Knight Without Armour

PART IV

He stood on the summit of the first low ridge that lifted out of the long level of the plains. Dawn was creeping over the horizon; distant and below lay the clustered roofs of the town. He and his companion had stopped for but a moment, to share bread and water together; she was so tired that she was already half asleep on the springy turf.

He stared strangely upon that refreshing August dawn, yet in his own mind, for some reason, he saw another picture—a frozen Arctic river under sunshine, all still and stiff, and then suddenly the splitting shiver of the ice-crust and the surge of water over the quickening land. He felt as if something like that were happening within himself. “Come now,” he said, picking up the bundles. She was asleep and he had to waken her. She smiled without a word and stumbled forward.

He dared not have allowed more than that moment’s halt, for though they had had good fortune so far, there was still danger, and perhaps the greatest of all now that daylight had come. They plunged on and on as the glow in the eastern sky deepened and became glorified by sunrise; over pine-covered ridges and down into little lonely valleys, through swishing gullies of dead leaves and round curving slopes whence Saratursk, glimpsed between tree-trunks, seemed ever further away yet ever dangerously near. By ten o’clock they had covered seven or eight miles, and were already deep in the foothill forests; but she was so tired that she could not take another step. There was nothing for it but to rest for at least a few moments. They sat on a fallen tree-trunk and she was asleep again instantly, with her head leaning forward into her hands.

He was tired himself and after a short time, being afraid of falling asleep also, he got up and moved about. Ten minutes—a quarter of an hour—might be enough to give her just the needful strength to scramble a few miles further. Even during those few minutes, he guessed, pursuers would be gaining on them. He had no illusions or false optimism; he knew that the escape must have been discovered within a few hours, at most, of its taking place, and that immense efforts would certainly be made to recapture such a fugitive. He had seen the whole routine carried through so often before—a price upon some prisoner, dead or alive—a whole army setting out on perhaps the cruellest and therefore the most intoxicatingly thrilling game in the world—a man-hunt. And a woman-hunt would be even a degree better than that. Then suddenly, even while he was pondering over it, he heard, very faintly in the distance, a shrill whistle, and, a few seconds later, a still fainter whistle answering it. The hunt had begun already.

He touched the woman on the shoulder, but it was no use—he had to shake her thoroughly to get her awake. He said quietly: “We must hide for a time—I think searchers are somewhere in the woods.” She answered in a dazed way: “All right. I’m ready.” He helped her to her feet and they moved away, he with eyes alert for a good hiding- place.

He was fortunate in finding one quite soon. A steep valley ended in a lame and desolate tract of undergrowth amidst whose tangle there seemed a good chance of escaping notice. Even if pursuers ever reached it, they would not be likely to give every thicket the attention it deserved. He plunged eagerly into the bushes and for ten minutes, out of sight of the world around them, they both wriggled further and deeper into the dense undergrowth. At last the seemingly perfect spot revealed itself—a little hollow hidden behind thick brambles and knee-deep in litter of twigs and leaves. “Here,” he cried, with sudden satisfaction. He stared thankfully about him at the protecting foliage, and then upwards at the blue sky just visible through the lacery of branches. Then he heard once again, but a little nearer, that shrill whistle and its answer.

He laid her gently on the ground and yet again she fell asleep instantly—so instantly that he smiled a rather rueful smile, for he had intended to give her some cautionary advice. No matter; it could probably wait. He would not think of wakening her. And then as the moments passed and he watched her sleeping, a feeling of tenderness came over him, like a slow warmth from another world, and he did something he had never done before in all his life—he put his arm round a woman and drew her gently towards him. She would sleep more comfortably so. He gazed on her with quiet, almost proprietary triumph; all the way from Khalinsk he had not ceased to guard her, through all manner of difficulty and peril, and here she was still, by miracle, under his protection. He was hungry and thirsty and tired and anxious, yet also, in a way he had never known before, he was satisfied.

The thicket was noisy with buzzing insects, but every few moments over the distant air came the whistling—now quite distinctly nearer. His heart beat no faster for it; he felt: We are here, and here is our only chance; we must wait and take whatever comes…The nearest of the pursuers, he judged, must be perhaps half a mile away; there were others, too, not far behind, and probably hundreds already combing the forests on the way from Saratursk. Soon the whistling became less intermittent and seemed to come from north and south as well as west; once, too, he thought he heard voices a long way off. Hunger and thirst were now beginning to be importunate, but he dared not satisfy them, since it might be night before he could risk leaving the thicket in quest of any fresh supplies.

Then he saw that her eyes were wide open—dark, sleepy eyes staring up at him. She whispered, half smiling: “How uncomfortable you must be—with me leaning on you like this!”

“All the better,” he answered, with a wry smile. “It helps me to keep awake.”

“I think it is your turn to sleep now.”

“No, no—you go on sleeping.”

“But I can’t.” Her voice dropped agonisingly. “I’ve kept my nerve pretty well up to now, but I’m afraid—I’m beginning to be just—terrified.”

“Terrified? Oh, no need for that.”

“Those whistles that keep on sounding—we’re being hunted—that’s what they mean, don’t they?”

“They’re looking for us, of course. That was to be expected. But it doesn’t follow that they’re going to find us.”

“Promise me—promise me one thing—that you’ll kill me rather than let them get me again!”

“Yes, I promise.”

“You mean it?”

“Absolutely.”

A whistle suddenly shrilled quite close to them—perhaps two or three hundred yards away, on the edge of the undergrowth. Even he was startled, and he felt her trembling silently against him. He whispered: “Keep calm—they’re a long way off yet—they might easily come within ten yards and not see us in a place like this. Don’t worry.”

All she could muster, amidst her fear was: “You have your revolver? You remember?”

“Yes, of course.”

His arm tightened upon leer; he whispered: “Poor child, don’t give up hope.” Then they both waited in silence. It seemed an age until the next whistle—an answering one that appeared to come from about the same distance on the other side. What was happening was not very clear; perhaps the two searchers were passing along the edges of the undergrowth and did not intend to make any detailed search amongst it. He could imagine their condition—tired, hot, thirsty, and probably bad-tempered after the so far fruitless search. The prickly brambles would hardly tempt them. On the other hand, there was the big reward that had most likely been offered—men would do most things for a few hundred roubles.

After a short time it was evident that the searchers numbered far more than two; whistling proceeded from every direction, and sounded rather as if fresh searchers were coming up at every moment. Then came echoes of shouting and talking, but voices did not carry very well and he could not catch any words. He judged, however, that some sort of a consultation was in progress. Next followed a chorus of whistling and counter-whistling from both sides, the meaning of which was only too easy to guess.

“They’re coming through!” she gasped.

He whispered: “I daresay they’ve got the sense to realise that this is a good place to hide. And so it is, too. There are so many of them there’s bound to be over-lapping and confusion. Keep calm. We’ve still a good chance.” The approach of almighty danger gave him a feeling of exaltation as difficult to understand as to control. He went on, a moment later: “Leaves—these leaves. A childish trick, but it might work. I want you to lie down in this hollow and let me cover you up.”

“Yes, if you wish.”

He placed her so that, with the leaves over her, there seemed no break in the level ground. The whistling by this time was very much nearer, and there could be heard also the tearing and breaking of twigs as some of the searchers broke through. He whispered: “Keep still—don’t move or say a word. And whatever happens, trust me and don’t be surprised. Whatever happens, mind.” A moment afterwards the tousled head of a Red soldier, streaked with dirt and perspiration, pushed itself through the undergrowth a few yards away. A.J. did not wait to be accosted. Wiping his forehead with his sleeve and kicking up some of the litter of twigs, he shouted: “Hallo? Found anything yet? There’s nothing here.”

The man answered: “Nor here either, Tovarish. It’s my belief she didn’t go into the forest at all. And if she did, she wouldn’t have got so far as this. It’s a terrible job, searching through this sort of country on a hot day.”

A J. agreed sympathetically. “You’re right, my friend—its the devil’s own job. And I’ve lost my whistle too, confound it.”

The other laughed. “Never mind, I’ll whistle for you.” He gave two mighty blasts. “That’ll show we’ve done our duty, anyway. Have a drink with me, Tovarish, and It’s get out of this muddle.”

A.J. accepted the offer by no means ungratefully, for he wanted the drink badly enough. The soldier seemed a simple, good-natured fellow, with a childishness, however, that was quite capable of being dangerous. “You were with the other lot, I suppose?” he queried, and A.J. nodded. They struggled through the thickets and reached at last the open ground. There a few other soldiers were already gathered together, evidently satisfied that they had performed their share of the search. They were all rather disgruntled. It was a ticklish moment when A.J. joined them, but his highest hopes were realised; there had been a tremendous amount of confusion and no man expected to know his neighbour. The chief concern of all was the food and drink due to arrive from the forests below.

A.J. found them a friendly lot of men, behind their temporary ill-humour; he soon learned that they had been promised a large reward for the discovery of the escaped Countess, and that the latter, if captured alive, was to be accorded a solemn full-dress execution in the market-place at Saratursk. “She will be hanged, not shot,” said one of the men, rolling a cigarette between grimy fingers. And he added contemplatively: “It is a pity, in some ways, to hang a woman, because their necks are made differently. I am a hangman by profession, and I can speak from knowledge.”

Soon a few men came toiling up the valley with sacks of bread and buckets of thin potato-soup. The searchers greeted them boisterously, relieved them of their burdens, and began to eat and drink ravenously. A.J. and his tousled companion, whose name was Stephanov, managed to secure a loaf of black bread between them, as well as a large can of soup. Stephanov was not astonished that A.J. knew none of the men. “That is the worst of the army nowadays,” he said. “They shift you about so quickly that you never get to know anybody. It was different in the old days when there were proper regiments.” He went on chatting away in a manner most helpful to A.J. “I suppose all the others have got lost—that’s what usually happens. I only know one of the fellows here by name. That’s little Nikolai Roussilov over there. Do you see him? That man snoring against that tree-trunk.” A.J. looked and observed. “I can tell you a secret, Tovarish, about that man—and though you’ll hardly believe it, I assure you it’s the heavenly truth and nothing less.” He dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. “That man was once kissed by the Emperor.”

A.J. made some surprised and enquiring remark and Stephanov went on, pleased with his little sensation: “Ah, I guessed that would startle you! Well, you see, it all happened like this. Nikolai was doing sentry duty one night outside a railway train in which the Emperor was sleeping. The train was drawn up in a siding, and it was Easter Sunday morning—in the old clays, of course. You know the custom—you kiss the first person you meet and give the Easter greeting. Well, Nikolai was the first person the Emperor met that morning when he stepped out of the train, so the Emperor kissed him. Isn’t that remarkable? And you would hardly think it to look at him, would you?”

Many of the men had already fallen to dozing in the shade, but Stephanov’s conversation showed no signs of early abatement. A.J. was not wholly sorry, for the man’s garrulous chatter gave him much information that he guessed might be of value in the immediate future. At last, towards the late afternoon, an officer appeared on the edge of the scene and gave leisurely instruction to the half-sleeping men. They were to form themselves into detachments and march back to Saratursk. Evidently the search, for that day, at any rate, was being abandoned.

A.J.’s problem, of course, was to escape from the soldiers without attracting attention, and there were many ways in which he hoped to be able to do so. Having, however, been given such incredible good fortune so far, he was determined to take no unnecessary risks, and he saw no alternative to accompanying the men for some distance, at least, on their march back to the town. He and Stephanov walked together, or rather, Stephanov followed him with a species of dog-like attachment which threatened to be highly inconvenient in the circumstances. The retreat began about six o’clock and dusk fell as the stragglers were still threading their way amongst the pine-trees. From time to time as they descended, other parties of soldiers joined them—all tired and rather low-spirited. But for the too pertinacious Stephanov, it would have been a simple matter to slip away in the twilit confusion of one or other of these encounters. At last, however, when the last tint of daylight had almost left the sky, an opportunity did come. Stephanov halted to take off his boot and beat in a protruding nail; A.J. said he would go ahead and see how far they had still to go. He went ahead, but he did not return, and he hoped that Stephanov would realise that, in the darkness, nothing was more likely than that two companions, once separated, should be unable to find each other again.

A.J. waited till the last faint sounds of the retreating men had died away in the distance; some were singing and could be heard for a long time. Then he took deep breaths of the cool pine-laden air and tried to induce in himself a calm and resourceful confidence. He took careful note of his bearings; the stars and the rising moon and the slope of the ground were all helpful guides. His Siberian experiences had made him un-cannily expert at that sort of thing; with a night lasting for nine months it had been necessary to train the senses to work efficiently in the dark. Still, it was not going to be an easy task to locate the exact whereabouts of that valley wilderness. During the journey with Stephanov he had tried to memorise the ground passed over, and he had counted five successive ridges that they had crossed.

Cautiously he climbed to the summit of the first ridge. There moonlight helped him by showing a vague outline of the next one. He paused a moment to munch a little bread he had managed to save; there was still some left. At the next stream he filled his water-bottle to the brim. On the top of the second ridge he saw cigarette wrappings that had been thrown away by the soldiers, and that was heartening, for it showed that he was in the right direction. Twice after that he imagined he was lost, and the second time he had just decided to stay where he was until dawn, when he caught a distant glimpse of a pale clearing that seemed somehow familiar. He walked towards it, and there, glossy under the moonlight, lay that steep valley with the wilderness of thickets like a dark velvet patch at the upper end of it. He stumbled over the turf with tingling excitement in his blood, and all at once and surprisingly for the first time the thought came to him that she might not be there. What if she were not? If she had grown tired or terrified of waiting—if she had wildly sought to escape on her own—if she had lost hope of his ever returning? He gave a low whistle across the empty valley, and at once a hundred voices answered, so that he shivered almost in fear himself. Then he smiled; they were only owls. He reached the edge of the thickets and plunged into them, not caring that the brambles tore at his clothes and face and hands. In a little while he dared to speak—he shouted softly: “I’m coming—don’t be afraid—I’m coming. Tell me where you are.” And a voice, very weary and remote, answered him.

When he came at last to that little hollow of dead leaves she sprang up and clung to him with both arms, sobbing and laughing at the same time. “Darling—darling,” she whispered hysterically, and he felt all the ice in his soul break suddenly into the flow of spring. “Were you thinking I wouldn’t come?” he stammered, dazed with the glory of her welcome. She could not answer, but she was all at once calmed. Then he stooped and kissed her lips, and they were like the touch of sleep itself. “You must be so tired,” she said, and he answered: “I am—yes, I am.” There was a curious serenity about her that made him feel a child again—a child to whom most things are simple and marvellous.

They shared food and water and then lay down together on the bed of leaves until morning.

The chorus of birds awoke him at sunrise; he looked up and saw the blue sky between the branches and then looked down and saw her sleeping. He memorised her features as he might have done the contours of some friendly, familiar land; he saw her wide, round eyelids, and her slender nose, and her lips a little parted as she slept. He wondered if she were really beautiful, as one may wonder if a loved scene is really beautiful; for to him, as she lay there, she meant so much more than beauty. He saw her as the centre of a universe, and all else—those years of exile and loneliness and wandering—dissolved into background.

Then, as if aware that he was thinking about her so intensely, she wakened and smiled.

They finished what remained of the food and then talked over what was to be done next. Their immediate aim, of course, was to get as far away as possible from Saratursk, and for this the soldier disguise seemed the safest, though later it might be advisable to drop it. Even more pressing might soon be problems of food and shelter, since they could not expect to leave the forest for several days and the warm and dry weather had already lasted exceptionally.

As they set out under the trees that early morning they talked as they had never done before—about themselves, She told him of her family, of which, she believed, she might be the only survivor: her mother was dead; her father and two brothers had certainly been killed by the Reds; and among other relatives there were few whom she could be sure were still alive. They had all, of course, lost their money and possessions. Almost as an afterthought she told him that she had been married, and that her husband had been killed in Galicia fighting the Austrians. “Almost as soon as the war began, that was. We had been married four years, but we had no children. I am glad.”

She continued: “I stayed on our estates as long as I could; I never believed our old servants would turn against me, but they did, in the end—they were intimidated, no doubt. Then there seemed nothing left but to clear out of the country altogether, which my friends had been urging me to do for a Ion, while. A few of them who were plotting against the Reds asked for my support, and I gave it to some extent, but my real desire was to get away—out of it all—utterly. When I was taken prisoner I was terribly disappointed at first, as you can imagine. Then a mood came on me in which nothing seemed to matter at all. Even when I tried to bribe you and you refused, I didn’t find myself caring very much. But now I’m beginning to care again—a little—and it hurts—it’s really more convenient not to have any hopes and fears. But I want to live—oh, I do want us both to live—we must—mustn’t we?”

“Yes,” he replied, and the word, as he uttered it, seemed a keystone set upon his life. Then he began to tell her, quite simply and dispassionately, of his own years of exile, though not of anything previous to that. As it was, the accounting was like turning old keys in rusty locks; to no one ever before had he spoken of those bitter years that had frozen his soul with their silence just as hers had been numbed by grief.

All morning they trudged from ridge to ridge, skirting Saratursk at a wide radius, and then making in a southwest direction. He kept a continually watchful look-out, for he thought it more than possible that the Reds would resume their search of the forests. Nobody, however, appeared within sight until mid-afternoon, when they saw, far off on a hillside, a man gathering small timber for fuel. They were so hungry by then that A.J. took the risk of walking up to him and, posing as a soldier who had lost his way, asking to buy food and drink. The man was quite cordial, and took A.J. to his tiny cottage half a mile away, where he lived with his wife and a large family amidst conditions of primitive savagery. It seemed a pity to take food from such people, but the man was glad to sell eggs, tea, and bread at the prices A.J. offered. It was hard, indeed, to escape from his good-natured friendliness, and especially from his offer to show the way in person for few had been made when A.J.’s desire to be unaccompanied almost offensively clear, the man’s puzzlement changed to a gust of amusement. “Ah, I begin to see how it is, comrade,” he chuckled. “You have a woman waiting for you out there in the woods, eh? Oh, don’t be afraid—I shan’t say anything! You’re not the first soldier who’s deserted the Red army and taken to the hills with a woman. But I’ll give you this bit of advice—if you do happen to meet anyone else at the same game, be careful—for they shoot at sight. They’re wild as wolves, many of’ em.”

