Knight Without Armour

PART III

In the late spring of 1917 a small party of Cossacks set out from Yakutsk by reindeer and dog sledge. They were seven in number and travelled swiftly, visiting each one in turn of the remoter settlements. Russkoe Yansk was almost the last.

They reached it in the twilight of a May noontide, and at the sound of their arrival the entire native population—some dozen Yakut families—turned out of their huts to meet them, surrounding the clog- teams and chattering excitedly.

At length a tall figure, clad in heavy furs, approached the throng; and even in that dim northern light there was no mistaking leadership of such a kind. One of the soldiers made a slight obeisance and said, in Russian: “Your honour, we are from Yakutsk.”

A quiet, rather slow voice answered: “You are most welcome, then. You are the first to visit us for three years. Come into my hut. My name is Ouranov.”

He led them a little distance over the frozen snow to a hut rather larger than the rest. They were surprised when they entered, for it was so much better furnished than any other they had seen. The walls were hung with clean skins, and the stove did not smoke badly, and there were even such things as tables, chairs, a shelf of hooks, a lamp, and a raised bed. Ouranov motioned the men to make themselves comfortable. There was something in his quiet, impersonal demeanour that made them feel shy, shy even of conveying the news that they had brought with them. They stood round, unwilling to sit in those astonishing chairs; most of them in the end squatted on the timber floor.

Ouranov was busying himself with the samovar. Meanwhile the soldiers could only stare at one another, while the still shouting and chattering Yakuts waited outside the hut in a tempest of curiosity. At last the spokesman of the party began: “Brother, we are the bearers of good news. Don’t be too startled when you hear it, though it certainly is enough to send any man such as yourself out of his wits for joy. At Kolymsk that did actually happen to one poor fellow, so you will understand, brother, why we are taking such a long time to tell you.”

Then Ouranov turned from the samovar and smiled. It was a curious smile, for though it lit up his face it seemed to light up even more the grimness that was there. “Whatever news it is,” he said, “you may be sure I shall not be affected in that way.”

“Then, brother, it is this. You are a free man. All exiles everywhere are now released and may return to their homes, by order of the new revolutionary government. Think of it—there has been a revolution in Petrograd—the Emperor has been deposed.” And as if a hidden spring had suddenly been touched, the soldiers all began to talk, to explain, to shout out the good news, with all its details, to this man who knew nothing. They had told the same story at each one of the settlements, and every time of telling had made it more marvellous to them. Their eyes blazed with joy and pity, and pride at having the privilege of conveying the first blessings of revolution to those who stood most in need of them. But if only Ouranov had been a little more excited, they would have been happier. He handed them tea so quietly, and after they had all finished talking he merely said: “Yes, it is good news. I will pack my things.”

The soldiers again ’stared at one another, a little awed, perhaps even a little chilled; they had enjoyed such orgies of hysteria at the other settlements, but this man seemed different—as if the Arctic had entered his soul.

He said, rather perceiving their disappointment: “It is very kind of you to have come so far to tell me. As I said before, there has been no news for three years. There were four other exiles here then, but that same winter three died of typhus, and another was drowned the following summer.”

“So for over a year you have been altogether alone?” said one of the soldiers.

“Oh, no. There have been the Yakuts.” And once more that grim smile.

They fell to talking again of the revolution and its manifold blessings, and after a little time they noticed that Ouranov seemed hardly to be listening; he was already taking his books from the shelf and making them into a neat pile.

Two days later eight men set out for the south. There was need to hurry, as the warmer season was approaching and the streams would soon melt and overflow.

As they covered mile after mile it was as if the earth warmed and blossomed to meet them; each day was longer and brighter than the one before; the stunted willows became taller, and at last there were trees with green buds on them; the sun shone higher in the sky, melting the snows and releasing every stream into bursting, bubbling life, till the ice in the rivers gave a thunderous shiver from bank to bank; and the soldiers threw off their fur jackets and shouted for joy and sang songs all the day long. At Verkhoiansk there was a junction with other parties of released exiles, and later on, when they had crossed the mountains, more exiles met them from Ust Viluisk, Kolymsk, and places that even the map ignores.

Yakutsk, which was reached at the end of July, was already full of soldiers and exiles, as well as knee-deep in thick black mud and riddled with pestilence. Every day the exiles waited on the banks of the Lena for the boat that was to take them further south, and every hour fresh groups arrived from the north and north-east. Food and money were scarce; sick men and women staggered into the settlement with stories of others who had died during the journey; a few were mad and walked about moaning and laughing; every night the soldiers drank themselves into quarrelsomeness and careered about firing shots into the air and falling off the timbered paths into the thick mud; every morning dead bodies were pushed quietly into the Lena and sent northwards on their icy journey. Yet beyond all the misery and famine and pestilence, Yakutsk was a city of hope.

Ouranov had little money, but he did not go hungry. The seven soldiers of his escort had taken a curious fancy to him. They called him their captain, and saw to it that he always had food and shelter. There was much in him that they did not understand, but also something that attracted them peculiarly. During the first part of the southward expedition he had naturally taken command, for he knew the land far better than they, and was in less danger of losing the track. After that it had seemed natural that he should go on telling them when and where to halt, where to stay for the nights, and so on. They let him do that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that they thought him a little mad. They had a nickname for him which meant ’The man who has forgotten how to talk.’ It was an obvious exaggeration, since he did talk whenever there was need for it; yet even on such occasions it was as if he were thinking out the words, and as if each word cost him effort. They told one another that this was because he had been exiled by himself and had been left alone so long. By the time of reaching Yakutsk the legend had grown; Ouranov, they were saying, had been such a dangerous revolutionary that, by the ex- Emperor’s personal order, he had been sent to the remotest and most terrible spot in all Siberia. And after a week of gossip in Yakutsk it was easy to say and believe that he had been ten years utterly alone in Russkoe Yansk, and that he had not spoken a word during the whole of that time. So now, when the soldiers saw him reading a book or making pencil notes on paper, they said he must be learning language over again.

At last came the long-awaited steamer, an old paddle-boat, built in Glasgow in the ’seventies, towing behind it a couple of odorous and verminous convict-barges. Fifteen hundred persons crammed themselves into the boat and another thousand into the barges. There was nowhere to sleep except on the bare boards of the deck or in the foul and pestilential holds; men and women sickened, died, and were dropped overboard during that month of weary chug-chugging upstream through a forlorn land.

By August the exiles were in Irkutsk. The city was in chaos; its population had been increased threefold; it was the neck of the channel through which Siberia was emptying herself of the accumulated suffering of generations. From all directions poured in an unceasing flood of returning exiles and refugees—not only from Yakutsk and the Arctic, but from Chita and the Manchurian border, from the Baikal mines and the mountain-prisons of the Yablonoi. In addition, there were German, Austrian, and Hungarian war- prisoners, drifting slowly westward as the watch upon them dissolved under the distant rays of Petrograd revolution; and nomad traders from the Gobi, scraping profit out of the pains and desires of so many strangers; and Buriat farmers, rich after years of war-profiteering; and Cossack officers, still secretly loyal to the old régime: Irkutsk was a magnet drawing together the whole assortment, and drawing also influenza and dysentery, scurvy and typhus, so that the hospitals were choked with sick, and bodies were thrown, uncoffined and by scores, into huge open graves dug by patient Chinese.

On a warm August afternoon A.J. wandered about the Irkutsk railway depot, threading his way amongst the refugees and listening for a few odd moments to various political speeches that were being made by soldiers. He was dressed in a nondescript, vaguely military uniform which he had acquired at Yakutsk as soon as the cold weather had begun to recede; he might have been taken for a Russian soldier, though not, at a second glance, for a very ordinary one. His fine teeth, spare figure, and close-cropped hair and beard, would all have marked him from a majority. His features, lined and rugged, were not without a look of gentleness and pity; but as he wandered about the station and freight- yards he seemed really to have no more than the shadow of any quality; all was obscured by a look of uncomprehendingness that did not quite amount to bewilderment.

The seven Cossacks who had been with him for so many weeks were also on the platform, very dejected because they had been ordered east, while he, of course, must take the first train in the other direction, He joined them for a final meal of tea and black bread before their train arrived. “You must go to Petrograd,” one of them told him earnestly. “All the exiles are going there to work for the new government; Kerensky will find you a job—perhaps he will make you an inspector of taxes.”

“No, no,” interrupted another. “Our brother is surely fitted to be something better than an inspector of taxes. He has books—he must be a great scholar; I should think Kerensky might make him a postmaster, for a postmaster, after all, has to know how to read and write.”

They argued thus until the train arrived, and A.J. stayed with them, smiling at their remarks occasionally, but saying very little. There was a great rush for seats on the train, and when at last the seven soldiers had all crowded into a coach they leaned out of the open window and kissed him—their captain, their legend, the man whom they would remember and wonder at until the end of their lives. And he, when their train had gone, strolled away still half smiling.

He lay at night, like thousands of others, in any sheltered corner he could find, with a little bundle of all his possessions for a pillow. After three more days a train came in from the east; it was grotesquely full already, but he managed to find a place in a cattle-truck.

The train was very long, and between the first coach next to the engine and the last cattle-truck at the rear the whole world lay in mad microcosm. For the first coach was a dining-car, smooth-running and luxurious; you could look through the windows and see military officers, spattered with gold braid, picking their teeth after fried chicken and champagne, while attendants in evening-dress hovered about them obsequiously. Next came the first-class coach in which these magnates lived when they were not eating and drinking; and next the second-class coaches, containing those who were not fortunate enough to be high military officers; they were not allowed to use the dining-car, but the attendants would sometimes, at an extortionate price, supply them with food and drink. After that carne the third-class coaches, crammed with soldiers of the Revolution, who bought or commandeered food at wayside stations; and last, comprising two-thirds of the whole train, were the cattle-trucks, packed from floor to roof with refugees and peasants and returning exiles—folk who had spent their last paper rouble on a railway ticket, or else had smuggled themselves on board with no ticket at all, and who had nothing to eat except the food they could bargain for, or the ghastly tit-bits they could rake out of rubbish-bins behind the station refreshment-rooms.

A.J. spent hours in his corner of the truck, watching through the slats the constant procession of miles. He was half oblivious of those about him, of babies who screamed and were sick, of women who moaned with hunger, of men who chattered or quarrelled or were noisily companionable. In a similar way he half noticed the changes that had taken place since he had last moved over the scene—the extraordinary evidences of a new Siberia that had sprung up ribbon-like along the thin line of the railway, the new factories and freight-yards, the trams in the streets of Omsk, the steel bridges that had replaced wooden ones.

The journey was tiring, but worse for others than for himself, for his body, like his mind, seemed only capable of half-sensations. For years he had been unaware of this, but now, in a world of men and women, he perceived and was puzzled by it; he found himself doing things in a curious dream-like way, as if part of him were asleep and were obeying the other part automatically. Even when he talked, he heard his own voice as if it were another person speaking; and when he felt tiredness, or hunger, or a physical ache, the sensation came to him slowly, incompletely, almost at secondhand.

A fellow-exile tried to converse with him, but received little encouragement. The man was an ex-university professor named Tribourov—fat, pompous, and tremendously eager to reach Petrograd because he knew many people in the government and felt sure of a good appointment. He was also extremely annoyed that he had not been able to find a place for himself and his wife in the second-or first-class coaches. “Really, the government ought to arrange things better,” he complained continually.

Madame Tribourov, a thin and rather delicate-looking woman, who had shared the professor’s exile for five years, was suffering acutely from illness and hunger; she could not eat any of the rough food that was the only kind obtainable at wayside stations, and every day she grew weaker and nearer to collapse. Tribourov himself, dreaming bureaucratic dreams, paid little attention to her beyond an occasional word of perfunctory encouragement; she would be all right, he kept saying, as soon as they reached the end of the journey.

One morning the train stopped to load fuel in the midst of forest country, far from any station or settlement, and some of the men, glad of the chance to stretch their legs, climbed out of the trucks and walked about. A.J. and Tribourov were together, and Tribourov, as usual, talked about himself and his future importance and the iniquity of his having to travel in a cattle- truck. His complaining increased when they had strolled along the track as far as the dining-car and could sec its occupants talking, laughing, and guzzling over an excellent lunch. Seen through the window from the track-level, the dining-car presented a vista of large, munching jaws, glittering epaulettes, and the necks of wine-bottles. One man was gnawing the leg of a fowl, another was lifting champagne to his lips, another was puffing at a cigar in full- stomached contentment. At the far end of the car was the little kitchen- compartment where the food was cooked and stored; the window was open and on the shelves could be seen rows of bottles as well as canned foods, cheeses, and boxes of biscuits. “All that stuff comes from Japan and America,” Tribourov explained. “They load it on board at Vladivostok and it lasts all the way to Moscow and back. Excellently organised, but the scandal is—” And he resumed his usual complaint and continued until the engine-whistle warned them to hasten back to their truck.

That night, when it was almost pitch-dark and his fellow-travellers were mostly asleep or half-asleep, A.J. climbed out on to the footboard and began to feel his way cautiously along the length of the train. His hands and mind were functioning automatically; half of him was asking—’What on earth are you doing?’—and the other half was answering—’I am going to the dining-car to steal some food for Madame Tribourov.’ He did not know why he was doing so; he cared nothing at all for Madame Tribourov; it was no feeling of chivalry, or of compassion, or of indignation. It was rather a chance idea that had entered his half- mind—just an idea that loomed unwontedly large in a void where there were no other ideas.

The train was travelling at a moderate speed—not more than twenty miles an hour; the night was cloudy and the fringe of swamps to the side of the track was only to be dimly perceived. Little could be done by eye as he made his way from truck to truck; his hands groped for the slats and his feet for the buffers between one truck and the next. It was not particularly dangerous progress, provided one kept one’s nerve, and A.J. kept his easily enough; or rather, in another sense, he had no nerves at all—he was simply unaware of fear, terror, joy, triumph, and all other excitations. His hands and feet did what was required of them, while his brain looked on with mild incredulity.

