Knight Without Armour (22 page)

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.