Knight Without Armour (8 page)

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

“Yes,” answered A.J.

“Is he here now?”

“Yes.”

“We must have a word with him.”

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

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

“Certainly. In there.”

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

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

“The porter brought him up?”

“Yes.”

“Continue.”

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

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

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

“Continue with the story.”

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

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

“Nothing at all.”

“And you could make no guess?”

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

“You know who the young man is?”

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

“And your name?”

“Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov.”

“How did you come to know Maronin?”

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

“What was he by profession?”

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

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

“I certainly was.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“I believe so—once.”

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

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

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

“Not the slightest.”

“May we examine your passport?”

“Certainly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Silence! Take him away!”

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