Knight Without Armour

PART II

Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill was born in 1880. He had five brothers and four sisters, and his father’s living yielded seven hundred a year. His mother died in 1881, having never quite got over her most recent contribution to the family, and the Reverend Wilson, left to keep house with ten children, wandered helplessly about his parish as if he were the last person on earth responsible for his own situation. He was a large, heavily-built man, with fat hands and a bald head; he did his job in a dull, conscientious way, and thrashed his elder children irregularly and without relish. He was an Evangelical and a Gladstonian Liberal; he disliked Dissent, had hated the Oxford Movement, and had a superstitious horror of Rome. It was his habit to preach hour-long sermons explaining the exact meaning of Greek and Hebrew words to a congregation largely composed of farm-labourers.

A widowed sister came to keep house for him in due course; her husband had been an army officer, accidentally killed in India in an age when few officers of either service ever died of anything more exciting than cirrhosis of the liver. Aunt Nellie never tired of boasting of her unique bereavement, and it was she who had principal charge of Ainsley. She had been a school teacher in earlier life, and along with two of his sisters the boy obtained from her a fairly complete grounding in reading, writing, simple arithmetic, and the sort of geography that consists in knowing what belongs to England. Barbara and Emily, fifteen months and two and a half years older than their brother respectively, had no aptitude for learning anything of any kind; Ainsley, even by the age of five, had far outstripped them. He was, indeed, a bright, fairly good-looking child—dark-eyed, dark-haired, well- moulded, but perhaps (Aunt Nellie thought, doubtfully) ‘a little foreign- looking.’

Timperleigh was a dull village in the midst of passable hunting country, and the Reverend Wilson, despite his small income, managed to hunt once a week during the season. It meant that the elder children could not be sent to a good school, but that did not trouble him. He hunted in the same joyless, downright manner as he preached and thrashed. Sometimes the hunt would meet in the rectory drive and the children would run about among the horses and dogs and have their heads patted by high-up gruff voiced men in scarlet coats. Ainsley liked this, but not quite so much as he enjoyed having tea in the kitchen with Cook. She was called Cook, but she was really only a good-natured person of middle age who, being also mentally deficient, had been willing for years to do all the rough work of the household in return for a miserably poor wage. Ainsley was fond of her, and the look of the large rectory kitchen, with the window-panes slowly changing from grey to black and the firelight flickering on all the pots and dish-covers, gave him a comfortable feeling that he was certain only Cook could share. And her talk seemed far more thrilling than any fairy-story; she had been born in Whitechapel, and she made Whitechapel seem a real place, full of real people and real if horrible happenings; whereas Capernaum, which his father talked about in Sunday sermons, and Gibraltar, which Aunt Nellie insisted belonged to England, were vague, shadowy, and impossible to believe in.

When Ainsley was seven, his father was killed in a hunting mishap. Aunt Nellie, behind a seemly grief, was again rather thrilled; next to being trampled to death on an Indian polo-ground, to die on the hunting-field was perhaps the most socially eligible of all earthly exits. The boy, quite frankly, felt no grief at all; he had had hardly anything to do with his father, having not yet attained the age of chastisement. Nor was he old enough to realise the problem presented by the existence of himself and his nine brothers and sisters. There was practically no money, not even an insurance; the family, in terms of hard cash, was scarcely better off than that of a deceased farm-labourer. Fortunately the Reverend Wilson had been one of as large a family as his own, and communication was soon and inevitably opened up with uncles and aunts, many far distant and some almost mythical. After long and peevish negotiations, the family was divided somehow or other amongst such relatives, until only the two youngest remained Then, in sheer desperation, a letter was written to Sir Henry Jergwin, whose wife had been Aunt Helen, and after whom the youngest Fothergill had been hopefully but so far fruitlessly named. Could Sir Henry do anything for Barbara, aged eight, and for Ainsley Jergwin, aged seven? The great man commanded the children to visit him at his London house; they were taken there by Aunt Nellie and solemnly exhibited. After a week he decided; he would have the boy, but not the girl. So Barbara, after further struggles, was pushed on to one of the other uncles, while Ainsley came to live at a big Victorian house in Bloomsbury already inhabited by his uncle, a secretary, a butler, a cook, a coachman, three maids, and a gardener.

Sir Henry, in fact, was tolerably rich. He had always cultivated influential friendships in the City, and he was also editor and proprietor of the Pioneer, a weekly paper of Liberal views. Sixty-three years of age, with a vigorous body, an alert mind, a mellow booming voice, and an impressively long and snow-white beard, he was almost as well known as he wished to be. He entertained; he was invited to speak at public dinners; he knew everybody; Garibaldi had stayed a night at his house; Gladstone had knighted him. Besides all this, his reputation as a man of letters stood high—and curiously high, for he had written nothing that could be considered really first-rate. Only, all along, he had had the knack of making the most of everything he did; even a very mediocre poem he had once composed had managed an entry into most of the anthologies. Somehow, too, he had got himself accepted as an authority on Elizabethan literature; he had edited the Hathaway edition of Shakespeare, and thousands of schoolchildren had fumbled over his glossaries. Surmounting and in addition to all else, the man was a character; should any big controversy arise in the Press, he was always asked for his opinion, and always, without fail, gave it. His views, though unexciting, stood for something that still existed in far greater proportions than the brilliant youngsters realised—a certain slow and measured solemnity that flowed in the bloodstream of every Englishman who had more than a thousand pounds in Consols.

Sir Henry had begotten no children; he took Ainsley in the spirit of a martyr bearing his cross, and in the same spirit engaged a German governess. This capable person added history and music to the list of things the boy was supposed to have been taught; later on a beginning was made with French and German. The great Sir Henry rarely saw either him or her; sometimes, however, Ainsley was conducted into the library ‘to see the books’ and to be called ‘my little man’ and smiled at. “These,” explained Sir Henry, on more than one such occasion, sweeping his arm towards the rows of shelves, “are my best friends, and some day you will find them your best friends also.” Ainsley was never quite certain whether this was a promise or a threat.

When he was twelve, Sir Henry sent him to Barrowhurst.

Barrowhurst was not a very old foundation; Liberal and Evangelical in tendency, it had several times entertained Sir Henry as its Speech Day guest of honour. Situated in wild moorland country, it provided a vast change from the atmosphere of governesses and Bloomsbury gardens. At first Ainsley revelled in the freedom suddenly offered him; for the first time in his life he could walk about on his own, read books of his own choosing, and make friends without the frosty surveillance of grown-ups. He did not, however, make many friends. He was rather shy and reserved in manner; amongst the school in general he was for a long time hardly known, and the masters did not care for him, because he soon displayed that worst sin of the schoolboy—an indisposition to fit into one or other of the accepted classifications. He was not exactly troublesome, and his work was always satisfactory; only, somehow or other, he was difficult to get on with; he was apt to ask questions which, though hardly impertinent, were awkwardly unanswerable; he wouldn’t respond, either, to the usual gambits of schoolmasterly approach. For some reason he hated games, yet he wasn’t by any means the too brainy, bookish youngster; on the contrary, he was physically strong and sturdily built, and soon became actually the best swimmer and gymnast the school had known for years.

There was another Fothergill at the school, of a different family, and Ainsley, to avoid mistakes, always signed his papers with a very large and distinguishable ‘A.J.’ This became such a characteristic that he began to be called ‘A.J.’ by his friends, and the initials finally became an accepted nickname.

In his third year he suddenly startled everybody by leading a minor rebellion. There was a master at the school named Smalljohn who had a system of discipline for which A.J. had gradually conceived an overmastering hatred. The system was this: Smalljohn stood in front of the class, gold watch in hand, and said, “If the boy who did so-and-so does not declare himself within twenty-five seconds, I shall give the whole form an hour’s detention.” One day, after confessing himself, under such threat of vicarious doom, the author of some trivial misdeed, A.J. calmly informed his fellows that it was the last time he ever intended to do such a thing. Couldn’t they see that the system was not only unfair but perfectly easy to break down if only they all tackled it the right way? And the right way was for no one ever to confess; let them put up with a few detentions—Smalljohn would soon get tired of it when he found his system no longer worked. There are a few Barrowhurst men who will still remember the quiet-voiced boy arguing his case with an emphasis all the more astonishing because it was the first case he had ever been known to argue.

He carried the others with him enthusiastically, and the next day came the test. He was whispering to a neighbour; Smalljohn heard and asked who it was. Silence. Then: “If the person who whispered does not confess within twenty-five seconds, the whole form will be detained for an hour.” Silence. “Fifteen seconds more….Ten seconds…Five…Very well, gentlemen, I will meet the form at half-past one in this room.”

After that afternoon’s detention Smalljohn announced: “I am sorry indeed that thirty-three of your number have had to suffer on behalf of a certain thirty-fourth person, whose identity, I may say, I very strongly suspect. I can assure him that I do not intend to let a coward escape, and I am therefore grieved to say that until he owns up I shall be compelled to repeat this detention every day.”

It was nearing the time of house-matches and detentions were more than usually tiresome. A.J. soon found his enemies active, and even his friends inclined to be cool. After the third detention he was, in fact, rather disgracefully bullied, and after the fourth he gave in and confessed. He had expected Smalljohn to be very stern, and was far more terrified to find him good-humoured. “Pangs of conscience, eh, Fothergill?” he queried, and A.J. replied: “No, sir.”

“No? That sounds rather defiant, doesn’t it?”

A.J. did not answer, and Smalljohn, instead of getting into a temper, positively beamed. “My dear Fothergill, I quite understand. You think my system’s unfair, don’t you?—I have heard mysterious rumours to that effect, anyhow. Well, my boy, I daresay you’re right. It is unfair. It makes you see how impossible it is for you to be a sneak and a coward—it brings out your better self—that better self which, for some perverse reason, you were endeavouring to stifle. To a boy who is really not half the bad fellow he tries to make out, my system is perhaps the unfairest thing in the world…Well, you have been punished, I doubt not—for apart from the still small voice, your comrades, I understand, have somewhat cogently expressed their disapproval. In the circumstances, then, I shall not punish you any further. And now stay and have some cocoa with me.”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” answered A.J. not very coherently, “I’m afraid I must go. I’ve got a letter ’to finish—”

“Oh, very well, then—some other evening. Goodnight.”

And the next morning Smalljohn, whose worst crime was that he thought he understood boys, recounted in the common-room how magnanimity had melted young Fothergill almost to tears—how with shaking voice the boy had declined the cocoa invitation and had asked to be allowed to go.

It had been A.J.’s first fight, and he fully realised that he had lost. What troubled him most was not Smalljohn’s victory but the attitude of his fellows; if they, had only stood with him, Smalljohn could have been defeated. Yet they called him a coward because in Rugby football, which he was compelled to play although he disliked it, he sometimes showed that he didn’t consider it worth while to get hurt. At the end of his third year the headmaster’s report summed him up, not too unreasonably, as: “A thoughtful boy, with many good qualities, but apt to be obstinate and self- opinionated. Is hardly getting out of Barrowhurst all he should.”

A.J. had two adventures at Barrowhurst altogether; the first was the Smalljohn affair, which was no more than a nine days’ wonder and certainly did not add to his popularity; but the second was in a different class: it established his fame on a suddenly Olympian basis, and passed, indeed, into the very stuff of Barrowhurst tradition. Two miles away from the school is the tunnel that carries the Scotch expresses under the Pennines. It is over three miles long, boring under the ridge from one watershed to another. A.J. walked through it one school half-holiday. Platelayers met him staggering out, half-deafened and half-suffocated, with eyes inflamed, soot-blackened face, and hands bleeding where he had groped his way along the tunnel wall. He was taken to the school in a cab, and had to spend a week in bed; after which he was thrashed by the headmaster. He gave no explanation of his escapade beyond the fact that he had wanted to discover what it would be like. He agreed that the experience had been thoroughly unpleasant.

A.J.’s fourth year was less troubled. He was in the sixth form by then, preparing for Cambridge, and was left to do pretty much as he liked. The tunnel affair had given him prestige of an intangible kind both with boys and masters, and he spent much of his time reading odd books on all kinds of subjects that form no part of a public-school curriculum. He cycled miles about the moorland countryside, picking up fossils and making rubbings of old brasses in churches; he also (and somehow quite incidentally) achieved an official Barrowhurst record by a long jump of twenty feet. His sixth-form status carried prefecture with it, and rather to everyone’s surprise he made an excellent prefect—straightforward, firm, and tolerant.

He went to Cambridge in the autumn of 1898; his rooms at St. John’s overlooked the river and the Backs, being among the best situated in the University. Sir Henry made him a fairly generous allowance, and began to hope that the boy might prove some good after all, despite the tepid reports from Barrowhurst. A.J. liked Cambridge, of course. He didn’t have to play games, there were no schoolmasters with their irritating systems, he could read his queer books, listen to string quartets, and wield a geologist’s hammer to his heart’s content. The only thing he seemed definitely disinclined for was the sort of work that would earn him a decent degree. Sir Henry encouraged him to join the Union, and he did so, though he never spoke. He made one or two close friends, and was well liked by those who knew him at all. (He was still called ’A.J.’—the nickname had followed him to Cambridge through the agency of Barrowhurst men.) Most of the vacations he spent in Bloomsbury; of late years he had seen less and less of his brothers and sisters, several of whom had emigrated. He also travelled abroad a little—just to the usual places in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

He had no particular adventures in Cambridge, and left no mark on university history unless it were by the foundation of a short-lived fencing club. He had picked up a certain skill with the foils in Germany; it was a typically odd sort of thing to capture his enthusiasm.

