Knight Without Armour (32 page)

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.”