A.J. thanked the fellow and was glad to walk away with an armful of food and nothing worse than a roar of laughter behind him. When he rejoined his companion they continued their walk for a mile or so and then sat down to eat, drink, and rest. It was already late afternoon and they had had nothing since the few crusts of bread at early morning. A.J. now gathered sticks for a small fire, on which he boiled eggs and made tea. The resulting meal lifted them both to an extraordinary pitch of happiness; as they sat near the smoking embers while the first mists of twilight dimmed the glades, a strange peacefulness fell upon them, and they both knew, even without speaking, that neither would have chosen to be anywhere else in the world. All around them lay enemies; to- morrow might see them captured, imprisoned, or dead; there might be horror in the future to balance all the horrors of the past; yet the tiny oasis of the present, with themselves at the core of it, was a sheer glow of perfection.

They were so tired that they did not move before darkness came, and then merely lay clown on the brown leaves. The evening air was chilly, and they clung together for warmth with their two great-coats huddled over them. All the small and friendly sounds of the forest wrapped them about: an owl hooted very far away; a mouse rustled through the near undergrowth; a twig broke suddenly aloft and fell with a tiny clatter to the ground. She kissed him with a grave, peaceful passion that seemed a living part of all the copious, cordial nature that surrounded them; they hardly spoke; to love seemed as simple and as speechless as to be hungry and thirsty and tired. That night he could almost have blessed the chaos that had brought them both, out of a whole world, together.

On the fifth day they fell in with a peasant who told them of a quick way into the plains. He was a bent and gnarled fellow of an age that looked to be anything between sixty and eighty, and with the manner of one to whom Bolshevism and revolution were merely the pranks of a young and foolish generation. He was full of chatter, and told A.J. all his family affairs, besides pointing to a small timbered roof on a distant hillside that was his own. He had left a sick daughter alone in that hut with five small children; her husband was a soldier, fighting somewhere or other—or perhaps dead—no news had been received for many months. “Of course he will never come back—they never do. She has had no baby now for over two years—is it not dreadful? And she would make a good wife for any man when she is in good health—oh yes, a very good wife.”

A.J. made some sympathetic remark and the old man continued: “But what are young men nowadays? Mere adventurers pretending to want to see the world! What is the world, after all? When you have seen one forest you have seen them all, and one field is very much like another. I myself am quite happy to have been no further than Vremarodar, seventy versts away.” He chuckled amidst the odorous depths of a heavy matted beard and still continued: “I don’t suppose you’d ever guess my age, either, brother. I’m a hundred and three, though people don’t always believe me when I tell them. You see my youngest daughter’s only thirty-five, and people say it’s impossible.” He chuckled again, “but it isn’t impossible, I assure you—I’m not the sort of fellow to tell you a lie. Why, look at me now, still fit and hearty, as you can see, and if there was a pretty woman about, and my honour as a man depended on it, I don’t know but what…” His chuckles boiled over into resonant laughter. “Mind you, I’m not what I used to be, by a long way, and I think it’s a girl’s duty to look after her father when he lives to be my age, don’t you? She’s not a bad girl, you know, but she’s inclined to be lazy and I have to thrash her now and again. Not that I like doing it, but women—well, you know all about them, I daresay. Ah well, there’s your path—it leads out into a long valley and at the end of that there are the plains as far as you can sec. Good- day to you, brother, and to you too, madam.”

The next day they reached the edge of the forests and saw the plains stretching illimitably into the hazy distance. But before descending, it was necessary to make arrangements. It was certain that they would meet man’’ strangers once they left the hillsides, and with the prospect, too, of colder weather, they could no longer rely on sleeping out of doors. A soldier’s disguise, for the woman especially, seemed therefore likely to be a source of danger, and A.J. decided that it would be Better for them to resume their peasant roles. In his own case the change was inconsiderable, since so many peasants wore army clothes whenever they could acquire them; and as for Daly, she had only to change into the female attire that she had been carrying with her all the way from Saratursk.

The change was made, and on the seventh day, very early in the morning, they left the forests. The sky was fine, but clouds were already massing on the horizon for a thunderstorm that would doubtless Tiring to an end the long spell of fine weather. It was still hard to make more than the sketchiest plan of campaign. Amidst those lonely Ural foothills there had been an atmosphere of being out of the world, removed from many of its bewilderments and troubled by nothing more complicated than the elemental problem of the hunted eluding the hunter. In the plains, however, all problems were subtler and more intricate—as intricate, at least, as the political and military situation of the country generally. At Saratursk, before the escape, A.J. had tried to visualise what was happening as a whole, and not merely locally, but it had been difficult owing to the wildness of the rumours that gained credence. Every morning there had come a fresh crop of them—that the German Kaiser had committed suicide, that Lenin had been shot in Moscow by a young girl, that a British army was invading from Archangel, that the Japanese were approaching from the east along the line of the Trans-Siberian; there had been no lack of such sensational news, much of which was always more likely to be false than true. It seemed, however, fairly probable that Czecho-Slovak detachments were by this time in full occupation of great lengths of the Trans- Siberian, and it was also possible (as rumour alleged) that they had pushed up the Volga and captured Sembirsk and Kazan. The repulse of the Whites from Saratursk would appear, in that case, to have been a merely isolated and local affair—as local, in fact, as the Red Terror that had followed it. But then, all Russia was seething with such local affairs, and the history of the whole country could scarcely be more than the sum-total of them. A village here might be Red, or there White, and a stranger could hardly tell which until he took the risk of entering it. The Czechs, despite their imposing position on the map, held merely the thin line of the railway; a few versts on either side of the track their sway ended, and the brigandage of Red and White soldiery went on without interruption.

So much A.J. had in mind, though there was little he knew for certain. If there had been any fixed battle-line between Red and White, it would have been a straightforward task, despite the danger of it, to make for the nearest point of that line and cross over. As it was, however, there could be no advantage in joining up with some small and local White colony which, in a few days or weeks, might surrender to the Reds and be massacred.

The two of them talked the matter over during that early morning descent to the plains, and she said at length, putting it far more concisely than he would care to have done: “The whole question is really—am I to escape alone, or are you to come with me? You are to come with me, of course, and that means we must go right away—out of the whole area of these local wars.” Then she looked at him and laughed rather queerly. “Oh, it all comes to this, I suppose, that what I want more than anything in the world is to be with you. Can’t You believe me? In a way I’m enjoying every minute of all this—it’s an adventure I don’t want ever to end; but if it must end, then let anything end it rather than separation. Promise that wherever we go and whatever happens to us, it will be together!”

“That is all I hoped you would say,” he answered. “We will make south for the railway, then, and take a train, if there are trains, towards Kazan. And there, if the situation remains the same, we can join the Czechs.”

The hill country ended with disconcerting abruptness; by noon they were crossing land so level that it looked like a sea, with the horizon of hills as a coastline in the rearward distance. It was dizzily hot; the threatened storm had passed over with a few abortive thunderclaps. The earth was caked and splitting after weeks without rain; dust filled eyes and nostrils at the slightest breath of wind; the crops were withering in the unharvested fields.

As distance increased between themselves and the mountains, they found tracks widening into roads, and roads becoming more frequented. Every side- track yielded its stragglers, most of whom were peasants carrying all their worldly goods on their backs. Where they had come from and where they were bound for were problems that were no more soluble after, as often happened, they had unburdened their secrets to the passing stranger. But many were too ill and dejected even to give the usual greeting as they passed, and some showed all the outward signs of prolonged hardships and semi-starvation.

For every passer-by in the opposite direction there were at least a dozen, bound, like themselves, for the railway twenty miles to the south. The chance of getting aboard a train did not, in such circumstances, seem very promising, and still less attractive was the prospect of camping out for days or weeks on the railway platforms, as thousands of refugees were doing. A.J. learned this from a youth with whom, along the road, he effected an exchange of a couple of eggs in return for a small quantity of butter made from sunflower- seeds. The boy—for he was scarcely more—seemed so knowledgeable and intelligent that A.J. was glad enough to agree when he suggested pooling resources for a small roadside meal. The stranger hardly got the better of the bargain, since his own provender included white bread (an almost incredible luxury) and part of a cooked chicken; but he only laughed when A.J. apologised. He was a merry, pink-checked youth, eager to treat A.J. with roguish bonhomie and the woman with a touch of gallantry. He was eighteen, he said, and his life had been fairly adventurous. At sixteen he had been a cadet in an Imperial training-school for officers, but the Revolution had happened just in time to fit in conveniently with his own reluctance to die in a trench fighting the Germans. He seemed also to have quarrelled with his family, for he said he neither knew nor cared what had happened to them. He had joined the revolutionaries at the age of seventeen, doubtless to save his own skin, and in a single year had risen to be a military commissar. But even that, in the end, had become too tedious and exacting, for in his heart he had always pined for something more individually adventurous. Presently the had found it. He had become a train-bandit. He admitted this quite frankly, and with a joyous taking of risks in so doing. “It suits me,” he explained, “because I’m a bad lot—I always was.”

It appeared that he had been the leader of a group of bandits operating on the Cheliabinsk-Ufa line before the advance of the Czechs had put an end to such enterprise. His colleagues had since dispersed, and he himself was now at a loose end, but he rather thought there was a good chance of successful banditry on the Ekaterinburg-Sarapul line, which was still to a large extent in the hands of the Reds. All he needed were ’a few suitable companions; the rest would be easy. There was a steep incline not far away where west-bound trains always slowed down. One man could jump into the engine-cab and make the driver pull up; the others would then go through the train, coach by coach and compartment by compartment. It was the usual and almost always successful method. A.J. expressed surprise that the passengers, many of whom were doubtless well armed, did not put up a fight. The boy laughed. “You must remember that it’s in the middle of the night, when most of them are asleep and none of them feel particularly brave. Besides, some of them do try their tricks, but we try ours first. If you shoot straight once you don’t often have any trouble with the rest.” He spoke quite calmly, and not without a certain half-humorous relish. “After all,” he then went on, as if feeling instinctively some need to defend himself, “it’s not a bad death—being shot. Better than starvation or typhus. A good many people in this country, I should reckon, have got to die pretty soon, and the lucky ones are those that get a bullet through the heart.” Looked at in such a way, the situation undoubtedly showed him in the guise of a public benefactor. And he added: “I suppose you don’t feel you’re the sort of fellow to join forces with me?”

When A.J. smiled and shook his head, the boy smiled back quite amicably. “That’s all right—only I thought I’d just put it to you. You look the sort of man I’d like to work with, that’s all. Anyhow, I can help you with a bit of advice. There’s not a thousand to one chance of your getting on board a train at Novochensk. The station’s already cram-full. But if you go about three versts to the east you’ll come to that incline I was talking about—where the trains all slow up. There you might manage it.”

“I suppose the trains are full too.”

“Absolutely, but they’ll make room for you and your lady if you shout that you’ve got food. Show them a loaf of bread and they’ll pull you into the cars even if they murder you afterwards.”

A.J. thanked him for the excellent-sounding advice, and after a little further conversation the eighteen-year-old bandit shouldered his bundle and departed. Following his suggestion, they reached the railway late that evening at a point a few miles east of the railway station. It was too dark to see exactly where they were, and they were just preparing to sleep on the parched ground until morning when, from the very far distance, came the sound of a train. It was a weird noise amidst the silence of the steppes—rather like the breathing of a very tired and aged animal. Once or twice, as the wind veered away, the sound disappeared altogether for a time, and they listened for it intermittently for nearly half an hour before they first saw the tiny sparkle of a headlight on the horizon. They perceived then that they were on the ridge of some low downs, which the train would have to surmount—that, presumably, being the incline they had been told about. And soon, to confirm this assumption, the breathing of the engine became a kind of hoarse pant as the rising gradient was encountered. More and more asthmatic grew the panting, until, with a sudden sigh, it ceased altogether, and a sharp jangle of brakes showed that the train was locked at a standstill.

“Let’s walk down,” A.J. said, rapidly gathering up the bundles. “They might take us on board—at any rate, we can try.”

They walked along the track down the noticeable slope; evidently the builders of the line had been unable to afford the evening out of the gradient by means of cutting and embankment. The train, as they approached it, looked in some commotion, and to avoid being seen too clearly in the glare of the headlight they made a detour into the fields and returned to the track opposite the third vehicle. They could see now that the train was composed of some dozen box-cars of refugees and a single ordinary passenger-coach next to the engine.

Scores of heads peered at them through the slats of the cars, and several occupants, evidently taking A.J. for some wayside railway official, enquired why the train had stopped. A.J. said he thought it was because the engine could not manage the hill, and then, feeling that nothing was to be lost by broaching the matter immediately, added: “I have a little bread and some tea and sugar—could you make room for just the two of us?”

“We cannot,” answered several, which did not sound unreasonable in view of the fact that men were even perched on the buffers between the cars. One or two voices, however, began to ask how much tea and sugar he had.

The whole colloquy was then sharply interrupted by the sound of shots proceeding from the passenger-coach. At once women began to shout and scream, and a few of the men standing on the buffers actually dropped to the ground and hid themselves beneath the cars. Other shots followed in rapid succession; then suddenly a group of men appeared out of the darkness, brandishing weapons and shouting. One carried a lantern and flashed it in A.J.’s face, exclaiming in had Russian: “What are you doing here? Didn’t you hear the order that no one was to get out?”

A.J. explained with an appropriate mixture of eloquence and simplicity that they hadn’t got out, and that, on the contrary, they were a couple of poor peasants trying their best to get in.

Another man then joined in the argument; he was clearly for shooting the two of them out of hand, but first man restrained him with some difficulty. “They are only peasants,” he said, and turning to A.J., added: “You say you were only looking for a place on the train?”

A.J. assured him that this was so, and just as he had finished, a soft, rather plaintive voice from the car above them cried out: “Yes, he is speaking the truth, your honour—they were offering us tea and sugar if we would make room for them.”

The man with the lantern grunted sharply. “Tea and sugar, eh? Come on—hand them over.” Obedience seemed advisable in the circumstances, and A.J. yielded up his precious commodities; after which the men, with a few final shouts, hurried away into the darkness, leaving the couple standing there by the side of the train, unharmed, but bereft of their most potent bargaining power.

After a judicious interval the occupants of the train took courage and set up a chorus of loud and indignant protests. The engine-whistle began a continuously ear-piercing screech, while from the passenger-coach sprang half a- dozen Red soldiers, armed with rifles and fixed bayonets. It soon became known that the bandits had run off with a large quantity of money and had also killed two Red guards on the train. The survivors, to excuse themselves, estimated the number of bandits at twenty, but A.J. did not think there could have been more than half that number.

Rather oddly the crowd of harassed and scared refugees were now inclined to show sympathy towards A.J. and his companion. “They were going to share their tea and sugar with us,” said the man with the plaintive voice. And another man said: “It’s all very well to kill the soldiers and steal the money, but to take away a poor man’s food is something to be really ashamed of. Climb up, friends, and we’ll make room for you somehow.”

So A.J. and Daly got aboard the train after all. There was hardly a square foot of space, and they were huddled together against the dirtiest and most odorous fellow-travellers, but there they were, as they had dreamed of being for many days—on board a train that would take them a further stage on their journey.

It was dawn, however, before the train started. In despair of surmounting the hill from a standstill, the engine-driver reversed for a mile or so and tried to take the gradient by storm. The manoeuvre failed, and the train was again reversed. This time the order was given for all able-bodied men to get out and push the cars over the crest of the rise, and by this means, with many snortings and splutterings, the train did finally crawl over the summit. There was then a further long wait while the pushers regained their places, and it was not till an hour after sunrise that the train steamed into Novochensk station, less than three miles from the scene of the hold-up.

A first view of Novochensk proved to A.J. how fortunate, after all, had been the boy-bandit’s advice. The station was packed from end to end of its large platforms and freight-yards, and the train, as it entered, seemed to push a way through the crowd like a vehicle threading through a fair-ground. Added, of course, to the normal pandemonium that the arrival of any train would have caused, was the extra sensation arising out of the hold-up. There was much agitated shouting and gesticulation among the railway officials as the bodies of the shot soldiers were removed from the train. The remaining soldiers had already revised their earlier estimate of the number of attackers; it was now reckoned about a hundred.

Scarcely any of those waiting at Novochensk succeeded in getting a place on the train, and those already in occupation dared not move for fear of losing their own places. The station, too, was without food, and many of the refugees had had nothing to eat for several days. Even water was scarce, owing to the prolonged drought, and when buckets were handed into the cars, there was barely enough to give each occupant a single quick gulp.

The train left Novochensk shortly before midday, and amidst the drowsy torpidity of the afternoon A.J. had plenty of time and opportunity to observe his fellow-passengers. There were perhaps fifty or sixty of them squatting on the floor of the box-car; many were leaning against each other and trying to sleep, and the whole effect was rather that of a litter of old rags. There was just enough talk and movement, however, to indicate that the litter was alive, and there was certainly ample liveliness of another kind. A.J. and Daly, whose clothes had been fairly clean on entering, shared the common misfortune during the first half-hour.