He took a mediocre pass degree in his third year and then wondered what on earth came next. Sir Henry was disappointed and made it very clear that he did not intend to support him any longer. A.J. fully agreed; he did not want to be supported; he would certainly find something to do of some kind or other, but he was completely vague about it, and there were so many jobs which, for one reason or another, were impossible. He did not care for the services; he had no vocation for the church; his degree was not good enough for school- mastering or for diplomacy or for the law. Clearly then, very little remained, and when, in the summer of 1901, he left Cambridge for good, it was understood that he was to become a journalist and that Sir Henry would ‘find him something.’ In August he went abroad for a month, and it was while he was doing the conventional Rhine tour that he received a typewritten letter signed ‘Philippa Warren’ and conveying the information that Sir Henry’s former secretary, a Mr. Watts, had died of pneumonia and that she had been appointed instead. He thought little of it, or of her, except to reflect that Sir Henry’s choice of a female secretary would probably be based on dignity rather than elegance. At the beginning of September he returned to London and found there was to be a big dinner-party on his first evening, which annoyed him slightly, as it meant he had to unpack everything in a hurry so as to dress. Sir Henry’s sister, a Mrs. Holdron, was hostess; she said—“Oh, Ainsley, will you take in Miss Warren?”—and he smiled agreement and tried vaguely to associate the name with any particular one of the dozen or so strangers to whom he had been perfunctorily and indistinctly introduced. He had completely forgotten the Philippa Warren who had written to him.

The reception room was on the first floor, overlooking the square, and all its windows were wide open and unshuttered to admit the soft breeze of a September night. He felt an arm slipped into his and guiding him rather than being guided through the plush-curtained archway into the long and rather gloomy corridor that led to the dining-room, Almost simultaneously they both made the same banal remark about the weather, whereupon she laughed and added, with a sort of crystal mockery: “I said it first, Mr. Fothergill.” He laughed back, but could not think of an answer.

In the dining-room that looked on to the typical brick-walled oblong garden of London houses, he glanced at her curiously. She was young, and full of a vitality that interested him. Her dark, roving eyes gave poise, and even beauty, to a face that might not otherwise have seemed noteworthy. Her nose was long and well-shaped, but her lips were perhaps too small and thin, just as her forehead looked too high. She certainly was not pretty. Not till half-way through the meal did he realise that she must be Sir Henry’s new secretary.

It was a distinguished gathering, in a small way—professors and professors’ wives, a Harley Street surgeon, a titled lawyer, journalists, a few M.P.’s—all, of course, dominated by the patriarchal figure of Sir Henry himself. He was now seventy-seven, broad- shouldered, straight-backed, with leonine head and flashing eye—a truly eminent Victorian who had survived, wonderfully preserved, into the new reign. He had long ago reached the age when people said that he ‘still’ did things. He still owned the Pioneer, which, after a stormy career in the ’sixties and ’seventies, had settled down, like Sir Henry himself, to an old age of ever-slightly-increasing respectability and ever-slightly-diminishing circulation.

The odd part of it (to A.J.) was the way Philippa Warren had suddenly fitted herself into Sir Henry’s scheme of things. She seemed already to take both him and his views equally for granted; she was at once casual and proprietary, like a guide displaying a museum piece; she realised quite simply that Sir Henry had become an institution and that visitors liked to hear him gossip in an intimate way about great names that were already in the history books. She would give him conversational cues, such as—’That’s rather what Matthew Arnold used to tell you, isn’t it, Sir Henry?’—or—’Sir Henry, I’m sure Mr. So-and-so would like to hear about your meeting with Thackeray.’ She rarely expressed opinions of her own, but she knew exactly, like a well-learned lesson, the precise attitude of Sir Henry towards every topic of the day. It was almost uncanny, and from the beginning A.J. found himself queerly fascinated. She had a clear, icy mind; she could compress her ideas into an epigram where others might have needed to employ a speech. On hearing about the Barrowhurst and Cambridge nickname she immediately called him ‘A.J.’ and expected him to call her ‘Philippa’; he was certain, from the first half-hour of the dinner-party, that they were destined for the most intimate of friendships.

After a week he was less positive, and after a month he was frankly puzzled and doubtful. He seemed so early to have reached an unsurmountable barrier; she would talk about anything and everything with the utterest frankness, yet somehow, after it all, he felt that it had no connection with getting to know her. Sir Henry, of course, never ceased to sing her praises. She was the model secretary; how he had ever managed so many years with that fellow Watts, he could hardly think. The scene in the library every morning at ten o’clock when Philippa arrived to begin work was almost touching. Sir Henry, stirred to a gallantry that had never been his in earlier days, would greet her with a benign smile, pat her shoulder and ask after her health, and, if he imagined or chose to imagine that she looked tired, would ring for a glass of sherry. And she on her side grudgingly yet somehow gratefully permitted time to be wasted on such courtesies.

A.J. agreed that she was marvellous. Her merely physical effect on the old man was remarkable; there came a sparkle into his eyes and a springiness into his walk that had not been seen since the first Jubiles. A.J. judged, too, that she did other things; Sir Henry’s occasional articles in the Press (writing was one of those things he ‘still’ did) became more frequent, more varied, and—if that were possible—more characteristic of him than ever. Once A.J. glanced over her shoulder when she was working; she was preparing notes, she said, for some centenary article on Elizabethan literature that Sir Henry had promised to write. In neat, verbless phrases she had selected just the material he would need—’Marlowe in his worst moments grandiloquent and turgid’—’Fairy Queen a monument of literary atavism’—’Titus Andronicus probably not Shakespeare’s’—and so on. Sir Henry did the rest, and how well he did it, too, and with what a sublime flavour of personality! A.J. kept the article when it appeared, underlining such sentences as—’I do not think it can be denied that in his less happy moments Marlowe was occasionally guilty of a certain grandiloquence of phraseology—almost, I might say, turgidity’—’I cannot but think that the Faerie Queene, regarded from a strictly literary viewpoint, is in some sense atavistic’—and—’I have yet to discover any arguments that would lead me to suppose that Titus Andronicus was, in its entirety, a work by the master-hand that penned Lear and Othello.’

A.J. was kept fairly busy during the years that followed. Sir Henry got him reviewing jobs on the Comet and other papers, besides which he wrote occasionally for the Pioneer and was also understood to be at work upon a novel. But the plain truth soon became apparent that he was no good at all as a journalist. He was too conscientious, if anything; he read too carefully before he reviewed, and he gave his opinions too downrightly—he had none of Sir Henry’s skill in praising with faint damns. Nor had he the necessary journalistic flair for manufacturing an attitude at a moment’s notice; he would say ‘I don’t know’ or ’I have no opinion’ far oftener than was permissible in Fleet Street. He even, after several years, gave up his projected novel for the excellent but ignominious reason that he could not make up his mind what it was to be about. But for the fact that Sir Henry was behind him, his journalistic career would hardly have lasted very long. Aitchison, the Comet editor, could never use more than a fraction of the stuff he sent in, though personally he liked the youth well enough and was sorry to see him slaving away at tasks for which he had so little aptitude.

Meanwhile, at the Bloomsbury house, A.J.’s friendship with Philippa continued and perhaps a little progressed. Gradually and at first imperceptibly a warmer feeling uprose on his side, but there was nothing tumultuous in it; indeed, he chaffed himself in secret for indulging something so mild and purposeless. He had certainly nothing to hope for; apart from his own lack of prospects, she had so often, in the course of their talks, conveyed how little she cared for men and for the conventional woman’s career of marriage and home life. Nor, for that matter, had A.J. any particularly domestic dreams. In a way, that was why she attracted him so much; she was so unlike the usual type of girl who fussed and expected to be fussed over.

Then suddenly something quite astonishing happened. It was rather like the Smalljohn episode at Barrowhurst; it occurred so sharply and unexpectedly, and to the completest surprise of those who thought that A.J. was, if anything, too sober a fellow. Philippa, he discovered, was an ardent supporter of the woman’s suffrage movement, though, in deference to Sir Henry’s views on the matter, she kept her ardours out of the house. She was not a militant, but Sir Henry made no distinctions of such a kind; he was genuinely and comprehensively indignant over the burnings, picture-slashings, and other outrages of which the newspapers were full. Philippa realised how hopeless it was to convert him, while as for A.J., she probably did not consider his support even worth the trouble of securing. Yet, without effort, it was secured. A.J., in fact, dashed into the movement with an enthusiasm which even his greatest friends considered rather fatuous; there was no stopping him; he went to meetings, walked in processions, and wasted hours of his time writing propagandist articles which Aitchison turned down with ever-increasing acerbity. He really was caught up in a whirl of passionate indignation, and neither Sir Henry’s anger nor Philippa’s indifference could check the surge of that emotion.

The whole thing ended in quite a ridiculous fiasco; he got himself arrested for attacking a policeman who was trying to arrest a suffragette who had just thrown a can of paint into a cabinet minister’s motor-car. The magistrate seemed glad to have a man to be severe with; he gave A.J. seven days, without the option of a fine, and, of course, the case was prominently reported in all the papers.

At Brixton jail A.J. thought at first he would hunger-strike, but he soon perceived that hunger-striking during a seven-days’ sentence could not be very effective; the authorities would merely let him do it. He therefore took the prison food and spent most of his time in rather miserable perplexity. He had, he began to realise, made a complete ass of himself.

When he was discharged at the end of the week he hoped and rather expected that Philippa, at any rate, would have some word of sympathy for him. Instead of that, she greeted him very frigidly. “What an extraordinary thing to do!” was all she commented. Sir Henry was far from frigid; he was as furious as a man of eighty dare permit himself to be. He had A.J. in the library for over an hour telling him what he thought. A.J. must clear out—that was the general gist of the discourse; Sir Henry would no longer permit their names to be connected in any way. If A.J. chose to emigrate (which seemed the best solution of the problem), Sir Henry would give him a hundred pounds as a final expression of regard—but it was to be definitely final—no pathetic letters begging for more. A.J. said: “You needn’t fear that, anyhow.” In the midst of the rather unpleasant discussion, Philippa entered the library, fresh and charming as usual, whereupon Sir Henry, his mood changing in an instant, remarked: “Perhaps, my dear, we had better tell Ainsley our piece of news.”

She barely nodded and Sir Henry went on, more severely as he turned to A.J.—“Philippa has done me the honour of promising to be my wife.”

A.J. stared speechlessly at them both. He saw the green-shaded desk-lamp spinning round before his eyes and the expanse of bookshelves dissolving into a multi-coloured haze. Then he felt himself going hot, shamefully hot; he managed to stammer: “I—I must—congratulate you—both.”

Philippa was not looking at him.

His eyes kept wandering from one to the other of them; she was so beautiful, he perceived now, and Sir Henry, with all his sprightliness, was so monstrously old. He had never noticed before how hideous were those rolls of fat between his chin and his neck, and how he very slightly slobbered over his sibilants.

“Yes, I congratulate you,” he repeated.

He went out for lunch, paced up and down in Regent’s Park during the afternoon, and spent the evening at a restaurant and a music-hall. Towards midnight he went to the Comet office and asked to see Aitchison. Aitchison, a hard-bitten Scotsman of sixty, smiled rather cynically when A.J. suggested being sent abroad as a foreign correspondent; he guessed the reason, and personally thought it not at all a bad idea that A.J. should live down his notoriety abroad. There was, of course, no moral stigma attached to a seven-day sentence for trying to rescue a suffragette, but the boy had made a fool of himself and one can be laughed out of a profession as well as drummed out. The foreign correspondent notion, however, was hopeless; A.J. would be as useless, journalistically, abroad as at home. Aitchison knew all this well enough, and when A.J. further went on to suggest being sent out to the Far East to report the Russo-Japanese War which had just begun, he laughed outright. It was impossible, he answered; jobs like that required experience, and A.J. possessed none; reporting a war wasn’t like writing a highbrow middle about the stained-glass at Chartres. Besides, it would all be far too expensive; the Comet wasn’t a wealthy paper and probably wouldn’t have a correspondent of its own at all. To which A.J. replied that, as for money, he had a little himself and was so anxious to try his luck that he would willingly spend it in travelling out East if the Comet would give him credentials as its correspondent and take anything he sent that was acceptable. Aitchison thought this over and quickly reached the conclusion that it was an ideal arrangement—for the Comet. It was, to begin with, a way of getting rid of A.J., and it was also a way by which the Comet could obtain all the kudos of having a war-correspondent without the disagreeable necessity of footing the bill for his expenses—though, of course, if A.J. did send them anything good the Comet would be delighted to pay for it. And in haste less A.J. should see any flaw in this most admirable scheme, Aitchison accepted, adding: “Naturally you’ll bear in mind the policy of this paper—we don’t much care for the Russians, you know. Not much use you sending us stuff we can’t print, especially when it’ll cost you God knows how much a word to cable.”

A.J. left for Siberia at the beginning of April. Sir Henry declined either to approve or to disapprove of the arrangement; all he made clear was that A.J. could not expect any more chances, and that, if he wanted the hundred pounds, he must go abroad as one of the prime conditions. Siberia was undoubtedly abroad; its prospects for the emigrant were A.J.’s affair entirely. During the last week of hectic preparation that preceded the departure A.J. saw rather little of the old man, and the final good-byes both with him and with Philippa were very formal.

No one saw him off at Charing Cross, and he felt positive relief when, a couple of hours later, the boat swung out of Dover Harbour and he saw England fading into the mist of a spring morning. Two days afterwards he was in Berlin; and two days after that in Moscow. There he caught the Trans-Siberian express and began the ten-days’ train journey to Irkutsk.

