upon it was patently absurd—all of it seemed like flaunting to us. Only the ocean thundered and rolled like an ill-mannered kinsman waxing boisterous during a birthday celebration in a respectable family.

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Adams, "you are driving through one of the few places in the United States where people retired from business live on their incomes. America is not France, where such people are met in every city. Americans almost never stop when they accumulate some previously agreed upon sum of money. They continue to acquire and to acquire more and more money. But occasionally you find some queer fellows who suddenly decide to retire. More often than not, they are not very rich people, because a rich man can arrange a little California all his own even in his New York house. California attracts because of its cheapness and its climate. Look, look! In these little houses which we are now passing live the petty rentiers. But not only rentiers live in California. Occasionally you find here representatives of a special human breed—American liberals. Gentlemen, our radical intellectuals are good, honest people. It would be foolish to think that America is all standardized and that it consists only of dollar-chasing, only of bridge games or poker. Please remember the young gentleman with whom we recently spent an evening."

The "young gentleman" was an old friend of Adams's who came of an aristocratic family. His parents were very wealthy. He received a splendid education, and ahead of him was an easy, refined life, without care or thought, with three automobiles, golf, a beautiful and devoted wife—in fact, everything that only wealth and descent from a pioneer family, whose ancestors had disembarked from the Mayflower several centuries ago, can secure in America. But he spurned it all.

We came to him late one evening (that was in a large industrial city). He had rented an apartment which consisted of one large room with a gas fireplace, a typewriter, and a telephone, and was almost without furniture. The host and his wife, a German communist, were pale in an un-American way. Theirs was the pallor of people whose working day is not regulated and too frequently goes beyond midnight, of people who have neither the time nor the money needed for indulgence in sports, of people who eat any old way, any old place and devote themselves completely to their chosen cause.

Convinced of the injustice of the capitalist order, the young man did not limit his reading to uplifting books, he drew the necessary inferences, and carried on to the bitter end—abandoned his rich papa and joined the Communist party. Now he is a party worker.

A half-hour after we came, another guest arrived. He was the secretary of the district committee of the party. There was not enough furniture, so our host sat on the floor. Before us were two typical representatives of American communism — a worker communist and an intellectual communist.

The secretary was a young man with high cheekbones who looked like any young Moscow communist. It seemed that the only thing lacking to complete the resemblance was a cap with a long peak that hangs over like a cornice. He was a dockworker, and at the moment was leading a strike of stevedores at the port.

"We have already lost several people. They were shot. But we'll fight to the bitter end," he said. "Last night the police tried to bring strike-breakers to the ships. They began to crowd our pickets, took their revolvers out, started firing. The police flooded the place where the fighting was going on with searchlights. Many workers were threatened with arrest. Then one of our fellows broke through to the searchlight and threw a rock into its lens. The searchlight was snuffed out. In the dark the workers managed to protect their positions and not let the strike-breakers through. It is hard to carry on this strike, because we do not have trade-union unity. While the stevedores strike, the sailors work! On our coast a strike goes on, but on the Atlantic coast there is no strike. Of course, the bosses take advantage of this and send their freight to the Atlantic ports. It costs them more, but at the moment money doesn't matter to them. They've got to break us. Nevertheless, we work hard to establish trade-union unity, and we hope for success."