Soon he reached the second-class coaches, in which candles were glimmering in bottle-necks; and he could see the occupants asleep—wealthy traders, bound on this business or that—well-dressed women, wives or mistresses of high officials—a few military officers of lower rank. He passed them all and then swung himself over the buffer-boards to the first-class coach, which rolled along less noisily on well-greased bogies. Here the compartments were well upholstered, lit by electricity, and provided with window-blinds. Many of the latter were not drawn, however, and A.J. could see officers of high rank, partially undressed, lying on the cushions with their mouths gaping in obvious snores. The coach was not crowded; no compartment held more than two occupants, and some only one. An especially luxurious coupé with a large red star pasted on the windows contained a small table and a comfortable couch on which a man sprawled in sleep. A military tunic hung on a hook above his head, and in the far corner of the coupé there was a compact lavatory-basin and water- tank. Such details fastened themselves with curious intensity on A.J.’s mind as he made that slow hand-over-hand journey from window to window. At last he passed on, over the last set of buffers, to the object of his pilgrimage—the dining-car. It was a long, heavy vehicle belonging to the international company, and at three in the morning it was, naturally, deserted, with only a glimmer of light showing from the further end where the attendants slept in their bunks. A.J. continued his way along, but this final stage was more difficult because of the increasing volley of sparks from the engine-chimney. When he reached the tiny kitchen compartment he was quite prepared for a climb through the window, with all the risks it involved of waking the attendants; but fate, at that last moment, was unexpectedly kind. The window was still open, and rolls of white bread, tins of American pork and beans, and wine-bottles lay so accessibly that he could reach them merely by putting in a hand. He did so as quickly as he could, filling his pockets, and then beginning the backward crawl by the same route. It had taken him, he reckoned, twenty minutes to reach the dining-car from the truck at the far end of the train, but he could not hope to accomplish the return journey so quickly, for his hands were a little numbed and his swollen pockets impeded movement.

He reached the first-class coach and swung himself on to it, but the effort, employing a different set of muscles, made him wince; and when he reached the footboard in safety he paused to regain strength. Suddenly he realised that he was standing opposite the window of the coupé and that the occupant of the couch was sitting up and staring at him. He began to move on hurriedly, but before he could reach the next compartment the door of the coupé was flung open and strong hands seized his wrists. It was impossible to struggle; the slightest attempt to do so would have meant his falling backwards to the track, and his arms, too, were aching after those successive swings from coach to coach. At first he thought the man was trying to push him off the train, but soon he realised that the intention was to drag him inside the coupé. As he could not free himself and as to be dragged inside was better than to be flung off, he yielded and the next minute found himself sprawling on the couch with the door closed and the man above him flourishing a revolver. He was a tall man with a trim beard and moustache and an exceedingly good set of teeth; just now he was snarling with them and punctuating his words with waves of the revolver. “So!” he cried venomously. “You try to assassinate me, eh? You creep along by the windows and shoot while I am asleep, perhaps, eh? Your friends in Omsk have heard of my promotion and they send you to execute revenge, no doubt? But instead, it is I who turn the tables, my friend! Now let me relieve you of your weapons.” He felt in A.J.’s bulging pockets and pulled out, not the revolver he had expected, but a bottle of wine. “So!” he snarled, flinging it aside. “A little celebration after the deed, eh? How disappointed your friends will be! And especially when they hear you have been shot, also. For, mistake not, my friend, I will have you shot at the next station. Assassin! Do you hear that?” He rapidly went through A.J.’s other pockets, pulling out, to his increasing surprise, nothing but long rolls of white bread, pieces of cheese, and tins of food.

All this time A.J. had not spoken a word, but now he judged it expedient to confess nothing less than the simple truth. “You see I am not armed,” he began. “I am not an assassin, and I had no intention of making any attack on you. I have no friends at Omsk, and I did not even know you were travelling on this train. I am an exile, returning to Russia, and all I wanted was food. I took these things from the dining-car and was on my way back with them to the truck in which I have been travelling from Irkutsk.”

The other seemed scarcely mollified by this explanation. He obviously believed it, but the revelation that he had been made to suffer such shock and inconvenience by a mere petty pilferer angered him, if anything, more than the idea of being assassinated. “A thief, indeed?” he cried harshly. “You are only a thief, do you say? And you were only crawling along in the middle of the night to steal food from the dining-car? Do you know that the food is all required for high officers of the government? You do, no doubt; but that did not deter you. Very well, you will find that the penalty for thieving is just the same. We behave with fine impartiality, you will find—thief or assassin, it does not matter—all face the firing squad.”

“Some of the refugees in the trucks are starving,” said A.J. slowly.

“Are they, indeed? Then let them starve. Why do they all want to come crowding on the trains at a time like this? Let them starve—the scum—the country could well manage with a few millions less of them. And as for these things—after your dirty hands have touched them they are clearly no use at all.” And with childish rage he began to pick them up and throw them out of the window—first the bottle of wine, then the rolls, then the cheese, and lastly the tins.

Something jerked forward in A.J.’s mind at that moment. As the other stooped to pick up the last tin, he suddenly hurled himself at the sneering face and flashing teeth, while his right hand caught hold of the revolver by the barrel and twisted it back. A.J. was still in a dream, but it was a different dream, a rising, billowing nightmare. He saw and heard the revolver slip to the floor, and then he felt both his hands move to the red, mottled neck in front of him; he saw the eyes bulge in terror and the snarl of the teeth transfix into something glittering and rigid.

A moment later he stood by the side of the couch looking down upon its curious occupant. There was no life now in the staring eyes and in the twisted limbs.

All at once it occurred to him: he had killed the fellow. He had not intended to—or had he? Yet no—there was hardly such a thing as intention in him. It had just happened; the sight of the food disappearing through the window had set up some unwonted electrical contact between mind and body.

He tried to think what to do next, and his mind worked with icy clearness, as in a vacuum. The dead man had clearly been a person of importance, and that meant certain death for his slayer. Assuming, of course, that the latter were discovered. But need he be? Was there a chance of escape? No one had seen him so far; the blinds of the windows next to the corridor were drawn and the corridor-door was fastened on the inside. He must, of course, hasten back to the cattle-truck and feign sleep; his absence might or might not have been particularly noticed, but perhaps he would be safe if he could return unobtrusively. At the next station, he knew, there would be a huge commotion, with probably the most minute examinations and cross-questionings of everybody in the train.

He was just about to open the door of the coupe and begin a swift return journey along the footboards, when he heard a tap at the corridor-door. “Tarkarovsk in fifteen minutes’ time, sir,” came the voice of the train-attendant. After a pause the message was repeated, and then A.J. managed to stammer out “All right.” He heard the attendant move away and tap at other doors along the corridor with the same message—“Tarkarovsk in fifteen minutes’ time, sir.”

And that, unfortunately, settled it. He could not return to the truck; it had taken him twenty minutes to make the forward journey, and it was impossible to think of doubling his rate on the way back. Besides, the train attendant’s warning would waken the passengers in the compartments; they would be sitting up and yawning, and would certainly see him if he passed their windows. The only alternative seemed to be a risky jump off the train and an escape across country, though his position would be desperate enough even then. Tarkarovsk was dangerously near; the body would be discovered quite soon; within an hour the surrounding country would be swarming with armed searchers. Nor, among those open, desolate swamps, could a fugitive hope to elude pursuers for long.

Then suddenly his mind alighted on a third possibility—fantastic, almost incredible, yet not, in such circumstances, to be rejected too scornfully. After all, one way, and perhaps the best way, in which a culprit might avoid discovery was by contriving that his crime should not be discovered either. A.J. looked at the dead man, then at the tunic hanging above him; and all at once his mind began arranging the future with astonishing precision. Yet there was no astonishment in the way he accepted every detail of an amazing scheme. He was cool, almost slow, in his movements. First he stripped the body of the dead man. Next he undressed himself and put on the dead man’s clothes. After that he dressed the body in his own discarded garments. Then opening the door of the coupé, he hurled the clothed body as far away from the track as he could. With luck it might sink into a swamp and never be discovered at all, but even without luck, it was hardly likely to attract much attention in such circumstances as he would arrange. Refugees and peasants often fell out of trains; several bodies had been noticed on the way from Irkutsk, but no one had thought of stopping to identify or examine them.

After reclosing the door of the coupé, he washed in the lavatory- basin and completed his toilet. The other man’s uniform fitted him very well indeed, as did also the military top-boots. The brakes were already grinding on the wheels as he pulled down the window-blinds, half lay down on the couch, took up a magazine that was on the table, and closed his eyes. If anyone opened the door from the platform it would appear that he had fallen asleep whilst reading.

The rest of his scheme was comparatively simple, if only he could escape attention at Tarkarovsk. Between Tarkarovsk and the next station there was almost sure to be some suitable spot where, before dawn, he could jump from the train and slip away across country. The disappearance of a high officer would create a stir, but only eventually; it would be more natural first of’ all to assume that any one of a dozen minor mischances could account for it.

The train jerked and jangled to a standstill—Tarkarovsk—Tarkarovsk. A sound of shouting reached him from outside and then the scurry of footsteps running along the platform as the train halted. He did not think Tarkarovsk was a very large place, but of course even the smallest stations were crowded with refugees. Suddenly sharper cries pierced the general din, and the door of the coupé opened violently to admit an intruder very different from any A.J. had anticipated. He was of small stature and corpulent, was dressed in a black frock-coat and trousers, and carried a rather shabby top-hat. “Welcome, sir!” he cried, making a profound bow. “As chairman of the local council of Khalinsk, I bring you the town’s most gracious felicitations.” A.J. rose in astonishment, whereupon the other, smiling and still bowing, took hold of his hand and gave it a tremendous shaking. The dream in which A.J. had been living for so long turned a corner now and swept into the infinite corridors of another dream. Somehow or other he found himself stepping out of the train; porters immediately entered it and began lifting out quantities of luggage. Other men in frock-coats and top-hats were presented to him, and he heard the little man saying sweetly: “The cars are waiting outside, sir, if you are ready.” He walked across the platform and out into the courtyard, where a huge Benz was waiting. He got in; several frock- coats followed him; the luggage was packed into a second car behind. Then the two cars lurched forward along a dusty uneven road. He did not speak, but his companions, evidently thinking he was very sleepy, commiserated with him on the inconvenience of arriving at a country railway station at half-past three in the morning. Soon the road widened into the typically Siberian town of Tarkarovsk. The cars pulled up outside the small hotel, and A.J. was informed that a room had been engaged for him and that he could take a rest, if he chose, until breakfast, after which the journey to Khalinsk would be resumed. He gave rather vague thanks and said the arrangement would suit him very well. The frock-coats conducted him upstairs to his room with obsequious gestures and then went drown again, he guessed, to have many drinks and much gossip about himself.

About himself—that was the question. Who was he? Who was he supposed to be? Why was he being taken to Khalinsk? And why the finery of a frock-coated railway station reception at such an hour? Then, alone in the rather dingy bedroom as the first light of dawn paled against the edges of the window-blinds, it occurred to him that the contents of his pockets might afford a clue. He examined them; he found a thick wallet containing a large sum in paper money and several official documents. One was a letter from Petrograd addressed to a Colonel Nikolai Andreveff, of Krasnoiarsk, appointing him Commissar of the town and district of Khalinsk, Western Siberia. And another was from the local council of Khalinsk, tendering their best respects and expressing sincere appreciation of’ the privilege conferred on them by the Petrograd government. A.J. read them through, put them back in the wallet, and then sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. He was still in his dark dream, and he dared not try to waken. There was no help for it; from the moment the frock-coat had entered the train at Tarkarovsk, a third identity had descended on him like a sealed doom.

So he became Nikolai Andreyeff, Commissar of Khalinsk, and he began to wonder whether he would be fortunate enough to arrange an escape before he was found out. As it chanced, it became increasingly impossible to arrange an escape; but then, on the other hand, he was not found out. Both time and place were, in fact, especially favourable to the impersonation; Khalinsk was a small town, well away from the main avenues of Siberian communication, and too remote at first even to be affected seriously by the Revolution itself. Most of its inhabitants, some ten thousand or so in number, were quietly and prosperously bourgeois; the surrounding district provided abundant food, and though the usual exchange of exports and imports with European Russia had been impeded, that had meant to the folk of Khalinsk no greater privations than a shortage of cotton-thread and Ford motor parts, and the necessity to use their best butter as axle-grease for farm-wagons. Khalinsk, indeed, was a little island of normality in the midst of a rising sea of chaos, and its new Commissar fitted into its peaceful scheme of things without much difficulty. Everyone agreed that he was a ‘queer’ man with ‘queer’ ways, but most were glad, in their bourgeois hearts, that Petrograd had not sent them a fire- eater. About a week after his arrival news came that his wife and child had died of typhus in Vladivostok, and Khalinsk people felt much sympathy for the quiet, rarely-speaking man who had to sit in his office signing travel-passes while his family were buried at the other end of a continent. When someone ventured to express that sympathy, all he received was a patient ’Thank you—it is most kind of you’—courteously given, but somehow not an encouragement to continue.

Once a visitor to Khalinsk who had known of Colonel Andreyeff in Krasnoiarsk commented that he would hardly have recognised him for the same man. “He was a wild fellow in those days—always ready to crack a joke—or another man’s head, for that matter. And now look at him!”

Khalinsk looked at him quite often, for the commissary office was in the centre of the town, adjoining the court-house and the prison, and the Commissar walked between his office and his hotel four times a day. In the hotel he had rooms of his own and took all his meals in private. But Khalinsk people could see him in their streets, and behind his desk whenever they had business with him; he presided, too, in the local courthouse, and paid official visits to the prison. His justice was firm, and the town’s young bloods soon learned that they could play no tricks with the new ruler; yet it was noticed and commented upon that in court he always looked as if he were only half attending and didn’t really care what happened.