The train was comfortable but crowded, and most of the way he studied a Russian grammar and phrase-book. Every mile that increased his distance from London added to a certain bitter zest that he felt; whatever was to happen, success or failure, was sure to be preferable to book-reviewing in Bloomsbury. His trouble had always been to know what to write about, and surely a war must solve such a problem for him. It was an adventure, anyway, to be rolling eastward over the Siberian plains. He met no fellow-countryman till he reached Irkutsk, where several other newspaper-correspondents were waiting to cross Lake Baikal. They were all much older men than he was, and most of them spoke Russian fluently. They seemed surprised and somewhat amused that such a youngster had been sent out by the Comet, and A.J., scenting the attitude of superiority, preferred the companionship of a young Italian who represented a Milan news agency. The two conversed together in bad French almost throughout the crossing of the lake in the ice-breaker. It was an impressive journey; the mountains loomed up on all sides like steel-grey phantoms, and the clear atmosphere was full of a queer other-world melancholy. Barellini, the Italian, gave A.J. his full life-history, which included a passionate love-affair with a wealthy Russian woman in Rome. A.J. listened tranquilly, watching the ice spurt from the bow of the ship and shiver into glittering fragments; the sun was going down; already there was an Arctic chill in the air. Barellini then talked of Russian women in general, and of that touch of the East which mingled with their Western blood and made them, he said, beyond doubt’ the most fascinating women in the world. He quoted Shakespeare—’Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where she most satisfies’—Cleopatra, that was—Shakespeare could never have said such a thing about any Western woman. “But I suppose you prefer your English women?” he queried, with an inquisitiveness far too childlike to be resented. A.J. answered that his acquaintance with the sex was far too small for him to attempt comparisons. “Perhaps, then, you do not care for any women very much?” persisted Barellini, and quoted Anatole France—’De toutes les aberrations sexuelles, la plus singuličre, c’est la chasteté.’ “For thousands of years,” he added, “people have been trying to say the really brilliant and final thing about sex—and there it is!”

Barellini was very useful when they reached the train at the further side of the lake. There was a curious and rather likeable spontaneity about him that enabled him to do things without a thought of personal dignity (which, in fact, he neither needed nor possessed), and when he found the train already full of a shouting and screaming mob, he merely flung himself into the midst of it, shouted and screamed like the rest, and managed in the end to secure two seats in a third-class coach. He had no concealments and no embarrassments; his excitableness, his determination, his inquisitiveness, his everlasting talk about women, were all purified, some-how, by the essential naturalness that lay behind them all. The train was full of soldiers, with whom he soon became friendly, playing cards with them sometimes and telling stories, probably very gross, that convulsed them with laughter. The soldiers were very polite and gave up the best places to A.J. and the Italian; they also made tea for them and brought them food from the station buffets. When A.J. saw the English correspondents bawling from first-class compartments to station officials who took little notice of them, he realised how much more fortunate he had been himself The hours slipped by very pleasantly; as he sat silent in his corner- seat listening to continual chatter which he did not understand and watching the strange monotonous landscape through the window, he began to feel a patient and rather comfortable resignation such as a grown-up feels with a party of children. The soldiers laughed and were noisy in just the sharp, instant way that children have; they had also the child’s unwavering heartlessness. One of them in the next coach fell on to the line as he was larking about, and all his companions roared with laughter, even though they could see he was badly injured.

Harbin was reached after a week’s slow travelling from Irkutsk. At first sight it seemed the unpleasantest town in the world; its streets were deep in mud; its best hotel (in which Barellini obtained accommodation) was both villainous and expensive; and its inhabitants seemed to consist of all the worst ruffians of China and Siberia. Many of them were, in fact, ex-convicts. A.J. was glad to set out the next day for Mukden, in which he expected to have to make his headquarters for some time. The thirty-six hours’ journey involved another scrimmage for places on the train, but he was getting used to such things now, and Barellini’s company continued to make all things easy. He was beginning to like the talkative Italian, despite the too- frequently amorous themes of his conversation, and when he suggested that they should join forces in whatever adventures were available, A.J. gladly agreed.

A.J. had no romantic illusions about warfare, and was fully prepared for horrors. He was hardly, however, prepared for the extraordinary confusion and futility of large-scale campaigning between modern armies. Nobody at Mukden seemed to have definite information about anything that was happening; the town was full of-preposterous rumours, and most of the inhabitants were rapidly growing rich out of the war business. All the foreign correspondents were quartered in a Chinese inn, forming a little international club, with a preponderance of English-speaking members. A.J. found the other Englishmen less stand-offish when he got to know them better; several became quite friendly, and gave him valuable tips about cabling his news, and so on. The trouble was that there was so little news to cable.

The ancient Chinese city wore an air of decay that contrasted queerly with the sudden mushroom vitality infused by the war. A.J. had plenty of time for wandering about among the picturesque sights of the place; indeed after a week, he knew Mukden very much better than he knew Paris or Berlin. Then came the sudden though long-awaited permission for war-correspondents to move towards the actual battle-front. Barellini and A.J. were both attached to a Cossack brigade, and after a tiresome journey of some sixty miles found themselves courteously but frigidly welcomed by General Kranazoff and his staff The general spoke French perfectly, as also did most of his officers. He obviously did not like the English, but he talked about English literature to A.J. with much learning and considerable shrewdness.

During that first week with the Cossacks nothing happened, though from time to time there came sounds of gun-fire in the distance. Then one morning, about five o’clock, a servant who had been detailed to attend on him woke A.J. to announce that a battle was beginning about four miles away and that if he climbed a hill near by he might perhaps see something of it. While he was hastily dressing, Barellini, who had been similarly wakened, joined him, and soon the two were trudging over the dusty plain in the fast-warming sunlight.

They climbed the low hill and lay down amongst the scrub. For several hours nothing was to be seen; then suddenly, about nine o’clock, a violent cannonade began over the next range of hills and little puffs of white smoke a couple of miles away showed where shells were bursting. A staff officer approached them and explained the position; the Russians were over here, the Japanese over there, and so on. It was all very confusing and not at all what A.J. had imagined. The sun rose higher and the cannonade grew in intensity; Russian batteries were replying. Barellini talked, as usual, about women; A.J. actually dozed a little until another staff officer ran to tell them to move off, as the Russian line was beginning to retreat. They obeyed, descending the hill and walking a mile or so to the rear. By this time they were dog-tired and thirsty. A Chinese trader on the road offered them some Shanghai beer at an extortionate figure; Barellini beat him down to half his price and bought four bottles, which they drank there and then with great relish.

And that, by pure mischance, was all that A.J. saw of the actual Russo- Japanese War, for the beer had been mixed with foul water, and that same evening, after sending a long cable to the Comet, he fell violently ill and had to be taken to the base hospital. There his case was at first neglected, for it was hardly to be expected’ that the doctors, in the after-battle rush of work, should pay much attention to a foreign war- correspondent with no visible ailment. Later, however, when his temperature was a hundred and four and he was in the most obvious agony, they changed their attitude and gave him good nursing and careful attention. For a fortnight his life was in danger; then he began to recover. The hospital was clean and well- managed, though there was a shortage of drugs and bandages. Barellini, on whom the bad beer had had no ill effects at all, visited him from time to time, as also did some of the other correspondents. It was universally agreed that he had met with the most atrocious luck. Afterwards, however, he looked back upon his period in hospital as the time when he really began to know Russia and the Russians. To begin with, he made great progress with the language. None of the nurses or patients could speak any English and after his third week in hospital he found himself beginning to converse with them fairly easily. What struck him most was the general eagerness to help him; he could not imagine a foreigner in a London hospital being so treated. Both men next to him were badly wounded (one in the stomach and the other with both legs amputated), yet both took a keen delight in teaching him new words. They were middle-aged, with wives and families thousands of miles west; they accepted their lot with a fatalism that was bewildered rather than stoic. One of them always screamed when his wounds were being dressed, and always apologised to A.J. afterwards for having disturbed him. Neither could read or write, yet when A.J. read to them, very haltingly and with very bad pronunciation, from a book by Gogol, they listened enthralled. They were devoutly religious and also very superstitious. They had not the slightest idea why their country was fighting Japan, but they assumed it must be God’s will. The one with the amputations did not seem to worry very much; his attitude seemed chiefly one of puzzlement. It had all happened so quickly, almost as soon as he had gone into battle; he had had no time to fight any of the enemy; indeed, it was as if he had travelled seven thousand miles merely to have his legs blown off. He could not get rid of a dim feeling that the Japanese must have been personally angry with him to have done such a thing. He felt no vindictiveness, however. There was a badly wounded Japanese in the ward; the men treated him very courteously and often spoke sympathetically to one another about him. As they did not know a word of his language nor he a word of theirs, it was all that could be done.

Both A.J.’s neighbours told him all about themselves and showed the frankest curiosity about his own life. They thought it very strange that people in England were so interested in the war that they would send out men especially to describe it for them, and they were amazed when A.J. told them how much his journey had cost, the price of his cables to the Comet, and so on. They listened with great interest to anything he told them about English life, English politics, and so on, though such matters were difficult to compress within the confines of his still limited Russian. They always showed their appreciation with the most childlike directness, often giving him articles of food which he really did not want, but which he could not refuse without risk of hurting their feelings.

The effect of his weeks in hospital was to give him an extraordinarily real and deep affection for these simple-hearted men as well as a bitter indignation against the scheme of things that had driven them from their homes to be maimed and shattered in a quarrel they did not even understand. The fact that they did not complain themselves made him all the more inclined to complain for them, and the constant ingress of fresh wounded to take the place of men who died had a poignantly cumulative effect upon his emotions. He had already cabled Aitchison about his illness, promising to resume his job as soon as he could; now he began to feel that his real message might be sent as appropriately from a bed in hospital as from a position near the lines. After all, it was the tragic cost of war that people needed to realise; they were in no danger of forgetting its excitements and occasional glories. In such a mood he began to compose cables which a friendly nurse despatched for him from the local telegraph-office. He described the pathos and heroism of the Russian wounded, their childlike patience and utter lack of hatred for the enemy, their willingness to endure what they could not understand. After his third cable on such lines a reply came from Aitchison—’Cannot use your stuff advise you return immediately sending out Ferguson.’ So there it was; he was cashiered, sacked; they were sending out Ferguson, the well-known traveller and war-correspondent who had made his name in South Africa. A.J. was acidly disappointed, of course, and also (when he came to think about it) rather worried about the future. There was nothing for it but to pack up and return to Europe as soon as he was fit to leave hospital—to Europe, but not to England. The thought of London, of the London streets, and of Fleet Street, especially, appalled him in a way he could not exactly analyse. He had a little money still left and began to think of living in France or Germany as long as it held out, and as the most obvious economy he would travel back third-class. He left hospital at the beginning of August and caught the first train west. The discomfort of sleeping night after night on a plank bed without undressing did not prevent him from enjoying the journey; the train itself was spacious and the halts at stations were long and frequent enough to give ample opportunity for rest and exercise. His companions were nearly all soldiers, most of them returning to their homes after sickness or wounds, and their company provided a constant pageant of interest and excitement. The long pauses at places he felt he would almost certainly never visit again and whose names he would almost certainly never remember, gave an atmosphere of epic endlessness to the journey; and there was the same atmosphere in his talks to fellow-travellers, with some of whom he became very intimate. Sometimes, especially when sunset fell upon the strange, empty plains, a queer feeling of tranquillity overspread him; he felt that he wanted never to go back to London at all; the thought of any life in the future like his old Fleet Street life filled his mind with inquietude. And then the train would swing into the dreaming rhythm of the night, and the soldiers in the compartment would light their candles and stick them into bottles on the window-ledges, and begin to sing, or to laugh, or to chatter. Siberia surprised him by being quite hot, and sometimes the night passed in a cloud of perfume, wafted from fields of flowers by the railside. Then, early in the morning, there would be a halt at some little sun-scorched station, where the soldiers would fetch hot water to make tea and where A.J. could get down and stretch his legs while the train-crew loaded wood into the tender. Often they waited for hours in sidings, until troop trains passed them going east, and for this reason the return journey took much longer than the eastward one.

At a station a few hundred miles from the European frontier A.J. got into conversation with a well-dressed civilian whom he found himself next to in the refreshment-room. The man was obviously well educated, and discussed the war and other topics in a way that might have been that of any other cultured European. He made the usual enquiries as to what A.J. was doing and who he was; then he congratulated him on his Russian, which he said was surprisingly good for one who had had to learn so quickly. The two got on excellently until the departure of the train; then they had to separate, since the Russian was travelling first-class.

At the next halt, three hours later, they met again in a similar way, and the Russian expressed surprise that A.J. should be travelling so humbly. A.J. answered, with a frankness he saw no reason to check, that he was doing things as cheaply as possible because he had so little money. This led to further questions and explanations, after which the Russian formally presented his card, which showed him to be a certain Doctor Hamarin, of Rostov-on-Don. He was, he said, the headmaster of a school there; his pupils came from the best families in the district. If A.J. wished to earn a little money and was not in any great hurry to return to England (for so much he had gathered), why not consider taking a temporary post in Russia? And there and then he offered him the job of English master in his school. A.J. thanked him and said he would think it over; he thought it over, and at the next station jumped eagerly to the platform, met Hamarin as before, and said he would accept.