Here and there, and from time to time, some isolated phenomenon detached itself from that jumble of rags, chatter, and drowsiness; a baby cried; a woman opened her blouse and exposed a drooping shrunken breast-’ man groaned heavily as he stirred in sleep; the train lurched over a bad patch of line and drew a sigh, a curse, or a muttered exclamation from every corner of that strange assembly. The sunlight, shining through the wooden slats, made a flickering febrile patchwork of the whole picture, showing up here a piece of gaudy-coloured cloth, there a greasy, dirt-stained face, and everywhere, like a veil drawn in front of reality, the smoke rising from the men’s coarse tobacco and the myriad particles of dust.

The speed of travel was very slow—never more than ten miles an hour, and oftener no more than five; nor could anything be seen outside save that vast, vacant expanse of brown earth, on which the horizon seemed to press like a heavy, brazen rim. Miles passed without sight of a habitation, while nothing moved over the emptiness save swirls of dust and curlews scared by the train.

Actually she whispered to him as she leaned against the curve of his arm: “Oh, I’m happy—I’m happy. I’m beginning to have hope. When do you think we shall reach Kazan?”

“In two or three days, at this rate. Are you hungry?”

“Very, but I don’t mind. We had a good meal yesterday.”

“I’ll try to get you some water to drink at the next stop.”

“Yes, if you can. And for yourself too.”

“Oh, I’m all right. Are you tired?”

“Just a bit.”

“Then go to sleep now, if you like. At night it may be chilly and you’ll be kept awake.”

She gave him a single quick glance that somehow expressed the utter simplicity of their relationship. Their lives had been knit together perfectly and completely; to have shared hunger and thirst and tiredness, to have hidden in dark thickets from enemies, to have washed in mountain streams and slept under high trees—all had built up, during those few hurried weeks, a tradition of love as elemental as the earth on which they had lain together.

When she was asleep he stared at the slowly passing landscape till he was drowsy himself. A little man next to him, who had been sleeping, then awoke and produced a small plug of chewing tobacco which he asked A.J. to share. A.J. thanked him but declined, and this led to conversation. There was something in the little man’s soft lilting voice that sounded vaguely familiar, and it soon appeared that it was he who had shouted down to the bandits in confirmation of A.J.’s own account of himself. As this intervention had quite probably saved the situation, A.J. felt grateful to him, though his appearance was far from pleasant. He was dirty and very verminous, and had only one eye; the other, he declared proudly, had been knocked out by a woman. He did not explain when or how. He was full of melancholy indignation over the cowardice of the others in dealing with the bandits. “Nobody but me had the courage to say a word to them,” he kept repeating, and it was undoubtedly true. “Just me—little Gregorovitch with the one eye—all the rest were afraid to speak.” A man some distance away shouted to him to stop talking, and added, for A.J.’s benefit: “Don’t listen to him, brother. He’s only a half-wit. The other half came out with his eye.” There was laughter at that, after which the little man fell into partial silence for a while, muttering only very quietly to himself. A.J. was inclined to believe the diagnosis correct; the man’s remaining eye held all the hot, roving mania of the semi-insane.

Later the little man began to talk again. He seemed to have something on his mind, to be nourishing some vast and shadowy grievance against the world in general, and from time to time he would scan the horizon eagerly with his single eye. His talk was at first so idle and disjointed that A.J. had much difficulty in comprehending him; it was as if the man’s brain, such as it might be, were working only fitfully. But by degrees it all worked itself out into something as understandable as it ever would be. He had been a soldier, conscribed to fight the Germans; he had fought them for two years without being injured—the eye (once again his plaintiveness soared momentarily into pride) was not a war-wound, but the work of a woman. (And once again, also, he forbore to explain when or how.) After the Revolution he had tried to get back home, but he had lost his papers, and apparently nothing could be done without papers. All he knew was his own name—Gregorovitch—and the name of his village—Krokol; and these two names, it appeared, hadn’t been enough for the authorities. With rather wistful indignation he described his visit to a government office in Petrograd, whither he had drifted after the collapse of the battle-fronts. “I should be glad,” he had said, “if you could tell me my full name and how I can get home. I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye, and I live at Krokol.”

“Krokol?” the clerk had said. (The little man imitated the mincing, educated tones of the bureaucrat with savage exaggeration.) “Krokol? Never heard of it? How do you spell it?”

“I don’t spell it,” Gregorovitch had replied.

“Don’t spell it? And why not?”

“Because I don’t spell anything. But I can describe it to you—it is a village with a wide street and a tiny steepled church.”

“I am afraid,” the clerk had then answered, “we can do nothing for you. Good-day.”

The little man’s eye burned with renewed fever as he recited this oft-told plaint. “Is it not scandalous,” he asked, “that in a free country no one can tell you who you are or where you come from?”

That had taken place a year before, and since then Gregorovitch had been travelling vaguely about in search of Krokol. He had just got on trains anywhere, hoping that sometime he might reach a place where Krokol was known. Occasionally he left the trains and walked, and always he hoped that just over the horizon he would come across the little steepled village.

A.J. was interested enough to question him minutely about Krokol, but it was soon obvious why the clerk at Petrograd had been so impatient. Gregorovitch could give nothing but the vaguest description that might have applied to a thousand or ten thousand villages throughout the length and breadth of the country. Even the name, without a spelling, was a poor clue, since local people often called their villages by names unidentifiable in maps or gazetteers. Nor had Gregorovitch a notion whether Krokol was near or far from the sea, near or far from any big city, near or far from any railway or river. All he could supply was that repeated and useless mention of the wide street and the steepled church.

A.J. questioned him further about his family, but again his replies were valueless; he could only say that he had a brother named Paul and a sister named Anna. Of any family name he was completely ignorant, and was, indeed, completely convinced that it was unnecessary. “Is it not enough,” he asked, “that I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye? Everyone in Krokol knows me.”

He went on quietly protesting in this way until the train came to a slow standstill in the midst of the burning steppe. The halt was for no apparent reason save the whim of the engine-driver and fireman, who climbed down from their cab and lazed picturesquely on the shady side of the train. The air, motionless as the train itself, soon became hot and reeking inside the car, and those whose heads chanced to be in sunlight twitched and fidgeted under the glare. Movement, with its own particular discomforts, had somehow kept at bay the greater tortures of hunger and thirst; but now these two raged and stormed in a world to themselves. Water—bread—the words became symbols of all that a human being could live and die for. A scuffle suddenly arose at one end of the car; a man was drinking out of a bottle and his neighbour, unable to endure the sight, attacked him with instant and ungovernable fury. For a few seconds everyone was shouting at once, till at last the assailant was overborne, and was soon sobbing to himself, aware that he had behaved shamefully. And the others, beyond their anger, seemed not unwilling to be sorry for him. Then, with a sharp lurch, the train began to move again and the resulting breath of air took away the keener pangs for another interval.

Towards evening they reached a small station called Minarsk, where they were shunted into a siding and given water, but no food. The satisfaction of thirst, however, put everyone in a good humour for a time; chatter became quite animated, and noisy fraternisation went on between the occupants of the car and the swarming refugees from the station. A.J. was now beginning to know the circumstances and personalities of many more of his fellow-travellers. Besides the little man with one eye, there was a large family of exiles returning from Irkutsk and hoping to reach Kharkoff; there were others seeking family or friends, some whose villages had been destroyed in the fighting between Reds and Whites, some who travelled in the despairing belief that any place must be better than the one they had left. One old pock-faced and long-limbed Tartar confessed to a passionate love of travel for its own sake; his home had been on the Kirghiz plains, but he had never, in those old days, been able to afford the luxury of a third-class ticket. Since the Revolution, however, it had become increasingly easy to board trains without a ticket at all, and his life had become correspondingly and increasingly enjoyable. He had already (he told A.J.) been as far north as Archangel, as far east as Tomsk, and as far south as Merv. Now he was taking a westward trip; he hoped to visit Kiev and make a pilgrimage to the monastery there. He was quite happy. He chewed a little tobacco, but had had no food for days and did not seem greatly to mind hunger, thirst, or any other physical hardship.

The train remained in the siding until dawn, by which time cheerfulness had sunk to zero again, for the night air had been bitterly cold. To most had come the realisation that summer was practically over, and that to hunter and thirst would soon be added that more terrible enemy—winter. The transition between the seasons was always very short in that part of the country, so that when, soon after dawn, the sun did not appear and the cold wind still blew, it seemed as if winter had come in a single night.

Then the train moved out and resumed its slow jog-jog over the badly-laid track. Towards noon the weather, which till then had been merely cold and cloudy, turned to rain, which at first was greeted with joy, for it removed all fears of a water-shortage. It was, plainly, the end of the long drought, and such torrents were falling within an hour that the thirsty had only to hold their tin cups through the slats to have them, after a few moments, half- filled. But the removal of thirst served only to accentuate hunger, from which many, especially the women, were already suffering torments.

A.J. had slept intermittently during the night and had tried to shelter Daly with his great-coat; she, too, had slept, but he was concerned by the way she had felt the cold. Throughout the morning the weather worsened in every way, and by late afternoon everyone (except the Tartar) was in the lowest depth of misery and depression. The roof of the car leaked water on the huddled occupants, and a slanting wind cut in like knives. It was sad to remember that twenty-four hours before men had been shielding their faces from the sun; for now the sun seemed a last good friend who had deserted them. No one could draw comfort from the grey and empty desolation of those plains that stretched mile beyond level mile until all was hazy in rain-swept distance.

Again and again the train came to sudden jangling stops, till at last the occupants were too tired and disspirited to say anything, even to ask each other why; they just lay where they were, crouching away from the wind, and trying not to listen to the tattoo of rain on the roof. But after one particularly long wait the engine-driver and fireman carne walking together along the track and to a few dismally enquiring faces announced that the train could proceed no further; a heavy storm just ahead had caused part of the line to subside. As for how long it would take to repair the damage, they could only shrug their shoulders and mutter ‘Nichevo.’ Where were they?—someone asked; and the same answer came—’Nichevo’—neither the driver nor the fireman had had any previous knowledge of that line. After which, cursing the rain that was drenching their thin clothes, they returned to the warmth and dryness of the engine-cab.

For the passengers in the box-cars, however, such consolations were not available. They were wet, cold, miserable, ravenous with hunger, and stranded in an unknown land. It was the little one-eyed man, who, still dreaming of Krokol, gave them their first lift of hope when, for a few seconds, the rain slackened. During that interval he alone chanced to be searching the horizon with his single eye and saw the towers and roofs of a town in the far distance. It gave him no thrill, for the place was decidedly not Krokol, but the others, when he told them, were swept into a flurry of anticipation. A town—perhaps a large town—food—shelter—warmth—their cravings soared dizzily as they began in frantic haste to gather up their bundles and clamber out of the train. How even a large town could instantly supply the wants of a thousand starving and penniless refugees was a question that did not, in that first intoxicating moment, occur to them.

A.J. shared, though more soberly, the general jubilation, but he had the more reason to, since money was in his pocket and he could buy if there were anything at all to be bought. Daly, tired and chilled, summoned all her strength for the effort, and they climbed out of the train with the others and began the dismal trek over the fields. To those already weak and feverish, it was a perilous journey. The rain continued to fall in heavy slanting swathes, through which, from time to time, the distant town showed like a mocking mirage; and the dry brown dust of the steppes had been transformed to a jelly of squelching mud, into which the feet sank ankle-deep with every pace. After the first mile the procession had thinned out into a trail of weary, mud- smeared stragglers, floundering along at scarcely a mile an hour.

It was dark when A.J. and Daly reached the outskirts of the town, and he had had to lift her practically every step during that last half-mile. She was so obviously on the verge of collapse that when he saw a large barn not far away he made for it eagerly, anxious to reach any place where she could rest out of the rain. There were already several shelterers in the barn—women and children, mostly, to whom weariness had grown to mean more than hunger, cold, or any other feeling. He laid her gently on a heap of sodden straw; the others were too tired to speak, and so was she. “Wait here till I come back,” he whispered, and she gave him a faintly answering smile.

Then, bracing himself for the renewed buffeting of rain and wind, he struggled on into the town. It seemed fairly large, but he looked vainly for shop-signs or public notices from which he might learn its name. The streets were deserted in the downpour, but it was good, anyhow, to leave the mud and reach the firm foothold of paved roads. And he had roubles in his pocket—that, in the circumstances, was the most cheering thing of all.

He walked so quickly that he arrived at the apparent centre of the town well ahead of the others, many of whom had committed the tactical error of knocking at the first habitations they came to and begging for food. The cottagers, fearing invasion by a seemingly vast rabble, had replied by barricading their doors and refusing even to parley. A.J. had guessed that this would happen, and his own plan was based on it, though perhaps it was not much of a plan in any event. He passed the church and the town-hall, noticing that most of the shops were closed and shuttered and that even those whose windows were on view looked completely empty of foods. Soon he came to a district of small houses such as might belong to better-class artisans or factory-workers. He turned down a deserted street, passing house after house that looked as if it might be equally deserted, till at length he saw one whose chimney showed a thin curl of ascending smoke. He tapped quietly on the front door. After a pause it was opened very cautiously by an elderly respectable-looking woman, but his hopes fell heavily as he observed her. The too vivid eyes and jutting cheek-bones told the tale he had feared most, and her first words, in answer to his question, confirmed it. The whole town, she told him quite simply, was half- starving. Factories had closed down; men scoured the countryside every day in quest of food which became ever scarcer and dearer; food-shops opened only twice a week, and there were long queues for even the scanty allowance permitted by the new rationing system.

A.J. mentioned that he had a little money and was prepared to pay generously for food and shelter for himself and his wife, but the woman shook her head, “We have no food,” she said “no matter what you were to offer us for it We haven’t had a meal since the day before yesterday and as soon as the rain stops my daughters and myself are going to take turns in the bread-queue. The shop opens to-morrow morning but to be in time for anything we shall have to wait all night.”

He thanked her and went on to another house a little further along the street. There he was told a similar tale. He entered another street. In all he tried nearly a dozen houses before he found one whose occupants, very cautiously and grudgingly, offered a little bread and a promise of shelter in return for a quite fantastic sum of money. He gave them something on account, took a piece of the bread, and hastened back to the other side of the town. There he found rioting already going on between the invading refugees and the local inhabitants; several persons had been seriously hurt. He reached the barn where women were still sheltering, took Daly in his arms, helped her to her feet, and almost carried her across the town. He dared not offer her the bread until they were well away from the others.

At last, at last, he had her safely under the roof of the cottage, and its occupiers, with a promise of more money, were lighting a fire.

They were curious people, and he could not at first place them. There seemed to be a mother, two sons, and two daughters, all living in four small rooms; their name was Valimoff. They had much better manners and cleaner habits than were usual amongst working people; they were secretive, too, about their personal affairs, though inquisitive enough about A.J.’s. When later in the evening news reached them of the rioting at the other end of the town, Madame Valimoff asked A.J. if he were one of the refugees from the train. He said yes, he was. She replied severely: “We should have had nothing to do with you if we had known that. Why can’t you wretched people stay in your own towns, the same as we have to stay in ours?”

But soon a small wood fire was burning in the hearth and a scanty meal of black bread and thin soup was being prepared. The two travellers ate, drank, and dried themselves as well as they could, but A.J. s pleasure at such comparative good fortune was offset by anxiety about Daly. She seemed to have taken a bad chili, and he promised a further bribe to one of the daughters of the house in return for the loan of dry clothes. The daughter, a clean and neatly-dressed girl, helped him to prepare a bed near the fire, and Daly, by that time feverishly tired, was helped into it. She was soon asleep. He sat up for a time by the fire, and towards midnight the girl entered the room and brought him a small tumbler of vodka. The gift was so unexpectedly welcome that he was profuse in his thanks, and he was still more astonished when she went on: “You see, sir, I think I know who you are. You are Count Adraxine.”

“What?” he cried, and was about to make an indignant denial; then he checked himself and added more cautiously: “Why, whatever makes you think that?”

“I remember the Countess, sir. I used to be a maid at Baron Morvenstein’s house in Moscow, and I remember her quite distinctly.”

He still stared in bewilderment, and she continued: “You need not be afraid, sir—we are all very happy to be of service to you and the Countess.”

The revelation had been so sudden that, coming with the vodka after all the hardships and adventures of the day, it made him a little dizzy. Then, before his uncertain eyes, a curious pageant was enacted. The rest of the household, which till then had been rather unfriendly and had bargained greedily for every rouble, came into the room and were solemnly and separately presented to him by the girl, whose name was Annetta. They all bowed or curtseyed, and stared hard at the woman asleep in bed. Then they said polite things, and he said (or thought he said—he was too dazed to be sure of it) polite things in return. And afterwards, which was more to the point, Annetta brought him a second glass of vodka.

She told him that they had all been servants in big houses until the Revolution; the men had been footmen and the girls lady’s-maids. Madame Valimoff had been a housekeeper. They had all saved money, so that the loss of their jobs had not meant instant poverty; besides, their masters and mistresses had been generous with farewell gifts. But much more important than money, Annetta confessed, was the fact that they had managed to hoard up supplies of food.

After she had gone, A.J. sat for another hour in front of the fire. The vodka had set the blood tingling in his veins; his mind was still bewildered. He partly undressed and lay down in the bed beside Daly; he went to sleep and awoke to find himself somehow in her arms. She was asleep then, and fever-hot; the fire in the hearth was smouldering; rain was still falling outside. How fortunate was their lot compared with that of the night before…Then she awoke and he told her all that had happened. She was quietly astonished and confirmed the one fact confirmable—that she had, on several occasions before her marriage, visited Baron Morvenstein’s house in Moscow. He listened to her, yet all the time he was thinking of something rather different; he was thinking how strange, yet how natural, that they should both be lying together, he and she, ex-commissar and ex-countess, there in a workman’s cottage in a town whose name they did not yet know. (Which reminded him that he must ask Annetta in the morning.) He said: “Of course, they take me for the Count—which is funny, in a way.”

