Knight Without Armour (10 page)

The prison governor was a good-tempered, jovial fellow who liked to make
the days and nights pass by as pleasantly as possible for Himself and mankind
in general. Every morning he would tour the prison and greet the men with a
bluff, companionable—“Good morning, boys—how goes
it?” He was always particular about their food and the warmth of their
rooms, and he would sometimes pay a surprise visit to the kitchens to sample
the soup that was being prepared for them. He seemed a little in awe of some
of the politicals, but he was on friendly terms with most of the criminals,
and enjoyed hearing them give their own accounts of their various crimes. The
more bloodthirsty and exciting these were, the better he liked them; he would
sometimes, at the end of a particularly thrilling recital, clap a man on the
back and exclaim: “Well, you
are
a fellow, and no mistake! To
think of you actually doing all that!”

Naturally, the criminals invented all kinds of incredibilities to please
him.

A.J. soon found that the only way to keep his mind from descending into
the bitterest and most soul-destroying gloom was to think of the only
inspiring possibility open to a prisoner—that of escape. Together with
another political he began to plan some method of getting away, not
immediately, but as soon as the spring weather should make the open country
habitable. This task, with all its complications, helped the winter days to
pass with moderate rapidity. Unfortunately a fellow-prisoner who was a
government spy (there were many of these, sometimes unknown even to the
prison authorities) gave the plan away, and A.J. and his co-conspirator were
summoned before the governor. His attitude was rather that of a pained and
reproachful guardian whose fatherly consideration has been basely rewarded.
“Really, you know,” he told them, “that was a very foolish
thing to do. Your attempt to escape has already been reported to Petersburg,
and it will only make your eventual punishment more severe. The original idea
was to exile you to Yakutsk as soon as the season permitted, but now heaven
knows where you will be sent.” And he added, almost pathetically:
“Whatever made you act so unreasonably?”

So the position seemed rather more hopeless than ever. Soon, too, the
easy-going governor was sent away to another prison. The Petersburg
authorities transferred him to Omsk, and in his place was sent a different
type of man altogether—a small, dapper, bristling-moustached martinet,
whom everyone—prisoners and prison officials alike—detested with
venomous intensity. It was he who, the following May, sent for A.J. and
barked at him in staccato tones: “Ouranov, your case has been
reconsidered by the authorities in view of your recent attempt to escape.
Your revised sentence is that of banishment for ten years to Russkoe Yansk.
You will go first to Yakutsk, and then wait for the winter season. You will
need special kit, which you will be allowed to purchase, and I am instructed
to pay you the customary exile’s allowance, dated back to the time of
your entry into Siberia. Perhaps you will sign this receipt.”

A fortnight later the journey commenced. A.J. had spent part of the
interval in making purchases in the Irkutsk shops; the two Cossack guards who
were to accompany him to his place of exile advised him what to buy and how
much to pay for it. They were big, simple-hearted, illiterate fellows and
could give him few details about Russkoe Yansk, except that the journey there
would take many months. A.J. suspected that with the usual Siberian attitude
towards time, they were merely estimating vaguely; he could not believe that
even the remotest exile station could be quite so inaccessible. The first
stage was by road and water to Yakutsk. Along with hundreds of other exiles,
including a few women, the trek was begun across the still frost-bound
country to Katchugo, near the source of the Lena. This part of the journey
was made in twenty-mile stages and lasted over a week. The nights were spent
in large barn-like sheds, horribly verminous, and well guarded by sentries on
all sides.

At Katchugo the entire detachment was transferred to barges, and resigned
itself to a two months’ meandering down the river to Yakutsk, which was
reached towards the end of July. The horrors of that journey, under a sky
that never, during the short summer, darkened to more than twilight, engraved
still more deeply the mood of fatalism that had already descended on most of
the prisoners. A.J. was no exception. He did not find himself worrying much,
and he was not nearly so low-spirited as he had been amidst the comparatively
comfortable surroundings of the Irkutsk prison. He felt scarcely more than a
growing numbness, as if a part of his brain and personality were losing
actual existence.