So he settled down at Rostov. It was a pleasantly prosperous city, with a climate cold and invigorating in winter and mild as the French Riviera in summer; it was also very much more cosmopolitan than most places of its size, for, as the business capital of the Don Cossack country, it contained many Jews, Armenians, Greeks and even small colonies of English, French, and Germans. Picturesquely built, with many fine churches, it was interesting to live in, though A.J. had no initial intention of staying in it for long. He did, in fact, stay there for two years, which was about four times his estimate. His work was simple—merely to teach English to the sons and daughters of Rostov’s plutocratic rather than aristocratic families. He made a successful teacher, which is to say that he did not need to work very hard; he had plenty of leisure, and during holidays was able to take trips into the Caucasus, the Crimea, and several times to Moscow and Petersburg.. With a natural aptitude for languages, he came to talk Russian without a trace of foreign accent, besides picking up a working knowledge of Tartar, Armenian, and various local dialects. He was moderately happy and only bored now and again. A physical change became noticeable in him; he lost, rather suddenly, the boyish undergraduate air that had surprised the other war-correspondents when they had first seen him. He was liked by his pupils and respected by their parents; he moved a little on the fringe of the better-class town society, which was as high as a schoolmaster could well expect. He soon found that his profession carried with it little dignity of its own. During his first week at school the daughter of one of Rostov’s wealthiest families, in sending up a very bad English translation exercise, enclosed a ten-rouble note between the pages, clearly assuming that it would ensure high marks.

At the close of his first year he saw in a literary paper that Sir Henry Jergwin, the celebrated English critic, editor, and man of letters, had died suddenly in London whilst replying to a toast at the annual dinner of a literary society.

Hamarin pressed him to stay another year at Rostov, and he did so chiefly because he could not think of anything else to do or anywhere else to go. It was during this second year that he began to gain insight into the close network of revolutionary activity that was spread throughout the entire country. Even bourgeois Rostov had its secret clubs and government spies, and there seemed to be an ever-widening gulf between the wealthier classes and the workpeople. When occasionally he went into better-class houses to give private English lessons he was often amazed at the way servants were bullied by everyone, from the master of the house even down to the five-year-old baby who had already learned whom he might kick and scratch with impunity. One youth, the son of a wealthy mill-owner, went out of his way to explain. “You see, they’re all thieves and rogues. We know it, and they know we know it. They steal everything they can—they have no loyalty—they lie to us a dozen times a day as a matter of course. Why should we treat them any better than the scum that they are? It’s their fault as much as ours.”

A.J. became quite friendly with this youth, who had travelled in Germany and France, and looked at affairs from a somewhat wider standpoint than the usual Rostov citizen. His name was Sergius Willenski, and he was destined for the army. He had no illusions about the country or its people. “You simply have to treat them like that,” he often said. “It’s the only basis on which life becomes at all possible.”

“And yet,” A.J. answered, “I have met some of the most charming folk among the common people—ignorant soldiers whom I would certainly have trusted with my life.”

“A good job you didn’t. They may have been charming—quite likely—but they were rogues, I’ll wager, and would probably have killed you for a small bribe. Our people have no morals—only a sort of good humour that impresses foreigners.”

A.J. went to the Willenskis’ twice a week to teach English to the two girls, aged fifteen and seventeen respectively. Neither learned anything, except in the dullest and least intelligent way; neither considered that life held any possible future except a successful marriage. The older girl would have flirted with him if he had been inclined for the diversion. The younger girl was the prettier, but had a ferocious temper. She boasted that she had once maimed for life a man who had come to the house to polish the floors. It was his custom to take off one of his shoes and tie a polishing cloth round his stockinged foot so that he could polish without stooping. The girl, then aged eleven, had flown into a temper because he had accidentally disturbed some toy of hers; she had seized a heavy silver samovar and dropped it on to his foot, breaking several bones. “And it wasn’t at all a bad thing for him,” she told A.J., “because father pays him something every now and then and he doesn’t have to polish the floors for it.”

A.J. sometimes went to parties at the Willenskis’ house; monsieur and madame (as they liked to be called) were hospitable, and refrained from treating him as they would have done a native teacher. Once he met Willenski’s brother, who was a publisher in Petersburg. Anton Willenski, well known to all the Russian reading public, took considerable interest in the young Englishman and, after an hour’s conversation, offered him a post in his own Petersburg office. “You are far too good a scholar to be teaching in a little place like Rostov,” he said. The post offered was that of English translator and proof-reader, and the salary double that which Hamarin paid. A.J. mentioned his contract at the school, but Willenski said: “Oh, never mind that—I’ll deal with Hamarin,” and he did, though A.J. could only guess how.

So A.J. left Rostov and went to Petersburg. That was in 1907, when he was twenty-seven. The change from the provincial atmosphere to the liveliness and culture of the capital was immeasurably welcome to him. The gaiety of the theatres and cafés, the fine shops on the Nevsky, the splendour of the Cathedral and of the Winter Palace, all pleased the eye of the impressionable youth whose job left him leisure for thinking and observing. He had been to Petersburg before, but to see it as a visitor had been vastly different from living in it. His rooms were across the river in the Viborg district; from his windows he could see, at sunset, the Gulf of Finland bathed in saffron splendour, and there was something of everlasting melancholy in that pageant of sky and water ushering in the silver northern night. Before he had been long in Petersburg he received other impressions—the glitter of Cossack bayonets and scarlet imperial uniforms, and in the darker background, the huge scowling mass of misery and corruption through which revolutionary currents ran like threads of doom. It was fascinating to watch those ever-changing scenes of barbaric magnificence and sordid degradation—to cheer the imperial sleigh as it swept over the snow-bound boulevards, to gaze on the weekly batches of manacled prisoners marching to the railway station en route for the Ural convict-mines, to see the crowds of wild-eyed strikers surging around the mills of the new industrialism. His work at Willenski’s office was easy; he had to superintend the translation of English works into Russian and to give them final proof-reading. It was also expected that he should make suggestions for new translations, and it was over this branch of his work that, after a successful and enjoyable year, he came to sudden grief. At his recommendation a certain English novel had been translated, printed, published, and sent to the shops; it was selling quite well when all at once the police authorities detected or pretended to detect in it some thinly-veiled allusions to the private life of the Emperor. Willenski was thus put in a most awkward position, since he supplied text-books to the government schools and had a strictly orthodox reputation to keep up; his only chance of escaping business ruin and perhaps personal imprisonment was by laying the entire blame on his subordinate. As he told A.J. quite frankly: “It just can’t be helped. They won’t do anything to you, as you’re English. If you were Russian they’d probably send you to Siberia—as it is, they can only cancel your permit.”

So Willenski made a great show of dismissing with ignominy a subordinate who had disgracefully let him down, and managed, by such strategy, to escape with a severe warning so far as he himself was concerned. As for A.J., he received a polite note from police headquarters informing him that he must leave Russia within a week.

He felt this as a rather considerable blow, for in the first place he was sorry to have brought so much trouble on Willenski, whom he had grown to like; and besides, he had his own problems to solve. He did not wish to return to England. He had no idea of anything that he could do if he did return; he had no specialist qualifications except a knowledge of Russian, which would be hardly as useful in London as was a knowledge of English in Petersburg. Journalism was hopeless; he could realise now, over the perspective of several years, what a complete failure he had been in Fleet Street. Teaching, of which he had had some experience, would be impossible in any good English school owing to his poor degree, while as for the other professions, he neither inclined towards them nor had any hope that they would incline towards him.

Beyond even this he had grown to like Petersburg. He had lived in it now for over a year, had seen it in all its climatic moods; and now it was April again and the sledge-roads on the frozen Neva would soon be closing for the thaw. The prospect of summer had been alluring to him more than he had realised; he had been looking forward to many a swim at Peterhof and many an excursion into the flower-decked woods that fringed the city on so many sides.

His permitted week expired on Easter Tuesday and on Easter Eve he strolled rather sadly along the Nevski and watched the quaint and fascinating ceremonial. Thousands of poor work-people had brought their Easter suppers to be blest, and the priests were walking quickly amongst the crowds sprinkling the holy water out of large buckets. The food was set out on glistening white napkins on which stood also lighted tapers, and there was a fairy-like charm in that panorama of flickering lights, vestmented priests, and rapt, upturned faces. A.J. had seen it all the previous year, but it held additional poignancy now that it seemed almost the last impression he would have of the city. He was observing it with rather more than a sight-seer’s interest when a well- dressed man in expensive furs, who happened to be pushed against him by the pressure of the crowd, made some polite remark about the beauty of the scene. A.J. answered appropriately and conversation followed. The man was middle-aged and from his speech a person of culture. He was not, A.J. judged, an Orthodox believer, but he showed a keen sympathy and understanding of the religious motive, and was obviously as fascinated by the spectacle as A.J. himself.

The two, indeed, soon found that they had a great many common ideas and interests, and talked for perhaps a quarter of an hour before the stranger said: “Excuse my curiosity, but I’m just wondering if you’re Russian. It isn’t the accent that betrays you—don’t think that—merely a way of looking at things that one doesn’t often find in this country. At a venture I should guess you French.”

“You’d be wrong,” answered A.J., smiling. “I’m English.”

“Are you, by Jove?” responded the other, dropping the Russian language with sudden fervour. “That’s odd, because so am I. My name’s Stanfield.”

“Mine’s Fothergill.”

They talked now with even greater relish, and though Stanfield did not say who he was, A.J. surmised that he had some connection with the British Embassy. They, discussed all kinds of things during the whole four-mile walk down the Nevski and back, after which Stanfield said: “Did you ever go to midnight Mass at St. Isaac’s?” A.J. shook his head, and the other continued: “You ought to—it’s really worth seeing. If you’ve nothing else on this evening we might go together.”

They did, and the experience was one that A.J. was sure he would never forget. They arrived at the church about eleven, when the building was already thronged and in almost total darkness. Under the dome stood a catafalque on which lay an open coffin containing a painted representation of the dead Christ. Thousands of unlighted candles marked the form of the vast interior, and Stanfield explained that they were all linked with threads of gun-cotton. There was no light anywhere save from a few tall candles round the bier.

Soon the members of the diplomatic corps arrived, gorgeously uniformed and decorated, and took up their allotted positions, while black-robed priests began the mournful singing of the Office for the Dead. Then followed an elaborate ritual in which the priests pretended to search in vain for the Body. Despite its touch of theatricalism the miming was deeply impressive. Then sharply, on the first stroke of midnight, the marvellous climax arrived; the chief priest cried loudly—’Christ is risen!’ while the gun-cotton, being fired, touched into gradual flame the thousands of candles. Simultaneously cannon crashed out from the neighbouring fortress, and the choir, led by the clergy (no longer in black but in their richest cloth of gold), broke out into the triumphant cadences of the Easter Hymn. The sudden transference from gloom to dazzling brilliance and from silence to deafening jubilation stirred emotions that were almost breath-taking.

Afterwards, amidst the chorus of Easter salutations the two men sauntered by the banks of the river. A.J. said how glad he was to have seen such a spectacle, and Stanfield answered: “Yes, it’s one of the things I never miss if I happen to be here. I’ve seen it now at least a dozen times, yet it’s always fresh, and never fails to give me a thrill.”

Something then impelled A.J. to say: “I’m particularly glad to have seen it, because I don’t suppose I’ll ever have the chance again.”

“Oh, indeed? You’re only on a visit? You spoke Russian so well I imagined you lived here.”

“I do—or rather I have done for some time—but I’m going away—very soon, I’m afraid—for good.”

“Really?”

A.J. was not a person to confide easily, but the difficulty of his problem, combined with Stanfield’s sympathetic attitude and the emotional mood in which the Cathedral ceremony had left them both, made it easy for him to hint that the circumstances of his leaving Petersburg were not of the happiest. Stanfield was immediately interested, and within half an hour (it was by that time nearly two in the morning) most of A.J.’s position had been explained and explored. Once the process began it was difficult to stop, and in the end A.J. found himself confessing even the ridiculous suffragette episode which had been the immediate cause of his departure from England four years before. Stanfield was amused at that. “So I gather,” he summarised at last, “that you’re in the rather awkward position of having to leave this country and of having no other country that you particularly want to go to?”

“That’s it.”

“You definitely don’t want to return to England?”

“I’d rather go anywhere else.”

“But you must have friends there—a few, at any rate. Four years isn’t such a tremendous interval.”

“I know. That’s why I’d rather go anywhere else.”

“Don’t you think you’re taking the suffragette affair rather too seriously? After all, most people will have forgotten it by now, and in any case it wasn’t anything particularly disgraceful.”

“Yes, but—there are other reasons—much more important ones. I—I don’t want to go back to England.” He gave Stanfield a glance which decided the latter against any further questioning in that direction. “Besides, even if I were to go back there, what could I do?”

“I don’t know, do I? What are your accomplishments?”

A.J. smiled. “Very few, and all of them extremely unmarketable. I can speak Russian, that’s about all. Oh yes, and I can swim and fence, and I’m a bit of a geologist in my spare time. It doesn’t really sound the sort of thing to impress an employment agency, does it?”

“Do you fancy an outdoor life?”

“I don’t mind, provided it isn’t just merely physical work. It may sound conceited, but I rather want something where I have to use a small amount of brains. Yet I wouldn’t care for a job at a desk all the time. I’m afraid I’m talking as though I were likely to be given any choice in the matter.”

“What about danger—personal danger? Would that be a disadvantage?”

“I’d hate the army, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, that isn’t what I mean. I meant some kind of job where you had occasionally to take risks—pretty big risks, in their way—playing for high stakes—that sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid your description doesn’t help me to imagine such a job, but as a guess I should say it would suit me very well.”

Stanfield laughed. “I can’t be more explicit. How about the money?”

“Oh well, I’d like enough to live on and a little bit more. But isn’t it rather absurd to be talking in this way, since I shall be very lucky to get any sort of job at all?”

