Knight Without Armour (9 page)

Outside in the corridor the rough manners of the police guard changed
abruptly to a mood of almost fatherly solicitude. “I wouldn’t
worry so much if I were you,” he remarked soothingly.
“Personally, I should much prefer exile to being herded in jail with
criminals and such-like. I always think it is a great scandal to mix up
decent fellows like yourself with that scum.” He went on to give A.J.
some practical advice. “As an exile you are entitled to a fair amount
of luggage, though the authorities will try to do you out of your privileges
if they can. I suggest that you make out a list of everything you want to
take with you, and I will see that the things are collected from where you
have been living.”

A.J. was too tired and depressed at that moment to consider the matter
with any zest, and the guard continued, with a curious mixture of
friendliness and officialdom: “Ah, I see—you are
upset—perhaps, then, you will be so good as to tell me and
I
will make out the list. Oh yes, I can write—I am a man of education,
like yourself. Come now, there is no time to lose. You will want heavy winter
clothes, the usual cooking utensils, blankets, and things like that. Oh yes,
and books—you are permitted by the regulations to take books with you.
You are a reader, of course? Ah, education is a wonderful thing, is it not?
Perhaps you would like me to have your books packed up and sent with the
other things?”

“There are too many of them,” A.J. answered dully. “Far
too many to carry.”

“But you would be allowed to take a dozen or so. Do you mean that
you have more than a dozen books? You are perhaps a professor, then, eh? Ah
well, I will ask them to send on a dozen for you, anyhow.”

And in due course the pertinacious fellow, whose name was Savanrog,
compiled his list and the bureaucratic machine, with numerous clankings and
rumblings, got to work upon it. Savanrog was delighted when, a few days
later, the complete assortment of articles arrived. By that time A.J. had
grown more resigned to his fate, a few days of solitary confinement in a
comparatively clean and comfortable cell having helped considerably towards
such a state. “You see,” Savanrog exclaimed, taking both
A.J.’s hands in his and shaking them, “I have managed it all for
you! Oh yes, I do not let anything slip past me. It is the turn of fortune
that has brought us together, Peter Vasilevitch—I have done my
duty—and as for our acquaintance, it has been a thing of delight. I
have always counted it a privilege to make myself known to eminent politicals
like yourself.”

“But surely I am not an eminent political?” A.J. answered,
half-smiling.

“Ah, you are too modest. Were you not the friend of Maronin, who
killed Daniloff, Minister of the Interior?”

A.J. let the question pass. It was the first intimation he had had that
his offence was reckoned as ‘friendship’ with the boy-assassin.
He had sometimes feared that he would be ranked as an accessory to the crime
itself; in which case, of course, his status would have been that of a
criminal, not a political. Savanrog’s chatter was, in its way,
reassuring.

At last the morning came when he was ordered to prepare for the journey.
Savanrog, at the final moment, shook hands with him, kissed him on both
cheeks, and gave him a black cigar. “It will be a breach of regulations
to smoke it, until you are across the Urals,” he told him, with a last
spasm of official correctitude. Then, leading A.J. into the corridor, he
marched him into a courtyard in which a hundred or so other prisoners were
already on parade, and with a great show of blustering brutality, pushed him
into line. A.J. did not recognise any of the faces near him. He was ordered
to separate his luggage into two bundles, a personal one to carry on his
back, and a larger one consisting of things he would not require until the
end of the journey, wherever and whenever that might be. The larger bundles
of all the prisoners were then collected into a van and carried away.
Afterwards the men themselves were divided up into two detachments, and here
came the final welcome proof that A.J. was a political; he was not put into
the group of those who had to wait for the blacksmith to manacle their wrists
together. Finally the whole melancholy procession was led out through the
prison-gate into the street. It was only a very short distance to the railway
station, and the throngs on the pavements stared with just that helpless,
half-compassionate, half-casual curiosity which A.J. had observed on so many
previous occasions when he had himself formed part of them.