His subordinates respected him, with the possible exception of Kashvin, the assistant commissar. Kashvin, a local youth of considerable intelligence, felt that the Petrograd authorities had needlessly superseded him in bringing Andreyeff from Krasnoiarsk, and he was the more antagonistic to his superior because he could not, with all his shrewdness, understand him. The two men, indeed, were complete opposites. Kashvin was cordial, unscrupulous, an astute observer of politics, and an impassioned orator. Probably, too, he was clever enough to foresee that power at Petrograd would eventually pass into the hands of extremists. During the autumn the normally easy-going life of Khalinsk did very rapidly deteriorate; a garrison of soldiers arrived from Europe with new and wilder doctrines; they were hardly willing to obey their own officers, much less a local commissar. Great excitement, also, had been caused by the establishment, in custody, of the ex-Emperor and his family at Tobolsk, a few hundred miles away. Throughout October conditions grew more and more turbulent, and it was clear that the situation in Petrograd was already slipping out of the hands of the moderates. Then in November came news of the Bolshevik revolution, and an immediate acceleration in Khalinsk and all such places of the trend already in progress.

Even Kashvin found it increasingly difficult to keep his balance on the political tight-rope. Following a custom beginning to be prevalent, the soldiers had got rid of their officers and had elected others from their own ranks; unfortunately, however, they obeyed their elected superiors no better than anyone else. Kashvin’s loudest oratory could not persuade them to cease their plundering raids into the town shops. Andreyeff did not try the oratorical method; he collected a few personal supporters and made arrests. Sternness succeeded for a while, until, quite suddenly, the blow was struck. While the Commissar was sitting at the courthouse one morning in January, the building was surrounded by soldiers and a spokesman entered to deliver an ultimatum. The soldiers, he announced, wished to choose their own commissar as well as their own officers; they had been in communication with Petrograd and had received official support; so would, therefore, the Commissar kindly consent to consider himself no longer a commissar until a vote had been taken? Most observers expected Andreyeff to give a sharp answer, but, to general surprise, he merely smiled (which he so rarely did) and replied: “Certainly—with pleasure.” The vote was taken there and then, and Kashvin was elected Commissar, with Andreyeff as his civilian assistant. Again it was expected that the latter would indignantly refuse to serve under his recent subordinate, but Andreyeff continued to give surprise by his easy acceptance of the situation. And, indeed, the reversal of position made more difference in theory than in fact. Kashvin, though nominally in authority, was completely at the mercy of his military supporters, while Andreyeff, exactly as before, continued his patient work of issuing ration- cards, arranging for the distribution of food and fuel, and making out travel- passes.

During the early months of the new year the position at Khalinsk was still worsening. The nearness of Tobolsk, with its illustrious prisoners, brought to the district a heavy influx of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary spies, German and Allied secret agents, and freelance adventurers of all kinds. Tobolsk was their goal, but Khalinsk was a safer place for plotting. Half the pedlars and market-dealers were in the service of one or other organisation, and every day brought new and more startling rumours. In March a regiment of the new Red Army arrived from Ekaterinburg to relieve the older men who had already served through most of the Siberian winter. Many were criminals freshly released from European prisons; the best of them were miners and factory-workers lured into the army by generous pay and rations. They were all completely undisciplined and changed their officers with monotonous regularity.

Towards the end of March the long succession of rumours did at length culminate in something actual. Late one night the telephone-bell rang in the commissary office; A.J., who was there working, answered it; the call came from a post-house half-way between Khalinsk and the railway. The message reported that there were rumours that the Trans-Siberian line had been cut by White guards, assisted by Czecho-Slovak prisoners-of-war.

A.J., tired after a long day of wrestling with the complications of a new rationing system, took no particular notice, since such scare messages arrived almost regularly two or three nights a week. But a quarter of an hour later another message came—this time from Tarkarovsk; no train, it said, had arrived from the east since noon, and there were rumours that counterrevolution had broken out at Omsk. A.J. rang through to the garrison but could get no answer; Kashvin, he guessed, would be in bed and asleep; he walked, therefore, a mile or so over the hard snow to the soldiers’ barracks. He found the place in a state of utter chaos and pandemonium, with all the officers more or less drunk and incapable. Most of the men were in a similar condition; it was a saint’s day, and by way of celebration they had looted several wine-cellars in the town. A.J. tried to make known the dangerous possibilities of the situation, and while he was actually in the officers’ room there came a further telephone message from Pokroevensk, ten miles away, conveying the brief information that counter-revolutionary bands had occupied and plundered a neighbouring village. At this a few of the officers struggled to rouse themselves, and men were hastily sent to the armoury for rifles and ammunition. Meanwhile orders were given for a general turn-out, but out of nearly a thousand men only two hundred could be equipped for whatever emergency might arise. Hundreds were so drunk that they could not stir from the floors on which they had collapsed; many also were sleeping with women in the town and could not be reached at all.

A.J. himself took a rifle and a belt of cartridges, and soon after midnight the detachment, in charge of an officer, set out along the gleaming snow-bound road. The cold air soon cleared the drink-sodden heads of the men, and they stepped out at a good pace in the direction of Pokroevensk. Ruffians though most of them were, A.J. found them almost pathetically companionable and full of amazement that he, a civilian commissar, should be accompanying them. Surely, as a government official, it was his privilege—his perquisite, as it were—to keep out of all serious danger?

He smiled and answered that he had come because he knew the district very well—the roads, directions, and so on. It would not matter his temporarily deserting the office-desk; there was Kashvin in charge. And at this the men laughed. Though they loved to let themselves be stirred by Kashvin’s eloquence, a moment such as this brought out their secret contempt for the man whose tongue was so much mightier than his sword.

During the first hour the men sang songs—not spirited marching songs, but dragging, rather melancholy refrains that seemed to be known by all. One was ’Far away and over the marshes’—a weird recitative about exile; another favourite was ‘A Soldier lays down his Life.’ Into these slow, crooning tunes the men somehow contrived to insert a strange ghost of rhythm, hardly noticeable to the listener, yet sufficient to keep them in rough, plodding step. After the first few miles, however, A.J. suggested that they had better march in silence, since voices carried far in that still, cold atmosphere. The men obeyed him, not instantly as from a military order, but with a gradual trail of voices from high melody to the faintest murmur amongst themselves. The officer who should have had the wit to give the order was staggering along, still very drunk. The men said tranquilly that it was because he was not satisfied to get drunk like other men; he dosed himself with a sort of yeast-paste which produced more permanent effects.

The remaining events of that night might serve as a model for much that was happening and that was yet to happen throughout the vast territory between the Pacific and the Vistula. All the typical ingredients were present—confusion, rumour, inconsequence, surprise. To begin with, at Pokroevensk, which was reached about three in the morning, the officer in charge suddenly collapsed and died. A.J. telephoned the news to Khalinsk and gathered that the town was in the wildest panic; rumours of an overwhelming White advance along the line of the Trans-Siberian were being received, and the garrison was already preparing to evacuate the town. This seemed to A.J. the sheerest absurdity as well as cowardice, but he could not argue the matter over the wire with a person who, from the sound of his voice, was still half-drunk. He determined, if the soldiers were willing (for of course he had no real authority over them), to march on to the railway and tear up a few lengths of line—the usual and most effective way of delaying an advance. The men agreed to this plan, and were just about to leave Pokroevensk, when a mortifying discovery was made. The ammunition that they carried would not fit the rifles, the former being of French pattern, while the latter were Japanese. Similar mistakes, the men said, had often been made during the war against the Germans. It meant, of course, that the detachment was practically unarmed, and A.J. could see nothing for it but to return to Khalinsk as quickly as possible. But then something else happened. In the grim light of dawn a band of White guards swept suddenly into the village along the frozen road from the west; there were several hundred of them, all fully armed and all in a mood to wreak terrible havoc upon a small village. They were not, however, prepared for A.J. and his couple of hundred men. Still less was A.J. prepared for them. He realised that a fight would be hopeless, and rather than have all his followers shot to pieces he would prefer to surrender; he had none of the more spectacular heroic virtues, and conceived that a soldier’s aim should be to preserve his own life at least as much as to destroy his enemy’s. As it chanced, however, the White captain thought similarly, and was, moreover, a little quicker in action. He surrendered to A.J. a few seconds before the latter could possibly have reversed the compliment. It was amusing, in a way, to see four or five hundred well-armed Whites surrendering to less than half as many Reds who could not, if they had tried, have fired a shot. The White captain explained that he was not really a very convinced White; he had always, in fact, inclined to be a little pink. Some of the White soldiers raised cheers for the Soviets. A.J. nodded gravely; the procedure was very familiar.

More important than the White soldiers was a party of civilians whom they had been escorting. These were various personages, more or less illustrious, who had escaped from European Russia and were hoping to cross Siberia and reach America. They had travelled disguised as far as Tarkarovsk and had there given themselves into the hands of a White detachment which, in return for an enormous bribe, had undertaken to get them through to Omsk.

A.J. was in no doubt as to his proper course of action. Such a distinguished party must be conveyed to Khalinsk and held as hostages. He arranged this promptly, after arming his men with the rifles taken from the White soldiers. Khalinsk was reached by noon, and by that time the atmosphere was completely changed; the Whites had everywhere been defeated, and Red reinforcements were already arriving from Ekaterinburg. A.J.’s prisoners were examined and locked away in the town jail, with the exception of most of the soldiers, who were permitted to join the Red army. In the reaction that followed the excitements of the whole episode A.J. felt a certain bewildered helplessness; all was such confusion, incoherence, chaos—a game played in the dark, with Fate as a blind umpire. The chapter of accidents found itself interpreted as a miracle of intrepid organisation, with A.J. as the hero of the hour. Even Kashvin congratulated him. “I would have accompanied you myself,” he explained, “but as Commissar, it would have been improper for me to leave the town. Now tell me, Andreyeff, do you think it would be better to ask for Japanese ammunition to fit he rifles or for French rifles to fit the ammunition?” He then showed A.J. a few reports he had drafted and which were to be telegraphed away immediately. They were all circumstantially detailed accounts of atrocities committed by White guards—women raped, babies speared on the ends of bayonets, wounded men tortured to death, and so on. Kashvin seemed extremely proud of the collection. “But surely,” A.J. said, “you can’t have received proof of all this in so short a time?” Kashvin replied cheerfully: “Oh no—they are my own invention entirely; don’t you think they read very well? After all, since we have no rifles and ammunition for the present, we must do what we can with moral weapons.”

And, as it further chanced, the Whites had committed atrocities, though less ingeniously than Kashvin had imagined. The Reds, too, were not without a natural lust for vengeance. Hundreds of prosperous local inhabitants were thrown into prisons on charges of having been in sympathy with the White insurrectionists; wholesale raids and arrests were made, and the Khalinsk prison was soon quite full. Meanwhile in the town itself all semblance of civilian authority vanished. A strongly Red local Soviet was appointed by the soldiers; Kashvin, despite prodigies of oratory and private manoeuvre, was deposed from office and a Jewish agitator named Baumberg took his place. A.J. was allowed to remain as assistant-commissar because he was personally popular and because nobody else either wanted or was capable of performing his various jobs. These jobs now vastly increased, especially as food grew less plentiful and disease broke out in the overcrowded prison and barracks. Baumberg was a loud-voiced, heavy-featured Pole whose ferocity in public was only rivalled by an uncanny mildness in private life. At the age of twenty he had been accused (falsely, he said) of killing a gendarme; he had thenceforward spent twenty years in a military fortress and twenty more in exile at Missen, in the desolate tundra region of North Russia. Now, at sixty, he was being given his opportunity for revenge, and he was having no mercy. His ruthlessness gratified the soldiers, and his speeches, sincerer if no more extreme than those of Kashvin, were constant incitements to violence. Yet he was a pleasant person compared with the military commandant, an ex-railwayman named Vronstein. Vronstein was a psycho-pathological curiosity; he, too, had been long in exile, and its results had been an astounding assortment of perversions. Even his sadism was perverted; when prisoners were punished or shot he would never watch the scene himself, but would insist that a full and detailed report, complete with every horror, was submitted to him in writing. Over such reports he would savagely and secretly gloat for hours. Baumberg openly despised him, but there was a sinister power about the fellow which gave him considerable hold over the soldiers.

Among the commissary duties was that of visiting the prison and prison hospital, which were now under the control of the local Soviet. Both were small and crammed with White prisoners, most of whom were sullenly resigned to whatever fate might be in store for them. A few were defiant, exulting in the still-expected breakdown of the Revolution. Almost every day fresh arrivals were brought in by Red guards, and—as it were, to make room for them—others were removed by Baumberg’s orders, taken to the military camp, and shot. Baumberg never explained on what system he selected his victims; perhaps, indeed, he had no system at all. His ferocity was coldly impersonal; when he had done his day’s duty, including perhaps the ordering of half a dozen shootings for the morrow, he would go home to his daughter, who kept house for him, and play noisy capering games with his fatherless grand-children.

The White prisoners included a score or more women, who were lodged separately in a large overcrowded room. This was a thoroughly unsatisfactory arrangement, since the room was badly needed as a supplementary hospital ward for the male prisoners, many of whom were sick and wounded. Baumberg, though he would have scorned any idea of sex-distinction, did not in fact have any of the women shot, and was willing enough to allow the majority of them to be transferred to Omsk, where the prison was larger. This only stipulated exceptions were the two most distinguished captives, whom he wished to keep at Khalinsk, and who, after the departure of the rest, were transferred to separate cells. Both had been captured by A.J.’s men in the affair at Pokroevensk. The Countess Vandaroff was one, and A.J., who had the job of visiting her from time to time, soon recommended her transference to hospital, since she was clearly going out of her mind. The other woman prisoner was the Countess Marie Alexandra Adraxine. She was of a different type; calm, exquisitely dignified, she accepted favours and humiliations alike with slightly mocking nonchalance. When A.J. first visited her, she said: “Ah, Commissar, we have met before, I think? That morning at Pokroevensk—I dare say you remember?”

He said: “I have come to ask if you have any particular complaints—is your food satisfactory, and so on?”

“Oh, fairly so, in the circumstances. My chief wish is that there were fewer bugs in my mattress.”

“I will try to see that you have a fresh one, though of course I cannot promise that it will be perfectly clean.”

“Oh, I’m not fastidious—don’t think that.” She went to the narrow mattress by the wall of the cell and gave it a blow with her clenched fist. After a second or so a slowly spurting-red cascade issued from every rent and seam. “You see?” she said. “It’s the trivial things that really bother one most, isn’t it?”