“On the contrary, it’s just possible—yes, it is just possible that I might be able to put you in the way of the kind of job you say you would like. And here in Petersburg, too.”

“You forget that I have to leave. My police permit expires on Tuesday.”

“No, I don’t forget that at all. I am remembering it most carefully.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Let me explain. But first, I must pledge you to the strictest secrecy. Whether or not you and I can come to terms, you must give me that assurance.”

“I do, of course.”

“Good. Then listen.”

Briefly, Stanfield’s suggestion was that A.J. should become attached to the British Secret Service. That sounded simple enough, but an examination of all that it implied revealed a network of complication and detail. Stanfield, relying on A.J.’s promise of secrecy, was as frank as he needed to be, but no more so. British diplomacy, he explained, had its own reasons for wishing to know the precise strength and significance of the revolutionary movement in Russia. It was impossible to obtain reliable information from official channels, whether British or Russian; the only sources were devious and underground. “Supposing, for instance, you decided to help us, you would have to join one of the revolutionary societies, identify yourself with the cause, gain the confidence of its leaders, and judge for yourself how much the whole thing counts. I think you’ll agree with me that such a job calls for brains and might well involve considerable personal risks.”

“I should be a spy, in fact?”

“In a way, yes, but you would not be betraying anybody. You would merely make your confidential reports to our headquarters—you would not be working either for or against the revolutionaries themselves. We take no sides, of course—we merely want to know what is really happening.”

“I see. And the danger would be that the revolutionaries would find me out and think I was betraying them to the Russian police?”

“The danger, my friend, would be twofold, and I’m not going to try to minimise it in the least. There would be, of course, the danger you mention, but there would be the even greater danger that the Russian police would take you for a genuine revolutionary and deal with you accordingly. And you know what ‘accordingly’ means.”

“But in that case I suppose I should have to tell them the real truth?”

“Not at all—that is just what you would not have to do. You would have to keep up your pretence and accept whatever punishment they gave you. If you did tell them the truth, the British authorities would merely arch their eyebrows with great loftiness and disown you. I want you to be quite clear about that. We should, in the beginning, provide you with passport and papers proving you to be a Russian subject, and after that, if anything ever went wrong, you would have to become that Russian subject—completely. Do you see? We could not risk trouble with the Russian Government by having anything to do with you.”

“It seems rather a one-sided arrangement.”

“It is, as I can say from experience, having worked under it for the best part of my life. On the other hand, it has certain advantages which probably appeal to people like you and me rather more than to most others. It is interesting, adventurous, and quite well paid. It is also emphatically a job for the Cat that Walks by Itself—you remember Kipling’s story?—and I should imagine both of us are that type of animal.”

“Maybe.”

“Mind you, I don’t want to persuade you at all—and I do want you to have time to think the whole thing over very carefully before coming to a decision. Unless, of course, you feel that you may as well say ‘No’ straight away?”

A.J. shook his head. “I’ll think it over, as you suggest.”

“Then we’d better meet again to-morrow.” He gave A.J. an address, and the arrangement was made. A.J. did not sleep well that night. When he tried to look at the future quite coolly, when he asked himself whether his ambition really was to be a Secret Service spy in a Russian revolutionary club, the answer was neither yes nor no, but a mere gasp of incredulity. It was almost impossible to realise that such an extraordinary doorway had suddenly opened into his life. It was not impossible, however, to grasp the fact that if he did not accept Stanfield’s offer he would have to leave Russia in two days’ time, with very poor and uncertain prospects.

He called in the morning at the address Stanfield had given him—a well-furnished apartment in one of the better-class districts. Stanfield was there, together with another man, introduced as Forrester. “Well,” began Stanfield, “have you made up your mind?”

A.J. answered, with a wry smile: “I don’t feel in the least like jumping at the job, but I’m aware that I must either take it or leave Russia.”

“And you’re as keen as all that on not leaving Russia?”

“I rather think I am.”

“That means you’ll take on the job.”

“I suppose it does.”

Here Forrester intervened with: “I suppose Stanfield gave you details of what you’d have to do?”

“More or less—yes.”

“You’d have to be the young intellectual type—your accent and manner would pass well enough, I daresay. But what about enthusiasm for the cause—can you act?” He added, slyly: “Or perhaps you would not need to act very much, eh?”

“As an Englishman in Russia,” answered A.J. cautiously, “I have always felt that I ought to avoid taking sides in Russian politics. You can judge from that, then, how much I should have to act.”

Forrester nodded. “Good, my friend—a wise and admirable reply. I should think he would do, wouldn’t you, Stanfield?”

The latter said: “I thought so all along. Still, we mustn’t persuade him. It’s risky work and he knows some of the more unpleasant possibilities. It’s emphatically a game of heads somebody else wins and tails he loses.”

“Oh yes,” Forrester agreed. “Most decidedly so. The pay, by the way, works out at about fifty pounds a month, besides expenses and an occasional bonus.”

“That sounds attractive,” said A.J.

“Attractive?” Forrester turned again to Stanfield. “Did you hear that? He says the pay’s attractive! You know Stanfield, it’s the money that most people go for in, this job, yet I really do believe our friend here is an exception! He only admits that the money’s attractive!” With a smile, he swung round to A.J. “I’m rather curious to know what it is that weighs most with you in this business. Is it adventure?”

“I don’t know,” answered A.J. “I really don’t know at all.”

So they had to leave that engrossing problem and get down to definite talk about details. That definite talk lasted several hours, after which A.J. was offered lunch. Then, during the afternoon, the talk was resumed. It was all rather complicated. He was to be given a Russian passport (forged, of course, though the ugly word was not emphasised) establishing him to be one Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, a student. He must secure rooms under that name in a part of the city where he was not known; he must pose as a young man of small private means occupied in literary work of some kind. To assist the disguise he must cultivate a short beard and moustache. Then he must frequent a certain bookshop (its address would be given him) where revolutionaries were known to foregather, and must cautiously make known his sympathies so that he would be invited to join a society. Once in the society, it would be his task to get to know all he could concerning its aims, personnel, and the sources from which it obtained funds; such information he would transmit at intervals to an agent in Petersburg whose constantly changing address would be given him from time to time. It would not be expected, nor would it even be desirable, that he should take any prominent or active part in the revolutionary movement; he must avoid, therefore, being elected to any position of authority. “We don’t want you chosen to throw bombs at the Emperor,” said Forrester, “but supposing anyone else throws them, then we do want to know who he is, who’s behind him, and all that sort of thing. Get the idea?”

A.J. got the idea, and left the two men towards evening, after Stanfield had taken his photograph with an ordinary camera. That night and much of the next day he spent in packing. He had told the porter and the woman who looked after his room that he might be leaving very soon, so they were not surprised by his preparations for departure. In the evening, following instructions, he gave the two of them handsome tips, said good-bye, and drove to the Warsaw station. There he left his bags in the luggage office, giving his proper name (which was, in fact, on all the luggage labels as well). After sauntering about the station for a short time he left it and walked to Stanfield’s address. There he handed over to Forrester his English passport and luggage tickets. He rather expected to see Forrester burn the passport, but the latter merely put it in his pocket and soon afterwards left the house. Stanfield smiled. “Forrester’s a thorough fellow,” he commented. “He doesn’t intend to have the Russian police wondering what’s happened to you. To-night, my friend, though it may startle you to know it, Mr. A.J. Fothergill will leave Russia. He will collect his luggage at the Warsaw station, he will board the night express for Germany, his passport will be stamped in the usual way at Wierjbolovo and Eydkuhnen, but in Berlin, curiously enough if anyone bothered to make enquiries, all trace of him would be lost. How fortunate that your height and features are reasonably normal and that passport photographs are always so dreadfully bad!”

After an hour or so Forrester returned and informed A.J. that he was to stay with them in their apartment for a fortnight at least, and that during that time he must consider himself a prisoner. The rather amusing object of the interval was to give time for his beard and moustache to grow. A.J. rather enjoyed the fortnight, for both Forrester and Stanfield were excellent company, and there was a large library of books for him to dip into. The two men came in and went out at all kinds of odd hours, and had their needs attended to by a queer-looking man-servant who was evidently trustworthy, since they spoke freely enough in front of him.

At the end of the fortnight, by which time A.J.’s face had begun to give him a remarkably different appearance, Forrester again photographed him, and a few days later handed him his new passport and papers of identity. It gave him a shock, at first, to see himself so confidently described as ‘Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov,’ born at such and such a place and on such and such a date. “You must get used to thinking of yourself by that name,” Forrester told him. “And you must also make it your business to know something about your own past life. Your parents, of course, are both dead. You have just a little money of your own—enough to save you from having to work for a living you are a studious, well-educated person, at present engaged in writing a book about—what shall we say?—something, perhaps, with a slightly subversive flavour—political economy, perhaps, or moral philosophy. Oh, by the way, you may permit yourself to know a little French and German—as much, in fact, as you do know. But not a word of English. Remember that most of all.”

The next morning A.J. was made to change into a completely different outfit of clothes. He was also given three hundred roubles in cash, a small trunk-key, and a luggage ticket issued at the Moscow station. After breakfast he said good-bye to Forrester and Stanfield, walked from their apartment to the station, presented his ticket, received in exchange a large portmanteau, and drove in a cab to an address Forrester had given him. It was a block of middle- class apartments on the southern fringe of the city. There chanced (or was it chance?) to be an apartment vacant; he interviewed the porter, came to terms, produced his papers for registration, and took up his abode in a comfortable set of rooms on the third floor. There he unlocked the portmanteau, and found it contained clothes, a few Russian books, a brass samovar, and several boxes of a popular brand of Russian cigarettes. These miscellaneous and well-chosen contents rather amused him.

Thus he began life under the new name. He was startled, after a few days, to find how easy it was to assume a fresh identity; he conscientiously tried to forget all about Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill and to remember only Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, and soon the transference came to require surprisingly little effort. Forrester had cautioned him not to be in any great hurry to begin his real work, so at first he merely made small purchases at the bookshop whose address he had been given, without attempting to get to know anyone. Gradually, however, the youthful, studious-looking fellow who bought text-books on economic history (that was the subject finally fixed on) attracted the attention of the bookseller, a small swarthy Jew of considerable charm and culture. His name was Axelstein. A.J. had all along decided that, if possible, he would allow the first move to be made by the other side, and he was pleased when, one afternoon during the slack hours of business, Axelstein began a conversation with him. Both men were exceedingly cautious and only after a longish talk permitted it to be surmised that they were neither of them passionate supporters of the Government. Subsequent talks made the matter less vague, and in the end it all happened much as Forrester had foreshadowed—A.J. was introduced to several other frequenters of the shop, and it was tacitly assumed that he was a most promising recruit to the movement.

A few days later he was admitted to a club to which Axelstein and many of his customers belonged. It met in an underground beer-hall near the Finland station. Over a hundred men and women crowded themselves into the small, unventilated room, whose atmosphere was soon thick with the mingled fumes of beer, makhorka tobacco, and human bodies. Some of the men were factory-workers with hands and clothes still greasy from the machines. Others belonged to the bourgeois and semi-intelligentsia—clerks in government offices, school teachers, book-keepers, and so on. A few others were university students. Of the women, some were factory-workers, some stenographers, but most were just the wives of the men.

A.J. allowed himself to make several friends in that underground beer- hall, and the reality of its companionship together with the secrecy and danger of the meeting, made a considerable impression on him. Often news was received that one or another member had been arrested and imprisoned without trial. Police spies were everywhere; there was even the possibility, known to all, that some of the members might themselves be spies or agents provocateurs. Caution was the universal and necessary watchword, and at any moment during their sessions members were ready to transform themselves into a haphazard and harmless group of beer-drinking and card-playing roisterers.

It was only by degrees that A.J. came to realise the immensity of the tide that was flowing towards revolution. That club was only one of hundreds in Petersburg alone, and Petersburg was only one of scores of Russian cities in which such clubs existed. The movement was like a great subterranean octopus stirring ever more restlessly beneath the foundations of imperial government. An arm cut off here or there had absolutely no effect; if a hundred men were deported to Siberia a hundred others were ready to step instantly into the vacant places. Everything was carefully and skilfully organised, and there seemed to be no lack of money. The Government always declared that it came from the Japanese, but Axelstein hinted that most of it derived from big Jewish banking and industrial interests.

A.J. became rather friendly with an eighteen-year-old university student named Maronin. He was fair-haired, large-eyed, and delicate-looking, with thin, artistic hands (he was a fine pianist) and slender nostrils; his father had been a lawyer in Kieff. The boy did no real work at the university and had no particular profession in view; he lived every moment for the revolution he believed to be coming. A.J. found that this intense and passionate attitude occasioned no surprise amongst the others, though, of course, it was hardly typical.

Young Alexis Maronin interested A.J. a great deal. He was such a kindly, jolly, amusing boy—in England A.J. could have imagined him a popular member of the sixth-form. In Russia, however, he was already a man, and with more than an average man’s responsibilities, since he had volunteered for any task, however dangerous, that the revolutionary organisers would allot him. Axelstein explained that this probably meant that he would be chosen for the next ‘decisive action’ whenever that should take place. “He is just the type,” Axelstein explained calmly. “Throwing a bomb accurately when you know that the next moment you will be torn to pieces requires a certain quality of nerve which, as a rule, only youngsters possess.”

Regularly every week A.J. transmitted his secret reports and received his regular payments by a routine so complicated and devious that it seemed to preclude all possibility of discovery. He found his work extremely interesting, and his new companions so friendly and agreeable, on the whole, that he was especially glad that his spying activities were not directed against them. He was well satisfied to remain personally impartial, observing with increasing interest both sides of the worsening situation.