After marching into a goods yard beyond the station and halting beside a
train, the manacled prisoners were pushed into cattle-trucks, but the
politicals were allowed to choose their own places in ordinary third-class
rolling-stock, passably clean and comfortable. A.J. found himself cordially
welcomed by the men of his compartment. There were five of them, with one
exception all young like himself. The exception was a very ancient fellow
with a huge head and a sweeping beard. Even before the train moved off A.J.
was told a good deal about his fellow-passengers. The old man’s name
was Trigorin—just Trigorin—he seemed to possess no other. His
offence had been the preaching of roadside sermons in which had occurred
certain remarks capable of seditious interpretation. He had been exiled once
before for a similar offence. “I am an old man,” he said,
“and nothing very dreadful can happen to me now. But of course it is
different for you youngsters.”

The journey to Moscow took two days, and then there was considerable delay
while the prison-train was shunted round the city and linked up with other
coaches from different parts of the country. Finally the complete train, by
this time very long, set out at a slow pace on its tremendous eastern
journey. To many of the prisoners there was something ominous in the fact
that they were now actually on the track of the Trans-Siberian, and spirits
were low during the first few hours. A.J., however, did not share the general
gloom; he remembered Siberia from his previous visit, and the name did not
strike any particular terror into his mind. When some of the young men spoke
with dismay of the possible fate in store for them, he felt strongly tempted
to tell them that parts of Siberia, at any rate, were no worse than many
parts of Europe. Trigorin, however, saved him from any temptation to recount
his own experiences. Trigorin described how conditions had improved since the
opening of the railway; during his first exile, he said, he had had actually
to walk three thousand miles from railhead at Perm, and much of the way
through blinding rain and snow. He gave lurid and graphic descriptions of the
horrors of the old forwarding prisons at Tiumen and Tomsk, and of the convict
barges on the rivers, and of the great Siberian highway along which so many
thousands of exiles had been driven to misery and death. “Things are
much better now,” he said, with sadly twinkling eyes. “We
politicals are pampered—no floggings, hospitals if we fall
ill—what more can we expect, after all? You youngsters, whose knowledge
of Siberia comes from Dostoievski’s book and a few lurid novelettes,
can’t realise what a good time politicals have nowadays. We die, of
course, but only of loneliness, and a man may die of that in bed in his own
home, may he not?”

A mood of curious fatalism sank upon A.J. during those days and nights of
travel. The journey was not too arduous; the food was coarse, but sufficient
in quantity and fairly nourishing; the military guards were easygoing
fellows, especially after all the politicals had given parole that they would
not attempt to escape during the train-journey. The future, of course, loomed
grimly enough, but A.J. did not seem to feel it; his mind had already attuned
itself to grimness. He kept remembering his interviews with Stanford and
Forrester, and their repeated assurances that the game was one of
’heads somebody else wins and tails you lose.’ Well, he had lost,
and he could not complain that he had not been amply warned of the
possibility. He felt, however, that he had had distinctly bad luck; it had
been pure misfortune, and not any personal carelessness or stupidity of his
own, that had led to his present position. But for his friendship with
Maronin all would have still been well. Yet he did not regret that
friendship. It was, on the contrary, one of the few things in his life that
he prized in memory.

He remembered one of Stanfield’s remarks: “If anything goes
wrong, you will have to become a Russian subject completely.” That
seemed of peculiar significance now that things
had
gone wrong, and it
was true, too, that whether he willed it so or not, he was becoming Peter
Vasilevitch Ouranov in a way he had certainly never been before. He wondered
frequently whether by this time the Secret Service people knew all about his
trouble. Most probably information had reached them, by their own secret
channels, within a few hours of his arrest. He could picture their
attitude—a shrug of the shoulders, a vaguely pitying look, and
then—forgetfulness. Perhaps Stanfield might have commented to Forrester
or Forrester to Stanfield: “Well,
he
didn’t last long, eh?
Still, we warned him. Wonder if he’ll play the fool by trying to make
out he’s English?”