The second time he paid her cell an official visit she thanked him for having replaced the mattress by a comparatively unverminous one. Then she said: “Have you any idea what is going to happen to me, Commissar?”

He shook his head. “It is altogether a matter for others to decide.”

“You think I shall be shot?”

“No women have been shot as yet.”

“Nevertheless, it is possible?”

“Oh, perfectly.”

“Would you approve?”

“I should not be asked either to approve or to disapprove.”

She seemed amused by his attitude. After that he did not again visit her alone, for he did not care to be asked questions which he could not answer.

As spring advanced it could be foreseen that events in the district were hastening to a further crisis. Along the whole length of the Trans-Siberian the Czecho-Slovak prisoners-of-war, whom the Petrograd government had promised a safe journey to Vladivostok, had seized trains and station depots. This comparatively small body of men, stretched out in tenuous formation for four thousand miles, was practically in possession of Siberia, and there was talk that the Allies, instead of letting them proceed across the Pacific, intended to use them to break the Soviets and re-form the eastern front against Germany. Simultaneously the forces of counter-revolution were again massing for an attack. In April the Reds began to send important political prisoners away from the endangered districts; the ex-Emperor was removed from Tobolsk for an unknown destination. From Khalinsk there would doubtless have been a big exodus but for a dispute between the district commissars of Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg as to who held authority over the town. Baumberg favoured Ekaterinburg; Vronstein preferred Siberian rule. A hot quarrel arose between the two officials, broken only by intermittent shootings that both could agree upon.

At last came news that Omsk itself had been taken by the counter- revolutionaries. Khalinsk was then caught up in another sudden scurry of panic; military and civilian authority both made preparations to evacuate the town; stores and ammunition were packed and sent away west; and Baumberg’s speeches grew more and more tumultuous. Kashvin’s invented atrocity stories now began to trickle back with many elaborations; they drove the Red garrison to the highest pitch of fury, and this, in the absence of any convenient battlefield enemy, was vented upon the White captives in the prison.

One night the quarrelling between Baumberg and Vronstein came to a head. Difficulties had arisen over the provision of transport for sending certain of the prisoners to safer places—safer, that was, from White capture. Rather than run the risk of any being rescued by their friends, Vronstein was for a wholesale massacre; but this was too much for Baumberg. The two stormed and threatened each other, Vronstein declaring in the end that he would march at the head of his soldiers and take the prison by storm. As soon as he had left the commissary office, Baumberg turned to A.J. in his suddenly normal and placid way and said: “I do believe the fellow means it. He’ll have them all murdered before the night’s out. Andreyeff, I think you ought to go to the prison and get out the two women. Petrograd will be furious if they are slaughtered by those drunken hogs.” He added, a little pompously: “The women are both very important links in the chain of evidence against the enemies of the Revolution, and I have already received strict orders that they are to be taken care of. When the counterrevolution has been crushed, they are to be put on trial in Petrograd—I tell you that in confidence, of course.”

It was almost midnight when A.J. reached the prison. Even so soon there was in the atmosphere a queer feeling of impending terror; the prison-guards were nervous and inclined to question his authority. It was obvious that most of them, if only to save their own skins, would join with the soldiers in whatever bloodthirsty orgy was to ensue. A.J. sought Countess Vandaroff first; she was kept in an outlying part of the prison under semi-hospital conditions. As soon as the warder unlocked her door she sprang screaming out of bed and crouched in the furthest corner of the cell. A.J. began: “Do not alarm yourself, Countess, but get ready to move away at once. You are to be taken elsewhere.” Then, as he saw the warder’s eyes upon him, he knew that he had blundered. In the hurry of the moment he had called her ‘Countess’. Commissars had been degraded and private soldiers shot, he knew, for less than that. Perturbed by the possible results of his slip, he went on to the other woman’s cell. She was asleep and had to be awakened. He gave her the same message, but with careful omission of the forbidden word.

Waiting in the prison-hall for the two women to present themselves, he could hear the sound of shouting and rifle-fire from the barracks not far away. Intense nervousness had by this time communicated itself to warders and prisoners alike; all were wide awake and chattering, and A.J. wondered what might be in store for them during the next few hours.

Countess Adraxine appeared first; she had put over her shoulders a light travelling cloak that still retained a trace of its original fashionableness, and she carried a few personal belongings in a small bundle. In the presence of the guards he did not speak to her; they waited for a moment in silence, and then he despatched one of the guards to fetch Countess Vandaroff. A little later the guard returned with the astonishing news that the woman was dead. A.J. rushed to her cell; it was true. Mad with terror at the thought that she was to be taken away and shot, the woman had killed herself by a desperate and rather difficult method: she had stabbed herself repeatedly in the throat with an ordinary safety-pin, and had died from shock and loss of blood.

A.J. was a little paler when he rejoined the other prisoner. There was no time to be lost, and accompanied by guards the two hurried out of the prison and across the town-square to the commissary office. Baumberg was waiting; he had heard of the suicide by telephone and was in a fine fury. The Petrograd authorities would hold him responsible; how was it that the woman had been allowed to have in her possession such a dangerous weapon as a safety-pin; and much else that was extreme and absurd. Then, with one of those sudden returns to mildness that were such an odd trait in his character, he handed his assistant a sheaf of papers. “You are to take the remaining prisoner to Moscow, Andreyeff; there you will hand her over to the authorities. Two guards will go with you. Here are all the necessary papers; you will board the first train west from Tarkarovsk. The horses are waiting outside—you must set out instantly, for the latest news is that the Whites are advancing quickly along the line from Omsk.”

In the courtyard of the office building stood a couple of tarantasses—the ordinary Siberian conveyance which, badly sprung and yoked to relays of horses, would sometimes accomplish the journey to Tarkarovsk in five or six hours. There was a small moon shining, and a sky of starlight. The roads, after the grip of winter, were on the point of thawing; in a few days they would be choked with mud. A.J., clad in a heavy soldier’s greatcoat and fur cap, superintended the stowing away of the luggage into the first vehicle, which, driven by one of the guards, pulled out into the deserted street and clattered away south towards one o’clock in the morning. A few minutes later the second tarantass followed; A.J. and the woman sat together in the back of the swaying, rickety vehicle, while the other guard drove.

In the commissary yard A.J. had spoken a few words to his prisoner—formal courtesies and so on, but as soon as the journey began he relapsed into silence. He was, to begin with, physically tired; he had been working at more than normal pressure for weeks, and now reaction was on him. Apart from that, the stir of Countess Vandaroff’s death and the sudden unfolding of a new future gave him a certain weariness of mind; he felt too mentally fatigued to realise what was happening. Fortunately, fatigue drove away anxiety; he felt again as if he were living in the midst of some vague and curious dream, full of happenings over which he had no control and with which, in any major sense, he was completely unconcerned. He was, he supposed, bound for Moscow, yet how and even whether he would ever get there did not seem in the least important. He had a pocketful of documents stamped with all the official seals and signatures Baumberg had been able to commandeer, but he had no confidence that they were worth more than the paper they were written on. The ex-Emperor, it was rumoured, had been seized by the local Soviet at Ekaterinburg in defiance of official orders; things like that were constantly happening; anything, indeed, might happen. The only course was to drift onwards, somehow or other, inside this busy dream, always ready, in an emergency, to grope into a wakefulness that was but another dream of another kind.

Steadily through the night the horses galloped over the softening earth. Only once was anything said, and that was at Pokroevensk, where the horses were changed and rumours were shared with the local telegraph official. The latest report was that Tarkarovsk had already fallen to the Whites. A.J., with better knowledge of distances, did not credit this, but it was futile to argue. As the journey was resumed, the woman said: “So you are going on to Tarkarovsk, Commissar?”

“Yes.”

“But if the Whites hold the place, that means we shall be running into them?”

“Yes. Only I don’t believe they do hold it.”

“What would happen if they did?”

“You would be freed and I should be shot, most probably.”

“Whereas, if all goes well and we get to Moscow safely, it is I who will be shot?”

“Possibly.”

“You strike the Napoleonic attitude rather well, Commissar.”

“Pardon me, I am not striking any attitude at all. I am merely very tired—really too tired to talk.”

After that she said nothing.

He was right; Tarkarovsk was still Red, though the town and district were being rapidly prepared for evacuation. The two jolting vehicles drove up to the railway station towards dawn, after a journey of nightmare weariness. Hour after hour the Commissar and his prisoner had been bumped along over the interminable Siberian plain, and now, at the station, with limbs sore and aching, they had to begin the next and perhaps more arduous task of finding scats on the train. The station was swarming with refugees from the surrounding country, most of them in a pitiable condition, and all frantically anxious to be out of the way when the White troops should enter. There had been no trains since the previous evening, though several were rumoured to be on their way. The stationmaster bowed respectfully when A.J. presented his papers; yes, he should certainly be given a compartment in the next train, but would there be any next train—that was the real question? “I cannot, you see, invent a train, Commissar—not being God, that is to say.” A.J. detected a slight impertinence behind the man’s outward obsequiousness. Of course the Whites were coming and the Reds were leaving; the fellow was adroitly trimming his sails to catch the new wind.

Throughout the hardships of the journey and now amidst the throng and scurry of the railway platform, the woman prisoner preserved a calm that had in it still that same slight touch of mockery. Of course it was not her place to worry about the train or the White advance; if the latter arrived before the former, the advantage would all be hers. She could afford to watch with equanimity and even exultation the growing congestion of the station precincts and the increasing anxiety on the faces of the two Red guards. Yet for all that, her attitude was no more than calm; it was as if she were neither hoping nor fearing anything at all. She sat on her bundle of possessions and watched the frantic pageant around her with a sleepy, almost mystical detachment. Even when, at three in the afternoon, the stationmaster came shouting the news that the train was arriving after all, she did not move or betray by a murmur that the matter concerned her; and this attitude, because it so queerly accorded with his own, stirred in A.J. a slight and puzzled attention.

The train arrived at half-past four, already full, with Red soldiers and refugees crouching between and on the roofs of the coaches. The two guards, doubtfully assisted by the stationmaster, opened the door of a second-class compartment (there was no first-class on the train) and drove its occupants on to the platform at the point of the revolver. They were refugees from Omsk, and pity for them was tempered with indignation at the horrible state in which they had left the compartment. They had ripped up the cushioned seats to make puttees to wind round their legs; they had scattered filth of every description all over the floor; and they (or some previous occupants) had also stripped the compartment bare of every detachable object. The two guards worked for half an hour to make the place habitable, and even then its interior atmosphere was still unpleasant.

The train left Tarkarovsk about dusk and crawled slowly westward. A.J., his prisoner, and the guards made a frugal breakfast of coffee and black bread. Both guards were huge fellows—one of a typical peasant type, and the other of superior intelligence but less likeable. As for the prisoner, her attitude remained exactly the same. At the first station west of Tarkarovsk news came that the Whites were on the point of entering that town; the train had apparently escaped by only the narrowest of margins. Yet the woman betrayed no suspicion of disappointment. She obeyed all A.J.’s requests with unassuming calmness; she sat where he told her to sit, ate when he told her to eat, and so on. He had now time to notice her appearance. She was perhaps under thirty years of age, though her type was that whose years are difficult to guess. Her hair was smooth and jet-black, framing a face of considerable beauty. Her lips had the clean, accurate curvings of the thoroughbred, and her eyes, when they were in repose, held a rather sleepy, mystical look. And she was not only calm; she was calming.

Towards evening the train reached Ekaterinburg. The Ural mountain city, noted for its extreme brand of revolutionary sentiment, was in a state of wild excitement, and for two reasons—the White advance along the railway, and the murder of the ex-Emperor that had taken place a few nights before. The station was packed with Red soldiers, and from their looks as the train sailed past their faces to a standstill, A.J. did not anticipate pleasant encounters. The first thing that happened was the invasion of the compartment by a dozen or so of them, extravagantly armed and more than half drunk. The two guards wisely made no attempt to resist, but A.J. said, authoritatively: “I am a Commissar on my way to Moscow on important government business. This compartment is reserved for me.” His manner of speaking was one which usually impressed, and most of the invaders, despite their ruffianism, would probably have retired but for one of them, a swaggering little Jew about five feet high, who cried shrilly: “Not at all—nothing is reserved, except by order of the Ekaterinburg Soviet. Besides, how do we know you are what you say? And who is this woman with you?” A.J. pulled out his wallet of documents and displayed them hopefully. They were so magnificently sealed and stamped that most of the men, who could not read, seemed willing enough to accept their validity. But again the Jew was truculent. He read through everything very carefully and critically examined the seals. Then he stared insolently at the woman. “So you are taking her to Moscow?” he remarked at length. “Well, I’m afraid you can’t. Khalinsk has no authority over Ekaterinburg and we refuse you permission to pass. I must see Patroslav about this. Meanwhile, you fellows, stand here on guard till I come back.”

He jumped down to the platform and disappeared amidst the throng. The soldiers remained in the compartment, talking among themselves and getting into conversation with the two Khalinsk guards. One of the latter talked rather indiscreetly but A.J. did not think it wise to interfere.

After a few moments the little Jew returned, accompanied by another obvious Jew, taller and rather fine-looking. Without preamble he addressed himself to A.J.

“You are the Assistant-Commissar at Khalinsk?”

“Yes.”

“And this woman was formerly the Countess Marie Alexandra Adraxine?”

“Yes.”

“Then we cannot permit you to pass—either of you. In fact, you are both arrested.”

A.J. argued with sudden and rather startling vehemence: the central government wanted this woman; she was to supply evidence which would be wanted at a full-dress trial of all the counter-revolutionary ringleaders; there would be a tremendous row if some local Soviet were to interfere with such intentions. A.J. ended by an astute appeal to the men personally—“You two are doubtless ambitious—you would perhaps like to see yourselves in higher positions than a local Soviet? Do you think it will help you to countermand the orders of the central government? Whereas if, on the other hand—” It was pretty bluff, but he played it well, and the two Jews were reluctantly impressed. At last the man called Patroslav said something to his colleague in a language A.J. did not understand, and a lively and evidently acrimonious argument developed between them. Then Patroslav swung round on his heel and went off. The other Jew turned to A.J. “You are to be allowed to proceed with your prisoner,” he announced, with sullen insolence. “But your guards must return to Khalinsk—we will replace them by two others. And your prisoner will travel in a third-class compartment with the guards—we do not allow privileges of any kind to enemies of the Revolution. You yourself, being a government official, may remain here.”