She shivered with laughter. “Isn’t it all funny? Isn’t everything rather a bad joke? Everything except—” And she cast over him again the spell of her own dark and sleepy passion.

In the morning they both rose late, the household evidently preferring not to waken them. As soon, however, as they were up and dressed, Annetta appeared with a pot of steaming coffee, fresh rolls made of white flour, and cherry jam. It was miraculous, and they guzzled over it like children at a party.

Thus, for the time, they settled down with the Valimoffs in that once- prosperous town (whose name, by the way, was Novarodar). Daly, as A.J. had suspected, had caught a severe chill, and only very slowly recovered. But the Valimoffs did not appear to mind the delay; on the contrary, they showed every sign of wishing it to continue. Nor, now that they knew or thought they knew the identity of their guests, would they accept a single rouble in payment. A.J. was grateful, but he found it perplexingly difficult to like them for it all. Their obsequiousness got on his nerves, and he was a little disconcerted, at times, by the utter ruthlessness of their attitude towards their less fortunate neighbours. The cottage was certainly a treasure-trove; it contained sacks of white flour, dozens of tins of meat, fruit, and vegetables, and large quantities of wines and spirits. Knowing what servants were, A.J. was of the opinion that most of it had been systematically thieved during the decade preceding the Revolution. Anyhow, it was there; fortunately, in the house of the Valimoffs, stowed away carefully in wardrobes and cupboards, while the rest of the town raked for potato peelings in rubbish-heaps. A.J. had ample evidence of this, for the took many walks about the streets. Sometimes, fresh from an almost luxurious meal, he would pass the bread-queue, stretching its unhappy length for nearly a quarter of a mile along the main street. He saw women who had been waiting for many hours faint and shriek hysterically when they were told that nothing was left for them. The Valimoffs were careful never to give any cause of suspicion to their neighbours; they took turns in the bread-queues themselves, and they banged the door relentlessly on every beggar—more relentlessly, indeed, than they need have done. They seemed quite confident that A.J. could be trusted with their secret; they had his secret in return, and doubtless felt it to be sufficient security. What puzzled him most was why they should trouble to be so generous; he hardly thought it could be because they hoped for future favours, for they probably knew how slender were the chances of the old aristocracy ever getting back their former possessions. He knew, too, that it could not be from any altruistic notion of helping a stranger, since before they had identified him they had been eager to drive the hardest of bargains. In the end he was forced to the conclusion that their motive was one of simple snobbery—they were just delighted to be in a position to help a Count and Countess. They had lived so comfortably (and perhaps thieved so comfortably too) in a world of superiors and inferiors that now, when that world seemed completely capsized, they clung to any floating shred of it with a fervour born of secret panic.

Novarodar was Red, but not as Red as many other places; its geographical position had kept it so far out of the battle area, and also, owing to its small importance as a railway centre, it had escaped Czecho-Slovak occupation. The Valimoffs, of course, dreamed secret dreams ’of the day when they should see the Revolution overthrown, the Imperial flag floating again over the town hall, and strings of leading Reds lined up in the market square before a firing squad. Perhaps, too, they envisaged a certain bitter prestige appertaining to them when all Novarodar should learn that they, the Valimoffs, had given shelter to two such illustrious persons as Count and Countess Adraxine.

That day, remote as it seemed, looked infinitely more so after an event which took place in mid-September. That was the capture of Kazan by the Bolsheviks. The new army, under Trotsky, drove out the Czechs after a two-day fight, thereby changing the entire military and political situation. With the Czechs in retreat down the Volga it was no longer likely that the pincers would close and the British troops from Archangel link up with the Czech drive from the south. The news of the fall of Kazan caused great commotion in Novarodar, for it was hoped that the Bolshevist victory would mean the release of quantities of food that had been hitherto held up. Its first effect, however, was disappointingly contrary. Hundreds of White refugees, many belonging to wealthy families, streamed into the town from Kazan, where they had been living for some time under Czech protection. The whole situation was further complicated by exceptionally heavy rainfall, which had flooded the surrounding country and made all the roads to the south of the town impassable. Many White refugees, caught between the floods and the Bolsheviks, preferred to remain in the town and come to terms with its inhabitants, whose redness did not preclude the acceptance of large bribes for temporary shelter. Thus Novarodar actually received more mouths for feeding instead of more food to feed them, and the plight of those who had little money became much worse than before.

To A.J., living through those strange days while Daly slowly recuperated, it seemed impossible to state any sort of case or draw any sort of moral from the chaos that was everywhere. It was as if the threads of innumerable events had got themselves tied up in knots that no historian would ever unravel. The starved townspeople, the wealthy refugees, the poverty-stricken refugees, the youths of seventeen and eighteen in civilian clothes who had obviously been Imperialist cadets, the streams of ragged, famished, diseased, and homeless wanderers who passed into the town as vaguely and with as little reason as they passed out of it—all presented a nightmare pageant of the inexplicable. Novarodar’s small-town civilisation had crumbled instantly beneath that combined onslaught of flood, famine, and invasion; all the niceties of metropolitan life—cafés, cinemas, electric light, shop-windows—had disappeared in quick succession, leaving the place more stark and dreary than the loneliest village of the steppes.

Daly grew gradually stronger, though the strain of recent weeks had been more considerable than either A.J. or herself had supposed. A.J. was divided between two desires—to give her ample time to rest and recover, and to continue the journey. He did not like the way events were developing in Novarodar, especially when, towards the end of the month, came further news that the Bolshevik army had taken Sembirsk. At last, to his great relief, Daly seemed well enough again to face the risks of travel—so much the more formidable now that the cold weather had arrived. Their plans were of necessity altered owing to the Czech retreat; indeed, it had been a bitter disappointment to have to stay in Novarodar day after day and know that every hour put extra miles between themselves and safety. The nearest city now at which they could hope to link up with the Whites was Samara, some two hundred miles distant.

Meanwhile affairs at Novarodar very rapidly worsened. As the inflowing stream of refugees continued, the last skeleton organisation of the town collapsed; bread-riots took the place of the bread-queues, and the main streets were the scenes of frequent clashes between Red police and bands of White fugitives. It looked, indeed, as if the latter were planning a coup d’état; so many had entered the town that they stood a good chance, if they were to try. The inhabitants, starved and dispirited, were hardly in a mood to care what happened, so long as, somehow or other, they received supplies of food.

Then came news that the Bolsheviks were moving down the Volga towards Samara. This sent a wave of panic amongst the White refugees, for, unless they got away quickly eastward, there was every possibility of their being trapped. Yet eastward lay the floods, still rising, that had turned vast areas into lakeland and swamps. Some took the risk of drowning and starvation and set out, but for most there began a period of anxious tension, with one eye on the floodwater and the other on the maps which showed the rapid Red advance. A shower of rain was enough to plunge the town in almost tangible gloom, and groups of White cadets, a little scared beyond their boyish laughter, climbed the church tower at all times of the day and scanned impatiently that horizon of inundated land. Even the local inhabitants were beginning to be apprehensive. Their position was a ticklish one, and the worried expression on the faces of local Soviet officials was wholly justified. Was it wise to have been so complacent with the White refugees? The latter were too numerous now to be intimidated, but at first, when they had begun to enter the town, would it not have been better to have been more severe? Troubled by these and similar misgivings, and with their eyes fixed feverishly on the war-map, the Novarodar Soviet, from being mildly pink, flushed to deep vermilion in almost record time.

A.J. and Daly, like the rest, were waiting for the floods to subside. They were both keen to get away, and even the hospitality of the Valimoffs, so unstintingly given, would not induce them to stay an hour longer than had to be. The Valimoffs assured them that Novarodar was quite safe whatever happened, but A.J. did not think so. At last a day came when the floods showed signs of falling. He had made all preparations for departure, had accepted supplies of food from the still generous Valimoffs, had thanked them, and pressed them in vain to take some money in return for all their gifts and services; and then, just as he was tying up a final bundle, one of the young men rushed in from the street with the news that Samara had fallen.

All Novarodar was in instant uproar. With Samara in Bolshevik hands the last hope that the Czech retirement was only temporary disappeared. Worse still, the White line of retreat was cut off; Novarodar was now ringed round on three sides by Red troops, and the fourth and only line of escape was waterlogged. White refugees were gathering in little excited groups to discuss the matter; some set out across the swamps, and later on that very day a few stragglers carne back, mud-caked from head to foot, to report catastrophes as horrible as any that were to be feared.

Once again A.J.’s plans suffered a blow. There seemed little hope now of ever catching up with the recreating Czechs. A.J. and Daly talked the whole question over with the Valimoffs; the latter, of course, thought that the best plan would be for them to stay, disguised as they were, in Novarodar. But A.J. was still all for movement; he felt instinctively that every moment in Novarodar was, as it were, a challenge flung to Fate. He talked of making for the Don country, where White troops, under Denikin, had already driven a northward wedge to within a few score miles of Voronesk. His eagerness increased as he computed the chances of the plan. Denikin’s army, he argued, was more likely to advance than to retreat, since, unlike the Czechs, it had a solid backing of support from the local populations. And it was an advantage, too, that the way towards Denikin was the way towards the Black Sea ports. Had he and Daly succeeded in reaching the Czechs, their sole line of escape would have been by the long and tedious Trans-Siberian journey, during which anything might have happened, and with the chance of being held up indefinitely in the Far East. But to reach Denikin’s army was to reach at once a far simpler gateway to the outer world.

In the end it was agreed that the southward plan should be tried; it was, in fact, the only practical alternative to remaining in Novarodar. “We shall trust to our disguise,” A.J. said, “and work our way, by trains, if we can find any, through Kuszneszk and Saratof.” He agreed, however, in view of the change of plans, to postpone departure to the following morning.

The Valimoffs were keenly interested in the adventure, and, though discouraging at first, soon came to regard it with tempered enthusiasm. In particular the mention of Saratof roused them to a curious interchange of looks amongst one another which A.J. did not fail to notice. That evening, after the excellent dinner with which he and Daly were always provided, Madame Valimoff humbly presented herself and craved an interview. He treated her politely, as he always did, but with reserve. Daly was more cordial, and this cordiality, natural as it was in the circumstances, had often given him a feeling which he could only diagnose as petulance. The fact was that Madame Valimoff, behind her obsequious manners, was an exceedingly strong-willed person and had, he was sure, acquired a considerable influence over Daly, whether the latter was aware of it or not. He had no reason, of course, to believe that this influence was for the bad, yet somehow, though he could not explain it, he had misgivings.

Madame Valimoff, with many apologies for troubling them, soon came to the point. Before the Revolution, she said, she and two of her sons had been servants in Petrograd at the house of the Rosiankas. Prince and Princess Rosianka had been murdered by the Reds at Yaroslav; there was a large family, all of whom had been massacred with their parents except the youngest—a girl of six. This child, the sole survivor of the family and inheritor of the title, had been hidden away by loyal servants and taken south. It had been intended to smuggle the child abroad, but, owing to increased Bolshevist vigilance, it had not been possible to reach the Black Sea ports in time. The two servants, a former butler named Stapen and his wife, who had been a cook in the same household, were now living in Saratof, and the child was still with them there.

Madame Valimoff then produced a letter from this ex-butler, written some weeks previously and delivered by secret messenger. It conveyed the information that the child was in fairly good health, and that Stapen was constantly on the watch for some chance of sending her south, especially now that Denikin was advancing so rapidly. It was a risky business, however, and the person to be trusted with such a task could not be selected in a hurry. “You see,” Madame Valimoff explained, after A.J. and Daly had both examined the letter, “the Bolshevists have photographs of all the persons they are looking out for, and the little princess is of course one of them. So many escapes have been made lately that the examination is now stricter than ever.”

Briefly, Madame’s suggestion was that he and Daly, when they reached Saratof, should call at Stapen’s house and take the princess with them into safety. She was sure they were the right sort of people to carry through such a dangerous enterprise successfully. She gave them Stapen’s address and also a little amber bead which, she said, would convince him of their bona-fides, even if he did not recognise them. “But he probably will,” she added. “Butlers have a good memory for faces, and I’m sure you must sometime or other have visited the Rosiankas.”

Daly admitted that she had.

After Madame Valimoff had gone, A.J. was inclined to be doubtful. Madame’s dominant personality, the delivery of Stapen’s letter by secret messenger, and various other significant details, had all made him gradually aware that Madame was a person of some importance in the sub-world of counter-revolutionary plotting. He did not himself wish to be drawn into White intrigue; his only aim was to get himself and Daly out of the country, and he had no desire to jeopardise their chances of success for the sake of a small child whom they had neither of them ever seen. “If the child is safe at Saratof,” he argued, “why not let her stay there?”

All that Daly would say was that there could be no harm in promising the Valimoffs to do what they could. “Our plans,” she said, “may have to be altered again, so that we may never go anywhere near Saratof. We can only give a conditional promise, but I think we might give that—we really owe them a great deal, you know.”

It was true, beyond question, and later that evening A.J. assured Madame Valimoff that he would certainly call on Stapen if it were at all possible. Privately he meant the reservation to mean a great deal.

Very early next morning he bade farewell to his hosts, to whom he felt immensely grateful, even though he had not been able to like them as much as he felt he ought. He could not imagine how Daly and himself would have managed without them; they had provided food and shelter just when it had been most of all needed, and now they were prodigal to the last, making up bundles of well- packed and artfully disguised food supplies for them to take with them on their journey. A.J. thanked them sincerely, yet was never more relieved than when he turned the corner of the street.

Only a few moments afterwards a loud boom sounded from the distance, together with a shattering explosion somewhere over the centre of the town. The streets, which till then had been nearly empty, filled suddenly with scurrying inhabitants, all in panic to know what had happened, while a few youths, White cadets, rushed by in civilian clothes, hastily buckling on belts and accoutrements as they ran. A.J. did not stop to make enquiries, but he gathered from overheard question and answer that the White refugees had organised a coup d’état during the night, had killed the Soviet guard, taken possession of all strategic points, and were now preparing to defend the town against the approaching Red army. The latter, however, had evidently learned of these events, and were bombarding the town (so the rumour ran) from an armoured train some miles away.

A.J.’s first idea was to get as far from the danger-zone as possible, and with this intention he hurried Daly through the rapidly thronging streets. At intervals of a few minutes came the boom of the gun, but the shells were bursting a safe distance away. Daly was not nervous—only a little excited; and on himself, as always, the sound of gun-fire exercised a rather clarifying effect. He began to reckon the chances of getting well out of the town before the real battle began. There was irony in the fact that for weeks his aim had been to reach some place that was held by the Whites, and that now, being in such a place, his chief desire was to get out of it. It would be the most frantic folly, he perceived, to trust himself to this local and probably quite temporary White success, for his judgment of affairs led him to doubt whether the White occupation could last longer than a few days at most.

Disappointment faced him when he reached the outskirts of the town, where an iron bridge spanned the swollen river. White guards were holding up the crowd of fugitives who sought to cross, while other guards were hastily digging trenches on the further bank. They were all in an excitable, nerve-racked mood, aware of unwelcome possibilities, and prepared to act desperately and instantly. Not a single refugee, they ordered, must leave the town; this was to prevent spies from reporting to the Reds the preparations that were being made for the town’s defence. The ban applied to women and children as well as to men, and was being enforced at every possible exit.

There was nothing to be gained by arguing the point, apart from which, A.J. was anxious that both he and Daly should remain as inconspicuous as possible. He felt that their best chance of safety lay with the crowd of dirty, ailing, poverty-stricken wretches who, merely because nobody cared about them at all, were usually exempt from too close attention by either side. Most of them were squatting miserably in doorways along the road back to the town, nibbling precious fragments of food, or rebandaging their torn and blistered feet.

It was an anxious morning for Novarodar. Shells fell every ten minutes or so on the centre of the town, but many did not burst, and even the others were of poor construction and caused little damage. Once one realised that the likelihood of being hurt by the long-range bombardment was considerably less than that of catching typhus from the town’s water-supply, it was possible to ignore the intermittent booming and crashing. But such philosophic detachment was not possible to everyone, and towards midday there was evidence that many of the White defenders were themselves losing nerve. Already rifle- fire was being exchanged between the White trenches and advanced Red scouting- parties. During the afternoon the leaders of the local Soviet were dragged out of prison by White guards, lined up in the market-square, and ceremonially machine-gunned before a public for the most part too apprehensive of its own immediate future to be either repelled or elevated by such an entertainment.

During most of the morning A.J. and Daly sat patiently in a side-street with a crowd of other refugees. But in the afternoon, shortly after the shooting of the Soviet leaders, White guards toured the town in motor cars and rounded up all who were out of doors. Those who had no homes were lodged in some of the big rooms of The town-hall.

Thus it happened that the refugees had a sort of grand-stand view of the entry of the Bolsheviks into Novarodar, which took place about five o’clock in the afternoon, after a sharp and bloodthirsty battle at the town outskirts. At some points the Whites had resisted to the last, but at others they had run away into the town and sought refuge in houses.

Mysteriously and marvellously there appeared a dazzling array of red flags to greet the invaders. The actual march into the town was an almost suspiciously quiet affair. Not a rifle-shot, nor a cheer, nor a lilt of a song disturbed the march of those squads of hard-faced, bearded veterans and grinning, wild-eyed boys, caked with mud and blood, badly clothed, flushed with bitter triumph, helping their wounded along or carrying them in improvised stretchers made of great-coats. The Red leader, a keen-looking youth of not more than twenty, halted his troops in the market-square and read a proclamation declaring the friendliest intentions of the invaders towards all who had not given assistance to the Whites.