Yakutsk was almost pleasant after the barges, and the remaining weeks of
the summer passed without incident. Prison regulations, owing to the
remoteness of the settlement, were lax enough, and A.J. made several
acquaintances. One of them, an educated exile who had been allowed to set up
as a boot-repairer, had even heard of Russkoe Yansk. It was on the Indigirka
river, he thought, well beyond the Arctic Circle. It could only be a very
small settlement and it was years since he had heard of anyone being sent
there. “Perhaps they have made a mistake,” he hazarded, with
dispassionate cheerfulness. “Or perhaps the place does not exist at all
and they will have to bring you back. That
has
happened, you know.
There was a man sent to one place last year and the Cossacks themselves
couldn’t find it. They looked for it all winter and then had to hurry
back before the thaw began.” He laughed heartily. “I’m not
inventing the story, I assure you. Some of those Petersburg officials
don’t know their own country—they just stare at a map and
say—’Oh, we’ll send him here—or
there’—and maybe the map is wrong all the time!”

Early in September the Lena, miles wide, began to freeze over, and soon
the whole visible world became transfixed in the cold, darkening glare of
winter. The two guards who had left Irkutsk in charge of A.J. and who had
spent the summer amusing themselves as well as the amenities of Yakutsk
permitted, now indicated that the time for the resumption of the journey had
arrived. From now
onwards it became a much more personal and solitary
affair—almost, in fact, a polar expedition, but without the spur of
hope and ambition to mitigate hardship. The three men, heavily furred, set
out by reindeer sledge into the long greyness of the sub-Arctic winter. Two
of them carried arms, yet the third man, defenceless, was given the place of
honour on all occasions—at night-time in the wayside huts, usually
uninhabited, and during the day whenever a halt was made for rest and food.
The temperature sank lower and lower and the sky darkened with every mile;
they crossed a range of bleak mountains and descended into a land of frozen
whiteness unbroken anywhere save by stunted willows. For food, there were
birds which the guards shot or snared, and unlimited fish could be obtained
by breaking through the thick ice in the streams. The fish froze stiff on
being taken out of the water; they had to be cut into slices and eaten raw
between hunks of bread. A.J.’s palate had by this time grown much less
fastidious, and he found such food not at all unpleasant when he was hungry
enough. The cold air and the harsh activity of the daily travel bred also in
him a sense of physical fitness which, at any other time, he would have
relished; as it was, however, he felt nothing but a grim and ever-deepening
insensitiveness to all outward impressions. He imagined vaguely the vast
distance he had already travelled, but it did not terrify him; it was merely
a memory of emptiness and boredom, and though he knew that the end of the
journey would mean the end of even the last vestige of changefulness, he yet
longed for it, because, for the moment, it seemed a change in itself.

One evening, thirteen weeks after leaving Yakutsk, the three men were
crossing a plain of snow under the light of the full moon. At the last
settlement, ten days previously, they had exchanged their reindeer transport
for dogs, and since then had been traversing this same white and empty plain.
There seemed, indeed, no obvious reason why the plain and the journey might
not go on for ever. The temperature was fifty below zero. A.J. had noticed
that for some hours the guards had been muttering to each other, which was
unusual, for in such cold air it was painful to speak. Suddenly, out of the
silver gloom, appeared the hazy shapes of a few snow-covered roofs; the
guards gave a cry; the dogs barked; a few answering cries came from the
dimness ahead. They had reached Russkoe Yansk.

It was smaller and more desolate than he had imagined. There were only
four Russians in exile there, none of them educated men; the rest of the
population consisted of a score or more natives of very low intelligence. The
native men, under the direction of the guards, began to dig an entry through
the snow into an unoccupied timber hut that was to belong to the new exile;
there were several of these deserted huts, for the settlement had formerly
been larger. The natives looked on in amazement when A.J. began to unpack the
bundle that he had not been allowed to touch since leaving Petersburg; they
had never before seen such things as books, writing-paper, or a
kerosene-lamp. The Russians looked on also with a curiosity scarcely less
childlike; they had seen no strange face for years, and their eagerness
bordered on almost maniacal excitement. A.J. addressed them with a few
cordial words and they were all around him in a moment, shaking his hands and
picking up one after another of his belongings; they had evidently been half
afraid of him at first. One of them said: “This shows that the
Government has not forgotten us—they know we are still here, or they
would not have sent you.”

