Knight Without Armour (11 page)

Besides his few books his luggage contained several other things never
seen in Russkoe Yansk before. He had a watch and a clinical thermometer, a
few bottles and jars of simple medicines, and a pair of scissors; he had also
(he was sure) the only boot-trees north of the Arctic Circle. The police in
Petersburg, with typical inconsequence, had packed them inside a pair of
field- boots.

Oddly, perhaps, the time did not seem to pass very slowly. There was
always so much to be done—the mere toil of getting food, of repairing
and improving the hut, of keeping himself well clothed to withstand the
almost inconceivable cold. He did a little amateur doctoring whenever he
found anything he fancied he could cure amidst that nightmare of disease and
degradation. He made notes, without enthusiasm, yet somehow because he felt
he must, about the customs and language of the natives. He even tried to
teach the least stupid of the Russians to learn the Russian alphabet. And
whenever, during the long winter, or while day after day of blizzard kept him
a prisoner in the hut, he felt pangs of loneliness or disappointment piercing
to his soul, he would slip into a coma of insensibility and wait. The waiting
was not often for long. When, after the grey night of winter, the sunlight
showed again over the frozen earth, at first so very timidly, he welcomed it
with a smile that no one saw. Sometimes at midsummer he sailed clown the
swollen river in a small boat; once, with a couple of natives, he reached the
open Arctic and made a rough sketch-map of fifty miles of coast-line. He
hardly knew why he did such things—certainly not from any idea of
ultimate escape. There was nothing at all to prevent his making such an
attempt, except the knowledge of its utter hopelessness. His stern jailers
were the swamps in summer and the icy wastes in winter; and even if by some
miracle, he could pass them by, there was no place of safety to be reached.
It would have been more hopeful to make for the North Pole than for the
semi-civilised places in Siberia.

His first winter at Russkoe Yansk was that of 1909-10.

In the late spring of 1917 a small party of Cossacks set out
from Yakutsk by reindeer and dog sledge. They were seven in number and
travelled swiftly, visiting each one in turn of the remoter settlements.
Russkoe Yansk was almost the last.

They reached it in the twilight of a May noontide, and at the sound of
their arrival the entire native population—some dozen Yakut
families—turned out of their huts to meet them, surrounding the clog-
teams and chattering excitedly.

At length a tall figure, clad in heavy furs, approached the throng; and
even in that dim northern light there was no mistaking leadership of such a
kind. One of the soldiers made a slight obeisance and said, in Russian:
“Your honour, we are from Yakutsk.”

A quiet, rather slow voice answered: “You are most welcome, then.
You are the first to visit us for three years. Come into my hut. My name is
Ouranov.”

He led them a little distance over the frozen snow to a hut rather larger
than the rest. They were surprised when they entered, for it was so much
better furnished than any other they had seen. The walls were hung with clean
skins, and the stove did not smoke badly, and there were even such things as
tables, chairs, a shelf of hooks, a lamp, and a raised bed. Ouranov motioned
the men to make themselves comfortable. There was something in his quiet,
impersonal demeanour that made them feel shy, shy even of conveying the news
that they had brought with them. They stood round, unwilling to sit in those
astonishing chairs; most of them in the end squatted on the timber floor.

Ouranov was busying himself with the samovar. Meanwhile the soldiers could
only stare at one another, while the still shouting and chattering Yakuts
waited outside the hut in a tempest of curiosity. At last the spokesman of
the party began: “Brother, we are the bearers of good news. Don’t
be too startled when you hear it, though it certainly is enough to send any
man such as yourself out of his wits for joy. At Kolymsk that did actually
happen to one poor fellow, so you will understand, brother, why we are taking
such a long time to tell you.”

Then Ouranov turned from the samovar and smiled. It was a curious smile,
for though it lit up his face it seemed to light up even more the grimness
that was there. “Whatever news it is,” he said, “you may be
sure I shall not be affected in that way.”

