Knight Without Armour

There was no doctor to attend her; there had been none for the little princess, either. There was no private doctor, in fact, in the whole town. Typhus, spread by the war and nourished by the famine, had overwhelmed Saratof to an extent that A.J. had hardly realised during his few days in the place. The hospitals were full, with patients lying on stretchers between the beds; emergency hospitals were also full, and more were being hastily built; yet still the disease raged and spread, and the death-rate had been steadily and appallingly on the increase for weeks. All the hospitals were being managed by skeleton staffs of doctors and nurses, and it had lately become so difficult to give patients proper attention that many who stayed in their homes with no professional doctoring at all had probably an equal, if not a superior chance of recovery. Stapen evidently thought so, and urged A.J. not to try to get Daly into one of the hospitals. It would have been quite impossible, in any case, for they were State institutions and every patient entering had to pass through a sieve of official enquiries. The same reason had prevented Stapen from trying to find a hospital-bed for the princess, and now, as he comfortingly explained to A.J., he was very glad of it. “The countess will be far better here, just as the princess was,” he assured him, and A.J.’s heart warmed towards the old man for showing such willingness to share the burden of this extra misfortune, though in fact it was Stapen’s wife on whom the burden mostly fell.

A.J., fortunately, was at his best in an emergency of such a kind. He had a fine instinct for doctoring, and had acted as amateur doctor for so long and with such success during a part of his life that he felt none of that vague helplessness that afflicts the complete layman when faced with medical problems. He had also a particular knowledge of typhus itself; he had often diagnosed cases, and was quite familiar with the normal course of the disease. Apart from which, he possessed the proper temperament for living through anxious moments; he was calm, quiet, soothing, and never despondent. Stapen, he soon found, was no use at all except as an amiable figurehead to surround the whole affair with an atmosphere of benignity and goodwill; it was his wife who did and was everything. This hard-faced, dour, and rather truculent woman soon drew from A.J. the deepest admiration; he perceived that it was she, and she alone, who had saved the child’s life. And she tackled this additional job of nursing Daly with an apparent grudgingness which concealed, net so much a warm heart, as a thoroughly efficient soul. J, could well imagine the sort of cook she had been, and be cold also well imagine the sort of butler Stapen had been.

So Saratof, which was to have been but a stage on a final dash to freedom, became instead a last prison closing them round. To A.J., sitting at the bedside, nothing remained but love. He realised, now as never before, how dear she was, and how utterly beyond beauty to him. His mind glowed and throbbed with a hundred memories of her; he saw her dark eyes opening at dawn, and heard her deep tranquil laughter echoing amongst the boles of great trees; he felt again the slumberous passion that had seemed to wrap them both in unity with every little rustling leaf. From his first notice of her in the prison- cell at Khalinsk, everything had had the terrible, lovely reality of a child’s fairy-tale.

A good deal of the time she was in delirium and talked ramblingly, but sometimes her mind cleared for a few moments and she would beg him to look after himself and try not to take the disease from her. She often said: “Oh, I’m so sorry just at the end of our journey—I do feel I ought to be ashamed…”

He comforted her by relating how Denikin’s army was advancing, thus lessening the distance between themselves and safety even while she lay in bed.

Often, in her delirium, she called his name, appealing to him to protect her from shadowy terrors, but sometimes even her delirium was calm and she would talk serenely about all kinds of things. She constantly mentioned the girl, calling her ‘our little princess’ in the way they had joked about her during the barge journey.

About a week after the onset of the fever she appeared to become very much better, and A.J. began to hope that the crisis was passing. She talked to him that day quite lucidly about their plans for escape; the Whites, he told her, were now only forty or fifty miles to the south, so that they might count themselves fortunate, even in the delay. Then she asked suddenly: “Where can we be married, do you think?”

He answered: “In Odessa, perhaps or Constantinople, at any rate.”