From the large windows, mostly broken, of that first-floor room in the town-hall, history could be seen enacting itself at a prodigious rate. The first task after the reading of the proclamation was to deal with the White prisoners actually captured in the trenches outside the town. These men, battered and mud-stained as their captors, were lined up and machine-gunned from a roof on the opposite side of the square—not very copiously, however, for there seemed to be a shortage of ammunition. Their bodies, some still twitching, were then dragged away and piled in a heap in a side- street.

The Reds were quite convinced that the shot prisoners represented only a very small fraction of the Whites who had held the town, and as night approached, the rage of the invaders grew into a very positive determination to root out all Whites who might be in hiding. Then began a house-to-house search by groups of blood-maddened soldiery. The market-square was the scene of some of the worst incidents, for in it were the larger houses and shops in which Whites might be expected to have found sympathisers. Terrified wretches were dragged out of doorways and clubbed to death; several were flung out of high windows and left broken and dying on the pavements. Firing sounded from all over the town, with now and then the sharp patter of a machine-gun. Later on vengeance became more extended and took in the entire bourgeois element among the townspeople; shops were looted and better-class citizens seized in their houses, accused vaguely of having assisted the Whites, and butchered there and then on their own thresholds.

Some of the refugees screamed hysterically at the sights that were to be seen from the town-hall windows, and many covered their faces and refused to look. A few, however, of whom A.J. was one, gazed on the scene almost impassively, and this either because they were already satiated with horrors, or because their minds had reached that calm equilibrium, born of suffering, in which they saw that market-square at Novarodar as but a tiny and, on the whole, insignificant fragment of a world of steel and blood. To A.J. the latter reason applied with especial force; and more than ever, as the moments passed, his mind clung to what was all in his life that counted—the woman there at his side. The rest of the world was but a chaos of cancelling wrongs, and to offer pity for it was as if one should pour out a single drop of water upon a desert. He felt, as he gazed down upon all the slaughter, that it could not really matter, or it would not be happening.

He was pondering and feeling thus, when a man near him, who had also been watching the scene quite calmly; began to talk to him. He was a thin, ascetic- looking man, middle-aged, with deep-set eyes and a lofty forehead. His voice and accent were educated.

“If I may read your thoughts,” he said quietly, “you are wondering just how much and how little all this can mean.”

A.J. was unwilling to betray himself by any too intelligent answer, so he merely half-nodded and let the other continue talking, which he was more than willing to do. He had been a professor of moral philosophy, he confided, and was now penniless and starving. Probably also (though he did not say so) he was a little mad. He expounded to A.J. a copious theory of the decadence of Western civilisation and the possible foundation of a new and cruder era based on elementals such as hunger, thirst, cruelty, and physical uncleanliness. “No man,” he said oracularly, “has really eaten until he has starved, or been clean until he has felt the lice nibbling at him, or has lived until he has faced death.” He also praised civil war as against war between nations, because it was necessarily smaller and more personal. “It is better, my friend,” he said, “that I should kill you for your wife, or for the contents of your pockets, than that we should stand in opposing trenches and kill each other anonymously because a few men in baroque armchairs a thousand miles away have ordered us to.”

Conversation was several times interrupted by gusts of machine-gunning; once a spray of bullets shattered the already broken windows and several refugees were cut by falling glass.

About two in the morning there was a sudden commotion in the building below, and a Red officer, armed with two revolvers, rushed into the room with the brusque order that all refugees were to form up in the square outside for inspection, since it was believed that many White guards and bourgeois sympathisers were hiding in disguise amongst them.

The whole company, numbering between five and six hundred, were marshalled in long lines facing the town-hall front, where other groups of refugees were already drawn up. The procedure had a certain ghastly simplicity. Red officers, carrying lanterns, peered into the faces of each person, searching for any evidences of refinement such as might cast suspicion on the genuineness of identity. Hands were also carefully inspected. When A.J. observed these details he felt apprehensive, not on his own account, but on Daly’s. The examining officers, shouting furiously to those who from weakness or panic could not stand upright, were certainly not in a mood to give the benefit of any doubts. Those whose faces were not seared deeply from winds and rains, or whose hands were not coarse and calloused, stood little chance of passing that ferocious scrutiny. Slowly the group of suspects increased; the ex- professor of philosophy was among the first to be sent to join it. The officer who was examining those near A.J. was a coolheaded, trim young fellow much less given to bullying his victims than the rest, but also, A.J. could judge, much less likely to be put off by a plausible tale. He did not linger more than a few seconds over A.J.—that grim, lined face and those hands hardened by Arctic winters were their own best argument. At Daly, however, he paused with rather keener interest. A.J. interposed with the story he had prepared for the occasion—that she was his daughter, a semi-invalid, and that he was taking her to some distant friends by whom she might be better looked after. The officer nodded but said: “Let her speak for herself.” Then he asked her for her name, age, and place of birth—all of which had been agreed upon between A.J. and herself for any such emergency. She answered in a quiet voice and did not seem particularly nervous. That clearly surprised the questioner, for he asked her next if she were not afraid. She answered: “No, but—as my father has just said—I am ill and would like to be allowed to finish my journey as soon as possible.”

While the youth was still questioning her, another officer approached of a very different type. He was a small, fat-faced, and rather elderly Jew, glittering with epaulettes and gold teeth and thick-lensed spectacles. One glance at the woman was apparently enough for him. “Don’t argue with her, Poushkoff,” he ordered sharply. “Put her with the suspects—I’ll deal with her myself in a few moments.”

Poushkoff saluted and then bowed slightly to Daly. “You will have to go over there for a further examination,” he said, and added, not unkindly, to A.J.—“Don’t be alarmed. You can go with her if you like.”

They walked across the square, and on the way A.J. whispered: “Don’t be alarmed, as he said. We’ve come through tighter corners than this one, I daresay.” She replied: “Yes, I know, and I’m not afraid.”

The second examination, however, was brutally stringent. The Reds were determined that no White sympathiser should escape, and it was altogether a matter of indifference to them whether, in making sure of that, they slaughtered the innocent. The fat-faced Jew, who appeared to be the inquisitor- in-chief, made this offensively clear. He took the male suspects first, and after a sneering and hectoring cross-examination, condemned them one after another. He did not linger a moment over the professor of philosophy. “You are a bourgeois—that is enough,” he snapped, and the man was hustled away towards a third group. When this grew sufficiently large, the men in it were arranged in line in a corner of the square and given over to the soldiery, who, no doubt, took it for granted that all were proved and convicted Whites. Then followed a scene which was disturbing even to A.J.’s hardened nerves. The men were simply clubbed and bayoneted to death. It was all over in less than five minutes, but the cries and shrieks seemed to echo for hours.

Many of the waiting women were by that time fainting from fear and horror, but Daly was still calm. She whispered: “I am thinking of what he said—that one hasn’t lived until one has faced death. Do you remember?”

The Jew adopted different tactics with the women. He wheedled; he was mock-courteous; doubtless he hoped that his method would make them implicate one another. With any who were even passably young and attractive he took outrageous liberties, which most of the victims were too terrified to resent, though a few, with ghastly eagerness, sought in them a means of propitiation. When Daly’s turn came, he almost oozed politeness; he questioned her minutely about her past life, her parents, education, and so on. Then he signalled a soldier to fetch him something, and after a moment the man returned with a large book consisting of pages of pasted photographs and written notes. The Jew took it and began to scrutinise each photograph with elaborate care, comparing it with Daly. This rather nerve-destroying ordeal lasted for some time, for the photographs were numerous. At last he fixed on one, gazed at it earnestly for some time, and then suddenly barked out: “You have both been lying. You are not a peasant woman. You are the ex-Countess Alexandra Adraxine, related to the Romanoffs who met their end at Ekaterinburg last July. Don’t bother to deny it—the photograph makes absolute proof.”

“Nevertheless we do deny it!” A.J. exclaimed, and Daly echoed him. “It is absurd,” she cried, with well-acted emphasis. “We are two poor people on our way to visit our friends, and you accuse me of being someone I have never even heard of!”

The Jew laughed. “I accuse you of being the person you are,” he said, harshly. “Stand aside—we can’t waste all night over you.”

The sensation of the discovery had by this time reached the ears of the soldiers, and had also attracted the attention of a small group of officers, among whom was the youth who had conducted the earlier interrogation. He hurriedly approached the Jew and whispered something in his ear, and for several moments a muttered discussion went on between them. Meanwhile the rank and file, fresh from their slaughter of the first batch of suspects, were waiting with increasing impatience for the next. “Let’s have her!” some of them were already shouting. The Jew seemed anxious to conciliate them; he said, loudly so that they might all hear him: “My dear Poushkoff, it would not be proper to treat this woman any differently from the rest. Women have betrayed our cause no less than men—especially women of high rank and position. The prisoner here may herself, if the truth were known, be responsible for the lives of hundreds of our soldiers. Are we to quail, like our predecessors, before a mere title?”

Poushkoff answered quietly: “Not at all, Bernstein—I merely suggest that the woman should not be dealt with before she is definitely proved guilty. After all, she may be speaking the truth, and it would be too had if she were to lose her life merely because of a slight resemblance to one of those exceedingly bad photographs that headquarters have sent us.”

“Slight resemblance, eh? And bad photographs? My dear Poushkoff, look for yourself.”

He handed the book to the other, who examined it and then went on: “Well, there seems to me only a slight resemblance such as might exist, say, between myself or yourself and at least a dozen persons in this town if we took the trouble to look for them. Frankly, it isn’t the sort of evidence on which I would care to condemn a dog, much less a woman. And we have this fellow’s statement, also—he sounds honest.”

“About as honest as she is, if you ask my opinion. We’ll attend to him afterwards.”

“I merely suggest, Bernstein, that the matter should be deferred for further investigation.”

“But, my dear boy, where’s the need of it? Surely we are entitled to believe the evidence of our own eyes?”

“Photographs aren’t our own eyes—that’s just my point. If this woman is really the Countess, it could not be very difficult to have her identified by someone who knew her formerly. There is bound to be somebody, either at Sembirsk or Samar, who could do it.”

“But not at Novarodar, eh? How convenient for her!” The soldiers here began a renewed clamour for the prisoner to be surrendered, and Bernstein, with a shrug of the shoulders, exclaimed: “You see, Poushkoff, what the men are already thinking—they believe we are going to favour this woman because of her high rank.”

Poushkoff replied, still very calmly: “I beg your pardon, Bernstein—I thought the point was whether she is guilty or not. If it is merely a matter of amusing the men, doubtless she will do as well as anyone else.”

Bernstein snorted angrily. “Really, Poushkoff, you forget yourself! The woman, to my mind, is already proved guilty—guilty of having conspired against the Revolution and against the lives of the Red army.”

“Quite, if you are positive of her identity. That is my point.”

“Your point, eh? You change your point so often that one has an infernal job to keep up with you! No, no, my dear boy, it won’t do—we’ve proved everything—the Countess is guilty and this woman is the Countess. There is no shadow of reason for any delay.”

“I am afraid I do not agree.”

“Well, then, you must disagree, that is all. The responsibility, such as it is, rests with me.”

“Take note, then, that I protest most strongly.”

“Oh, certainly, my dear Poushkoff, certainly.”

“And in any case, since she is a woman, I suggest that she should be treated mercifully.”

“And not be handed over to our young rascals, you mean, eh?” He laughed. “Well, perhaps you deserve some small reward for your advocacy. Arrange the matter as you want—you were always a lady’s man. But remember—the penalty is death—death to all enemies of the Revolution. You may gild the pill as much as you like, but the medicine has to be taken.”

After this sententiousness Poushkoff saluted and signed to A.J. and Daly to accompany him. He led them into the town-hall through a small entrance beneath the portico. He did not speak till at length he opened the door of a basement room in which a number of soldiers were smoking and drinking tea. “Is Tamirsky here?” he asked, and an old and grey-bearded soldier detached himself from the group. Poushkoff took him out into the corridor and whispered in his ear for a few moments. Then, leading him to Daly, he began: “Do you know this woman?”

Tamirsky gave her a profound stare from head to foot and finally shook his head.

“You are prepared to swear that you have never seen her before?”

“Yes, your honour.”

“And you were—let me see—a gardener on the estate of Count Adraxine before the Revolution?”

“I was.”

“So that you often saw the Countess?”

“Oh, very often indeed, your honour.”

“Thank you. You are sure of all this, and are ready to swear to it?”

“Certainly.”

“Then come with me now.” To A.J. he added: “Wait there with the soldiers till I return.”

They waited, and in that atmosphere of stale tobacco-smoke and heavy personal smells, Daly’s strength suddenly gave way. She collapsed and would have fallen had not A.J. caught her quickly. The soldiers were sympathetic, offering tea, as well as coats for her to rest on. A.J. began to thank them, but one of them said: “Careful, brother—don’t tell us too much about yourselves.”

After a quarter of an hour or so Poushkoff and Tamirsky returned together, and the former signalled to the two prisoners to follow him again. Outside in the corridor several Red guards, fully armed, were waiting. Poushkoff said: “Sentence is postponed. You are to be taken to Samara for further identification. The train leaves in an hour; these men will take you to the station.” He gave an order and went away quickly.

A few minutes later, thus escorted, they were hastening through the dark streets. Scattered firing still echoed over the town, but all was fairly quiet along the road to the railway. Dawn was breaking as they passed through the waiting-hall; the station was crowded with soldiers, many asleep on the platforms against their packs. The line, A.J. heard, had just been repaired after the recent flood-damage. A train of teplushkas, already full, lay at one of the platforms, and on to it a first-class coach, in reasonably good condition, was being shunted. As soon as this operation was complete, A.J. and Daly were put into one of the compartments, with two soldiers mounting guard outside. The inevitable happened after that; the two fugitive-prisoners, weary and limp after the prolonged strain of the day and night, fell into almost instant sleep. When they awoke it was broad daylight; snow was falling outside; the train was moving slowly over an expanse of level, dazzling white; and in the compartment, quite alone with them, was Poushkoff. He smiled slightly and resumed the reading of a book.

A.J. smiled back, but did not speak. He felt a sort of bewildered gratitude towards the young officer, but he was not on that account disposed to be incautious. The youth’s steel-grey eyes, curiously attractive when he smiled, seemed both a warning and an encouragement. If there were to be conversation at all, Poushkoff, A.J. decided, should make the first move.

Several times during the next quarter of an hour Poushkoff looked at them as if expecting one or the other to speak, and at last, tired of the silence, he put down his book and asked if they were hungry.

They were, quite frantically, having eaten scarcely anything for twenty- four hours, despite the fact that their bundles, miraculously unconfiscated, were bulging with food. A.J. said ‘yes,’ and smiled; whereupon Poushkoff offered them hard, gritty biscuits and thin slices of rather sour cheese. They thanked him and ate with relish.

“We are due to reach Samara late this evening,” he said, after a pause.

“A slow journey,” A.J. commented.

“Yes, the line is shaky after the floods. When the train stops somewhere I may be able to get you some tea.”

“It is very kind of you.”

“Not at all—we are condemned to be fellow- travellers—is it not better to make things as comfortable as we can for one another?”

So they began to talk, cautiously at first, but less so after a while. There was something very likeable about Poushkoff; both A.J. and Daly fought against it, as for their lives, but finally and utterly succumbed. Its secret lay perhaps in contrast; the youth was at once strong and gentle, winsome and severe, shy and self-assured, boyish yet prematurely old. Like most officers in the new Red army, he was scarcely out of his teens; yet his mind had a clear, mature incisiveness that was apparent even in the most ordinary exchange of polite conversation. After about ten minutes of talk that carefully avoided anything of consequence, he remarked reflectively: “The curse of this country is that we are all born liars. We lie with such simple profundity that there’s nobody a man dare trust. You, for instance, don’t trust me—obviously not. And I, just as naturally, don’t trust you. Yet, once granting the initial untrustworthiness of both of us, we shall probably get on quite well together.”

“We learn by experience how necessary it is to be cautious,” said A.J.

“Oh, precisely. Don’t think I’m blaming you in the least.”

Then Daly, who had not so far spoken, interposed: “Still less are we blaming you, Captain Poushkoff. On the contrary, we owe you far more than we can ever repay.” A.J. nodded emphatically.

“Not at all,” Poushkoff courteously replied. “Yet even that, now you mention it, is a case in point—it could not have happened without hard lying.”

Daly smiled. “On our part, Captain?”

“Well, no—I was rather thinking of Tamirsky. He lies so marvellously—it is a pure art with him. And so faithfully, too—his lies are almost more steadfast than the truth. You certainly owe your life to him, Madame.”

“And why not also to you, Captain, who told him what lie to tell?”

“Oh no, no—you must not look at it in that way. My own little lie was only a very poor and unsuccessful one compared with Tamirsky’s.”

“What was your lie, Captain?”

He answered, rather slowly, and with his eyes, implacable yet curiously tender, fixed upon her: “I said, Madame, that in my opinion the photograph bore only a slight resemblance to you. That was my lie. For the photograph, in fact, was of you beyond all question.”

She laughed. “Nevertheless, don’t suppose for one moment that I shall admit it.”

“Of course not. Your best plan is so clearly a denial that I don’t find your denial either surprising or convincing.” He suddenly smiled, and as he did so the years seemed to fall away and leave him just a boy. “But really, don’t let’s worry ourselves. Quite frankly, I don’t care in the least who you are.”

A.J. had been listening to the conversation with growing astonishment and apprehension. There was such a charm about Poushkoff that he had been in constant dread of what Daly might be lured into saying; yet an almost equal lure had worked upon himself and had kept him from intervening. Even now he was waiting for her answer with curiosity that quite outdistanced fear. She said: “That leads up to a rather remarkable conclusion, Captain. You believed I was really the Countess, yet you made every effort to save my life.”

