Knight Without Armour (13 page)

Then suddenly his mind alighted on a third possibility—fantastic,
almost incredible, yet not, in such circumstances, to be rejected too
scornfully. After all, one way, and perhaps the best way, in which a culprit
might avoid discovery was by contriving that his crime should not be
discovered either. A.J. looked at the dead man, then at the tunic hanging
above him; and all at once his mind began arranging the future with
astonishing precision. Yet there was no astonishment in the way he accepted
every detail of an amazing scheme. He was cool, almost slow, in his
movements. First he stripped the body of the dead man. Next he undressed
himself and put on the dead man’s clothes. After that he dressed the
body in his own discarded garments. Then opening the door of the coupé, he
hurled the clothed body as far away from the track as he could. With luck it
might sink into a swamp and never be discovered at all, but even without
luck, it was hardly likely to attract much attention in such circumstances as
he would arrange. Refugees and peasants often fell out of trains; several
bodies had been noticed on the way from Irkutsk, but no one had thought of
stopping to identify or examine them.

After reclosing the door of the coupé, he washed in the lavatory- basin
and completed his toilet. The other man’s uniform fitted him very well
indeed, as did also the military top-boots. The brakes were already grinding
on the wheels as he pulled down the window-blinds, half lay down on the
couch, took up a magazine that was on the table, and closed his eyes. If
anyone opened the door from the platform it would appear that he had fallen
asleep whilst reading.

The rest of his scheme was comparatively simple, if only he could escape
attention at Tarkarovsk. Between Tarkarovsk and the next station there was
almost sure to be some suitable spot where, before dawn, he could jump from
the train and slip away across country. The disappearance of a high officer
would create a stir, but only eventually; it would be more natural first
of’ all to assume that any one of a dozen minor mischances could
account for it.

The train jerked and jangled to a
standstill—Tarkarovsk—Tarkarovsk. A sound of shouting reached him
from outside and then the scurry of footsteps running along the platform as
the train halted. He did not think Tarkarovsk was a very large place, but of
course even the smallest stations were crowded with refugees. Suddenly
sharper cries pierced the general din, and the door of the coupé opened
violently to admit an intruder very different from any A.J. had anticipated.
He was of small stature and corpulent, was dressed in a black frock-coat and
trousers, and carried a rather shabby top-hat. “Welcome, sir!” he
cried, making a profound bow. “As chairman of the local council of
Khalinsk, I bring you the town’s most gracious felicitations.”
A.J. rose in astonishment, whereupon the other, smiling and still bowing,
took hold of his hand and gave it a tremendous shaking. The dream in which
A.J. had been living for so long turned a corner now and swept into the
infinite corridors of another dream. Somehow or other he found himself
stepping out of the train; porters immediately entered it and began lifting
out quantities of luggage. Other men in frock-coats and top-hats were
presented to him, and he heard the little man saying sweetly: “The cars
are waiting outside, sir, if you are ready.” He walked across the
platform and out into the courtyard, where a huge Benz was waiting. He got
in; several frock- coats followed him; the luggage was packed into a second
car behind. Then the two cars lurched forward along a dusty uneven road. He
did not speak, but his companions, evidently thinking he was very sleepy,
commiserated with him on the inconvenience of arriving at a country railway
station at half-past three in the morning. Soon the road widened into the
typically Siberian town of Tarkarovsk. The cars pulled up outside the small
hotel, and A.J. was informed that a room had been engaged for him and that he
could take a rest, if he chose, until breakfast, after which the journey to
Khalinsk would be resumed. He gave rather vague thanks and said the
arrangement would suit him very well. The frock-coats conducted him upstairs
to his room with obsequious gestures and then went drown again, he guessed,
to have many drinks and much gossip about himself.