One afternoon he was walking with Maronin through a factory district during a lock-out; crowds of factory workers—men, women, and girls—were strolling or loitering about quite peaceably. Suddenly, with loud shouts and the clatter of hoofs, a troop of Cossacks swept round the street-corner, their lithe bodies swaying rhythmically from side to side as they laid about them with their short, leaden-tipped whips. The crowd screamed and stampeded for safety, but most were hemmed in between the Cossacks and the closed factory-gates. A.J. and Maronin pressed themselves against the wall and trusted to luck; several horsemen flashed past; whips cracked and there were terrifying screams; then all was over, almost as sharply as it had begun. A girl standing next to Maronin had been struck; the whip had laid open her cheek from lip to ear. A.J. and Maronin helped to carry her into a neighbouring shop, which was already full of bleeding victims. Maronin said: “My mother was blinded like that—by a Cossack whip,”—and A.J. suddenly felt as he had done years before when he had decided to fight Smalljohn’s system at Barrowhurst, and when he had seen the policeman in Trafalgar Square twisting the suffragette’s arm—only a thousand times more intensely.

Throughout the summer he went on making his reports, attending meetings, arguing with Axelstein, and cultivating friendship with the boy Alexis. There was something very pure and winsome about the latter—the power of his single burning ideal gave him an air of otherworldliness, even in his most natural and boyish moments. His hatred of the entire governmental system was terrible in its sheer simplicity; it was the system he was pledged against; mere individuals, so far as they were obeying orders, roused in him only friendliness and pity. The Cossack guards who had slashed the crowd with their whips were to him as much victims as the crowd itself, and even the Emperor, he was ready to admit, was probably a quite harmless and decent fellow personally. The real enemy was the framework of society from top to bottom, and in attacking that enemy, it might and probably would happen that the innocent would have to suffer. Thus he justified assassinations of prominent officials; as human beings they were guiltless and to be pitied, but as cogs in the detested machine there could be no mercy for them.

About midnight one October evening A.J. was reading in his sitting-room and thinking of going to bed when the porter tapped at his door with the message that a young man wished to see him. Such late visits were against police regulations, but the chance of a good tip had doubtless weighed more powerfully in the balance. A.J. nodded, and the porter immediately ushered in Maronin, who had been standing behind him in the shadow of the landing.

As soon as the door had closed and the two were alone together A.J. could see that something was wrong. The boy’s face was milky pale and his eyes stared fixedly; he was also holding his hand against his chest in a rather peculiar way. “What on earth’s the matter?” A.J. enquired, and for answer Alexis could do nothing but remove his hand and allow a sudden stream of blood to spurt out and stain the carpet.

A.J., in astonished alarm, helped him into the bedroom and laid him on the bed, discovering then that he had been shot in the chest and was still bleeding profusely. The boy did not speak at first; he seemed to have no strength to do anything but smile. When, however, A.J. had tended him a little and had given him brandy, he began to stammer out what had happened. He had, it seemed, fulfilled a secret task given him by revolutionary headquarters. He had shot Daniloff, Minister of the Interior. He had done it by seeking an interview and firing point-blank across the minister’s own study-table. Daniloff, however, had been quick enough to draw a revolver and fire back at his assailant as the latter escaped through a window. A ladder had been placed in readiness by an accomplice, and Alexis had been descending by it when Daniloff’s bullet had struck him in the chest. He had hurried down, unheeding, and had mingled—successfully, he believed—with the crowds leaving a theatre. He had been in great pain by then, and knew that he dare not let himself be taken to a hospital because in such a place his wound would instantly betray him. The only plan he had been able to think of had been a flight to his friend’s apartment, and though that was over a mile from Daniloff’s house, he had walked there, despite his agony, and even in the porter’s office had managed to make his request with-out seeming to arouse suspicion. Now, in his friend’s bedroom, he could only gasp out his story and plead not to be turned away.

There was no question of that, A.J. assured him; no question of that. “You shall stay here, Alexis, till you are well again, but I must go out and find a doctor—I have done all I can myself, I’m afraid.”

The boy shook his head. “No, no, you can’t get a doctor—he’ll ask questions—it’s impossible. But I have a friend—a medical student—I will give you his address—to-morrow you shall fetch him to me—he will take out the bullet—and say nothing…”

“Tell me where he lives and I will fetch him now.”

“No, no—the police would stop you—they will be all everywhere to-night—because of Daniloff.” He added: “I am sorry to be such a bother to you—I wish I could have thought of some other way. If only I had taken better aim I might have killed him instantly.”

“Don’t talk,” A.J. commanded, huskily. “Try to be quiet—then in the morning I will fetch your friend.”

“Yes. I shall be all right when the bullet is taken out.”

“Yes—yes. Don’t talk any more.”

He held the boy in his arms, that boy with the face of an angel, that boy who had just shot a government minister in cold blood; he held him in his arms until past one in the morning, and then, very quietly and apparently with a gradual diminution of pain, the end came.

Till that moment A.J. had felt nothing but, pity for his friend; but afterwards he began to realise that he was himself in an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous situation. How could he explain the death of the boy that night in his apartment? What story could he invent that would not connect himself with the attack on Daniloff? The deep red stain in the midst of his sitting-room carpet faced him as a dreadful reminder of his problems. He had no time to solve them, even tentatively, for less than a quarter of an hour after the boy’s death he heard a loud commotion in the street outside and a few seconds later a vehement banging on the door of the porter’s office. Next came heavy footsteps up the stairs and a sudden pummeling on his own door. He went to open it and saw a group of police officers standing outside, with the porter in custody.

“We understand that a young man visited you a short time ago,” began one of the officers, with curt precision.

“Yes,” answered A.J.

“Is he here now?”

“Yes.”

“We must have a word with him.”

“I am afraid that will be impossible. He is dead.”

“Ah—then, if you will permit us to see the body.”

“Certainly. In there.”

He pointed to the bedroom, but did not follow them. One of the officers stayed behind in the sitting-room. After a few moments the others returned and their leader resumed his questioning. “Now, sir,” he said, facing A.J. rather sternly, “perhaps you will be good enough to explain all this.”

A.J. replied, as calmly as he could: “I will explain all I can, which I am afraid isn’t very much. I was sitting here just over an hour ago, about to go to bed, when the young man was brought up to see me—”

“The porter brought him up?”

“Yes.”

“Continue.”

“I invited him to come in, and as he looked ill, I asked him what was the matter. Besides, of course, it was peculiar his wanting to see me at such a late hour.”

“Very peculiar indeed. You must have been a very intimate friend of his.”

“Hardly that, as a matter of fact. He used to drop and see me now and again, that was all.”

“Continue with the story.”

“Well, as I was saying, I asked him what was the matter, but he didn’t answer. He was holding his hand to his chest—like this.” A.J. imitated the position. “Then he suddenly took his hand away and the result was—that.” He pointed to the stain on the carpet. “Then he collapsed and I took him into my bedroom. I discovered that he had been shot, but I could not get him to explain anything at all about how it had happened. I made him as comfortable as I could and was just about to send for a doctor when he died. That’s all, I’m afraid.”

“You say he told you nothing of what had happened to him?”

“Nothing at all.”

“And you could make no guess?”

“Absolutely none—it seemed a complete mystery to me during the very short time I had for thinking about it.”

“You know who the young man is?”

“I know his name. He is Alexis Maronin.”

“And your name?”

“Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov.”

“How did you come to know Maronin?”

“We met in connection with some work I am engaged upon. I am writing a book of history and Maronin was interested in the same period. We used to meet occasionally for an exchange of ideas.”

“What was he by profession?”

“A student, I rather imagined. He was always very reserved about himself and his affairs.”

“Were you surprised to see him an hour ago when he came here?”

“I certainly was.”

“You know it is against police rules for strangers to be admitted at that hour?”

“Yes.”

“Had the porter ever admitted visitors to your apartment at such a time before?”

A.J., from the porter’s woebegone appearance, guessed that he had already made the fullest and most abject confession, so he replied: “Yes, he had—but not very often.”

“Had he ever admitted Maronin before at such a late hour?”

“I believe so—once.”

“Why, then, were you surprised to see him when he came to- night?”

A.J. answered, with an effort of casualness: “Because on that last occasion when he paid me a call after permitted hours I gave the boy such a scolding for breaking rules and leading me into possible trouble, that I felt quite sure he had learned a lesson and would not do so again.”

“I see…And you still say that you have not the slightest idea how Maronin met with his injury?”

“Not the slightest.”

“May we examine your passport?”

“Certainly.”

He produced it and handed it over. While it was being closely inspected two police officers carried the boy’s body to a waiting ambulance below. Finally the leading officer handed the passport back to A.J. with the words: “That will be all for the present, but we may wish to question you again.” The police then departed, but A.J. was under no illusion that danger had departed with them. When he looked out of his sitting-room window he could see and hear the march of a patient watcher on the pavement below.

He drank some brandy to steady his nerves and spent the rest of the night in his easiest armchair. He did not care to enter the bedroom. Now that the police had left him, personal apprehensions were again overshadowed by grief.

He had fallen into a troubled doze when he was awakened by the sound of scuffling on the landing outside, punctuated by shrill screams from the woman who usually came in the mornings to clear up his room and prepare breakfast. She was evidently being compelled to give up her keys, and a moment later the door was unlocked and two police guards strode into the room. They were of a very different type from those of the previous visit. Huge, shaggy fellows, blustering in manner and brutal in method, A.J. recognised their class from so many stories he had heard in that underground beer-hall. “You are to come with us immediately,” one of them ordered gruffly. “Take any extra clothes and personal articles that you can put into a small parcel.” A.J. felt a sharp stab of panic; the routine was dreadfully familiar. “By whose orders?” he asked, feeling that a show of truculence might have some effect with men who were obviously uneducated; but the only reply was a surly: “You’ll find that out in good time.”

The men were armed with big revolvers, apart from which they were of such physique that resistance was out of the question. A.J. gathered together a few possessions and accompanied his two escorts to a pair-horse van waiting at the kerbside. This they bade him enter, one of them getting inside with him, while the other took the reins. The inside was almost pitch dark. After a noisy rattling drive of over half an hour the doors were opened and A.J. was ushered quickly into a building whose exterior he had no time to recognise. The two guards led him into a large bleak room unfurnished except for a desk and a few chairs. A heavily-built and dissipated-looking man sat at the desk twirling his moustache. When A.J. was brought in the man put on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and stared fiercely.

“You are Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov?” he queried; and to A.J.’s affirmative, merely replied: “Take him away.”

The guards continued their Journey with him along many corridors and across several courtyards. He knew that he was in a prison, though which one out of the many in Petersburg he had no idea. At last one of the guards unlocked and opened a door and pushed him into a room already occupied by what at first seemed a large crowd. But that was because, in the dim light admitted by a small and heavily-barred window, it was difficult to distinguish the inhabitants from their bundles of clothing.

They had seemed asleep when A.J. entered, but as soon as the guards retired and the door was relocked they all burst into sudden chatter. A.J., dazed and astonished, found himself surrounded by gesticulating men and youths, all eager to know who he was, why he had been sent there, and so on. He told them his name, but thought it wiser to say that no charge had been made against him so far. They said: “Ah, that is how it very often happens. They do not tell you anything.” They even laughed when he asked the name of the prison; it amused them to have to supply such information. It was the Gontcharnaya, they said.

Altogether there were a score or more inhabitants of that room. About half were youths of between seventeen and twenty-one. One of them told A.J. he had already been imprisoned for two months without knowing any charge against him, and there was a steady hopelessness in his voice as he said so. “These people are not all politicals,” he went on, whispering quietly amidst the surrounding chatter. “Some are criminals—some probably government agents sent to spy on us—who knows?—there is always that sort of thing going on. A fortnight ago two fellows were taken away—we don’t know where, of course—nothing has happened since then until you came.”

Considering their plight the majority of the prisoners were cheerful; they laughed, played with cards and dice, sang songs, and exchanged anecdotes. One of them, a Jew, had an extensive repertoire of obscenity, and whenever the time fell heavily somebody would shout: “Tell us another story, Jewboy.” Another prisoner spent most of his time crouched in a corner, silent and almost motionless; he was ill, though nobody could say exactly what was the matter with him. He could not take the prison food, and so had practically to starve. The food was nauseating enough to anyone in good health, since apart from black bread it consisted of nothing but a pailful of fish soup twice a day, to be shared amongst all the occupants. A.J. could not stomach it till his third day, and even then it made him heave; it smelt and tasted vilely and looked disgusting when it was brought in with fish-heads floating about on its greasy surface. It was nourishing, however, and to avoid it altogether would have been unwise. There were no spoons or drinking vessels; each man dipped his own personal mug or basin into the pail and took what he wanted, and the same mugs, unwashed, served for the tea which the men were allowed to make for themselves.

At night they slept on planks ranged round the wall a foot from the floor. The cracks in the planks were full of bugs. Most of the men were extremely verminous; indeed, it was impossible not to be so after a few days in such surroundings. A smell of dirty clothes and general unwholesomeness was always in the air, mixed with the stale fish smell from the soup-pail and other smells arising from the crude sanitary methods of the place.