“Yes, perhaps I did, but I don’t see anything very remarkable in it.”

They sat in silence for some time, while the train-wheels jog jogged over the uneven track, across a world that was but a white desert meeting a grey and infinite horizon. A.J. was puzzled still, but less apprehensive; it was queer how the fellow’s charm could melt away even deepest misgivings. More than queer—there was something uncanny in it; and he knew, too, that Daly was aware of the same uncanniness. He glanced at her, and she smiled half- enquiringly, half-reassuringly. Then she said, all at once serene: “Captain, since you do not care who I am, there is no reason why we should not all be the greatest of friends.” And turning to A.J. she added: “Don’t you think we might share our food with the Captain?”

A.J., after a moment’s hesitation, returned her smile; in another moment one of the bundles that had been so neatly and carefully packed at the Valimoffs’ cottage was being opened on that shabby but only slightly verminous compartment-seat. There was a tin of pork and beans, a tin of American mixed fruits, shortbread, chocolate, and—rarest delicacy of all—a bottle of old cognac. As these treasures were displayed one after another, Poushkoff showed all the excitement of a well-mannered schoolboy. “But this is charming of you!” he exclaimed rapturously, and then, with swift prudence, rushed to lock the door leading to the corridor and pull down the blinds. “It will be best for us not to be observed,” he laughed, and continued: “And to think that I offered you my poor biscuits!”

“We were very grateful for them,” Daly said, with a shining sweetness in her eyes.

Then began a most incredible and extraordinary picnic. Zest came over them all, as if they had been friends from the beginning of the world, as if there were no future ever to fear, as if all life held nothing but such friendship and such joyous appetite. Poushkoff’s winsomeness overflowed into sheer, radiant high spirits; Daly laughed and joked with him like a carefree child; A.J. became the suddenly suave and perfect host, handing round the food as gaily as if they had all been on holiday together. It was like some strange dream that they were all, as by a miracle, dreaming at once. They shouted with laughter when Poushkoff tried to open the tin of fruit with the knife-blade and squirted juice over his tunic. They had to eat everything with their fingers and to drink the brandy out of the bottle—but how wonderful it all was, and how real compared with that unreal background of moving snowfields and flicking telegraph-poles! They did silly inconsequential things for no reason but that they wanted to do them; Poushkoff made a fantastic impromptu after-dinner speech; A.J. followed it by another; and Daly exclaimed, in the midst of everything: “Captain, I’m sure you speak French—wouldn’t you like to?” And they all, in madness to be first, began gabbling away like children.

The brandy passed round again, and Poushkoff made cigarettes out of the coarse army tobacco, and they puffed away furiously as they chattered. It was brilliant chatter, for the most part; Daly and Poushkoff were perfect foils for each other, and the queerest thing of all was that they talked in an intricate, intimate way that somehow needed neither questioning nor explaining on either side. A.J., not talking quite so much, was nevertheless just as happy—with a keenness, indeed, that was almost an ache of memory, for he felt the had known Poushkoff not only before but many times before. Then Poushkoff interrupted one of his own fantastic speeches to thank them both with instant tragic simplicity. “I suppose,” he said, “we shall not see one another again after we reach Samara. That is a pity. The French say—’Faire ses adieux, c’est mourir un peu’—but in this country it is ‘mourir entičrement.’ We have all of us died a thousand deaths like that during these recent years.” He seized Daly’s hand and pressed it to his lips with a strange blending of gallantry and shyness. “Oh, how cruel the world is, to have taken away my life far more than it can ever take away yours…” Then he suddenly broke down into uncontrollable sobbing. They were astounded and moved beyond speech; Daly put her arm round the boy and drew his head gently against her breast. He went on sobbing, and they could not step him; his whole body shook as if the soul were being wrenched out of it. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was all over, and he was looking up at her, his eyes swimming in tears, and saying: “I humbly beg your pardon. I don’t know what you must think of me—behaving like this It was the brandy—I’m unused to it.”

They both smiled at him, trying to mean all they could without speaking, and he took up his book and pretended to read again. A.J., for something to do, cleared away the remains of the meal and repacked the bundle, while lolly stared out of the window at the dazzling snow. A long time passed, and at length came the same cairn, controlled voice that they had heard first of all in the market-place at Novarodar. “Do you know Samara?” he was asking.

“I’ve been through it, that’s all;” A.J. answered.

Poushkoff continued: “It’s a fairly large town—much larger than Novarodar. As you know, our army has just taken it from the Czechs. Its full of important people—all kinds of people who were all kinds of things before the Revolution. There are bound to be many who knew Countess Adraxine personally.”

Daly said still smiling: “And no Tamirskys, eh?”

“Probably not. The perfect Tamirsky is the rarest of all creatures.”

“I see So you are warning us?”

“Well, Hardly so much as that. But I am rather wondering what is going to happen to you.”

“Ah, we none of us know that, do we?”

“No, but I thought you alight possibly have something in mind.”

She looked at A.J. enquiringly and said: “I’m afraid we just do what we can, as a rule, don’t we?”

“You mean that you just take a chance if it comes along?”

“What else is there we can do?”

“Do you think you will manage it in the end—what you are trying to do?”

“With luck, perhaps.”

“And you have had luck so far?”

She said: “Wonderful luck. And the most wonderful of all was to meet you.”

“Do you think so?”

“I would think so even if to-morrow sees the end of us, as it may do.”

Every word of speech between them seemed to have infinitely deeper and secondary meanings. He said, without emotion: “You are the most astonishing woman I have ever met. I altogether love you, as a matter of fact. I loved you from the minute I saw you last night. Am. I being very foolish or impertinent?”

“No, no, I’m sure you’re not.”

“You mean that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Ali, how perfect you are!” He stared at the pages of the book for another short interval. Then he turned to A.J. “I wonder if I might be permitted to have a little more of that excellent cognac? It would be good for me, I think—I feel a trifle faint.”

A.J. unpacked the bottle for him, and Daly said, warningly: “Remember now—you said you were unused to it.”

Poushkoff answered, taking a strong gulp and laughing: “I promise it won’t have the same effect again.” Then he leaned back on the cushions and closed his eyes. The train rattled on more slowly than ever; snow had stopped falling; it was nearly dusk. Neither A.J. nor Daly disturbed the strange silence through which the boy appeared to sleep. Suddenly he opened his eyes, yawned vigorously, and strode over to the window. “I think I can see a church in the distance,” he said, in perfectly normal tones. “That must be Tarzov—we have to change to another train there. Pick up your luggage and come out with me to the refreshment buffet—I may be able to get you some tea.”

In a few moments the train ground down to an impotent standstill at a small, crowded platform of a station. It looked an odd place to have to change; there was no sign of any rail junction, or of any other train, and Tarzov, seen through the gathering dusk, had the air of a very second-rate village indeed. There was the usual throng of waiting refugees, with their usual attitude of having come nowhence and being bound no-whither; and there was the usual shouting and bell-jangling and scrambling for places. Poushkoff led them through the crowd to the refreshment buffet, which, by no means to A.J.’s surprise, was found to be closed. The boy, however, seemed not only surprised but depressed and disappointed to a quite fantastic degree—he had so wished, he said, to drink tea with them once, before they separated. “You see,” he said, “the next station is Samara, only thirty versts away, and of course the authorities there have been notified about you by telephone, and there will be an escort waiting, and oh well, it is all going to be very difficult and complicated. Whereas here we can still be friends.” He led them some distance along the platform, away from the crowd, to a point whence there was a view of the village—a poor view, however, owing to the misty twilight.

He seemed anxious to talk to them about something—perhaps about anything. “Tarzov,” he said, “is only a small place—it is on the Volga. If you go down that street over there you come to the river in about ten minutes. There is a little quay and there are timber-barges usually, at this time of the year. They take the rafts downstream during the daytime, and tie up at the bank for the nights. Of course the passenger-boats have been stopped since the civil war, but I believe the timber- barges sometimes take a passenger or two, if people have the money and make their own arrangements with the bargemen. Some of the bargemen are Tartars—fine old fellows from the Kirghiz country.” He added, almost apologetically: “This is really a most interesting part of the world, though, of course, you don’t see it at its best at this time of the year.”

Suddenly, as if remembering something, he exclaimed: “Excuse me, I must go back to the train a moment—I shan’t be long.” He dashed away into the midst of the still scurrying crowd before they could answer, and in the twilight they soon lost sight of him.

“He looked ill,” Daly said.

A.J. answered: “He drank nearly all that brandy.”

“Did he? Poor boy! Do you like him?”

“Yes.”

“So do I—tremendously. And he’s only a boy.”

It was very cold, waiting there with the wind blowing little gusts of snow into their faces.

A.J. said: “It’s rather curious, having to change trains at a place like this. There doesn’t seem to be any junction, and if it’s only thirty versts to Samara, where else can the train be going on to?”

“Perhaps it isn’t going on anywhere.”

“Then why is everybody crowding to get into it?”

She clutched his arm with a sharp gesture. “Do you realise—that we could escape—now? It’s almost dark—there’s a mist—we should have a chance.”

He answered, his hand tightening over her wrist: “Yes—yes—I believe you’re right!” But he did not move. “Yes, it’s a chance—a chance!” Yet still he did not move, and all at once there came the splitting crack of a revolver-shot. It was not a sound to attract particular attention at such a place and at such a time—it would just, perhaps, make the average hearer turn his head, if he were idle enough, and wonder what it was. A.J. wondered, but his mind was grappling with that more insistent matter—escape. Yes, there would be a chance, and their only chance, for, as Poushkoff had told them, Samara was close, and Samara meant armed escorts and prison-cells. Yes, yes,—there was no time to lose—Poushkoff would be back any minute—they must think of themselves—they must go now—instantly….But no—not for a minute—a little man with a ridiculously tilted fur cap was pacing up and down the platform; he would pass them in a few seconds, would reach the end, turn, pass them again, and then would come their chance…Yet the man in the fur cap did not pass them. He stopped and remarked, cheerfully: “Exciting business down there, comrade,” and jerked his head backward towards the crowd. “Officer just shot himself. Through the head. Deliberately—everybody saw him. Not a bad thing, perhaps, if they all did it eh?” He laughed and passed on. A.J. stared incredulously; it was Daly who led him back to the crowd. “We must see,” she said. “We must make sure.” When they reached the crown, soldiers were already carrying a body into the waiting-room; it was she again who pressed forward, edging her way in what doubtless seemed mere ghoulish curiosity. When she rejoined A.J. it was only to nod her head and take his arm. They walked slowly away. Then she began to whisper excitedly: “Dear, I’m just understanding it—that’s what he wanted us to do—all that talk about the road to the river, and the bargemen who might take us if we offered them money—Dear, we must do it—think how furious he’d be if he thought we hadn’t had the sense to take the chance he gave us!”

“Yes. We’ll do it.”

They came to the end of the platform, but did not stop and turn, like other up-and-down walkers. They hastened on through the darkness, across the tracks and sidings, in between rows of damaged box-cars, over a ditch into pale, crunching snowfields, and towards the river.

They skirted the village carefully, keeping well away from the snow- covered roofs, yet not too far from them, lest they should lose themselves in the mist. But A.J. had sound directional instinct, and despite the mist and the deep snow it was no more than a quarter of an hour before they clambered over a fence and found themselves facing a black vastness which, even before they heard the lapping of the water, reassured them. They stopped for a few seconds to listen; as well as the water, they could hear, very faintly, the lilt of voices in the distance. They walked some way along the path, their footsteps muffled in snow. Then a tiny light came into view, reflected far over the water till the mist engulfed it; the voices became plainer. Suddenly A.J. whispered: “The timber-barges—here they are!”—and they could sec the great rafts of tree-trunks, snow-covered and lashed together, with the winking light of the towing barge just ahead of them. Voices were approaching as well as being approached; soon two men passed by, speaking a language that was not Russian, though it was clear from sound and gesture that one of the men was bidding farewell to the other. They both shouted out a cheerful ‘Good-night’ as they passed, and a moment later A.J. heard them stop and give each other resounding kisses on both cheeks. Then one of them returned, overtaking the two fugitives near the gang-plank that led down at a steep angle to the barge itself. They could not see his face, but he was very big and tall. He cried out a second cheerful ‘Good-night,’ and was about to cross the plank, when A.J. asked: “Are you the captain of this boat?”

The man seemed childishly pleased at being called ‘captain,’ and replied, in very bad Russian: “Yes, that’s right.”

“We were wondering if you could take us along with you?”

“Well, I might, if you were to make it worth my while.”

To accept too instantly would have looked suspicious, so A.J. went on: “We are only poor people, so we cannot afford very much.”

“Where do you want to go to?”

“A little village called Varokslav—it is on the river, lower down.”

“I don’t think I know it at all.”

A.J. was not surprised, for it was an invented name.

“It t is only very small—we would tell you when you come to it.”

“But how can we settle a price if I don’t know how far it is?”

To which A.J. answered: “Where is it you are bound for, Captain?”

“Saratof. We are due there in three weeks.”

“Very well, I will give you twenty gold roubles to take us both to Saratof.”

“Thirty, comrade.”

They haggled in the usual way and finally came to terms at twenty-four. Then the bargeman, whose Russian became rapidly imperfect when he left the familiar ground of bargaining, conveyed to them with great difficulty the fact that accommodation on the barge was very poor, and that there was only one cabin, which he himself, his wife, and five children already occupied, and which the passengers would have to share. A.J. said that would be all right, and they did not mind. Then the bargeman confided to A.J. that his name was Akhiz, and A.J. returned the compliment. Having thus got over the introductions, Akhiz gave A.J. two very loud kisses as a token of their future relationship and invited both passengers to come on board immediately. It was beginning to snow again, for which A.J. was thankful, since their tracks would soon be covered. As they crossed the steep plank there came, very faintly over the white fields, the sound of a train puffing out of Tarzov station.

Akhiz was a Tartar from Astrakhan—a young, genial, magnificently strong and excessively dirty monster, six feet five in height and correspondingly large in face and mouth. His perfectly spaced teeth glittered like gems whenever he smiled, which was fairly often. His wife, small, fat, and of the same race, was less genial, but almost more dirty, and their five children, ranging from a baby to a six-year-old, were noisy, good-looking, and full of ringworm.

The position of Akhiz in the scheme of things was simple enough. He went up and down the Volga with his timber-barge. He had been doing so for exactly twenty-six years—since, in fact, the day he had been born on just a similar barge on that same Volga. He was not a man of acute intelligence; he could handle the rafts and work the small steam-engine and strike a bargain and play intricate games with dice, but that was almost all. Above everything else, he was incurious—as incurious about his two passengers as he was about the various excitements and convolutions that had interfered with the timber trade during recent years.

A.J. and Daly settled down effortlessly to the tranquil barge life; they had been travelling so long and so far and so cumbrously that the large, spacious existence in swollen mid-stream seemed the most perfect and enchanting rest. Even the stuffy cabin, swarming with children and fleas, did not trouble them, though there was no privacy in it, and Akhiz and his family conducted themselves at all times with completely unembarrassed freedom.. They rather liked Akhiz, however, and soon found it possible to behave before him with no greater restraints than before some large and good-humoured dog.

Every evening, at dusk, the barge drifted in to the bank and was moored for the night. Akhiz was aware of every current and backwater, and showed great skill in manoeuvring the rafts into place. It was typical of him that he knew practically nothing of the land beyond the banks; he did not know even the names of most of the villages that were passed. With an instinct for adapting himself to circumstances without understanding them, he managed somehow or other never to be short of food, even though the country near by was famine- stricken; fortunately, he and his family could eat almost anything—queer-looking roots and seeds that A.J. would have liked to know more about, if Akhiz had been intelligent enough to be questioned. A.J. and Daly still had ample food for themselves; at first they were afraid of what Akhiz might deduce from their luxurious provender, but they very soon realised that it was the way of Akhiz to notice as little as possible and never to make any kind of deduction at all. Once they went so far as to share with him a tin of corned beef; he was hugely delighted, but completely and almost disappointingly indifferent as to how they had come to possess such a rarity.

It was so restful and satisfying to be on the barge that during their first night aboard they hardly gave thought to the dangers that might still be ahead. Dawn, however, brought a more dispassionate outlook; it was obvious then to both of them that their escape would soon be discovered and that efforts would be made to recapture them. A.J.’s immediate fear was of Samara, which they must reach during the first day’s journey; it seemed to him that the authorities there were likely to be especially vigilant and would probably suspect some method of escape by river. During that first day, as the wooded bluffs passed slowly by on either side, he debated in his mind whether he should take Akhiz somewhat into his confidence. Daly favoured doing so, and A.J. accordingly broached the matter as delicately as he knew how. But delicacy was quite wasted on Akhiz; he had to be told outright that his two passengers were escaping from enemies who wanted to kill them, and that anywhere, especially at Samara and the big towns, he might be questioned by the authorities. They half expected Akhiz to be furious and threaten to turn them ashore, but instead he took it all in with a comprehension so mild and casual that they could only wonder at first if it were comprehension at all. “I don’t think he really understands what we’ve been getting at,” A.J. said, but there he certainly did Akhiz an injustice, for about an hour later the huge fellow, beaming all over his face, drew them to the far end of the barge and showed them a small and inconspicuous gap which he had arranged amongst the piled tree-trunks. “If anyone comes to ask for you, my wife will say nobody here,” he explained, in broken Russian. “You will go in there—see?—and I will put the logs back in their places—so. Plenty of room for you in behind there.” He grinned with immense geniality and bared his arms to show them his bulging muscles. “Nobody move those logs but me,” he declared proudly, and it was satisfactory to be able to believe it.

