Knight Without Armour

“A good job you didn’t. They may have been charming—quite likely—but they were rogues, I’ll wager, and would probably have killed you for a small bribe. Our people have no morals—only a sort of good humour that impresses foreigners.”

A.J. went to the Willenskis’ twice a week to teach English to the two girls, aged fifteen and seventeen respectively. Neither learned anything, except in the dullest and least intelligent way; neither considered that life held any possible future except a successful marriage. The older girl would have flirted with him if he had been inclined for the diversion. The younger girl was the prettier, but had a ferocious temper. She boasted that she had once maimed for life a man who had come to the house to polish the floors. It was his custom to take off one of his shoes and tie a polishing cloth round his stockinged foot so that he could polish without stooping. The girl, then aged eleven, had flown into a temper because he had accidentally disturbed some toy of hers; she had seized a heavy silver samovar and dropped it on to his foot, breaking several bones. “And it wasn’t at all a bad thing for him,” she told A.J., “because father pays him something every now and then and he doesn’t have to polish the floors for it.”

A.J. sometimes went to parties at the Willenskis’ house; monsieur and madame (as they liked to be called) were hospitable, and refrained from treating him as they would have done a native teacher. Once he met Willenski’s brother, who was a publisher in Petersburg. Anton Willenski, well known to all the Russian reading public, took considerable interest in the young Englishman and, after an hour’s conversation, offered him a post in his own Petersburg office. “You are far too good a scholar to be teaching in a little place like Rostov,” he said. The post offered was that of English translator and proof-reader, and the salary double that which Hamarin paid. A.J. mentioned his contract at the school, but Willenski said: “Oh, never mind that—I’ll deal with Hamarin,” and he did, though A.J. could only guess how.

So A.J. left Rostov and went to Petersburg. That was in 1907, when he was twenty-seven. The change from the provincial atmosphere to the liveliness and culture of the capital was immeasurably welcome to him. The gaiety of the theatres and cafés, the fine shops on the Nevsky, the splendour of the Cathedral and of the Winter Palace, all pleased the eye of the impressionable youth whose job left him leisure for thinking and observing. He had been to Petersburg before, but to see it as a visitor had been vastly different from living in it. His rooms were across the river in the Viborg district; from his windows he could see, at sunset, the Gulf of Finland bathed in saffron splendour, and there was something of everlasting melancholy in that pageant of sky and water ushering in the silver northern night. Before he had been long in Petersburg he received other impressions—the glitter of Cossack bayonets and scarlet imperial uniforms, and in the darker background, the huge scowling mass of misery and corruption through which revolutionary currents ran like threads of doom. It was fascinating to watch those ever-changing scenes of barbaric magnificence and sordid degradation—to cheer the imperial sleigh as it swept over the snow-bound boulevards, to gaze on the weekly batches of manacled prisoners marching to the railway station en route for the Ural convict-mines, to see the crowds of wild-eyed strikers surging around the mills of the new industrialism. His work at Willenski’s office was easy; he had to superintend the translation of English works into Russian and to give them final proof-reading. It was also expected that he should make suggestions for new translations, and it was over this branch of his work that, after a successful and enjoyable year, he came to sudden grief. At his recommendation a certain English novel had been translated, printed, published, and sent to the shops; it was selling quite well when all at once the police authorities detected or pretended to detect in it some thinly-veiled allusions to the private life of the Emperor. Willenski was thus put in a most awkward position, since he supplied text-books to the government schools and had a strictly orthodox reputation to keep up; his only chance of escaping business ruin and perhaps personal imprisonment was by laying the entire blame on his subordinate. As he told A.J. quite frankly: “It just can’t be helped. They won’t do anything to you, as you’re English. If you were Russian they’d probably send you to Siberia—as it is, they can only cancel your permit.”