“Then, brother, it is this. You are a free man. All exiles
everywhere are now released and may return to their homes, by order of the
new revolutionary government. Think of it—there has been a revolution
in Petrograd—the Emperor has been deposed.” And as if a hidden
spring had suddenly been touched, the soldiers all began to talk, to explain,
to shout out the good news, with all its details, to this man who knew
nothing. They had told the same story at each one of the settlements, and
every time of telling had made it more marvellous to them. Their eyes blazed
with joy and pity, and pride at having the privilege of conveying the first
blessings of revolution to those who stood most in need of them. But if only
Ouranov had been a little more excited, they would have been happier. He
handed them tea so quietly, and after they had all finished talking he merely
said: “Yes, it is good news. I will pack my things.”

The soldiers again ’stared at one another, a little awed, perhaps
even a little chilled; they had enjoyed such orgies of hysteria at the other
settlements, but this man seemed different—as if the Arctic had entered
his soul.

He said, rather perceiving their disappointment: “It is very kind of
you to have come so far to tell me. As I said before, there has been no news
for three years. There were four other exiles here then, but that same winter
three died of typhus, and another was drowned the following
summer.”

“So for over a year you have been altogether alone?” said one
of the soldiers.

“Oh, no. There have been the Yakuts.” And once more that grim
smile.

They fell to talking again of the revolution and its manifold blessings,
and after a little time they noticed that Ouranov seemed hardly to be
listening; he was already taking his books from the shelf and making them
into a neat pile.

Two days later eight men set out for the south. There was need to hurry,
as the warmer season was approaching and the streams would soon melt and
overflow.

As they covered mile after mile it was as if the earth warmed and
blossomed to meet them; each day was longer and brighter than the one before;
the stunted willows became taller, and at last there were trees with green
buds on them; the sun shone higher in the sky, melting the snows and
releasing every stream into bursting, bubbling life, till the ice in the
rivers gave a thunderous shiver from bank to bank; and the soldiers threw off
their fur jackets and shouted for joy and sang songs all the day long. At
Verkhoiansk there was a junction with other parties of released exiles, and
later on, when they had crossed the mountains, more exiles met them from Ust
Viluisk, Kolymsk, and places that even the map ignores.

Yakutsk, which was reached at the end of July, was already full of
soldiers and exiles, as well as knee-deep in thick black mud and riddled with
pestilence. Every day the exiles waited on the banks of the Lena for the boat
that was to take them further south, and every hour fresh groups arrived from
the north and north-east. Food and money were scarce; sick men and women
staggered into the settlement with stories of others who had died during the
journey; a few were mad and walked about moaning and laughing; every night
the soldiers drank themselves into quarrelsomeness and careered about firing
shots into the air and falling off the timbered paths into the thick mud;
every morning dead bodies were pushed quietly into the Lena and sent
northwards on their icy journey. Yet beyond all the misery and famine and
pestilence, Yakutsk was a city of hope.

Ouranov had little money, but he did not go hungry. The seven soldiers of
his escort had taken a curious fancy to him. They called him their captain,
and saw to it that he always had food and shelter. There was much in him that
they did not understand, but also something that attracted them peculiarly.
During the first part of the southward expedition he had naturally taken
command, for he knew the land far better than they, and was in less danger of
losing the track. After that it had seemed natural that he should go on
telling them when and where to halt, where to stay for the nights, and so on.
They let him do that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that they
thought him a little mad. They had a nickname for him which meant ’The
man who has forgotten how to talk.’ It was an obvious exaggeration,
since he did talk whenever there was need for it; yet even on such occasions
it was as if he were thinking out the words, and as if each word cost him
effort. They told one another that this was because he had been exiled by
himself and had been left alone so long. By the time of reaching Yakutsk the
legend had grown; Ouranov, they were saying, had been such a dangerous
revolutionary that, by the ex- Emperor’s personal order, he had been
sent to the remotest and most terrible spot in all Siberia. And after a week
of gossip in Yakutsk it was easy to say and believe that he had been ten
years utterly alone in Russkoe Yansk, and that he had not spoken a word
during the whole of that time. So now, when the soldiers saw him reading a
book or making pencil notes on paper, they said he must be learning language
over again.

At last came the long-awaited steamer, an old paddle-boat, built in
Glasgow in the ’seventies, towing behind it a couple of odorous and
verminous convict-barges. Fifteen hundred persons crammed themselves into the
boat and another thousand into the barges. There was nowhere to sleep except
on the bare boards of the deck or in the foul and pestilential holds; men and
women sickened, died, and were dropped overboard during that month of weary
chug-chugging upstream through a forlorn land.