The presence of such an improvised hiding-place for use in an emergency gave them a feeling of comfort and security, and to A.J.’s further relief the barge did not even put in at Samara, owing to high dock-charges, but went on several miles below the town to a deserted and lonely reach, where no stranger came on board and no suspicious inspection seemed to be taking place from either bank.

They reached Syzran on the fifth day, passing under the great steel railway bridge on which, but a few yards above them, Red sentries were keeping guard, and reaching the end of the long river-loop. The air turned colder, but there was no further snowfall, and during the day-time the sun shone with a fierceness that was quite cheerful, even though it did not lift the temperature much above freezing-point. Already round the edges of the backwaters ice had begun to form. A.J. and Daly used sometimes to choose a sheltered and sunny place among the tree-trunks from which to watch the slowly-changing panorama; it was bitterly cold in the open air, but for a time that was preferable to the fetid atmosphere of the cabin. The river was so wide that they were safe from observation, and the country, especially on the left bank, so lonely that often whole days passed without sound or sight of any human existence on land. Compared with the chaos of which their memories were full, the barge-life seemed a kind and leisurely heaven. A.J.’s normally robust health benefited a great deal from the rest and the cold, keen air; at dusk and dawn he sometimes helped Akhiz with the rafts, and was amused to give proof that his own personal strength was not so very much inferior to that of the Tartar monster.

He would, indeed, have been very happy but for renewal of his anxiety about Daly’s health; the strain of the journey seemed again to be weighing heavily on her. Yet she was very cheerful and full of optimism. They began now to talk as they had hardly dared to do before—of their possible plans after reaching safety. Denikin’s outposts, A.J. believed, could not be much more distant than a few days’ journey from Saratof; it would probably be best to leave the river there and cross that final danger- zone on foot and by night. Then it seemed to occur to them both simultaneously that they would be passing through the town of Saratof, and that somewhere in it lived the ex-butler and the little princess of whom the Valimoffs had so carefully informed them. Should they take the trouble and incur all the possible extra risks that a visit might involve? A.J. decided negatively, yet from that moment they began to feel that the ex-butler and the child were really living people, not merely abstractions talked about by somebody else. They even began to imagine what the girl might be like—dark or fair, pretty or plain, well-bred or spoilt.

One cold sunny afternoon, as they sat together on the timber with no sound about them save the swish of the water and the occasional distant cry of a curlew, A.J. told her, quite suddenly and on impulse, that he had been born in England and had lived there during early youth. She was naturally astonished, and still more so when he told her the entire story of his early life and of the affairs that had led to his loss of nationality and subsequent exile. “But you are really English for all that?” she queried, and he replied that he was not sure how the technical position stood—there was little he could prove after so many years. “Perhaps I am as I feel,” he said, “and that is no nationality at all.”

It was curious how their life in the future, that was to be so strange and different from any life they had known together so far, seemed as much an end as a beginning. They tried not to admit it, yet the feeling was there with them both; it was so hard to think of a world that did not consist entirely of the dangers of the next hour and mile, of a life in which most things could be bought for money, in which day after day would bring peaceful, prophesiable happenings, and every night a bed and sleep. She said to him once: “Dear, what shall we do? Shall we live in Paris? Would you like to live in Paris?”

“I think I would like to live anywhere.”

“Anywhere with me?”

“I meant that. I can’t imagine life without you.”

“Can you imagine life without all this worry and adventure?”

“Hardly—yet. I don’t know.”

“How long will it take—the rest of the journey—it we have luck?”

“We shall be in Saratof within a week or so. Allow another week for reaching the Whites. I suppose then we could get through to Rostov or Odessa, and there are boats from those places to Constantinople, but we might have to wait some time to get one. There would be passport formalities and all that sort of thing.”

“And from Constantinople?”

“That again depends. Don’t let’s look too far ahead. At present I’ve got my mind on Saratof.”

“Saratof and our little princess.”

“No.” He smiled. “I don’t propose to have anything to do with her royal highness. And in any case she isn’t ours.”

“Nevertheless, I shall always think of her as ours, even if we never see her.”

One evening in mid-November when the barge tied up near a small village, A.J. heard a few men talking to Akhiz. They were saying that the war in Europe was over and that Germany had surrendered to the French and British, but the information did not create the expected sensation. Akhiz was unaware of a European war as distinct from any other war; the world, seen from his timber- barge, seemed always full of fighting, and he was entirely uninterested in details.

They passed Volshk on the fourteenth day, but by that time the clearing horizon of the future was dimmed again, for Daly was ill. It was the cold, she confessed abjectly, and bade A.J. not to worry about her; she would be all right again when they reached a warmer climate. In former times, she said, she had never been able to endure the Russian winters; she had always gone either abroad or to the Crimea. Besides, she had possessed furs in those days—“and now,” she added, half-laughing, “only Red generals dare show them.” She was still very cheerful, and inclined to joke about her own weakness, but A.J. was uneasy, because he knew that the cold was not excessive for the country and the time of the year, and that there were at least five hundred miles to be traversed before they could expect warmer weather.

The trouble was that the only alternative to the open air was the atmosphere of the cabin, which was always so sickening that it was quite as much as they could do to sleep in it during the nights.

They reached Saratof on the twentieth day, in the midst of a heavy snowstorm. A.J. had been a little apprehensive of the landing, which was just as well, for it enabled him to spy out Red soldiers, suspiciously armed and eager, waiting on the quay at which the barge was to berth. He saw them out of the cabin window, and there was just time to warn Akhiz and hurry Daly and himself to the arranged refuge amongst the timber. Akhiz fulfilled his part to perfection, pulling a huge log back to cover up the entrance to the hiding- place. It was all accomplished in good time and without mishap; again A.J.’s chief fear was for Daly, who shivered in his arms with an unhappy mingling of fear and cold. A.J. whispered to reassure her; it was only a precaution, he said; the soldiers on the quay might not be in search of them at all; and in any case, there was no reason yet to be alarmed—they had come successfully through many worse crises. But Daly would not or could not be comforted; she whispered: “Oh, my darling, I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I haven’t any nerve left at all—I can’t help it—I’m just more terrified than I’ve ever been!”

They felt the barge bumping against the quayside; they heard sharp voices questioning Akhiz and the latter’s slow, good-tempered answers; then they heard footsteps scampering on deck and over the piled timber. A.J. could not hear much that was said, but from the whole manner of the proceeding he guessed that a search was, after all, to be made.

About a quarter of an hour later voices came quite near to them. One said: “Well, you know, this may be all right as far as we’ve seen, but look at all this timber—anyone could hide amongst it.”

A.J.’s arm tightened round Daly, and from her sudden stillness he thought she must be half-fainting.

Another voice said: “Yes, of course, that’s true. And this fellow’s been putting in for nights at all kinds of lonely places—nothing at all to stop anybody from coming aboard while he’s been asleep.”

Akhiz said: “Timber very heavy to move.”

“She had a man with her.”

Akhiz repeated: “Timber very heavy.”

“Yes, you fool, you’ve said it once.”

Then from various sounds and movements it was apparent that a few of the men were trying to move some of the logs.

Later a voice said: “Well, how do you move the stuff then?”

“Big crane comes along,” said Akhiz.

“Well, keep a look-out when you unload, that’s all. I don’t suppose anyone can be here, but still, as I say, keep a look- out.”

After which the voices and footsteps disappeared. That was during the afternoon, and Akhiz did not release his prisoners until dusk. By that time they were stiff with cramp and chilled to the bone. “Very heavy, eh?” whispered Akhiz, beaming at them, when he had pushed the log a foot or so out of place. He seemed delighted at his own share in the escapade, though still incurious as to what it was all about. The quays were quite dark; the whole town, which in daylight had looked so important and flourishing, was now an overmastering stillness. Akhiz gave them scalding tea in his cabin; A.J. then gave Akhiz the twenty-four roubles agreed upon, plus another six for his extra services in outwitting the searchers, plus a small tin of American baked beans. Then they bade good-bye to their faithful host and saviour, who kissed A.J. with tremendous fervour, and even then, at that last moment, forbore to ask where they were going or what they were intending to do. Finally Akhiz went on deck to see if the quays were clear for them. There were sentries patrolling around, on the look-out for pilfering, but it was not very difficult to choose a safe moment to cross the litter of railway tracks and reach one of the steep alleys leading up from the docks to the town.

When they carne to the less deserted streets they were able to judge that Saratof was in a scarcely happier condition than Novarodar. The shop-windows were empty; the cafés closed and shuttered; no trams were running. It was all depressing enough, except for the fact that it was, after all, Saratof—the last important stage-point on their long journey from danger into safety. The Whites were but a few score miles away, which, after reckoning for so long in terms of hundreds of miles, seemed next to nothing at all; Denikin’s army, too, might have been advancing and have made the interval even less. As he trudged over the crunching snow, A.J.’s spirits rose as he contemplated the future.

But there was a more immediate future to be decided. Refreshed and abundantly fit after the river-journey, he would have pushed on that very night, and Daly also was anxious to avoid delay. For a time they talked of reaching some village perhaps ten miles or so out of Saratof and seeking accommodation there. Villages were safer than towns; the people in them were usually more kindly, less terrified of the authorities, and less likely to be inquisitive about passports and travel-permits.

But before they reached the suburban fringe of the town this plan became suddenly impossible, for Daly was clearly on the point of collapse. It was obvious that she could not walk another mile, much less the unknown distance to the nearest village, and there was nothing for it but to contemplate the risks of seeking shelter in Saratof itself. The town was noted for its strongly Red sympathies, and A.J. did not feel happy at the prospect of spending a night in it. He tried a few cottages, playing the part of the wandering but not quite penniless working-man who could pay a small sum for a bed for himself and his wife until the morning; but in every case he was turned away. One haggard housewife told him that nobody was allowed to take in strangers, and that if he wanted accommodation he had better apply to the Labour Bureau at the commisariat offices of the local Soviet. When he reached Daly, whom he had left a little distance away, he found her lying on the snow-covered pavement. He picked her up; she was shivering and trying to smile, but incapable of speech and only able to stagger along with great difficulty. There remained one last resource, which he had not wished to be driven to—the address of the ex-butler. He mentioned it, and she nodded agreement. Then he called at another house and enquired the way; by good fortune it was in the same quarter of the town, quite close.

A few moments later he was tapping at the door of a small workman’s- cottage. An elderly, white-haired man appeared, to whom he said: “Does Stapen live here?” At that the man’s face took on an expression of sudden terror. “Stapen?” he exclaimed, acting very badly. “No, there is no one here of that name.” Then A.J. realised the fears that might be in the man’s mind, and added: “I was sent here by the Valimoffs, of Novarodar.” The old man stared incredulously and, after a pause, asked them inside. He had been almost dumb with fear, and now was in the same condition with astonishment. A.J. talked a little to reassure him, while Daly sank into a chair, too weak to take any part in the conversation.

In the end their identities were satisfactorily established, and the old man admitted that he was himself Stapen, the ex-butler. He was also more than willing to help them, though he had very little food and no money. His wife was out at that moment, trying to get bread. Life was terrible in Saratof, and he prayed that Denikin’s army might arrive soon.

Daly recovered a little in front of the fire, and Stapen recognised her—or so he said—he had seen her in the old days in Moscow. Daly also said (but perhaps from mere politeness) that she thought she remembered him.

It was soon apparent that Stapen’s mind was obsessed with some other matter which he was afraid to mention until Daly broached it first. She said: “Well, and have you the little girl with you still?” Stapen’s voice dropped then to a throbbing whisper, he was evidently delighted that the strangers knew all about it, yet at the same time awestruck to be discussing it with them. He replied: “Yes, the princess is upstairs. She has been ill—she has had typhus—but she is now getting well. You would wish to see her, eh? Or no—she may be asleep—perhaps to-morrow will be better. You are going to take her with you when you go?” He turned to A.J. and added: “Ah, I knew the Valimoffs would make a good choice—how I have been longing for the day when I should hand her over to someone such as yourself!”

His sincerity and devotion were beyond suspicion, but A.J. at that moment was hardly in a mood to be appreciative. He felt, indeed, a little impatient with the fellow. Did nothing matter except the rescue of a princess? He realised again how difficult and complicated would be the escape to Denikin’s lines if he and Daly were to be burdened with a small and illustrious child.

“For the present,” he answered, rather coldly, “we can hardly look ahead as far as that. My wife is ill and needs rest.”

Stapen bowed, controlling his excitement like a well-trained servant who allows it to be supposed that he had momentarily forgotten himself. Within a short time he had prepared a bed and Daly was being put into it. She whispered, as A.J. laid her head on the pillow: “Dear, why are you so angry with people like Stapen? You were angry with the Valimoffs too.” He answered: “I’m not really angry with them—I’m everlastingly grateful in most ways. It’s just that they seem to think other things matter more than you.”

“Well, don’t they?”

“Possibly, but I can’t be expected to agree to it.”

“I don’t think you care, then, for this little princess?”

“Not a bit. I hate her, even, because I see in her a possible danger to you. It’s all very selfish, I know, but I can’t help it. I won’t even try to help it. The world is so full of misery that one cant—one daren’t—one’s eyes to it all. The most to be done is to make sure of what one loves and never to let it go. All the rest must be put outside—entirely.”

“Do you think Poushkoff felt like that?”

“Probably. He loved you too.”

She smiled and closed her eyes, and he went down to talk to Stapen. Her words, however, had made him rather more friendly towards the old man, who proved, on acquaintance, the pleasantest and simplest of types. His wife, who came in later in the evening after failing to secure any bread, was very different, but perhaps necessarily so in order to strike a balance with a husband of such benignity. She was a shrewd and rather embittered woman, who gave A.J. hut the chilliest of welcomes. A fruitless four-hour wait in a bread- queue had put her into a mood of outspokenness that her husband sought in vain to check; she almost began by saying: “Well, if Denikin’s men are on the way, let hem bring some food with them. For my part, I don’t care whether we are governed by Reds or Whites, so long as working people can get enough to eat.”

Afterwards Stapen apologised for her with stately courtesy. “She was always like that,” he said. “Many’s the time that my dear old master, Prince Borosil, said to me—’Stapen, you should whip her!’—and I promised I would. But, somehow, I could never bring myself to do it.”

In the morning Daly seemed much better, and A.J.’s hopes began to be optimistic again. It was all, of course, a little more difficult now that they had met Stapen. The fellow assumed so completely that they intended to take the child along with them when they made their dash for safety; it was a dream he had been dreaming for months, and now it seemed about to be accomplished he could only build pretty details all around it. Would they take her to Paris? Or to Rome? Or to London? There were royalties and semi-royalties all over Europe who, it appeared, would be delighted to extend unlimited hospitality to such an exalted babe. For she was, Stapen explained in a whisper, within measurable distance of being heir to all the Russias. The Bolsheviks had killed so many of the ex-Emperor’s family and relatives—far more than anyone could estimate exactly—and the careful, systematic process of extermination was still being carried out. “That is why they are always on the watch for the princess,” he added, “but so far I don’t think they have the slightest idea where she is. They have her photograph, of course, but it is bound to be an old one, and she is different now, especially after her illness.”

A.J. and Daly were solemnly presented to the princess that morning. She was a thin and sad little thing, wasted by fever and obviously very weak. Stapen treated her with rather absurd decorum, while his wife treated her exactly as if she had been her own child; and the princess showed unmistakable affection for them both.

But the more Stapen outlined the child’s social and dynastic importance the more unwilling A.J. was to encumber himself with her. Yet it became increasingly difficult to convey this to Stapen. It was not only that A.J. did not wish to offend the fellow, but rather that no means existed by which Stapen could be brought to conceive A.J.’s point of view. “He won’t see that we have our own future to think of,” A.J. told Daly. “Frankly, I’m not interested in dynastic intrigues—it doesn’t matter a jot to me that the child’s a princess, next in succession, and so on. All I care about in the world is getting you to safety, and I won’t agree to anything that will lessen the chance of it.”

She smiled. “Very well, then, we shall have to tell Stapen that we can’t take her.”

“Yes, and the sooner the better. I’ll tell him in the morning.”

But in the morning Daly was ill again, after being sick and feverish during the night. Their departure looked as if it must be postponed for another day or two, and so, in the circumstances, there did not seem any particular need to present Stapen with the arranged ultimatum.

By noon the whole situation was changed utterly and for the worse, for Daly was by this time very ill indeed, and A.J., with fair experience of such matters, diagnosed typhus. It was not really astonishing, and yet, for some reason, it was a mischance that he had never even considered.

There was no doctor to attend her; there had been none for the little princess, either. There was no private doctor, in fact, in the whole town. Typhus, spread by the war and nourished by the famine, had overwhelmed Saratof to an extent that A.J. had hardly realised during his few days in the place. The hospitals were full, with patients lying on stretchers between the beds; emergency hospitals were also full, and more were being hastily built; yet still the disease raged and spread, and the death-rate had been steadily and appallingly on the increase for weeks. All the hospitals were being managed by skeleton staffs of doctors and nurses, and it had lately become so difficult to give patients proper attention that many who stayed in their homes with no professional doctoring at all had probably an equal, if not a superior chance of recovery. Stapen evidently thought so, and urged A.J. not to try to get Daly into one of the hospitals. It would have been quite impossible, in any case, for they were State institutions and every patient entering had to pass through a sieve of official enquiries. The same reason had prevented Stapen from trying to find a hospital-bed for the princess, and now, as he comfortingly explained to A.J., he was very glad of it. “The countess will be far better here, just as the princess was,” he assured him, and A.J.’s heart warmed towards the old man for showing such willingness to share the burden of this extra misfortune, though in fact it was Stapen’s wife on whom the burden mostly fell.