“On the contrary, I shall go wherever the prisoner goes, since I am still in charge and responsible.”

“As you prefer.”

It was all, A.J. perceived, a scheme of petty annoyance, and on the whole he was glad to be escaping from Ekaterinburg with nothing worse. During the whole of the delay the woman had not spoken a word, but as they walked down the platform to change their compartment she said: “I am sorry, Commissar, to be inconveniencing you so much. If I give my parole not to escape, would you not prefer to stay in comfort where you were?”

“There is little difference in comfort between one place and another,” he answered.

But there was, for the third-class coaches were filthy and verminous, and there was neither time nor opportunity to make even the most perfunctory turnout.

The night had a brilliant moon, and the hills, seen through the windows of the train, upreared like heaving seas of silver. There was no light in the compartment save that of a candle-stump fixed in the neck of a bottle. The heavy bearded faces of the guards shone fiercely in the flickering light. They were Ukrainians and sometimes exchanged a few husky words in their local dialect. A.J. had a slight understanding of this, but the men talked so quietly that he could not catch more than a few words here and there.

Suddenly the train came to a jangling standstill, and after some delay a train official walked along the track with the information that a bridge had been blown up just ahead and that all passengers must walk on several miles to the next station, where another train would be waiting. A.J., his prisoner, and the two guards, climbed down to the track, which ran in a wide curve through densely wooded country. One of the guards declared that he knew the spot quite well, and that there was an easy short-cut to the station across country. A.J. doubtfully agreed and they set off along a wide pathway that met the railway at a tangent. They all walked in silence for a few minutes, with the voices of the other passengers still within hearing; but soon they were amongst tall pine- trees, and A.J. imagined, though he could not be certain, that the path was veering too far to the north. He said to the guards: “Are you quite sure that this is the way?”—and one of them answered: “Oh yes—you can hear the engine-whistle in the distance.” A.J. listened and could certainly hear it, but it sounded very remote.

They all walked on a little further, with the two guards chattering softly together in Ukrainian. A.J.’s acute sense of direction again warned him, and a somewhat similar feeling of apprehension must have seized on his prisoner, for she said “Don’t you think we should have done better to keep to the railway line?”

At last even the guards seemed to be undecided; they had been walking a little ahead and now stopped and began arguing together in excited undertones.

“Don’t you think it would have been better?” she repeated.

“Possibly,” he answered, in a whisper. “It was certainly foolish to let them lead us into this forest.”

“You think they have lost the way?”

“Maybe—or maybe not.”

“Ah,” she answered. “So you too are wondering?”

“Wondering what?”

“What they are chatting about so quietly.”

He said quickly: “I have a revolver. I am keeping a look- out.”

He was, in fact, beginning not to like the appearance of things at all. Had the two guards led them deliberately astray, and if so, with what intention? In the train he had heard them chattering together, but they could hardly have been plotting this particular piece of strategy since the blown-up railway bridge could not have been foreseen. Perhaps, however, the idea had come to one of them as a quick impromptu, a variant upon some less immediate scheme that they had had in mind.

One of the guards approached him with a measured deliberation which, in the moonlight, seemed peculiarly sinister. “If you will both wait here with me,” he began, “my friend says he will find out where we are and will come back to tell us.”

At first it seemed an innocent and reasonable suggestion, involving the somewhat lessened danger of being left alone with one possible enemy instead of two. But then A.J. recollected an ancient ruse that bandits sometimes played on their victims in Siberian forests; they said they were going away, but they did not really do so; they crept back and sprang on their enemies from behind. “No,” he answered, with sudden decision. “It doesn’t matter—we’ll go back to where we began and then walk along the track. I think I can remember the way.”

He began to walk in the reverse direction with the woman at his side and the two guards following him at a little distance. They seemed rather disconcerted by his decision, and continued to exchange remarks in whispers.

After a few moments A.J. said quietly to his companion: “I want you to be on your guard. I don’t trust those fellows.”

“Neither do I. What do you think their game is?”

“Robbery. Perhaps murder. This going back to the railway has upset their plans—I can gather that from the way they’re talking.”

“What can we do?”

“Nothing—except keep our heads. Have you good nerve?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Then take this revolver and use it if necessary, but not otherwise.” He handed it to her quickly as they passed into the shadow of dark trees.

For the next few moments there came no sound except the crunch of four pairs of footsteps over the fir-cones. Neither A.J. nor the woman spoke, and the two guards also had ceased their whispered conversation.

A.J.’s eyes were searching ahead for any sign of the railway as well as preparing for any lightning emergency in the rear. The silence and darkness of the forest were both uncanny, and though he listened acutely for any repetition of that distant engine-whistle, he heard nothing. After walking for some ten minutes, by which time he estimated that the railway ought to have come into view, the track narrowed and began to twist uphill. He whispered suddenly: “I’ve lost my way.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we may have to spend the rest of the night in the forest with these ruffians.” A moment later he added: “They’re talking again—they’re guessing we’re lost, and I’m afraid it suits them only too well. I think I’d rather have it out with them than go on like this.”

He stopped abruptly, facing the guards so quickly that they had not time to conceal the revolvers in their hands. “Gentlemen,” he said calmly, “I think you must find it a burden to carry those weapons as well as our luggage. Suppose you hand them over to me—I can guard the party if we are attacked.”

The very unexpectedness of the request might have succeeded with one of the men, had not the other, with a snarl of rage, flung himself all at once upon A.J. The other then went to his companion’s assistance, and the three men were soon engaged in a desperate struggle in which darkness seemed an extra enemy of them all. One powerful pair of arms gripped A.J. round the neck, while another seized his right arm and sought to wrest away the revolver. Both assailants were exceedingly strong, and though A.J. was strong also, he could not have held out for long against such odds. Suddenly one of the guards managed to wrench his own revolver free and aimed it full in A.J.’s face; and simultaneously a second revolver swung on to the scene and glinted in a shaft of moonlight. The two triggers were pressed almost together, but there was only one report. The guard’s weapon misfired, and a second later its owner collapsed to the ground. A.J. turned to deal with the second guard, but with a sharp movement the latter drew back and plunged wildly into the undergrowth and away.

A.J. was left, revolver in hand, peering down at a huddled body. The woman stood close to him, also holding a weapon, but hers was smoking.

He stooped and said, after a pause: “He’s dead.”

“Is he? I did it.”

“Probably saving your own life as well as mine.”

“Yes, I daresay. But what has to be done now?”

“This—before anything else.”

He dragged the body to one side of the path and pushed it into the midst of thick undergrowth.

“Was the other fellow hurt?” she then asked.

“No—only terrified. He’ll soon find his way to the nearest village and tell everybody. There’ll be a pretty big fuss.”

“But we were being attacked—it was self-defence, surely?”

“In a way, yes, but he’s hardly likely to say so, and nobody’s likely to take our word for it against his. Probably he’ll say we’re counter-revolutionary spies and that we seized the chance of a train hold-up to lure our two guards into the forest and attack them.”

“But you have your papers to prove who you are?”

“You saw for yourself how doubtfully they were accepted in Ekaterinburg. After the stories that fellow will spread about us, they’ll count even less.”

“Then it looks as if we’d better move on.”

“Yes. Instantly.”

“Do you know which way to go?”

“Away from the nearest village. That means, almost certainly, uphill.”

Then they discovered that they were both quite breathless. All about them were the dark pillars of tree-trunks, with here and there a delicate pattern on the undergrowth where moonlight spilled through. He began to gather up the various bundles that the two guards had thrown down. Then they hurried away. They climbed in silence for some time, till at last she asked, in a very ordinary casual voice, what he was thinking about. He answered: “To be exact, about a packet of chocolate I left on the seat in the train.”

She laughed softly. “Never mind. I have some. Shall we share it?”

“Not yet. Better get on further.”

They went on climbing amongst the trees, stopping only now and then to listen for any distant sound. But none could be heard distinctly, though once, from the very edge of the world, it seemed, there came what might have been the wail of a train-whistle. As they climbed higher, the trees thinned out into the open, and suddenly they reached a high curving summit outlined against the moonlight like a knife-edge. The air, after the cool forest depths, was warm, and they themselves were again breathless. “Keep in shadow,” he ordered, and they took a few backward steps into a little hollow full of dead leaves. A squirrel scampered past them as they halted. “Now for your chocolate,” he said.

They sat down on a leafy slope and shared the chocolate and also a hunk of black bread that he had brought from Tarkarovsk. There was nothing to drink, but he had a water-bottle and they could find a stream as soon as it grew daylight. They ate ravenously and were still hungry when they had finished. Then it was necessary to make plans, tentatively, at any rate, for the future.

A.J. was not disposed to minimise the seriousness of the situation. The story that the runaway guard would doubtless tell was just as credible as theirs—perhaps more so to those he would be addressing. A man supposed to be a Siberian assistant-commissar, supposed also to be escorting to Moscow a dangerous female counter-revolutionary and member of the aristocracy; the doubts that the Ekaterinburg officials had had, and their precautionary escort of two Red guards; the shooting of one of these guards in the middle of a forest—such a story would not seem difficult either to believe or to interpret in a district notorious for its ‘redness.’ And as for the wallet-full of assorted stamps and seals, A.J. began to feel that their presence might be a danger quite as much as a safeguard.

If they could only make their way to another district, across country, say, to the northern railway at Perm, they could there continue their journey to Moscow incognito, as it were. A.J. was fairly sure that his story would be credited at headquarters, especially as the Moscow authorities had had so much trouble themselves with the turbulent Uralian provinces. Anyhow, all that remained in the less immediate future; the more pressing problem was to avoid detection by search-parties who might soon be scouring the forests.

Fortunately for their chances of escape, the surrounding country was full of wanderers, refugees driven from their homes by the press of war or famine, seeking friends or relatives in distant parts of the country, or else tramping vaguely from village to village in default of anything more definite to do. Even in the forest country there were folk of this kind to be met with, and A.J. could not think of any better disguise than for the two of them to appear to be such wanderers. His own attire was reasonably suitable as it stood, but he realised that it would take a certain amount of adjustment to make his prisoner look like anything but a former aristocrat. Her clothes, though old and shabby, were hardly such as a peasant would ever have possessed, and her shoes, even after repeated patchings, were still recognisably foreign. He dared not allow her to be seen until these incongruities were removed, and he explained the matter to her briefly. “We shall have to be particularly careful during the next twenty-four hours,” he insisted. “As soon as it is daylight I will leave you in some arranged spot and try to get clothes for you. If there is a village anywhere within a few miles I ought to be able to manage it.”

After their short rest he climbed the hill while she remained more prudently below. The moon was now fast sinking over a distant ridge, and while he crouched in the long grass trying to get his bearings he saw the first whiff of dawn creeping over the eastern horizon. Soon he could see the forests turning from black to green and the sky from grey to palest blue; then, very slowly, the mist unrolled along the floor of the valley. But there was no sign of any village. It was, he knew, a sparsely populated district, and quite possibly the nearest settlement might be a score or more miles away. If that were so, he and his prisoner must hide in the forest during the day and push on as fast as they could when night fell.

By the time he rejoined her it was quite light, and the clear cloudless sky showed promise of a hot day. He took off his coat and then looked around for a stream from which to fill his water-bottle. Cautiously he descended the slope, skirting the hill in a wide curve, with the first rays of sunlight splitting joyously through the foliage. How lovely the world seemed, but for human beastliness, and how disgusting to wish that the birds were not singing so loudly, because they made it difficult to listen for anyone approaching in the distance. Yet behind a certain quiet rage and perturbation, excitement was on him, and when at last he found a stream, bubbling crystal-clear over pearl- grey rocks, he knelt to it and, dashing the icy water over his face and head, felt what was almost a new sensation—happiness.

After filling his water-bottle he looked up and saw something that gave him a sudden shock. It was a timbered roof half-hidden among the trees no more than a hundred yards away, yet even so close it would have been easy to miss it. Probably a woodman’s cottage, he thought, and with still cautious steps approached a little nearer to find out. Then he saw a thin wisp of smoke curling up amidst the treetops that screened the tiny habitation. The loneliness of the place as well as its look of cosy comfortableness lured him to an even closer examination; he worked his way through the trees towards a side which no window overlooked. In another moment he was standing against the outside wall and listening carefully—but there were no sounds of voices or of movement from within. Then he turned the corner and, crouching near the window, slowly lifted his head and peered over the sill. It was the usual one-roomed habitation of the peasant, very dirty and untidy; two persons, man and woman, were sleeping on a heap of straw and rags in a corner, and from their attitude and state of attire, A.J. guessed it to be a sleep of drunkenness. With greater interest, however, he saw the heap of clothes on the floor which the couple had thrown off. That settled it; it seemed that fortune had given him a chance which it would be far bigger folly to miss than to take. With his revolver in one hand he lifted the door-latch with the other; as he had hoped and expected, the door was not locked. He simply walked in, picked up the litter of clothes, walked out, closed the door carefully behind him, and climbed the hill through the trees. Nothing could have been easier, and he was glad that, from their appearance, the couple would still have many hours to sleep.

His prisoner laughed when he threw down the heap of clothes in front of her. Then she took grateful gulps of water from the bottle he offered. “You are very kind, Commissar,” she said. “But you had better not make a habit of leaving me alone as you did just then. I warn you that I shall escape at any suitable opportunity.”

“Naturally,” he answered, with a shade of irony. “But for the present remember that we are both escaping.”

“Yes, that’s queer, isn’t it? You are taking me to Moscow, where I shall probably be put on trial and shot; but for the time being I haven’t to think about that—I must only bother about preserving my life during the next twenty-four hours.”

“Well?”

“I’m afraid it all strikes me as rather illogical. If I am to be killed anyhow, does it matter very much who does the job?”