A fire was made, and the two Cossack guards stayed the night in the hut.
The next morning they hitched up their dog teams, shook hands cordially
enough, and began the long return journey. A.J. watched them till the
distance swallowed up their sleigh and the hoarse barking of the animals.
Then he set to work to make his habitation more comfortable.

Russkoe Yansk was close to but not actually on the Arctic Ocean; the
nearest settlements, not much larger, were four hundred and four hundred and
fifty miles to west and east respectively. There was no communication of any
regular kind with the civilised world; sometimes a fur-trapper would take a
message and pass it on to someone else who might be going to Yakutsk, but
even in most favourable circumstances an answer could scarcely arrive in less
than twenty months. The nearest railway and telegraph stations were over
three thousand miles away.

The year was composed of day and night; the day lasted from June to
September only. In winter the temperature sometimes fell to seventy below
zero, and there were week-long blizzards in which no living human being could
stir a yard out of his hut. During the short summer the climate became mild
and moist; the river thawed and overflowed, causing vast swamps and floodings
that cut off the settlement from the world outside even more effectively than
did the winter cold and darkness.

A.J. had brought a fair supply of tea and tobacco, and with small gifts of
these he could secure the manual services of as many natives as he wanted,
apart from the four Russians, who would have lived their whole lives as
personal slaves in his hut if he had wished it. He did not feel particularly
sad, but he did begin to feel a strange Robinson-Crusoe kind of majesty that
was rather like an ache gnawing at him all the time. He was the only person
in Russkoe Yansk who could read, write, work a simple sum, or understand a
rough map. The most intelligent of the Russians had no more than the mind of
a peasant, with all its abysmal ignorance and with only a touch of its
shrewdness. The others were less than half-witted, perhaps as a result of
their long exile. They remembered the names of the villages from which they
had been banished, but they had no proper idea where those villages were, how
long their banishment had lasted, or what it had been for. Yet compared with
the native Yakuts, even such men were intelligent higher beings. The Yakuts,
with their women and families, reached to depths of ugliness, filth, and
stupidity that A.J. had hardly believed possible for beings classifiable as
mankind. Their total vocabulary did not comprise more than a hundred or so
sounds, hardly to be called words. In addition to physical unpleasantness
(many were afflicted with a loathsome combination of syphilis and leprosy),
they were abominable thieves and liars; indeed, their only approach to virtue
was a species of dog- like attachment to anyone who had established himself
as their master. With a little of the most elementary organisation they could
have murdered all the exiles and plundered the huts, but they lacked both the
initiative and the virility. Life to them was but an unending struggle of
short summers and long winters, of snow and ice, blizzard and thaw, of
fishing in the icy pools and trapping small animals for flesh and fur, of
lust, disease, and occasional gluttony. They had never seen a tree, and knew
timber only as material providentially floated down to them on the
spring-time floods. Even when he had picked up their rudimentary language,
A.J. could not interest them by any talk of the outer they were incapable of
imagination, and the only thing that stirred them to limited excitement was
the kerosene-lamp, which, after some experimenting, he made to burn with
certain kinds of fish-oil.

Now especially he had cause to be grateful to Savanrog, the enterprising
and sympathetic prison-guard at the Gontcharnaya. For the luggage, packed
according to the latter’s instructions, included all kinds of things
that A.J. would never have thought of for himself, but which now were found
to be especially useful. With them, and with the miscellaneous articles he
had purchased in Irkutsk, he was not badly equipped. He had his twelve books,
chosen apparently at random from his shelves in Petersburg; the only one he
would have thought of selecting himself was a translation of
Don
Quixote
, but the others soon grew to be odd but no less faithful
companions. One was a school text-book in algebra, another an out-of-date
year- book; another was Dickens’s
Great Expectations
—of
course in Russian. Mr. Pumblechook and Joe Gargery became the friends of all
his waking and sleeping dreams, and before them alone he could relax and
smile.