A.J., fortunately, was at his best in an emergency of such a kind. He had a fine instinct for doctoring, and had acted as amateur doctor for so long and with such success during a part of his life that he felt none of that vague helplessness that afflicts the complete layman when faced with medical problems. He had also a particular knowledge of typhus itself; he had often diagnosed cases, and was quite familiar with the normal course of the disease. Apart from which, he possessed the proper temperament for living through anxious moments; he was calm, quiet, soothing, and never despondent. Stapen, he soon found, was no use at all except as an amiable figurehead to surround the whole affair with an atmosphere of benignity and goodwill; it was his wife who did and was everything. This hard-faced, dour, and rather truculent woman soon drew from A.J. the deepest admiration; he perceived that it was she, and she alone, who had saved the child’s life. And she tackled this additional job of nursing Daly with an apparent grudgingness which concealed, net so much a warm heart, as a thoroughly efficient soul. J, could well imagine the sort of cook she had been, and be cold also well imagine the sort of butler Stapen had been.

So Saratof, which was to have been but a stage on a final dash to freedom, became instead a last prison closing them round. To A.J., sitting at the bedside, nothing remained but love. He realised, now as never before, how dear she was, and how utterly beyond beauty to him. His mind glowed and throbbed with a hundred memories of her; he saw her dark eyes opening at dawn, and heard her deep tranquil laughter echoing amongst the boles of great trees; he felt again the slumberous passion that had seemed to wrap them both in unity with every little rustling leaf. From his first notice of her in the prison- cell at Khalinsk, everything had had the terrible, lovely reality of a child’s fairy-tale.

A good deal of the time she was in delirium and talked ramblingly, but sometimes her mind cleared for a few moments and she would beg him to look after himself and try not to take the disease from her. She often said: “Oh, I’m so sorry just at the end of our journey—I do feel I ought to be ashamed…”

He comforted her by relating how Denikin’s army was advancing, thus lessening the distance between themselves and safety even while she lay in bed.

Often, in her delirium, she called his name, appealing to him to protect her from shadowy terrors, but sometimes even her delirium was calm and she would talk serenely about all kinds of things. She constantly mentioned the girl, calling her ‘our little princess’ in the way they had joked about her during the barge journey.

About a week after the onset of the fever she appeared to become very much better, and A.J. began to hope that the crisis was passing. She talked to him that day quite lucidly about their plans for escape; the Whites, he told her, were now only forty or fifty miles to the south, so that they might count themselves fortunate, even in the delay. Then she asked suddenly: “Where can we be married, do you think?”

He answered: “In Odessa, perhaps or Constantinople, at any rate.”

She smiled, and seemed very happy in contemplation of it. After a pause she went on to ask if he had yet told Stapen that he did not intend to take the child with them.

He answered that he hadn’t, but that he would do so whenever the matter became urgent.

She said: “I suppose we can’t possibly take her with us?”

“Do you want to?” he asked; and she replied: “I would like to, if we could, but of course it’s for you to decide. It’s you who’d have all the bother of both of us, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t bother I’d mind. It’s danger—to you.”

“Do you think there would he much danger?”

“More than I’d care to risk.”

“I know. I agree. We won’t have her.”

“I wish we could, for your sake.”

“Oh no, it doesn’t matter. I don’t quite know why I’m worrying you so much about it.”

“You’re really keen on having her, then, if we could?”

She answered then, almost sobbing: “Terribly, darling—terribly. And I don’t know why.”

A few hours later the sudden improvement in her condition disappeared with equal suddenness, and the fever, after its respite, seemed to attack her with renewed venom. To A.J. the change was the bitterest of blows, and all the old iron rage stalked through his veins again. He could not look at the rapidly recovering child downstairs without a clench of dislike; but for her, he worked it out, they would never have called at Stapen’s house, and Daly would never have been ill. (Yet that, he knew in his heart, was far from certain; the whole district was typhus-ridden, and it was impossible to establish how and from whom contagion had been passed.)

On the tenth day he knew that the crisis was approaching; if she survived it, she would almost certainly recover. He was at her bedside hour after hour, helping in ail the details of nursing; Stapen’s wife and himself, though they rarely exchanged more than sharp question and answer, were grimly together in the struggle. And it was not only a struggle against disease, for every day the search for the barest essentials of food was a battle in itself. Only rarely could milk be obtained, while nourishing soups and other invalid delicacies were quite beyond possibility. The last of the food that he had brought with him from Novarodar had long since been consumed, so that now he too was relying on the acquisitive efforts of Stapen’s wife. Sometimes she went out early in the morning, with the temperature far below freezing- point, and came back at dusk, after tramping many miles—with nothing. A.J. never offered her copious sympathy, as Stapen did, yet there was between them always a secret comprehension of the agonies of the day. When he looked up from Daly’s flushed and twitching face it was often to sec Stapen’s wife gazing from the other side of the bed with queer, companionable grimness.

Once while Daly was sleeping they held a curious whispered conversation across the bed. She asked him how he intended to proceed when Daly was better, and then, after he had explained to her his plans, she said: “You’ll find the child a nuisance—perhaps a danger, too. There’s a very strict watch on all the frontiers.”

“I know that.”

“I wonder you bother to take her with you at all.”

“Oh?” He was surprised, and waited for her to continue. She said, after a pause: “Look after your own affairs—that would be my advice, if you asked for it.”

“And the child?”

“She can stay here.”

“For how long?”

“For always, if necessary. I don’t see that it matters whether she’s here or in a king’s palace, so long as she’s happy. And the way the world is just now, princesses haven’t much chance of happiness.”

“What would your husband say to that, I wonder?”

“Oh, him?”

She uttered the monosyllable with such overwhelming emphasis that it was not even contemptuous.

Neither of them pursued the argument farther. Yet it was strange how the problem of the child was growing in importance; hardly an hour passed now without some delirious mention of it by Daly. It seemed to be on her mind to the exclusion of all other problems. On the twelfth day she suddenly became clear-headed and told A.J. that she was going to get better. Then, with her next breath, she said: “But if I don’t, you will take the girl with you alone, won’t you?”

That word ’alone’—his first glimpse into another world—sank on his heart till he could scarcely reason out an answer of any kind.

She went on: “will you promise that—to take her with you alone—if—if I don’t—”

“But You are—oh, you are going to get better!”

“Darling, yes, of course I am. But still, I want your promise.”

He could do nothing but assent. But a moment later he said: “She would be all right, you know, left here—the Stapens would give her a good home.”

“But she’s ours—the only thing we can call ours, anyway. I’m pretending she belongs to us—I want somebody to belong to us. Do you understand?”

He nodded desperately.

“And so you do promise, then?”

“Yes, yes. You can trust me.”

She seemed to be suddenly calmed. In a few moments she went to sleep, and slept so peacefully that A.J.’s hopes surged again as he watched her. Then about midnight she woke up and touched his hand. “Dear,” she whispered, “I am quite happy. It has all been wonderful, hasn’t it?” He laid his cheek against her arm, and when he looked up she had closed her eyes. She never opened them to consciousness again. She died at a few minutes to one on that morning of the fourth of December nineteen hundred and eighteen.

A.J. took the child with him and set out from Saratof. There was a look of nothingness in his eyes and the sound of nothingness in his voice. Bitter weather had put a stop to Denikin’s advance, and the fugitives who passed him by along the roads were freezing as well as starving. He neither feared nor hoped; he pushed on, mile after mile over the snowbound, famine-stricken country; he was an automaton merely, and when he reached the Bolshevik lines the same automatism functioned to plan the necessary details of the final adventure. But it was no adventure, after all; he crossed over without a thrill, and was soon heading for the coast through a country harried by White Cossacks as well as by universal foes that knew and cared for no frontiers.

Soon, in some city full of White generals, his course of action should have been fairly simple. An interview at headquarters, the production of certain papers of identification with which Stapen had provided him, and the child would doubtless be taken off his hands and placed in the exalted groove to which her birth and the circumstances of the times entitled her. He had no relish for the task of surrender and explanation, nor yet was he reluctant to perform it; he cared simply nothing for the child, and as little for any praises that might be awaiting him as her deliverer.

The long journey from Saratof had been full of hardships, and the child, barely recovered from her earlier illness, was soon ailing again. Suddenly one morning, waking up in a small-town inn where they had both slept huddled together on the floor, A.J. knew that he was ill himself. He had scarcely strength to move, and fell in the roadway outside when he tried to resume the journey southward.

There was an American Relief detachment stationed in the town—a tiny fragment of the teeming wealth of the Far West, transferred bodily, as if by some miracle, to become an object of amazement on the stricken plains of Russia. The detachment had built itself hutments on the outskirts of the town; there were large hospital-wards, cleansing stations, and distributing depots for food and clothing. Outside the huts all was age-old and primeval; inside them, the white-coated surgeons and their enthusiastic helpers bustled about in a constant whirr of hygiene and efficiency. When A.J. and the child were carried into the examination room, particulars concerning them were neatly taken down by a Harvard graduate and filed away in an immense card- indexing cabinet. A.J. gave his assumed name, and when he was asked for an address he shook his head. He was then asked other questions—his age, profession, and where he had come from—but he was too ill to answer in detail, even if he had wished to. When, however, a separate card was filled in for the child and the latter was assumed to be his, he made an effort to explain something, but the Harvard graduate, knowing Russian imperfectly, did not fully comprehend, and A.J., seeing a whole world swimming round about him in vast circles of incredibility, was barely coherent. At last the Harvard man said: “You mean that the girl is not your child?” A.J. nodded. “Who is she then?” But he could only shake his head in reply, and they asked him no further questions. An hour later, when he was being undressed, the papers in his pocket were discovered, examined, found incomprehensible, and placed efficiently in the fumigating oven alongside his clothes and bundle of possessions. After a complete cleansing the whole lot were then made into a paper parcel, neatly ticketed, and put aside. The parcel was handed to him a month later when he left hospital after as near a death from typhus as two cheerful nurses from Ohio had ever watched for.

During delirium the had suddenly astonished these nurses by murmuring a few phrases in English, and this, on being reported to the higher authorities, had caused some little sensation. The Harvard graduate went even so far as to take a card from the filing-cabinet, inscribe in the ‘profession’ column the words ’speaks a little English—perhaps a waiter,’ and then replace the card in the filing-cabinet. When, after his delirium, the patient recovered consciousness, the nurses naturally addressed him in English; he would not answer at first, but on being told of his ravings, admitted that he knew the language. He would not, however, tell them anything more about himself, and firmly declined to converse. He soon gained a mysterious reputation, and several doctors, including one very eminent psycho- analyst from Boston, paid him special visits. The psycho-analyst said that he must have been blown up in the war, and specified the exact sections of his brain that had suffered most damage.

Once during Isis illness he had enquired about the child, but his questions could not be answered, being outside the province of the hospital staff. They assured him, however, that all children received by the relief detachments were splendidly looked after and that he had nothing at all to worry about. He was not worrying, as it happened. When he left the hospital he called at the relief headquarters to make further enquiry; the Harvard graduate turned up his card in the filing-cabinet, turned up the girl’s card, and declared, with business-like promptness, that she had been sent away. Then, seeing his own note on the man’s card, he added: “Ah, you’re the chap who speaks a little English, aren’t you? You won’t mind if I drop the Russian, then, eh?”

“I don’t mind,” A.J. said.

So they talked, or rather the Harvard graduate talked, in English. He explained that all orphaned children were being transferred to a big children’s camp in the Crimea, run by the Americans in connection with several American charitable organisations. There the children were being housed, fed, clothed, and looked after at American expense, and an attempt was even being made to get certain families in America to adopt individual children. “So far the response has been very gratifying,” declared the young man, toying with his horn-rimmed spectacles. “Of course it depends on our State Department how many are allowed to go, but I believe permission has already been given for the first batch.”

A.J. nodded.

“It would be possible, no doubt,” continued the young man agreeably, “to trace any particular child.”

“Yes, I see. But that would take time.”

“You are in a hurry?”

“No—not really—but I must get away.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

The Harvard man stared at the desk, thinking how typically Russian the reply was—so like a piece out of a Chekov play—in fact, to be candid, more than a little imbecile. Contenting himself with a final rally of his official self, he rejoined: “I trust there has been no mistake of any kind. We have it noted here that you came with the child, that you denied that you were the child’s father, and that you indicated that the child was without parents. That being so—”

“Oh yes, quite,” answered A.J., taking up his paper parcel. “It doesn’t matter, I assure you.”

And, after all, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was just passing out of the office after a perfunctory good-day, when the other called him back. “Just a moment. I don’t know whether—you see, you said you didn’t know where you were going to—”

“Yes?”

“Well, perhaps in that case you’d consider staying on here for a little while?”

“Why?”

“Well, you’d be pretty useful as an interpreter. The pay would be a dollar a day, and you could feed and sleep here, of course.”

“Thanks. I’ll stay.”

Such an instant acceptance seemed rather to disconcert the young man, but he managed to express his pleasure, and soon afterwards set A.J. to work on a pile of letters waiting to be deciphered from the Russian.

Thus A.J. became part of the American Relief detachment at Pavlokoff. His jobs, besides the translating and answering of letters, included the receiving and questioning of applicants for assistance, and he was also called for by anybody and everybody in all linguistic emergencies of every kind. He worked hard and was rather a success. Yet at the end of six months nobody knew him any better than at the beginning. The Harvard graduate, as well as many of the doctors and nurses, made innumerable efforts to break down the harrier and become intimate; hut, though always polite, A.J. never yielded an inch. They all concluded that he must be slightly mad, yet they all trusted him to a degree oddly inharmonious with such a conclusion.

One day in April the Harvard man approached him with an item of news that he evidently felt sure would lead to confidences. “Oh, I put through an enquiry,” he began, trying to appear very official, “about that young girl you were interested in. It seems she was in the first batch sent over to America. She must be there by now. Very lucky for her—I don’t think they’re intending to send any more.”

A.J. made no comment, and the other went on: “Yes, that’s right—she must have crossed on the Bactria some weeks ago. She hadn’t any name that our people knew of, so she was given one—’Mary Denver’—Denver being the city she was to be sent to on arrival the other side. Of course that’s only provisional—doubtless she’ll eventually take the name of the family that adopts her. I could find out who they are, I daresay though strictly speaking it would be against the rules.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” was all that A.J. said.

In the summer of 1919 the American Relief detachment was ordered home. A.J. had by that time saved up two hundred and fifty American dollars. When the time approached for the break-up of the organisation, he was rather surprised to find that he disliked the prospect of wandering vaguely about the earth again, even with American money in his pocket; he had grown so used to the clean, orderly rhythm of events with the Americans, to the daily baths, and the breakfast cereals, and the card-indexing system. Decadence, perhaps, but excusable. He felt too tired to break out of the comfortable groove, too uninterested ever again to find his own way about the world; he wanted just to be told quietly to do certain things, and to be given regular meals and a bed in return for doing them.

He applied for permission to go to America with the others, but though the heads of the medical staff strongly supported his application, it was turned down because of his supposedly Russian nationality. Then he told them, suddenly communicative after all those months of reticence, that he was not Russian but English by birth and parentage, and that his real name was Fothergill. The psycho-analyst doctor, who had all along been deeply interested in his case, was more than ever interested now. He questioned him further, about his birth, education, family, and so on, and to every question A.J. gave full and simple, answers, no longer wishing to conceal anything if concealment were to mean being flung back into the chaos of the world around.

All these particulars, together with the doctor’s earnest recommendation, were sent to the American Embassy at Constantinople, with the request that the hitherto mysterious but now elucidated Fothergill should be given a visa and allowed to proceed with the Relief detachment to America, where his services would continue to be of value. After a week or so came a somewhat curious reply. The visa could not be granted, but one of the attachés had been so interested in the case that he had got into touch with a friend of his in a British Military Mission. This friend knew the Fothergill family, it appeared, and knew, further, that one of them, presumably a brother of the applicant, had been an officer in Palestine during the War, and was now, he believed, stationed in Cairo awaiting demobilisation.

The American doctor informed A.J. of this, and suggested that he should proceed to Cairo on the trail of the long-lost brother. A.J. agreed, willing enough for anything, and after some further delay was provided with a visa from the British authorities at Constantinople.

He left Odessa on August 11th, 1919, and arrived in Cairo a week later. Captain William Fothergill had been informed, and the two men met at Shepheard’s Hotel. Neither, of course, could recognise the other, but by the time the second cocktail appeared they were in no doubt as to their proved brotherhood. As befitted Englishmen in such an emergency, they were restrained almost to the point of being embarrassed. “I suppose you must have had all sorts of adventures, living in Russia throughout the Revolution?” Captain William Fothergill remarked, with one finger running down the wine- list; and A.J. answered: “Oh yes, a few.”

Captain Fothergill was apt to be equally cursory about his own personal affairs: he owned rubber and coconut plantations in Sumatra which he had had to leave in the hands of a ‘damned artful Dutchman’ during the period of his war service. Now, of course, he was only waiting for demobilisation to be off to Singapore by the first available boat. “Seems to me you might as well come along too, if you’re at a loose end,” he said, and A.J. replied: “Yes, all right, I don’t mind. Will there be any job for me?”

“Oh Lord, yes, I can find you plenty to do. Ever looked after niggers’”

“No.”

“I don’t mean real niggers—just Chinks and Malays, you know. Queer fellers—all right as long as they’ve got someone to keep a strict eye on ’em. If you can do that, you’ll be worth your weight in gold on any rubber plantation.”

Captain Fothergill’s demobilisation papers arrived before the end of the month, and the two brothers caught a boat for Singapore, by way of Colombo, at the beginning of October.