“That, of course, is for you to decide. Personally, if I were in your place, I should rather think it did matter.”

She suddenly put a hand on his sleeve. “Commissar, I can lose nothing, can I, by asking a question? Just this—must you really take me to Moscow and hand me over? Hasn’t my own—our own—our rather unusual fate so far—given you a hint of anything else? To me it almost seems as if fate were asking you to give me a chance. Briefly, Commissar, I have friends abroad—influential friends—who would make it considerably worth your while if you would take me somewhere else instead of Moscow. Odessa, shall we say—or Rostov? You would have earned the reward by your courtesy alone, and as for me, how can the Revolution suffer because one poor woman takes ship for a foreign country?”

He looked at her for a moment in absolute silence. Then he merely replied: “You are mistaken in me—I am not bribable. And also, by the way, you must remember in future not to call me ‘Commissar.’”

“I see.” And after a pause she added: “You are quite incorruptible, then?”

“Quite.”

She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Well, anyhow, let’s not quarrel about it. Perhaps, after all, you think I deserve to be shot?”

“No, I don’t say that. I don’t think anything at all about it. You are my prisoner and I am taking you to Moscow. That is all.” He went on, more quickly: “Will you please put on these clothes without delay? We must get on—every minute increases the danger.”

“Are they clean?”

“I don’t know—I hadn’t time to look. Probably not, but you must wear them, anyhow.”

She laughed and their serious conversation ended by tacit agreement. She was amused at having to dress herself in a peasant’s long skirt and coarse coloured blouse, and she was still further amused when he told her how he had obtained them. Her own clothes they buried in a hiding-place under a heap of dead leaves; it was safer, he decided, than trying to burn them. Then he cut his beard and moustache, transforming his appearance to an extent that caused her a good deal of additional amusement. Next their joint luggage was carefully sorted out and all articles that might seem suspicious were also hidden away under the leaves. Finally he slit open the lining of his coat and carefully concealed all his commissary papers and a few government banknotes of large denomination.

These preparations took some time, and it was after eight o’clock when a fairly typical pair of peasant wanderers made their way down the hill to the valley on the far side of it. The man was tall and well-built, with a thin stubble of beard round his chin (he had not dared to give himself a close shave because of the deep tan that covered the rest of his face). The woman, slighter in build and pale even in the sunlight, trudged along beside him. They did not converse a great deal, but the man exchanged cheerful greetings with fellow- peasants passing in the opposite direction.

Arrangements had been reached about other matters. They had given each other names that were common enough, yet not suspiciously so; he was Peter Petrovitch Barenin, of the imaginary village of Nikolovsk, in the province of Orenburg; she was his daughter Natasha (called ’Daly’). They were trying to reach Petrograd, where he had a brother who had formerly been a workman in the Putilov factory. They were both poor people, he a simple-minded peasant who could neither read nor write, but his daughter, thank God, had had an education and had spent some years as lady’s maid in an aristocratic family. (Hence her accent and soft hands.) But they had both fallen lately on evil times—she, of course, had lost her job, and he had had his cottage burned down by White brigands. It was all just the sort of ordinary and quite unexceptionally pathetic case of which there were probably some millions of examples at that time throughout the country.

The morning warmed and freshened as the couple wound their way along the valley road. They met few people, and none save humble travellers like themselves; from one of these peasant wayfarers A.J. bargained a loaf of bread. With this and a few wild strawberries gathered by the roadside they made a simple but satisfactory meal, washed down with icy mountain-water from a stream.

Throughout the day they did not see a solitary habitation or come within rumour of a village. All about them stretched the lonely forest-covered foothills of the Urals, dark with pine-trees and soaring into the hazy distance where a few of the peaks still kept their outlines hidden in mist. The air was full of aromatic scents, and by the wayside, as they trudged, high banks of wildflowers waved their softer perfumes.

Towards evening they met an old bearded peasant of whom A.J. asked the distance to the nearest village. “Three versts,” he answered. “But if you are travellers seeking a night’s shelter, you had better not go there.” A.J. asked why, and the man answered: “A band of soldiers have been raiding the place in search of someone supposed to have murdered a Red guard in the forests. The soldiers are still there, and if you were to arrive as a stranger they might arrest you on suspicion. You know what ruffians those fellows are when they are dealing with us simple folk.” A.J. agreed and thanked the man; it was a fine night, he added, and it would do himself and his daughter no harm to rest in the forest. “Oh, but there is no need to do that,” urged the other.

“You can have shelter at my cottage just away up yonder hill. I am a woodcutter—Dorenko by name—but I am not a ruffian like most woodcutters. As soon as I saw you and your daughter coming along the road I thought how tired she looked and I felt sorry for her. Yes, indeed, brother, you are fortunate—not many woodcutters are like me. I have a kind heart, having lost my wife last year. Perhaps I may marry again some day. I have a nice little cottage and it is clean and very comfortable, though the cockroaches are a nuisance. Come, brother, you and your girl will enjoy a good meal and a night’s rest under a roof.”

A.J., thinking chiefly of the soldiers in the neighbouring village, accepted the invitation, and the three began to walk uphill, turning off the road after a short distance and entering again the steep and already darkening forest. A.J. told the old man the barest facts about himself; and was glad to note that they were accepted quite naturally and without the least curiosity. “I, too, had a daughter once,” said Dorenko, “but she ran away and I never heard of her afterwards. She was not so good-looking as yours.”

After a quarter of an hour’s hard climb they came to another of those forest cottages, timber-built, and completely hidden from any distant view. The interior was not particularly clean and comfortable, despite Dorenko’s contrary opinion, and though also, after his warning, they were prepared for cockroaches, they had hardly imagined such a plague of them as existed. They swarmed over everything; they were on walls and roof, and in every crack and corner; they had to be shaken off the bread and skimmed out of liquids; they crackled underfoot and fell in soft sizzling pats on to the smouldering hearth. “Yes,” admitted Dorenko, tranquilly, “they are a nuisance, but I will say this for them—they never bite.”

Dorenko was certainly hospitable. He made his guests an appetising meal of soup and eggs; barring the cockroaches, there would have been much to enjoy. He talked a good deal, especially about his late wife and his loneliness since she had died. “Yes, indeed, I may marry again some day. I am on the lookout for the right sort of person, as you may guess. And, of course, it would not be a bad match in these days for a girl to marry an honest woodcutter who has his own cottage and perhaps a little money hidden away, too.” He leered cunningly. “You see I am trusting you, Peter Petrovitch. I know you are not the kind that would rob an honest woodcutter. But it is a fact, I assure you—I have hundreds of silver roubles buried in the ground beneath this cottage. Think of it—and you are, without doubt, a poor man!”

“I am a poor man, it is true, but I certainly would not rob you.”

“I know that, brother. As soon as I saw you coming along the road I thought—Here comes an honest man. And honest men are rare in these days—nearly as rare as gold roubles, eh? Or shall we say nearly as rare as a good-looking woman?”

A.J. conversed with him amiably for a time and then, as it was quite dark and Dorenko possessed no lamp, suggested settling down for the night. He was, in fact, dead tired, and he knew that Daly (as he had already begun to think of her) must be the same. He arranged for her to have the best place—near the fire and for that reason not so popular with the cockroaches; he and Dorenko shared the ground nearer the door. He was so sleepy that he felt almost afraid of going to sleep; he guessed that in any emergency he would be hard to awaken. However, Dorenko seemed trustworthy and there was always the revolver at hand. He lay down with it carefully concealed beneath the bundle of clothes that formed his pillow. Neither he nor Daly undressed at all, but Dorenko took off his outer clothes and performed the most intimate ritual of toilet quite frankly and shamelessly in the darkness. A decent, honest fellow, no doubt.

A.J. went to sleep almost instantly and knew nothing thenceforward till he felt himself being energetically shaken. “What’s the matter?” he cried, rubbing his eyes and groping for his revolver. It was still dark and all was perfectly silent except for the scurry of cockroaches disturbed by his sudden movement. “It’s only me, brother—Dorenko the woodcutter,” came a hoarse whisper a few inches from his right ear. “I waited till your daughter was asleep so that we could have a little talk together in private.”

“But I’m really far too sleepy to talk—”

“Ah, but listen, brother. You are a poor man, are you not?”

“Certainly, but does it matter at this time of night?”

“It matters a great deal when you have to tramp the roads with a poor sick daughter. She looked so very tired and ill to-night, brother—it’s plain she isn’t used to walking the roads.”

“Of course she isn’t—as I told you, she’s been used to a much more delicate life.”

“In a fine house no doubt, eh, brother? Ah, that’s it—it’s a home she wants—a roof over her head—not to be tramping the roads all day long. And you—wouldn’t you be able to get to Petrograd quicker without her? After all, a man can rough things, but it’s different when he has a girl dragging along with him.” He added in a fierce whisper: “Brother, haven’t you ever thought of her getting married to some decent hardworking fellow who, maybe, has a comfortable house and a bit of money put away? I’m a good fellow, I assure you, though I am only a woodcutter, and to tell the truth, your daughter’s just the kind of woman I’ve been looking out for ever since my poor wife died. And you shall have a hundred silver roubles for yourself, brother, if you give her to me.”

A.J. was still too sleepy to be either amused or annoyed. He said merely: “Dorenko, it’s quite out of the question. My daughter, I know, wouldn’t consider it.”

“But if, as her father, you ordered her to?”

“She wouldn’t, even then.”

“She would disobey you?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Ah, I sympathise. My own daughter was like that—disobedient to her own father. It is a dreadful thing to have children like that. All the same, brother, I will make it a hundred and fifty roubles for you if you could manage to persuade her.”

“No, Dorenko, it’s no use—it’s impossible.”

“Not because I am only a woodcutter?”

“Oh no, by no means. Not in the least for that reason.”

“Ah, Peter Petrovitch, you are a good fellow like myself, I can see. It is a pity we could not have come to some arrangement. However, perhaps it is God’s will that I should look elsewhere. Good-night—Good- night.”

A.J. was soon asleep again and did not wake till the sunlight was pouring through the narrow window. Dorenko was already up and preparing a breakfast meal. He did not refer to the matter he had broached during the night, and after a homely meal the two travellers thanked him and set out to continue their journey. A.J. would have liked to offer him money, but that such generosity would not have suited the story of being poor.

Dorenko had given them directions before starting, telling them how they might travel so as to avoid the village which the soldiers had raided, and reach another less dangerous one by the end of the day. The route led them through the forest for several miles and then along a narrow winding track amidst the hills. It was again very hot in the middle of the day. They slept for a time in the shade of the pines, and then, towards evening, walked into a small town named Saratursk, whose market-place was full of Red soldiers, bedraggled and badly disciplined after long marches. It was hardly likely that they could be bothering about a casual forest murder, for much more serious events had happened during the past twenty-four hours. The Whites and the Czecho-Slovaks, acting together, had crossed the Urals and were reported in rapid invasion; the entire Revolution seemed in danger. All day long a steadily increasing stream of refugees had been entering Saratursk from the east; A.J. and Daly were but two out of thousands, and quite inconspicuous. They found it impossible to obtain any food except black bread at an extortionate price, and every room in the town was full of sleepers. Fortunately the night was warm, and it was not unpleasant to spread out one’s bundle on the cobbled stones and breathe the mountainy air. Sleep, however, was interrupted by the constant noise and shouting; fresh detachments of soldiers were entering the town from the west and south and reuniting with their comrades already in possession. They were a fierce-looking crowd, all of them, dressed in shabby, tattered, and nondescript uniforms—dirty, unkempt, heavy with fatigue. They had no obvious leaders, but throughout the night they held meetings in the market-square to elect new officers. There was much fervid oratory and cheering. The news of the White advance had put them in considerable consternation, for they themselves were badly armed—only one man in five or six possessing a rifle. The rest carried swords, knives, and even sticks. Some of them had been dragged out of hospitals too soon, and still wore dirty red-stained bandages. This curious, slatternly throng was, for the moment, all that stood between Moscow and counter-revolution.

All night long the hubbub proceeded, and soon after dawn something—but it was not clear exactly what—was decided upon. A few squads of men marched out of the town to the east; the rest, apparently, were to follow later. But shortly afterwards came a sharp outbreak of rifle-fire among the hills behind the town, and in less than an hour the original squads returned in a condition bordering on panic. The hills, they reported, were already in the hands of White outposts; Saratursk must be abandoned instantly. Whereupon soldiers, civilians, and refugees immediately gathered up as many of their personal possessions as they could and took part in a furious stampede to the west. The road was narrow—no more than a mere track—and military wagons jammed and collided into an immovable obstruction during the first quarter-mile. The wagons were full of ammunition and other military equipment, and after a vain attempt to disentangle the chaos the soldiers unloaded the stores and carried them forward on their backs. The sun rose blindingly on weary men staggering ahead with glazed and desperate eyes, straining the utmost nerve to put distance between themselves and a relentless enemy. Some of them, tired of scuffles in the roadway, took to the open fields and blundered on, with no guide to direction save the blaze of the sun on their backs. All through the morning came intermittent bursts of rifle-fire, each one rather nearer, it seemed; and there was a fresh outbreak of panic when a small child, fleeing with her parents, was struck and slightly injured by a spent bullet. Towards noon the rout was already becoming more than many could endure; refugees and even soldiers were collapsing by dozens along the roadside, throwing themselves face downwards in the dust and writhing convulsively. Some of them seemed to be dying, and there were rumours that White spies in Saratursk had put poison in the drinking-water from which many of the fugitives had filled their bottles.

A.J., hastening onwards, felt suddenly very ill himself. Severe internal pains gripped him, and at last he guessed that he was on the verge of collapse. He staggered and fell, tried to rise again, but could not; all the earth and the wide sky swam in circles before his eyes. He had to say: “I can’t go on any further. I’m ill.” And to himself he added that Fate, after all, was giving her the chance she had been wishing for; she could escape now, quite easily, and he had no power to stop her.

He knew that she was raising his head and staring into his eyes. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

“Nothing at all for me. But for yourself—well, you have only to go back into Saratursk and meet your friends.”

“They’ll find me here if I stay.”