The warders were mostly quite friendly and could be bribed to supply small quantities of such things as tea, sugar, and tobacco (to be chewed, not smoked). The entire prison routine was an affair of curious contrasts—it was slack almost to the point of being good-humoured, yet, beyond it all, there was a sense of complete and utter hopelessness. One felt the power of authority as a shapeless and rather muddled monster, not too stern to be sometimes easy-going, but quite careless enough to forget the existence of any individual victim. Most hopeless of all was the way in which some of the victims accepted the situation; they did not complain, they did not show anger, indignation, or even (it seemed) much anxiety. When the warders unlocked the door twice a day their eyes lifted up, with neither hope nor fear, but with just a sort of slow, smouldering fever. And when the man in the corner grew obviously very ill, they did what they could for him, shrugged their shoulders, went on with their card playing, and let him die. After all, what else was possible? Only in the manner and glances of a few of the youngsters did there appear any sign of fiercer emotions.

One of the prisoners, a political, had a passion for acquiring information on every possible subject. Most of the others disliked him, and A.J., to whom he attached himself as often as he could, found him a great bore. “I am always anxious to improve my small knowledge of the world,” he would say, as a preface to a battery of questions. “You are a person of education, I can see—can you tell me whether Hong Kong is a British possession?” Something stirred remotely in A.J.’s memory; he said, Yes, he believed it was. “And is Australia the largest island in the world?” Yes, again; he believed so. “Then, sir, if you could further oblige me—what is the smallest island?” A.J. could never quite decide whether the man were an eccentric or a half-wit. He afterwards learned that he had aimed a bomb at a chief of police in Courland.

All this time A.J. was immensely worried about his own position, which, from conversation with other prisoners, he gathered might be very serious. There were, apparently, few limits to the power of the police; they might keep arrested persons in prison without trial for any length of time, or, at any moment, if they so desired, they might send them into exile anywhere in the vast region between the Urals and the Far East.

For five weeks nothing happened; no one either left or joined the prisoners. Then, on the thirty-eighth day (A.J. had kept count) one of the warders, during his morning visit, singled out A.J. and another prisoner to accompany him. From the fact that the two were ordered to carry their bundles with them, the rest of the prisoners drew the likeliest conclusion, and there were many sentimental farewells between friends. The jailer obligingly waited till all this was finished; he did not mind; time was of little concern to him or to anyone else at the Gontcharnaya. Then, with a good-humoured shrug of the shoulders, he relocked the door and led the two prisoners across courtyards and along corridors into the room that A.J. had visited on first entering the prison. The same man was there behind the desk, twirling his moustache upwards almost to meet the bluish pouches under his eyes.

He dealt first with the other prisoner, verifying tree man’s name and then declaring, with official emphasis: “You are found guilty of treason against the government and are sentenced to exile. That is all.” The man began to speak, but a police guard who was in the room dragged him roughly away. When the shouts of both had died down in the distance, the man behind the desk turned to A.j. “You are Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov? You too are found guilty of treason. Your sentence is exile—”

“But what is the charge? What am I accused of? Surely—”

“Silence! Take him away!”

A police guard seized him by the arms and dragged him towards the door and out into the corridor. A.J. did not shout or struggle; he was suddenly dumbfounded, and into the vacuum of bewilderment came slowly, like pain, the clutchings of a dreadful panic. Although he had had exile in mind for weeks, it had been a blow to hear the word actually pronounced over him.

Outside in the corridor the rough manners of the police guard changed abruptly to a mood of almost fatherly solicitude. “I wouldn’t worry so much if I were you,” he remarked soothingly. “Personally, I should much prefer exile to being herded in jail with criminals and such-like. I always think it is a great scandal to mix up decent fellows like yourself with that scum.” He went on to give A.J. some practical advice. “As an exile you are entitled to a fair amount of luggage, though the authorities will try to do you out of your privileges if they can. I suggest that you make out a list of everything you want to take with you, and I will see that the things are collected from where you have been living.”

A.J. was too tired and depressed at that moment to consider the matter with any zest, and the guard continued, with a curious mixture of friendliness and officialdom: “Ah, I see—you are upset—perhaps, then, you will be so good as to tell me and I will make out the list. Oh yes, I can write—I am a man of education, like yourself. Come now, there is no time to lose. You will want heavy winter clothes, the usual cooking utensils, blankets, and things like that. Oh yes, and books—you are permitted by the regulations to take books with you. You are a reader, of course? Ah, education is a wonderful thing, is it not? Perhaps you would like me to have your books packed up and sent with the other things?”

“There are too many of them,” A.J. answered dully. “Far too many to carry.”

“But you would be allowed to take a dozen or so. Do you mean that you have more than a dozen books? You are perhaps a professor, then, eh? Ah well, I will ask them to send on a dozen for you, anyhow.”

And in due course the pertinacious fellow, whose name was Savanrog, compiled his list and the bureaucratic machine, with numerous clankings and rumblings, got to work upon it. Savanrog was delighted when, a few days later, the complete assortment of articles arrived. By that time A.J. had grown more resigned to his fate, a few days of solitary confinement in a comparatively clean and comfortable cell having helped considerably towards such a state. “You see,” Savanrog exclaimed, taking both A.J.’s hands in his and shaking them, “I have managed it all for you! Oh yes, I do not let anything slip past me. It is the turn of fortune that has brought us together, Peter Vasilevitch—I have done my duty—and as for our acquaintance, it has been a thing of delight. I have always counted it a privilege to make myself known to eminent politicals like yourself.”

“But surely I am not an eminent political?” A.J. answered, half-smiling.

“Ah, you are too modest. Were you not the friend of Maronin, who killed Daniloff, Minister of the Interior?”

A.J. let the question pass. It was the first intimation he had had that his offence was reckoned as ‘friendship’ with the boy-assassin. He had sometimes feared that he would be ranked as an accessory to the crime itself; in which case, of course, his status would have been that of a criminal, not a political. Savanrog’s chatter was, in its way, reassuring.

At last the morning came when he was ordered to prepare for the journey. Savanrog, at the final moment, shook hands with him, kissed him on both cheeks, and gave him a black cigar. “It will be a breach of regulations to smoke it, until you are across the Urals,” he told him, with a last spasm of official correctitude. Then, leading A.J. into the corridor, he marched him into a courtyard in which a hundred or so other prisoners were already on parade, and with a great show of blustering brutality, pushed him into line. A.J. did not recognise any of the faces near him. He was ordered to separate his luggage into two bundles, a personal one to carry on his back, and a larger one consisting of things he would not require until the end of the journey, wherever and whenever that might be. The larger bundles of all the prisoners were then collected into a van and carried away. Afterwards the men themselves were divided up into two detachments, and here came the final welcome proof that A.J. was a political; he was not put into the group of those who had to wait for the blacksmith to manacle their wrists together. Finally the whole melancholy procession was led out through the prison-gate into the street. It was only a very short distance to the railway station, and the throngs on the pavements stared with just that helpless, half-compassionate, half-casual curiosity which A.J. had observed on so many previous occasions when he had himself formed part of them.

After marching into a goods yard beyond the station and halting beside a train, the manacled prisoners were pushed into cattle-trucks, but the politicals were allowed to choose their own places in ordinary third-class rolling-stock, passably clean and comfortable. A.J. found himself cordially welcomed by the men of his compartment. There were five of them, with one exception all young like himself. The exception was a very ancient fellow with a huge head and a sweeping beard. Even before the train moved off A.J. was told a good deal about his fellow-passengers. The old man’s name was Trigorin—just Trigorin—he seemed to possess no other. His offence had been the preaching of roadside sermons in which had occurred certain remarks capable of seditious interpretation. He had been exiled once before for a similar offence. “I am an old man,” he said, “and nothing very dreadful can happen to me now. But of course it is different for you youngsters.”

The journey to Moscow took two days, and then there was considerable delay while the prison-train was shunted round the city and linked up with other coaches from different parts of the country. Finally the complete train, by this time very long, set out at a slow pace on its tremendous eastern journey. To many of the prisoners there was something ominous in the fact that they were now actually on the track of the Trans-Siberian, and spirits were low during the first few hours. A.J., however, did not share the general gloom; he remembered Siberia from his previous visit, and the name did not strike any particular terror into his mind. When some of the young men spoke with dismay of the possible fate in store for them, he felt strongly tempted to tell them that parts of Siberia, at any rate, were no worse than many parts of Europe. Trigorin, however, saved him from any temptation to recount his own experiences. Trigorin described how conditions had improved since the opening of the railway; during his first exile, he said, he had had actually to walk three thousand miles from railhead at Perm, and much of the way through blinding rain and snow. He gave lurid and graphic descriptions of the horrors of the old forwarding prisons at Tiumen and Tomsk, and of the convict barges on the rivers, and of the great Siberian highway along which so many thousands of exiles had been driven to misery and death. “Things are much better now,” he said, with sadly twinkling eyes. “We politicals are pampered—no floggings, hospitals if we fall ill—what more can we expect, after all? You youngsters, whose knowledge of Siberia comes from Dostoievski’s book and a few lurid novelettes, can’t realise what a good time politicals have nowadays. We die, of course, but only of loneliness, and a man may die of that in bed in his own home, may he not?”

A mood of curious fatalism sank upon A.J. during those days and nights of travel. The journey was not too arduous; the food was coarse, but sufficient in quantity and fairly nourishing; the military guards were easygoing fellows, especially after all the politicals had given parole that they would not attempt to escape during the train-journey. The future, of course, loomed grimly enough, but A.J. did not seem to feel it; his mind had already attuned itself to grimness. He kept remembering his interviews with Stanford and Forrester, and their repeated assurances that the game was one of ’heads somebody else wins and tails you lose.’ Well, he had lost, and he could not complain that he had not been amply warned of the possibility. He felt, however, that he had had distinctly bad luck; it had been pure misfortune, and not any personal carelessness or stupidity of his own, that had led to his present position. But for his friendship with Maronin all would have still been well. Yet he did not regret that friendship. It was, on the contrary, one of the few things in his life that he prized in memory.

He remembered one of Stanfield’s remarks: “If anything goes wrong, you will have to become a Russian subject completely.” That seemed of peculiar significance now that things had gone wrong, and it was true, too, that whether he willed it so or not, he was becoming Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov in a way he had certainly never been before. He wondered frequently whether by this time the Secret Service people knew all about his trouble. Most probably information had reached them, by their own secret channels, within a few hours of his arrest. He could picture their attitude—a shrug of the shoulders, a vaguely pitying look, and then—forgetfulness. Perhaps Stanfield might have commented to Forrester or Forrester to Stanfield: “Well, he didn’t last long, eh? Still, we warned him. Wonder if he’ll play the fool by trying to make out he’s English?”

A.J. had no intention of so playing the fool. It was not merely that he had given his word, but that his common sense informed him how utterly useless it would be. Apart from his knowledge of the English language, there was nothing at all he could advance in support of any claim he might make to be other than the Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov set out with authentic-looking detail on his passport and papers of identity. And even supposing he managed to persuade the authorities to enquire into his case, the result could only mean a communication to the British Embassy, with what result he had been warned. “The British authorities would merely arch their eyebrows with great loftiness and disown you,” had been Stanfield’s way of putting it. No, there was nothing to be gained by attempting the impossible; the only course was simple endurance for the time being, and later, if he could manage it, escape. Henceforward he was doomed to be Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov without qualification, and, rather curiously, he now began to feel what he had hardly felt before—a certain pride in his new identity. He was Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, exiled to Siberia for a political offence; and he felt that same quiet, unending antagonism towards the imperial authorities that the other exiles felt; he began to understand it, to understand them, to understand why they were so calm, why they so rarely roused the sleeping fury in their souls. They were saving it, as themselves also, for some vaguely future day.

He began, too, to breathe with comfort and comprehension the vast easy- going laziness of the country; he perceived why no one ever hurried, why trains were always late, why the word ‘sichass’ (’presently’) was so popular and universal; after all, if people were merely waiting for something to happen, there could be no special urgency about things done in the meantime. And they were waiting for something to happen—the exiles, the soldier-guards, the criminals in their chains, the railway-workers, the prison officials—a calm, passionless anticipation gleamed in their eyes when one caught them sometimes unawares. As the train rumbled eastwards this sense of anticipation and timelessness deepened immeasurably; life was just sunrise and sun-setting; food, drink, talk; the train would pull up in a siding; when would it move out again? ‘Sichass,’ of course; that might be in an hour or two, or perhaps the next day; nobody knew—nobody very much cared. When the train stopped, the prisoners sometimes climbed out and walked about the country near the track, or else lay down in the long grass with the midday sun on their faces. The nights were cold, but no snow had fallen yet. At Omsk, Krasnoiarsk, and other places, some of the men left the train, in charge of Cossack guards. Trigorin explained that they were the milder cases—men who had not definitely committed any crime, but were merely suspected of being ‘dangerous’ or of having ‘dangerous opinions.’ “It is clear,” he declared comfortingly, “that something much more serious is in store for all of us. We shall know when we reach Irkutsk.”

They reached the Siberian capital three weeks after leaving Moscow; the busy city, magnificently situated at the confluence of two rivers, gleamed brightly in the late autumnal sun. The exiles were marched from the station to the central forwarding prison and there split up into several groups. Trigorin was sent off almost immediately; he was bound for Chita, near the Manchurian frontier, and was to travel there with a contingent of local criminals. The other politicals were immensely indignant about this; it was against all the rules to put a political along with criminals, and much as they hated the penal code, such a breach of it stirred them to punctilious anger. The prison governor apologised; he was very sorry, but he could not help it; Trigorin must go with the criminals, but he would be given a separate railway coach. “Besides,” he explained, reassuringly, “they are only local murderers—not bad fellows, some of them.” Trigorin himself did not object at all, and actually rebuked his friends for their uncharitable championship. “Let us not forget,” he said, “that the only person to whom Christ definitely promised paradise was a criminal. He, the greatest of all political prisoners, was actually crucified between two of them.”

