Knight Without Armour

She seemed to be suddenly calmed. In a few moments she went to sleep, and slept so peacefully that A.J.’s hopes surged again as he watched her. Then about midnight she woke up and touched his hand. “Dear,” she whispered, “I am quite happy. It has all been wonderful, hasn’t it?” He laid his cheek against her arm, and when he looked up she had closed her eyes. She never opened them to consciousness again. She died at a few minutes to one on that morning of the fourth of December nineteen hundred and eighteen.

A.J. took the child with him and set out from Saratof. There was a look of nothingness in his eyes and the sound of nothingness in his voice. Bitter weather had put a stop to Denikin’s advance, and the fugitives who passed him by along the roads were freezing as well as starving. He neither feared nor hoped; he pushed on, mile after mile over the snowbound, famine-stricken country; he was an automaton merely, and when he reached the Bolshevik lines the same automatism functioned to plan the necessary details of the final adventure. But it was no adventure, after all; he crossed over without a thrill, and was soon heading for the coast through a country harried by White Cossacks as well as by universal foes that knew and cared for no frontiers.

Soon, in some city full of White generals, his course of action should have been fairly simple. An interview at headquarters, the production of certain papers of identification with which Stapen had provided him, and the child would doubtless be taken off his hands and placed in the exalted groove to which her birth and the circumstances of the times entitled her. He had no relish for the task of surrender and explanation, nor yet was he reluctant to perform it; he cared simply nothing for the child, and as little for any praises that might be awaiting him as her deliverer.

The long journey from Saratof had been full of hardships, and the child, barely recovered from her earlier illness, was soon ailing again. Suddenly one morning, waking up in a small-town inn where they had both slept huddled together on the floor, A.J. knew that he was ill himself. He had scarcely strength to move, and fell in the roadway outside when he tried to resume the journey southward.

There was an American Relief detachment stationed in the town—a tiny fragment of the teeming wealth of the Far West, transferred bodily, as if by some miracle, to become an object of amazement on the stricken plains of Russia. The detachment had built itself hutments on the outskirts of the town; there were large hospital-wards, cleansing stations, and distributing depots for food and clothing. Outside the huts all was age-old and primeval; inside them, the white-coated surgeons and their enthusiastic helpers bustled about in a constant whirr of hygiene and efficiency. When A.J. and the child were carried into the examination room, particulars concerning them were neatly taken down by a Harvard graduate and filed away in an immense card- indexing cabinet. A.J. gave his assumed name, and when he was asked for an address he shook his head. He was then asked other questions—his age, profession, and where he had come from—but he was too ill to answer in detail, even if he had wished to. When, however, a separate card was filled in for the child and the latter was assumed to be his, he made an effort to explain something, but the Harvard graduate, knowing Russian imperfectly, did not fully comprehend, and A.J., seeing a whole world swimming round about him in vast circles of incredibility, was barely coherent. At last the Harvard man said: “You mean that the girl is not your child?” A.J. nodded. “Who is she then?” But he could only shake his head in reply, and they asked him no further questions. An hour later, when he was being undressed, the papers in his pocket were discovered, examined, found incomprehensible, and placed efficiently in the fumigating oven alongside his clothes and bundle of possessions. After a complete cleansing the whole lot were then made into a paper parcel, neatly ticketed, and put aside. The parcel was handed to him a month later when he left hospital after as near a death from typhus as two cheerful nurses from Ohio had ever watched for.