Knight Without Armour (24 page)

So A.J. and Daly got aboard the train after all. There was hardly a square
foot of space, and they were huddled together against the dirtiest and most
odorous fellow-travellers, but there they were, as they had dreamed of being
for many days—on board a train that would take them a further stage on
their journey.

It was dawn, however, before the train started. In despair of surmounting
the hill from a standstill, the engine-driver reversed for a mile or so and
tried to take the gradient by storm. The manoeuvre failed, and the train was
again reversed. This time the order was given for all able-bodied men to get
out and push the cars over the crest of the rise, and by this means, with
many snortings and splutterings, the train did finally crawl over the summit.
There was then a further long wait while the pushers regained their places,
and it was not till an hour after sunrise that the train steamed into
Novochensk station, less than three miles from the scene of the hold-up.

A first view of Novochensk proved to A.J. how fortunate, after all, had
been the boy-bandit’s advice. The station was packed from end to end of
its large platforms and freight-yards, and the train, as it entered, seemed
to push a way through the crowd like a vehicle threading through a
fair-ground. Added, of course, to the normal pandemonium that the arrival of
any train would have caused, was the extra sensation arising out of the
hold-up. There was much agitated shouting and gesticulation among the railway
officials as the bodies of the shot soldiers were removed from the train. The
remaining soldiers had already revised their earlier estimate of the number
of attackers; it was now reckoned about a hundred.

Scarcely any of those waiting at Novochensk succeeded in getting a place
on the train, and those already in occupation dared not move for fear of
losing their own places. The station, too, was without food, and many of the
refugees had had nothing to eat for several days. Even water was scarce,
owing to the prolonged drought, and when buckets were handed into the cars,
there was barely enough to give each occupant a single quick gulp.

The train left Novochensk shortly before midday, and amidst the drowsy
torpidity of the afternoon A.J. had plenty of time and opportunity to observe
his fellow-passengers. There were perhaps fifty or sixty of them squatting on
the floor of the box-car; many were leaning against each other and trying to
sleep, and the whole effect was rather that of a litter of old rags. There
was just enough talk and movement, however, to indicate that the litter was
alive, and there was certainly ample liveliness of another kind. A.J. and
Daly, whose clothes had been fairly clean on entering, shared the common
misfortune during the first half-hour.

Here and there, and from time to time, some isolated phenomenon detached
itself from that jumble of rags, chatter, and drowsiness; a baby cried; a
woman opened her blouse and exposed a drooping shrunken breast-’ man
groaned heavily as he stirred in sleep; the train lurched over a bad patch of
line and drew a sigh, a curse, or a muttered exclamation from every corner of
that strange assembly. The sunlight, shining through the wooden slats, made a
flickering febrile patchwork of the whole picture, showing up here a piece of
gaudy-coloured cloth, there a greasy, dirt-stained face, and everywhere, like
a veil drawn in front of reality, the smoke rising from the men’s
coarse tobacco and the myriad particles of dust.

The speed of travel was very slow—never more than ten miles an hour,
and oftener no more than five; nor could anything be seen outside save that
vast, vacant expanse of brown earth, on which the horizon seemed to press
like a heavy, brazen rim. Miles passed without sight of a habitation, while
nothing moved over the emptiness save swirls of dust and curlews scared by
the train.

Actually she whispered to him as she leaned against the curve of his arm:
“Oh, I’m happy—I’m happy. I’m beginning to have
hope. When do you think we shall reach Kazan?”

“In two or three days, at this rate. Are you hungry?”

“Very, but I don’t mind. We had a good meal
yesterday.”

“I’ll try to get you some water to drink at the next
stop.”

“Yes, if you can. And for yourself too.”

“Oh, I’m all right. Are you tired?”

“Just a bit.”

“Then go to sleep now, if you like. At night it may be chilly and
you’ll be kept awake.”

She gave him a single quick glance that somehow expressed the utter
simplicity of their relationship. Their lives had been knit together
perfectly and completely; to have shared hunger and thirst and tiredness, to
have hidden in dark thickets from enemies, to have washed in mountain streams
and slept under high trees—all had built up, during those few hurried
weeks, a tradition of love as elemental as the earth on which they had lain
together.