A.J.’s other fellow-passengers were also sent away, but whither, he could not discover. He himself was kept at Irkutsk. It was a better managed prison than the Gontcharnaya at Petersburg, but after the easy-going train- journey the return to routine of any kind was irksome. A.J. found most of his fellow-prisoners in a state of depression and melancholy that soon began to affect him also, especially when the freezing up of the river and the first big snowstorm of the season marked the onset of Siberian winter.

The prison governor was a good-tempered, jovial fellow who liked to make the days and nights pass by as pleasantly as possible for Himself and mankind in general. Every morning he would tour the prison and greet the men with a bluff, companionable—“Good morning, boys—how goes it?” He was always particular about their food and the warmth of their rooms, and he would sometimes pay a surprise visit to the kitchens to sample the soup that was being prepared for them. He seemed a little in awe of some of the politicals, but he was on friendly terms with most of the criminals, and enjoyed hearing them give their own accounts of their various crimes. The more bloodthirsty and exciting these were, the better he liked them; he would sometimes, at the end of a particularly thrilling recital, clap a man on the back and exclaim: “Well, you are a fellow, and no mistake! To think of you actually doing all that!”

Naturally, the criminals invented all kinds of incredibilities to please him.

A.J. soon found that the only way to keep his mind from descending into the bitterest and most soul-destroying gloom was to think of the only inspiring possibility open to a prisoner—that of escape. Together with another political he began to plan some method of getting away, not immediately, but as soon as the spring weather should make the open country habitable. This task, with all its complications, helped the winter days to pass with moderate rapidity. Unfortunately a fellow-prisoner who was a government spy (there were many of these, sometimes unknown even to the prison authorities) gave the plan away, and A.J. and his co-conspirator were summoned before the governor. His attitude was rather that of a pained and reproachful guardian whose fatherly consideration has been basely rewarded. “Really, you know,” he told them, “that was a very foolish thing to do. Your attempt to escape has already been reported to Petersburg, and it will only make your eventual punishment more severe. The original idea was to exile you to Yakutsk as soon as the season permitted, but now heaven knows where you will be sent.” And he added, almost pathetically: “Whatever made you act so unreasonably?”

So the position seemed rather more hopeless than ever. Soon, too, the easy-going governor was sent away to another prison. The Petersburg authorities transferred him to Omsk, and in his place was sent a different type of man altogether—a small, dapper, bristling-moustached martinet, whom everyone—prisoners and prison officials alike—detested with venomous intensity. It was he who, the following May, sent for A.J. and barked at him in staccato tones: “Ouranov, your case has been reconsidered by the authorities in view of your recent attempt to escape. Your revised sentence is that of banishment for ten years to Russkoe Yansk. You will go first to Yakutsk, and then wait for the winter season. You will need special kit, which you will be allowed to purchase, and I am instructed to pay you the customary exile’s allowance, dated back to the time of your entry into Siberia. Perhaps you will sign this receipt.”

A fortnight later the journey commenced. A.J. had spent part of the interval in making purchases in the Irkutsk shops; the two Cossack guards who were to accompany him to his place of exile advised him what to buy and how much to pay for it. They were big, simple-hearted, illiterate fellows and could give him few details about Russkoe Yansk, except that the journey there would take many months. A.J. suspected that with the usual Siberian attitude towards time, they were merely estimating vaguely; he could not believe that even the remotest exile station could be quite so inaccessible. The first stage was by road and water to Yakutsk. Along with hundreds of other exiles, including a few women, the trek was begun across the still frost-bound country to Katchugo, near the source of the Lena. This part of the journey was made in twenty-mile stages and lasted over a week. The nights were spent in large barn-like sheds, horribly verminous, and well guarded by sentries on all sides.

At Katchugo the entire detachment was transferred to barges, and resigned itself to a two months’ meandering down the river to Yakutsk, which was reached towards the end of July. The horrors of that journey, under a sky that never, during the short summer, darkened to more than twilight, engraved still more deeply the mood of fatalism that had already descended on most of the prisoners. A.J. was no exception. He did not find himself worrying much, and he was not nearly so low-spirited as he had been amidst the comparatively comfortable surroundings of the Irkutsk prison. He felt scarcely more than a growing numbness, as if a part of his brain and personality were losing actual existence.

Yakutsk was almost pleasant after the barges, and the remaining weeks of the summer passed without incident. Prison regulations, owing to the remoteness of the settlement, were lax enough, and A.J. made several acquaintances. One of them, an educated exile who had been allowed to set up as a boot-repairer, had even heard of Russkoe Yansk. It was on the Indigirka river, he thought, well beyond the Arctic Circle. It could only be a very small settlement and it was years since he had heard of anyone being sent there. “Perhaps they have made a mistake,” he hazarded, with dispassionate cheerfulness. “Or perhaps the place does not exist at all and they will have to bring you back. That has happened, you know. There was a man sent to one place last year and the Cossacks themselves couldn’t find it. They looked for it all winter and then had to hurry back before the thaw began.” He laughed heartily. “I’m not inventing the story, I assure you. Some of those Petersburg officials don’t know their own country—they just stare at a map and say—’Oh, we’ll send him here—or there’—and maybe the map is wrong all the time!”

Early in September the Lena, miles wide, began to freeze over, and soon the whole visible world became transfixed in the cold, darkening glare of winter. The two guards who had left Irkutsk in charge of A.J. and who had spent the summer amusing themselves as well as the amenities of Yakutsk permitted, now indicated that the time for the resumption of the journey had arrived. From now onwards it became a much more personal and solitary affair—almost, in fact, a polar expedition, but without the spur of hope and ambition to mitigate hardship. The three men, heavily furred, set out by reindeer sledge into the long greyness of the sub-Arctic winter. Two of them carried arms, yet the third man, defenceless, was given the place of honour on all occasions—at night-time in the wayside huts, usually uninhabited, and during the day whenever a halt was made for rest and food. The temperature sank lower and lower and the sky darkened with every mile; they crossed a range of bleak mountains and descended into a land of frozen whiteness unbroken anywhere save by stunted willows. For food, there were birds which the guards shot or snared, and unlimited fish could be obtained by breaking through the thick ice in the streams. The fish froze stiff on being taken out of the water; they had to be cut into slices and eaten raw between hunks of bread. A.J.’s palate had by this time grown much less fastidious, and he found such food not at all unpleasant when he was hungry enough. The cold air and the harsh activity of the daily travel bred also in him a sense of physical fitness which, at any other time, he would have relished; as it was, however, he felt nothing but a grim and ever-deepening insensitiveness to all outward impressions. He imagined vaguely the vast distance he had already travelled, but it did not terrify him; it was merely a memory of emptiness and boredom, and though he knew that the end of the journey would mean the end of even the last vestige of changefulness, he yet longed for it, because, for the moment, it seemed a change in itself.

One evening, thirteen weeks after leaving Yakutsk, the three men were crossing a plain of snow under the light of the full moon. At the last settlement, ten days previously, they had exchanged their reindeer transport for dogs, and since then had been traversing this same white and empty plain. There seemed, indeed, no obvious reason why the plain and the journey might not go on for ever. The temperature was fifty below zero. A.J. had noticed that for some hours the guards had been muttering to each other, which was unusual, for in such cold air it was painful to speak. Suddenly, out of the silver gloom, appeared the hazy shapes of a few snow-covered roofs; the guards gave a cry; the dogs barked; a few answering cries came from the dimness ahead. They had reached Russkoe Yansk.

It was smaller and more desolate than he had imagined. There were only four Russians in exile there, none of them educated men; the rest of the population consisted of a score or more natives of very low intelligence. The native men, under the direction of the guards, began to dig an entry through the snow into an unoccupied timber hut that was to belong to the new exile; there were several of these deserted huts, for the settlement had formerly been larger. The natives looked on in amazement when A.J. began to unpack the bundle that he had not been allowed to touch since leaving Petersburg; they had never before seen such things as books, writing-paper, or a kerosene-lamp. The Russians looked on also with a curiosity scarcely less childlike; they had seen no strange face for years, and their eagerness bordered on almost maniacal excitement. A.J. addressed them with a few cordial words and they were all around him in a moment, shaking his hands and picking up one after another of his belongings; they had evidently been half afraid of him at first. One of them said: “This shows that the Government has not forgotten us—they know we are still here, or they would not have sent you.”

A fire was made, and the two Cossack guards stayed the night in the hut. The next morning they hitched up their dog teams, shook hands cordially enough, and began the long return journey. A.J. watched them till the distance swallowed up their sleigh and the hoarse barking of the animals. Then he set to work to make his habitation more comfortable.

Russkoe Yansk was close to but not actually on the Arctic Ocean; the nearest settlements, not much larger, were four hundred and four hundred and fifty miles to west and east respectively. There was no communication of any regular kind with the civilised world; sometimes a fur-trapper would take a message and pass it on to someone else who might be going to Yakutsk, but even in most favourable circumstances an answer could scarcely arrive in less than twenty months. The nearest railway and telegraph stations were over three thousand miles away.

The year was composed of day and night; the day lasted from June to September only. In winter the temperature sometimes fell to seventy below zero, and there were week-long blizzards in which no living human being could stir a yard out of his hut. During the short summer the climate became mild and moist; the river thawed and overflowed, causing vast swamps and floodings that cut off the settlement from the world outside even more effectively than did the winter cold and darkness.

A.J. had brought a fair supply of tea and tobacco, and with small gifts of these he could secure the manual services of as many natives as he wanted, apart from the four Russians, who would have lived their whole lives as personal slaves in his hut if he had wished it. He did not feel particularly sad, but he did begin to feel a strange Robinson-Crusoe kind of majesty that was rather like an ache gnawing at him all the time. He was the only person in Russkoe Yansk who could read, write, work a simple sum, or understand a rough map. The most intelligent of the Russians had no more than the mind of a peasant, with all its abysmal ignorance and with only a touch of its shrewdness. The others were less than half-witted, perhaps as a result of their long exile. They remembered the names of the villages from which they had been banished, but they had no proper idea where those villages were, how long their banishment had lasted, or what it had been for. Yet compared with the native Yakuts, even such men were intelligent higher beings. The Yakuts, with their women and families, reached to depths of ugliness, filth, and stupidity that A.J. had hardly believed possible for beings classifiable as mankind. Their total vocabulary did not comprise more than a hundred or so sounds, hardly to be called words. In addition to physical unpleasantness (many were afflicted with a loathsome combination of syphilis and leprosy), they were abominable thieves and liars; indeed, their only approach to virtue was a species of dog- like attachment to anyone who had established himself as their master. With a little of the most elementary organisation they could have murdered all the exiles and plundered the huts, but they lacked both the initiative and the virility. Life to them was but an unending struggle of short summers and long winters, of snow and ice, blizzard and thaw, of fishing in the icy pools and trapping small animals for flesh and fur, of lust, disease, and occasional gluttony. They had never seen a tree, and knew timber only as material providentially floated down to them on the spring-time floods. Even when he had picked up their rudimentary language, A.J. could not interest them by any talk of the outer they were incapable of imagination, and the only thing that stirred them to limited excitement was the kerosene-lamp, which, after some experimenting, he made to burn with certain kinds of fish-oil.

Now especially he had cause to be grateful to Savanrog, the enterprising and sympathetic prison-guard at the Gontcharnaya. For the luggage, packed according to the latter’s instructions, included all kinds of things that A.J. would never have thought of for himself, but which now were found to be especially useful. With them, and with the miscellaneous articles he had purchased in Irkutsk, he was not badly equipped. He had his twelve books, chosen apparently at random from his shelves in Petersburg; the only one he would have thought of selecting himself was a translation of Don Quixote, but the others soon grew to be odd but no less faithful companions. One was a school text-book in algebra, another an out-of-date year- book; another was Dickens’s Great Expectations—of course in Russian. Mr. Pumblechook and Joe Gargery became the friends of all his waking and sleeping dreams, and before them alone he could relax and smile.

Besides his few books his luggage contained several other things never seen in Russkoe Yansk before. He had a watch and a clinical thermometer, a few bottles and jars of simple medicines, and a pair of scissors; he had also (he was sure) the only boot-trees north of the Arctic Circle. The police in Petersburg, with typical inconsequence, had packed them inside a pair of field- boots.

Oddly, perhaps, the time did not seem to pass very slowly. There was always so much to be done—the mere toil of getting food, of repairing and improving the hut, of keeping himself well clothed to withstand the almost inconceivable cold. He did a little amateur doctoring whenever he found anything he fancied he could cure amidst that nightmare of disease and degradation. He made notes, without enthusiasm, yet somehow because he felt he must, about the customs and language of the natives. He even tried to teach the least stupid of the Russians to learn the Russian alphabet. And whenever, during the long winter, or while day after day of blizzard kept him a prisoner in the hut, he felt pangs of loneliness or disappointment piercing to his soul, he would slip into a coma of insensibility and wait. The waiting was not often for long. When, after the grey night of winter, the sunlight showed again over the frozen earth, at first so very timidly, he welcomed it with a smile that no one saw. Sometimes at midsummer he sailed clown the swollen river in a small boat; once, with a couple of natives, he reached the open Arctic and made a rough sketch-map of fifty miles of coast-line. He hardly knew why he did such things—certainly not from any idea of ultimate escape. There was nothing at all to prevent his making such an attempt, except the knowledge of its utter hopelessness. His stern jailers were the swamps in summer and the icy wastes in winter; and even if by some miracle, he could pass them by, there was no place of safety to be reached. It would have been more hopeful to make for the North Pole than for the semi-civilised places in Siberia.

His first winter at Russkoe Yansk was that of 1909-10.