“Yes, but in that case they’d find me, too, and I don’t fancy being taken prisoner. Besides, there’s bound to be firing along this road. Take the papers out of my coat—they’ll prove who you are.”

“And yourself?”

“I shall manage, I daresay, with luck.”

“You want me to leave you here?”

“I think you ought to take the chance that offers itself. If you stay, there’ll only be greater danger to both of us. So go now—and hurry. Don’t forget the papers.”

“You are letting me go, then?”

“Circumstances compel me, that’s all.”

“It—it is—good of you. I hope you manage yourself all right.”

“Most probably I shall if I’m not found with you. Take the papers.”

“Good-bye.”

“Yes, but the papers—the papers—in the lining of my coat.”

He felt her hands searching him; he heard her say something, but he could not gather what—he was fast sinking into unconsciousness. Ages seemed to pass; at intervals he opened his eyes and heard great commotion proceeding all around and over him. Successive waves of pain assaulted and left him gasping with weakness. It was dark when he finally awoke. Pain was ebbing by then, and his strength with it. Queer sounds still echoed in his ears—murmurs as of distant shouting, distant rifle-fire. The starlight shone a pale radiance over the earth; he saw that he was lying in a sort of gully and that, a few yards away, there was something that looked like another man. He called ‘Hello!’ but there was no answer. Perhaps the fellow was asleep. He was suddenly anxious to meet somebody, to speak a word to somebody. There had been a battle, he guessed, and it would be interesting to learn whether the Whites or the Reds had been victorious. It hardly seemed to matter very much, but, just out of curiosity, as it were, he would like to know. And Daly, his prisoner, had she by now been safely received and identified by her friends?…God, how thirsty he was—he would offer that man some money in return for a drink of anything but poisoned water. Slowly, and with greater difficulty than he had expected, he crawled along the gully towards the huddled figure. Then he perceived that the man was dead—killed by a smashing blow in the face. That, for all that he had seen so many dead bodies in his time, unnerved him a little; he stared round him a little vaguely, as if uncertain how to interpret the discovery. Then he rose unsteadily to his feet and began to stagger about. He climbed on to the roadway and up the sloping bank on to the pale stubble fields. He walked a little way—a few hundred yards—and then saw another dead man. Then another. A man with his head nearly blown off at close range. A man huddled in the final writhings of a bayonet-thrust through the stomach. A man covered with blood from a drained and severed artery. Most of the dead, from their uniforms, were Reds; a few only could have belonged to the other side. Sickly qualms overspread him as he wandered aimlessly among these huddled figures. Then he suddenly heard a cry. It seemed to come from a distance; he turned slightly and heard it again. “Brother!” it called. He walked towards it. “What is it?” he whispered, and the reply came: “Are you not wounded, brother?”—“No,” he answered, and the voice rejoined: “Neither am I. Come here.”

He approached a prostrate form that proved to be a Red soldier whose face was ghastly with congealed blood. Only, as the man explained with immediate cheerfulness, it was not his own blood. “Brother,” he said, “I am an old soldier and I know from experience what war is like. It is all very fine if you are winning easily, but it is unpleasant when you are being attacked by a much stronger enemy. The best thing to do at such a time, in my opinion, is to fall down and pretend to be dead. Then, if you are lucky, the enemy doesn’t bother about you. I have saved my life three times by this method—twice with the Germans and once again today. I suppose you too, brother, did the same?”

“No,” answered A.J. “I fell ill in the morning and that’s all I remember.”

“Ah, yes, it happened to so many of our poor fellows. Some White spy poisoned the water in Saratursk—a disgusting way of carrying on war, I call it. Not that I’m tremendously against the Whites—I believe they give their soldiers very good pay. For myself, I have a great mind to go into Saratursk to-morrow and join them. Do you feel like coming with me, brother?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mind you, I wouldn’t do it if the Reds were as generous. I really prefer the Reds, really. But a soldier’s job, after all, is to fight, and if he gets good food and pay, why should he bother what side he fights on? It isn’t for him to pick and choose. That’s how I feel about it. Would you like something to eat, brother?”

“I should indeed.”

“Then sit here with me. I have some bread and a sausage. I’m afraid I was rather scared at first when I woke up and saw you walking about. I thought you were a ghost—they say there are ghosts that haunt battlefields, you know. Yes, it was a sharp little fight, but our men stood no chance at all—every man on the other side had a rifle and ammunition. It was ridiculous to make a stand.”

“Where are the Whites now?”

“Still chasing our poor fellows, I expect. Whereas you and I, my friend, have had the sense to let them pass over us. We are all right. Two hours’ walk and we shall be in the woods, and an army corps wouldn’t find us there. Do you know this part of the country?”

“Not very well.”

“Then after our little meal I will take you along. Perhaps, after all, I need not be in any hurry to enlist with the Whites. A few days’ rest first of all, anyhow. We have three hours vet before dawn. If we hurry we shall reach the woods in good time.”

They ate quickly but with enjoyment, and then began the walk over the stubble fields. During the first mile or so they passed many dead bodies, but after that the signs of battle grew less evident. They avoided the road, along which White military wagons were still tearing westward in the rear of the pursuing army. A.J. wondered if there were not some danger of their being found and taken prisoner, but his companion, whose name was Oblimov, seemed quite confident of being able to reach the hills in safety. He had thrown away his soldier’s cap and the rest of his clothing was certainly so nondescript that it could convey little to any observer. “Besides,” he said, “if anyone questions us, we can say we are White refugees returning to our homes.”

They skirted Saratursk on the north side, working their way through orchards and private gardens, and passing within sight of several big houses in which lights were visible. In one of them the blinds had not been lowered, and they could sec that a party of some kind was in progress. White officers were drinking and shouting, and there carne also, tinkling over the night air, the sound of women’s laughter. A.J. wondered if his former prisoner were there, or in some other such house, celebrating her freedom and rescue. Oblimov said: “They will soon drink away their victory.” It certainly looked as if many of the White officers had preferred Saratursk to the continued pursuit of the enemy.

They reached the lower slopes of the hills just as the first tint of dawn appeared, and by the time the sun rose they were high amongst the woods. A.J. was by now beginning to feel very comfortable amongst the pine trees; he liked their clean, sharp tang and the rustle of fir-cones under his feet. He was tired, however, after the climb, and also, beyond his relief, rather depressed. The world seemed a sadly vague and pointless kind of place, with its continual movement of armies and refugees, and its battles and tragedies and separations. He kept wondering how his prisoner had fared. He did not particularly regret her escape; he had done his best, but Fate had out-manoeuvred him. Nine-tenths of life seemed always to consist of letting things happen.

Oblimov was an excellent and resourceful companion. He made a fire and boiled tea, and while A.J. slept in the dappled sunshine he raided a woodman’s cottage in the valley and came back with bread and meat. He also brought some coarse tobacco, which he smoked joyously during the whole of the afternoon. He was a great talker and looked on life in a mood of pleasant fatalism. Soldiering was doubtless the worst job in the world, but what else was there for a man of his type? He had no home; he couldn’t settle down. And soldiers did, in a sense, see the world. They met people, too—people they would never have met otherwise—“like yourself, brother. We came across each other on the battlefield, surrounded by dead men, and now we are yarning in a wood with our bellies full and the blue sky over us. To-morrow, maybe, we shall say good-bye and never see each other again. But is it not worth while? And will you ever forget me, or I you?”

He went on to tell of his many experiences; he had been fighting, he said, for years—ever since he had been a young man. He had fought for the Serbs in the first Balkan War and against the Serbs in the second Balkan War, and in the Great War, of course, he had fought the Germans. But that war had not pleased him at all, and after a year of it he had allowed himself to be taken prisoner. Fie admitted it quite frankly; his view of war was a strictly professional and trade union one: if soldiers were not treated properly, why should they go on performing their job? Two years in a German prison-camp had not been pleasant, but they had been preferable, he believed, to what he might have had to endure otherwise. The return of the prisoners to Russia after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had brought him back again to normal life—that of ordinary, rational soldiering. “A soldier does not mind occasionally risking his life,” he explained, “nor does he object to a battle now and again or a few tiring marches across country. But to stand in a frozen trench for weeks on end is another matter—it isn’t fair to ask such a thing of any man.” The warfare between Reds and Whites was much more to his taste—the localness of it, its sudden bursts of activity, its continual changes of scene, and its almost limitless chances of loot and personal adventure—all agreed with him. He did not much care on which side he fought; lie had already fought on both and would doubtless do so again. “But personally,” he added, “I am a man of the people.”

His completely detached attitude towards life and affairs prompted A.J. to confide in him more than it was his habit to confide in acquaintances. He told him briefly about the ‘daughter’ with whom he had been wandering and from whom he had become separated during the excitements of the day before. What was really on his mind was whether she was likely to have been decently treated by the White soldiers before the proving of her identity. To Oblimov, of course, he merely expressed his anxieties as a father. Oblimov was sympathetic, but hardly reassuring. “What will happen to her depends on what sort of a girl she is,” he declared concisely. “If she is pretty and not pure she will have a very good time. If she is pure and not pretty she will be left alone. But if she is pretty and wishes to remain pure…” He left the sentence unfinished. “Women,” he added, “are really not worth worrying about, anyway, and evidently you think so too, else you would be searching Saratursk for your daughter at this present moment instead of enjoying the sunshine.” A.J. was a little startled by this acuteness. Oblimov laughed and went on: “Brother, you cannot deceive an old soldier. I believe she is not your daughter at all, but your wife or mistress, and you are more than half glad to be rid of her! Don’t be offended—I know you think you are very fond of her and are worried about her safety. But I can see that deep down in your heart you do not care.”

He went on talking about women in general, and A.J. went on listening until both occupations were suddenly interrupted by a sound that came to them very clearly across the valley. It was the sharp rattle of machine-gun fire. Oblimov, all his professional instincts aroused, scented the air like a startled hound. “It looks as if the battle’s moving back on the village,” he said. “Let’s go down a little and see if we can judge what’s happening.”

They picked their way amongst the trees till they reached a small clearing whence could be seen the whole of the valley. Machine-gun and rifle- fire was by that time intense, and a thin chain of white smoke ringed the town on the further side. Already a few cavalry wagons were leaving Saratursk by the mountain road. By late afternoon the battle was over and its results were obvious; the Reds had retaken the town and the Whites were in full retreat to the east. “Now,” advised Oblimov, “we had better move along ourselves. If the Whites are pursued too hard, some of them may hide in these woods, and it would be just as well for us not to be found with them.” So they descended the hillside and walked boldly into Saratursk. There was no danger of their being noticed or questioned; the recaptured town was in far too much uproar and chaos. The earlier victory of the Whites had been due largely to the poisoning of the water that the Red soldiers had drunk; many more men had died of that than of battle-wounds, and the survivors were disposed to take revenge. The whole place, they said, was White in sympathy, and it was certainly true that the more prosperous shopkeepers and private citizens had loaded gifts upon White officers. Now they wished they had been more discreet. As the victorious Reds lurched into the town, drunk with that highly dangerous mixture of triumph and fatigue, the shopkeepers put up their shutters and made themselves as inconspicuous as possible. All the omens were for an exciting night.

Oblimov soon joined his soldier companions, but A.J. preferred to mingle with the crowd that surged up and down the main street. It was a hot, swaying, tempestuous, and increasingly bad-tempered multitude. The market-place, packed with wounded Reds for whom there was no hospital accommodation and hardly any but the most elementary medical treatment, acted as a perpetual incitement to already inflamed passions. Amidst this acre of misery the town doctor and a few helpers worked their way tirelessly, but there was little that could be done, since the retreating Whites had commandeered all medical supplies—even to bandages and surgical instruments. This was bad enough, but even worse to many was the fact that the Whites seemed also to have drunk the whole town dry. There was not a bottle of beer or a dram of vodka in any of the inns, and the litter of empty bottles in all the gutters told its own significant tale. The first ‘incident’ was caused by this. A few soldiers, refusing to believe that there was absolutely no drink to be had at all, insisted on inspecting the cellar of one of the inns. There they found a couple of bottles of champagne. They drank without much enthusiasm, for they preferred stronger stuff, and then wrecked the inn-keeper’s premises. The news of the affair soon spread and led to a systematic search, not only of inns, but of private houses. In many cases the terrified occupants handed over any liquor they possessed; where they did not, or had none to hand over, the soldiers usually went about smashing pictures and furniture amidst wild shouts and caperings. All this time the town was becoming more crowded; soldiers were still pouring in from the west, and these later arrivals, having endured more prolonged hardships, were in fiercer moods. Towards eight o’clock the rumour went round that a certain local lawyer had been responsible for the poisoning of the water-supply the day before. The man, who was hiding in his house, was dragged out into the middle of the street and clubbed to death. This only whetted appetites; between eight and midnight, perhaps a dozen citizens, mostly shopkeepers and professional men, were killed in various ways and places. Then the even more exciting rumour gained currency that a whole houseful of Whites, including high-born officers and ladies, were in hiding about a mile out of the town, their retreat having been cut off by the Reds’ rapid advance. The village schoolmaster saved his life by giving details of this illustrious colony; it included, he said, no less a personage than the Countess Marie Alexandra Adraxinc, well known in pre-Revolution Petersburg society, and distantly connected with the family of the ex-Emperor. She had been passing as a peasant, continued the informative schoolmaster, and had caused a great sensation among the White officers by declaring and establishing her true identity. Many of them had known her in former times, and a great party had been held both in her honour and to celebrate the glorious White victory of Saratursk. And it was the effects of this and similar parties that had helped towards the equally glorious Red victory that had so immediately followed.

Some of the crowd were for marching on the house and storming it, but the Red leader, a shrewd, capable fellow, was impressed by the political importance of the prisoners and anxious to act with due circumspection. Let a few local shopkeepers be butchered by all means, but countesses and highly-placed White officers were too valuable to be wasted on the mob. Besides, being a person of good memory and methodical mind, he seemed to recollect that there had already been some bother about that particular countess; she had been captured in Siberia, hadn’t she, and had been on her way to Moscow in charge of some local commissar when, somehow or other, the two had escaped from the train and had not been heard of since? The beautiful countess and the susceptible commissar—what a theme for a comic opera! General Polahkin, whose victory over the Whites had been due partly to military ability but chiefly to the sudden and almost miraculous repair of a couple of machine-guns, smiled to himself as he gave orders that the house should be surrounded, arid that, if its occupants gave themselves up, they should be conducted unharmed to the town jail.