When she was asleep he stared at the slowly passing landscape till he was
drowsy himself. A little man next to him, who had been sleeping, then awoke
and produced a small plug of chewing tobacco which he asked A.J. to share.
A.J. thanked him but declined, and this led to conversation. There was
something in the little man’s soft lilting voice that sounded vaguely
familiar, and it soon appeared that it was he who had shouted down to the
bandits in confirmation of A.J.’s own account of himself. As this
intervention had quite probably saved the situation, A.J. felt grateful to
him, though his appearance was far from pleasant. He was dirty and very
verminous, and had only one eye; the other, he declared proudly, had been
knocked out by a woman. He did not explain when or how. He was full of
melancholy indignation over the cowardice of the others in dealing with the
bandits. “Nobody but me had the courage to say a word to them,”
he kept repeating, and it was undoubtedly true. “Just me—little
Gregorovitch with the one eye—all the rest were afraid to speak.”
A man some distance away shouted to him to stop talking, and added, for
A.J.’s benefit: “Don’t listen to him, brother. He’s
only a half-wit. The other half came out with his eye.” There was
laughter at that, after which the little man fell into partial silence for a
while, muttering only very quietly to himself. A.J. was inclined to believe
the diagnosis correct; the man’s remaining eye held all the hot, roving
mania of the semi-insane.

Later the little man began to talk again. He seemed to have something on
his mind, to be nourishing some vast and shadowy grievance against the world
in general, and from time to time he would scan the horizon eagerly with his
single eye. His talk was at first so idle and disjointed that A.J. had much
difficulty in comprehending him; it was as if the man’s brain, such as
it might be, were working only fitfully. But by degrees it all worked itself
out into something as understandable as it ever would be. He had been a
soldier, conscribed to fight the Germans; he had fought them for two years
without being injured—the eye (once again his plaintiveness soared
momentarily into pride) was not a war-wound, but the work of a woman. (And
once again, also, he forbore to explain when or how.) After the Revolution he
had tried to get back home, but he had lost his papers, and apparently
nothing could be done without papers. All he knew was his own
name—Gregorovitch—and the name of his village—Krokol; and
these two names, it appeared, hadn’t been enough for the authorities.
With rather wistful indignation he described his visit to a government office
in Petrograd, whither he had drifted after the collapse of the battle-fronts.
“I should be glad,” he had said, “if you could tell me my
full name and how I can get home. I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye,
and I live at Krokol.”

“Krokol?” the clerk had said. (The little man imitated the
mincing, educated tones of the bureaucrat with savage exaggeration.)
“Krokol? Never heard of it? How do you spell it?”

“I don’t spell it,” Gregorovitch had replied.

“Don’t spell it? And why not?”

“Because I don’t spell anything. But I can describe it to
you—it is a village with a wide street and a tiny steepled
church.”

“I am afraid,” the clerk had then answered, “we can do
nothing for you. Good-day.”

The little man’s eye burned with renewed fever as he recited this
oft-told plaint. “Is it not scandalous,” he asked, “that in
a free country no one can tell you who you are or where you come
from?”

That had taken place a year before, and since then Gregorovitch had been
travelling vaguely about in search of Krokol. He had just got on trains
anywhere, hoping that sometime he might reach a place where Krokol was known.
Occasionally he left the trains and walked, and always he hoped that just
over the horizon he would come across the little steepled village.

A.J. was interested enough to question him minutely about Krokol, but it
was soon obvious why the clerk at Petrograd had been so impatient.
Gregorovitch could give nothing but the vaguest description that might have
applied to a thousand or ten thousand villages throughout the length and
breadth of the country. Even the name, without a spelling, was a poor clue,
since local people often called their villages by names unidentifiable in
maps or gazetteers. Nor had Gregorovitch a notion whether Krokol was near or
far from the sea, near or far from any big city, near or far from any railway
or river. All he could supply was that repeated and useless mention of the
wide street and the steepled church.