About himself
—that was the question. Who was he? Who was he
supposed to be? Why was he being taken to Khalinsk? And why the finery of a
frock-coated railway station reception at such an hour? Then, alone in the
rather dingy bedroom as the first light of dawn paled against the edges of
the window-blinds, it occurred to him that the contents of his pockets might
afford a clue. He examined them; he found a thick wallet containing a large
sum in paper money and several official documents. One was a letter from
Petrograd addressed to a Colonel Nikolai Andreveff, of Krasnoiarsk,
appointing him Commissar of the town and district of Khalinsk, Western
Siberia. And another was from the local council of Khalinsk, tendering their
best respects and expressing sincere appreciation of’ the privilege
conferred on them by the Petrograd government. A.J. read them through, put
them back in the wallet, and then sat on the edge of the bed with his head in
his hands. He was still in his dark dream, and he dared not try to waken.
There was no help for it; from the moment the frock-coat had entered the
train at Tarkarovsk, a third identity had descended on him like a sealed
doom.

So he became Nikolai Andreyeff, Commissar of Khalinsk, and he began to
wonder whether he would be fortunate enough to arrange an escape before he
was found out. As it chanced, it became increasingly impossible to arrange an
escape; but then, on the other hand, he was not found out. Both time and
place were, in fact, especially favourable to the impersonation; Khalinsk was
a small town, well away from the main avenues of Siberian communication, and
too remote at first even to be affected seriously by the Revolution itself.
Most of its inhabitants, some ten thousand or so in number, were quietly and
prosperously bourgeois; the surrounding district provided abundant food, and
though the usual exchange of exports and imports with European Russia had
been impeded, that had meant to the folk of Khalinsk no greater privations
than a shortage of cotton-thread and Ford motor parts, and the necessity to
use their best butter as axle-grease for farm-wagons. Khalinsk, indeed, was a
little island of normality in the midst of a rising sea of chaos, and its new
Commissar fitted into its peaceful scheme of things without much difficulty.
Everyone agreed that he was a ‘queer’ man with
‘queer’ ways, but most were glad, in their bourgeois hearts, that
Petrograd had not sent them a fire- eater. About a week after his arrival
news came that his wife and child had died of typhus in Vladivostok, and
Khalinsk people felt much sympathy for the quiet, rarely-speaking man who had
to sit in his office signing travel-passes while his family were buried at
the other end of a continent. When someone ventured to express that sympathy,
all he received was a patient ’Thank you—it is most kind of
you’—courteously given, but somehow not an encouragement to
continue.

Once a visitor to Khalinsk who had known of Colonel Andreyeff in
Krasnoiarsk commented that he would hardly have recognised him for the same
man. “He was a wild fellow in those days—always ready to crack a
joke—or another man’s head, for that matter. And now look at
him!”

Khalinsk looked at him quite often, for the commissary office was in the
centre of the town, adjoining the court-house and the prison, and the
Commissar walked between his office and his hotel four times a day. In the
hotel he had rooms of his own and took all his meals in private. But Khalinsk
people could see him in their streets, and behind his desk whenever they had
business with him; he presided, too, in the local courthouse, and paid
official visits to the prison. His justice was firm, and the town’s
young bloods soon learned that they could play no tricks with the new ruler;
yet it was noticed and commented upon that in court he always looked as if he
were only half attending and didn’t really care what happened.

His subordinates respected him, with the possible exception of Kashvin,
the assistant commissar. Kashvin, a local youth of considerable intelligence,
felt that the Petrograd authorities had needlessly superseded him in bringing
Andreyeff from Krasnoiarsk, and he was the more antagonistic to his superior
because he could not, with all his shrewdness, understand him. The two men,
indeed, were complete opposites. Kashvin was cordial, unscrupulous, an astute
observer of politics, and an impassioned orator. Probably, too, he was clever
enough to foresee that power at Petrograd would eventually pass into the
hands of extremists. During the autumn the normally easy-going life of
Khalinsk did very rapidly deteriorate; a garrison of soldiers arrived from
Europe with new and wilder doctrines; they were hardly willing to obey their
own officers, much less a local commissar. Great excitement, also, had been
caused by the establishment, in custody, of the ex-Emperor and his family at
Tobolsk, a few hundred miles away. Throughout October conditions grew more
and more turbulent, and it was clear that the situation in Petrograd was
already slipping out of the hands of the moderates. Then in November came
news of the Bolshevik revolution, and an immediate acceleration in Khalinsk
and all such places of the trend already in progress.