This operation was carried out without a hitch, and towards three o’clock in the morning the little procession entered the town. There were about a dozen White officers, whose resplendent uniforms and dejected faces contrasted piquantly with the shabby greatcoats and triumphant faces of their guards. There were five women also—dressed in a weird assortment of clothes, some of them walking painfully in ballroom slippers, and all rather pale and weary-looking. All except one gave occasional terrified glances at the jeering crowds that lined the streets to the prison entrance. The exception was the woman whose name everyone now knew—the woman who (according to a story that was being improved on, saga-Eke, with every telling) had beguiled a commissar into escaping with her and had then, somehow or other, escaped from him! The crowd were not disposed to be too unfriendly towards such a magnificent adventuress, and if she had only played the actress well enough, they were quite drunk enough to have cheered her. But she did not act the right part, and her appearance, too, was disappointingly unromantic. She gazed ahead with calm and level eyes, as if she were not caring either for them or for anything in the world.

When the captives were safely locked in the prison, the crowd, suffering a kind of reaction, began a systematic looting of the shops. They were, in truth, disconcerted by the tameness of what had promised to be highly exciting, and now worked out their spleen as best they could. Po did not object; loot was, after all, the perquisite of the poorly-paid soldier. By dawn the town presented a forlorn appearance; every window in the main street had been smashed and the gutters were full of broken glass and miscellaneous articles that had been stolen, broken, and then thrown away. Some of the local peasants, professing violently Red feelings, had taken part in the looting, and they, perhaps, had made most out of it, since they had homes in which they could store whatever they took. One small cottage attracted attention by having the end of a piano sticking out of the doorway; the acquirer could not play, but banged heavily with his fists to indicate his delight.

The following day was to some extent anti-climax; the revellers were tired and spent most of the time sleeping off the effects of the carousal. In the afternoon, however, fresh Red reinforcements arrived from the west—men of even more violent temperament than those already in possession, and accompanied, moreover, by several fluent and apparently professional orators who harangued the crowd in the market-place with unceasing eloquence. Polahkin, it soon appeared, was unpopular with these new arrivals; they doubted his ‘redness,’ and were particularly incensed because he had permitted the White captives to retain their lives.

A.J., mingling during the day with the crowds in the town and sleeping at nights on the bare boards of an inn-floor, could sense the keying of the atmosphere to higher and more dangerous levels. He did not feel any particular apprehension, still less any indignation; he had seen too many horrors for either. Every barbarism perpetrated by the Reds could be balanced by some other perpetrated by the Whites; the scales of bloodshed and cruelty balanced with almost exquisite exactness. There was also a point of experience beyond which even the imagination had no power to terrify, and A.J. had reached such a point. What he felt was rather, in its way, a sort of selfishness; out of all the chaos and wretchedness that surrounded him he felt inclined to seize hold of anything that mattered to him locally and personally in any way. And so little, when he came to think of it, did matter to him. Up to now he had been a blind automaton, letting Fate push him whither it chose and calmly accepting any task that was nearest. He had not cared; at Khalinsk he had been kind and wise and hard-working, but he had not cared. Yet now, for the first time, he felt a curious uprise of personality, a sort of you-be-damnedness entering his soul as he paced the streets and observed, still quite coldly, the wreckage of a world that cared as little for him as he for it.

Only very gradually did he perceive that he wanted the woman to escape. To any normally-minded person it would have seemed an absurd enough want, for the prison was strongly and carefully guarded. But A.J., just then, was not normally-minded. The more he tried to reconcile himself to the fact that his former prisoner would eventually he shot, like hundreds of other pleasant and possibly innocent persons, the more he felt committed to some kind of personal and intrepid intervention. But how, and when? He guessed that the revolutionary ardour of the soldiers would soon boil over and lead to the overthrow of Polahkin and the massacre of the White prisoners; he had seen that sort of thing happen too often not to recognise the familiar preliminary portents. Whatever was to be done must be done quickly—yet what could be done? He did not know in which part of the prison she was kept, nor even whether she were alone or with others. No doubt, wherever she was, she was being well guarded as one of the star-turns of some future entertainment.

At the prison entrance there was always a Red soldier on guard, and it was through these men alone that A.J. fancied he could accomplish anything. He silent many an hour furtively watching them and speculating which of them might be most likely to be useful for his purpose. At last he singled out a rough, fierce-looking fellow whom, about midnight, when the street was fairly quiet, he saw accept a small package from a passing stranger and transfer it guiltily to his own pocket. A.J. took the chance that thus offered itself.

“Good-evening, comrade,” he began, walking up to the man a moment later and looking him sternly between the eyes. “Do you usually do that sort of thing?”

It was a blind shot, but a lucky one. The guard, for all his fierce appearance, was a coward as soon as he thought himself discovered. He obviously took A.J. for an official spy who had been set deliberately to watch him, and A.J. did not disabuse him of the notion. He soon drove the fellow to an abject confession that he had been systematically smuggling tobacco into the prison for the benefit of the White officers. “Only tobacco, your honour,” he insisted, and produced from his pocket the little packet he had just received. “You know, your honour, how hard it is for a poor soldier to make a living in these days, and the White officers who are going to be shot very soon, promised me twenty roubles for this little packet. After all, your honour, I don’t have the chances that some of our men get—I had to be here on duty all that night when they were looting the shops.”

“That was unfortunate,” said A.J. dryly. “All the same, you must be aware of the penalties for smuggling things into the prison?”

“Yes, your honour, but surely you wouldn’t wish to get a poor man into serious trouble—”

And so on. After a quarter of an hour or so A.J. felt he had succeeded pretty well. He had learned all about the positions and arrangements of the prisoners, their daily habits, and the way in which they were guarded; and, most important of all, he had given the guard a note to be delivered secretly to the Countess. He wrote it in French; it merely said that he was on the spot and ready to help her to escape, and that she must be prepared to do her share in any way and at any time he should command. He told the guard it was merely a family message. “I am a Red,” he added, “but I do not see what harm there can be in treating a woman prisoner with ordinary courtesy. No more harm, anyway, than in smuggling tobacco for the men.” The guard agreed eagerly. “You are quite right, your honour—and I have said the same, even to my comrades. Why not be more civil and polite to people before you shoot them? It is not the shooting that makes so much bad feeling but treating people like dogs.”

The next time the guard was on duty A.J. received back his note together with an answer. It was a verbal one—merely a conventional ‘Thank you,’ which, though not very enlightening, seemed, in the circumstances, sufficient. He felt, anyhow, that something was being accomplished. He knew that she was in a ground-floor cell overlooking a yard which was patrolled by sentries day and night. Any romantic escapade with ropes and ladders was thus out of the question. The tobacco-smuggling guard, whose name was Balkin, had stressed how carefully she was watched, and after much thought and the formation of many tentative plans, A.J. reached the conclusion that escape could only take place, if at all, during some general commotion that would temporarily upset the prison routine. This, as clays passed, seemed more likely to happen, for the clamour of the extremists increased and there were strong rumours that at any moment Polahkin’s writ might cease to run. Then no doubt, there would be a brief civil war, culminating in a mob- attack on the prison and the massacre of its occupants.

A.J. argued thus: the attack on the prison would probably take place at night, if only because at such a time men’s spirits were always most inflamed with speechmaking and drink. The prison-guards might or might not attempt any resistance, but in either case it was unlikely that the regular routine of the sentry-patrol would remain unaffected. Most likely there would be either fighting or hilarious fraternisation. In the darkness a good many of the invaders would not know where they were, or where to look for the prisoners; there would be confusion of all kinds. Most fortunately, as it happened, the Countess’s cell was among the last that could be reached, being the end one in a long corridor. And let into the corridor wall close by was an ordinary unbarred window overlooking the yard. If only the prisoner were once outside her cell, it would not be too difficult to climb out through that window. A.J. did not wish to rely too much on Balkin’s assistance, for he did not seem a man of either trustworthiness or intelligence; the only promise to be exacted was that, as soon as there might be any hint of trouble, he should slip a small revolver through the bars of the cell. “You sec, Balkin, you are a kindhearted fellow, and I don’t mind telling you the truth—the poor creature wishes to kill herself rather than fall into the hands of the soldiers. Personally, I sympathise with her in that, and you also, I am sure, will feel the same. Is it not enough that she should die, without being torn to pieces to amuse a crowd? Let her have a decent death—the sort that a soldier, if he could choose, would ask for.” Balkin, greatly stirred, put his hand sentimentally on A.J.’s shoulder. “You are quite right, your honour. It is only fair that she should die properly. Why, I will shoot her myself rather than let her fall into the hands of those ruffians!”

“No, no—all you need do is to give her the revolver. She is no coward, and would rather do the job in her own way. It is more dignified—more seemly. Do you not understand?”

Balkin at length and with great melancholy admitted that he did understand; and he agreed also to take a further message to the woman. A.J. wrote it out and handed it over with the revolver.

That was in the morning; from all outward indications the crisis was likely to develop that night. Polahkin had already been openly insulted in the streets, and a brutal loutish Jew named Aronstein had been haranguing the crowd all afternoon. The actual coup d’état took place about seven o’clock. Polahkin was arrested and Aronstein duly ‘elected’ in his place. One by one all the official buildings in the town went over to the extremist party, and at last came the inevitable attack on the prison. Aronstein had promised the attackers that not a single counter-revolutionary life should be spared, and in such a mood of anticipated blood-lust the mob surged round the building. The guard at the entrance-gate offered no resistance, and within a few moments the invaders were pouring into the inner courtyard.

A.J., in a narrow lane behind the prison, waited with keen anxiety. At first it seemed that the whole affair was being conducted far too methodically, but soon the traditional chaos of all insurgency began to be evident. He could hear the shouts of the crowd; then he saw the sentries suddenly run from their posts in the prison-yard, from which the lane was separated only by tall iron railings. That was his signal for action. He walked along the railings quickly till he reached a certain spot; then he halted and listened. There was a loud commotion proceeding inside the prison—shoutings and screamings and revolver-shots; it was difficult to judge exactly the right moment. However, the lane looked quite deserted, and in the darkness it would be hard to see him in any case. He got hold of two of the iron railings and lifted them out of their sockets. He knew from previous observation that those particular railings were loose, for he had seen the sentries lift them out to admit women into the yard.

He waited for several minutes, refusing rather than unable to draw conclusions from what he could hear; he knew that noise could mean anything and everything; he knew also that Balkin was stupid and perhaps unreliable, that he might do the totally wrong thing, or else just nothing at all, either from error, slackness, or malice. He knew that the chance he had planned for was fantastically slender, that at a dozen points there were even odds of disaster. And he knew, too, that even if the miracle did happen, there were still further miracles to be accomplished in leaving the town and reaching comparative safety.

Then suddenly he saw a dim and shadowy figure rushing across the yard. He gave a loud cough; the figure stopped for a fraction of a second, changed its direction slightly, and came rushing towards him. He said softly: “Here—here—through here. Wait—T must put them back afterwards. Take this coat—I have another underneath. Quickly—but keep calm. Are you hurt at all?”

“No.”

“You managed it all right?”

“Yes—I had to fire into the lock three times—it’s surprising how little damage a bullet can do.” She laughed quietly.

“Don’t laugh. Don’t talk either, now. Put your collar up. If we meet anybody, we must be drunk. There are clothes hidden in a field for you.”

The greatcoat was useful in making her look, at any considerable distance, like an ordinary Red soldier; at any nearer encounter the semblance of drunkenness would give them their best chance. A Red soldier, half tipsy, taking a half-tipsy woman towards the outskirts of the town was not an unusual sight, and for the woman to be wearing a soldier’s coat was common enough in days when currency depreciation was making payment in kind increasingly popular.

They passed several people on their way and the stratagem seemed to succeed. One of the passers-by, a soldier, called out to ask what was happening in the town; A.J. replied, with fuddled intonation, that he rather thought the prison was being attacked. “Ah,” answered the other, laughing, “but I see you’ve evidently got something more important to do than join in, eh?” A.J. laughed, and the woman laughed too, and they passed on.

They reached the end of the town and climbed over the roadside into the fields. Hidden in a ditch were the clothes he had carefully obtained and carefully placed in position an hour before; it was a relief to find them, for there had always been the possibility of their being found and stolen in the interval. The clothes consisted of a more or less complete military outfit, including top-boots and a shabby peaked cap such as soldier or civilian might equally be wearing.

“Well?” she whispered, as he showed them to her. “So I am to be your obedient prisoner once again?”

He did not answer, except to urge her to dress quickly. Her own clothes, as she discarded them, he rolled into a bundle—it would not be safe to leave them behind. She was very calm; that was a good thing, yet he wondered if she realised that difficulties were beginning rather than ending, and that in a short while hundreds of blood-drunken searchers would be scouring the district for the escaped White countess. One thing he was sure of—the peasant disguise would never work a second time near Saratursk. Everyone knew that she had escaped as a peasant before; everyone would be prepared for the same disguise again. There was only the slender chance that as two soldiers they might escape through the cordon into safer country.

“Please hurry,” he said again. “And we had better not talk much.”

“I’m ready now, except for the boots.”

“Let me do them.”

He knelt on one knee and laced them quickly.

She whispered, looking down at him in the darkness: “You are very, very kind.”

“It will be safer not to talk just yet—your voice, you know. And when you do talk, you must call me ’Tovarish’—it’s the word the soldiers use. We must be very careful, even in details.”

“Yes, of course. I understand. Now I’m ready.”

“Good. We must try to get a long way into the forests by daylight.”

“Still en route for Moscow, I suppose?”

He answered, shouldering his bundle and helping her quickly over the uneven ground: “No. I have decided to accept your suggestion and will try to get you to the coast, where you can take ship for abroad. Now don’t answer me—don’t talk at all just save all your strength for the long journey.”