A.J. questioned him further about his family, but again his replies were
valueless; he could only say that he had a brother named Paul and a sister
named Anna. Of any family name he was completely ignorant, and was, indeed,
completely convinced that it was unnecessary. “Is it not enough,”
he asked, “that I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye? Everyone in
Krokol knows me.”

He went on quietly protesting in this way until the train came to a slow
standstill in the midst of the burning steppe. The halt was for no apparent
reason save the whim of the engine-driver and fireman, who climbed down from
their cab and lazed picturesquely on the shady side of the train. The air,
motionless as the train itself, soon became hot and reeking inside the car,
and those whose heads chanced to be in sunlight twitched and fidgeted under
the glare. Movement, with its own particular discomforts, had somehow kept at
bay the greater tortures of hunger and thirst; but now these two raged and
stormed in a world to themselves. Water—bread—the words became
symbols of all that a human being could live and die for. A scuffle suddenly
arose at one end of the car; a man was drinking out of a bottle and his
neighbour, unable to endure the sight, attacked him with instant and
ungovernable fury. For a few seconds everyone was shouting at once, till at
last the assailant was overborne, and was soon sobbing to himself, aware that
he had behaved shamefully. And the others, beyond their anger, seemed not
unwilling to be sorry for him. Then, with a sharp lurch, the train began to
move again and the resulting breath of air took away the keener pangs for
another interval.

Towards evening they reached a small station called Minarsk, where they
were shunted into a siding and given water, but no food. The satisfaction of
thirst, however, put everyone in a good humour for a time; chatter became
quite animated, and noisy fraternisation went on between the occupants of the
car and the swarming refugees from the station. A.J. was now beginning to
know the circumstances and personalities of many more of his
fellow-travellers. Besides the little man with one eye, there was a large
family of exiles returning from Irkutsk and hoping to reach Kharkoff; there
were others seeking family or friends, some whose villages had been destroyed
in the fighting between Reds and Whites, some who travelled in the despairing
belief that any place must be better than the one they had left. One old
pock-faced and long-limbed Tartar confessed to a passionate love of travel
for its own sake; his home had been on the Kirghiz plains, but he had never,
in those old days, been able to afford the luxury of a third-class ticket.
Since the Revolution, however, it had become increasingly easy to board
trains without a ticket at all, and his life had become correspondingly and
increasingly enjoyable. He had already (he told A.J.) been as far north as
Archangel, as far east as Tomsk, and as far south as Merv. Now he was taking
a westward trip; he hoped to visit Kiev and make a pilgrimage to the
monastery there. He was quite happy. He chewed a little tobacco, but had had
no food for days and did not seem greatly to mind hunger, thirst, or any
other physical hardship.

The train remained in the siding until dawn, by which time cheerfulness
had sunk to zero again, for the night air had been bitterly cold. To most had
come the realisation that summer was practically over, and that to hunter and
thirst would soon be added that more terrible enemy—winter. The
transition between the seasons was always very short in that part of the
country, so that when, soon after dawn, the sun did not appear and the cold
wind still blew, it seemed as if winter had come in a single night.

Then the train moved out and resumed its slow jog-jog over the badly-laid
track. Towards noon the weather, which till then had been merely cold and
cloudy, turned to rain, which at first was greeted with joy, for it removed
all fears of a water-shortage. It was, plainly, the end of the long drought,
and such torrents were falling within an hour that the thirsty had only to
hold their tin cups through the slats to have them, after a few moments,
half- filled. But the removal of thirst served only to accentuate hunger,
from which many, especially the women, were already suffering torments.

A.J. had slept intermittently during the night and had tried to shelter
Daly with his great-coat; she, too, had slept, but he was concerned by the
way she had felt the cold. Throughout the morning the weather worsened in
every way, and by late afternoon everyone (except the Tartar) was in the
lowest depth of misery and depression. The roof of the car leaked water on
the huddled occupants, and a slanting wind cut in like knives. It was sad to
remember that twenty-four hours before men had been shielding their faces
from the sun; for now the sun seemed a last good friend who had deserted
them. No one could draw comfort from the grey and empty desolation of those
plains that stretched mile beyond level mile until all was hazy in rain-swept
distance.