A.J. had no intention of so playing the fool. It was not merely that he
had given his word, but that his common sense informed him how utterly
useless it would be. Apart from his knowledge of the English language, there
was nothing at all he could advance in support of any claim he might make to
be other than the Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov set out with authentic-looking
detail on his passport and papers of identity. And even supposing he managed
to persuade the authorities to enquire into his case, the result could only
mean a communication to the British Embassy, with what result he had been
warned. “The British authorities would merely arch their eyebrows with
great loftiness and disown you,” had been Stanfield’s way of
putting it. No, there was nothing to be gained by attempting the impossible;
the only course was simple endurance for the time being, and later, if he
could manage it, escape. Henceforward he was doomed to be Peter Vasilevitch
Ouranov without qualification, and, rather curiously, he now began to feel
what he had hardly felt before—a certain pride in his new identity. He
was
Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, exiled to Siberia for a political
offence; and he felt that same quiet, unending antagonism towards the
imperial authorities that the other exiles felt; he began to understand it,
to understand them, to understand why they were so calm, why they so rarely
roused the sleeping fury in their souls. They were saving it, as themselves
also, for some vaguely future day.

He began, too, to breathe with comfort and comprehension the vast easy-
going laziness of the country; he perceived why no one ever hurried, why
trains were always late, why the word ‘sichass’
(’presently’) was so popular and universal; after all, if people
were merely waiting for something to happen, there could be no special
urgency about things done in the meantime. And they were waiting for
something to happen—the exiles, the soldier-guards, the criminals in
their chains, the railway-workers, the prison officials—a calm,
passionless anticipation gleamed in their eyes when one caught them sometimes
unawares. As the train rumbled eastwards this sense of anticipation and
timelessness deepened immeasurably; life was just sunrise and sun-setting;
food, drink, talk; the train would pull up in a siding; when would it move
out again? ‘Sichass,’ of course; that might be in an hour or two,
or perhaps the next day; nobody knew—nobody very much cared. When the
train stopped, the prisoners sometimes climbed out and walked about the
country near the track, or else lay down in the long grass with the midday
sun on their faces. The nights were cold, but no snow had fallen yet. At
Omsk, Krasnoiarsk, and other places, some of the men left the train, in
charge of Cossack guards. Trigorin explained that they were the milder
cases—men who had not definitely committed any crime, but were merely
suspected of being ‘dangerous’ or of having ‘dangerous
opinions.’ “It is clear,” he declared comfortingly,
“that something much more serious is in store for all of us. We shall
know when we reach Irkutsk.”

They reached the Siberian capital three weeks after leaving Moscow; the
busy city, magnificently situated at the confluence of two rivers, gleamed
brightly in the late autumnal sun. The exiles were marched from the station
to the central forwarding prison and there split up into several groups.
Trigorin was sent off almost immediately; he was bound for Chita, near the
Manchurian frontier, and was to travel there with a contingent of local
criminals. The other politicals were immensely indignant about this; it was
against all the rules to put a political along with criminals, and much as
they hated the penal code, such a breach of it stirred them to punctilious
anger. The prison governor apologised; he was very sorry, but he could not
help it; Trigorin must go with the criminals, but he would be given a
separate railway coach. “Besides,” he explained, reassuringly,
“they are only local murderers—not bad fellows, some of
them.” Trigorin himself did not object at all, and actually rebuked his
friends for their uncharitable championship. “Let us not forget,”
he said, “that the only person to whom Christ definitely promised
paradise was a criminal. He, the greatest of all political prisoners, was
actually crucified between two of them.”

A.J.’s other fellow-passengers were also sent away, but whither, he
could not discover. He himself was kept at Irkutsk. It was a better managed
prison than the Gontcharnaya at Petersburg, but after the easy-going train-
journey the return to routine of any kind was irksome. A.J. found most of his
fellow-prisoners in a state of depression and melancholy that soon began to
affect him also, especially when the freezing up of the river and the first
big snowstorm of the season marked the onset of Siberian winter.