By August the exiles were in Irkutsk. The city was in chaos; its
population had been increased threefold; it was the neck of the channel
through which Siberia was emptying herself of the accumulated suffering of
generations. From all directions poured in an unceasing flood of returning
exiles and refugees—not only from Yakutsk and the Arctic, but from
Chita and the Manchurian border, from the Baikal mines and the
mountain-prisons of the Yablonoi. In addition, there were German, Austrian,
and Hungarian war- prisoners, drifting slowly westward as the watch upon them
dissolved under the distant rays of Petrograd revolution; and nomad traders
from the Gobi, scraping profit out of the pains and desires of so many
strangers; and Buriat farmers, rich after years of war-profiteering; and
Cossack officers, still secretly loyal to the old régime: Irkutsk was a
magnet drawing together the whole assortment, and drawing also influenza and
dysentery, scurvy and typhus, so that the hospitals were choked with sick,
and bodies were thrown, uncoffined and by scores, into huge open graves dug
by patient Chinese.

On a warm August afternoon A.J. wandered about the Irkutsk railway depot,
threading his way amongst the refugees and listening for a few odd moments to
various political speeches that were being made by soldiers. He was dressed
in a nondescript, vaguely military uniform which he had acquired at Yakutsk
as soon as the cold weather had begun to recede; he might have been taken for
a Russian soldier, though not, at a second glance, for a very ordinary one.
His fine teeth, spare figure, and close-cropped hair and beard, would all
have marked him from a majority. His features, lined and rugged, were not
without a look of gentleness and pity; but as he wandered about the station
and freight- yards he seemed really to have no more than the shadow of any
quality; all was obscured by a look of uncomprehendingness that did not quite
amount to bewilderment.

The seven Cossacks who had been with him for so many weeks were also on
the platform, very dejected because they had been ordered east, while he, of
course, must take the first train in the other direction, He joined them for
a final meal of tea and black bread before their train arrived. “You
must go to Petrograd,” one of them told him earnestly. “All the
exiles are going there to work for the new government; Kerensky will find you
a job—perhaps he will make you an inspector of taxes.”

“No, no,” interrupted another. “Our brother is surely
fitted to be something better than an inspector of taxes. He has
books—he must be a great scholar; I should think Kerensky might make
him a postmaster, for a postmaster, after all, has to know how to read and
write.”

They argued thus until the train arrived, and A.J. stayed with them,
smiling at their remarks occasionally, but saying very little. There was a
great rush for seats on the train, and when at last the seven soldiers had
all crowded into a coach they leaned out of the open window and kissed
him—their captain, their legend, the man whom they would remember and
wonder at until the end of their lives. And he, when their train had gone,
strolled away still half smiling.

He lay at night, like thousands of others, in any sheltered corner he
could find, with a little bundle of all his possessions for a pillow. After
three more days a train came in from the east; it was grotesquely full
already, but he managed to find a place in a cattle-truck.

The train was very long, and between the first coach next to the engine
and the last cattle-truck at the rear the whole world lay in mad microcosm.
For the first coach was a dining-car, smooth-running and luxurious; you could
look through the windows and see military officers, spattered with gold
braid, picking their teeth after fried chicken and champagne, while
attendants in evening-dress hovered about them obsequiously. Next came the
first-class coach in which these magnates lived when they were not eating and
drinking; and next the second-class coaches, containing those who were not
fortunate enough to be high military officers; they were not allowed to use
the dining-car, but the attendants would sometimes, at an extortionate price,
supply them with food and drink. After that carne the third-class coaches,
crammed with soldiers of the Revolution, who bought or commandeered food at
wayside stations; and last, comprising two-thirds of the whole train, were
the cattle-trucks, packed from floor to roof with refugees and peasants and
returning exiles—folk who had spent their last paper rouble on a
railway ticket, or else had smuggled themselves on board with no ticket at
all, and who had nothing to eat except the food they could bargain for, or
the ghastly tit-bits they could rake out of rubbish-bins behind the station
refreshment-rooms.