Even Kashvin found it increasingly difficult to keep his balance on the
political tight-rope. Following a custom beginning to be prevalent, the
soldiers had got rid of their officers and had elected others from their own
ranks; unfortunately, however, they obeyed their elected superiors no better
than anyone else. Kashvin’s loudest oratory could not persuade them to
cease their plundering raids into the town shops. Andreyeff did not try the
oratorical method; he collected a few personal supporters and made arrests.
Sternness succeeded for a while, until, quite suddenly, the blow was struck.
While the Commissar was sitting at the courthouse one morning in January, the
building was surrounded by soldiers and a spokesman entered to deliver an
ultimatum. The soldiers, he announced, wished to choose their own commissar
as well as their own officers; they had been in communication with Petrograd
and had received official support; so would, therefore, the Commissar kindly
consent to consider himself no longer a commissar until a vote had been
taken? Most observers expected Andreyeff to give a sharp answer, but, to
general surprise, he merely smiled (which he so rarely did) and replied:
“Certainly—with pleasure.” The vote was taken there and
then, and Kashvin was elected Commissar, with Andreyeff as his civilian
assistant. Again it was expected that the latter would indignantly refuse to
serve under his recent subordinate, but Andreyeff continued to give surprise
by his easy acceptance of the situation. And, indeed, the reversal of
position made more difference in theory than in fact. Kashvin, though
nominally in authority, was completely at the mercy of his military
supporters, while Andreyeff, exactly as before, continued his patient work of
issuing ration- cards, arranging for the distribution of food and fuel, and
making out travel- passes.

During the early months of the new year the position at Khalinsk was still
worsening. The nearness of Tobolsk, with its illustrious prisoners, brought
to the district a heavy influx of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary
spies, German and Allied secret agents, and freelance adventurers of all
kinds. Tobolsk was their goal, but Khalinsk was a safer place for plotting.
Half the pedlars and market-dealers were in the service of one or other
organisation, and every day brought new and more startling rumours. In March
a regiment of the new Red Army arrived from Ekaterinburg to relieve the older
men who had already served through most of the Siberian winter. Many were
criminals freshly released from European prisons; the best of them were
miners and factory-workers lured into the army by generous pay and rations.
They were all completely undisciplined and changed their officers with
monotonous regularity.

Towards the end of March the long succession of rumours did at length
culminate in something actual. Late one night the telephone-bell rang in the
commissary office; A.J., who was there working, answered it; the call came
from a post-house half-way between Khalinsk and the railway. The message
reported that there were rumours that the Trans-Siberian line had been cut by
White guards, assisted by Czecho-Slovak prisoners-of-war.

A.J., tired after a long day of wrestling with the complications of a new
rationing system, took no particular notice, since such scare messages
arrived almost regularly two or three nights a week. But a quarter of an hour
later another message came—this time from Tarkarovsk; no train, it
said, had arrived from the east since noon, and there were rumours that
counterrevolution had broken out at Omsk. A.J. rang through to the garrison
but could get no answer; Kashvin, he guessed, would be in bed and asleep; he
walked, therefore, a mile or so over the hard snow to the soldiers’
barracks. He found the place in a state of utter chaos and pandemonium, with
all the officers more or less drunk and incapable. Most of the men were in a
similar condition; it was a saint’s day, and by way of celebration they
had looted several wine-cellars in the town. A.J. tried to make known the
dangerous possibilities of the situation, and while he was actually in the
officers’ room there came a further telephone message from Pokroevensk,
ten miles away, conveying the brief information that counter-revolutionary
bands had occupied and plundered a neighbouring village. At this a few of the
officers struggled to rouse themselves, and men were hastily sent to the
armoury for rifles and ammunition. Meanwhile orders were given for a general
turn-out, but out of nearly a thousand men only two hundred could be equipped
for whatever emergency might arise. Hundreds were so drunk that they could
not stir from the floors on which they had collapsed; many also were sleeping
with women in the town and could not be reached at all.