Knight Without Armour

After an hour or so Forrester returned and informed A.J. that he was to stay with them in their apartment for a fortnight at least, and that during that time he must consider himself a prisoner. The rather amusing object of the interval was to give time for his beard and moustache to grow. A.J. rather enjoyed the fortnight, for both Forrester and Stanfield were excellent company, and there was a large library of books for him to dip into. The two men came in and went out at all kinds of odd hours, and had their needs attended to by a queer-looking man-servant who was evidently trustworthy, since they spoke freely enough in front of him.

At the end of the fortnight, by which time A.J.’s face had begun to give him a remarkably different appearance, Forrester again photographed him, and a few days later handed him his new passport and papers of identity. It gave him a shock, at first, to see himself so confidently described as ‘Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov,’ born at such and such a place and on such and such a date. “You must get used to thinking of yourself by that name,” Forrester told him. “And you must also make it your business to know something about your own past life. Your parents, of course, are both dead. You have just a little money of your own—enough to save you from having to work for a living you are a studious, well-educated person, at present engaged in writing a book about—what shall we say?—something, perhaps, with a slightly subversive flavour—political economy, perhaps, or moral philosophy. Oh, by the way, you may permit yourself to know a little French and German—as much, in fact, as you do know. But not a word of English. Remember that most of all.”

The next morning A.J. was made to change into a completely different outfit of clothes. He was also given three hundred roubles in cash, a small trunk-key, and a luggage ticket issued at the Moscow station. After breakfast he said good-bye to Forrester and Stanfield, walked from their apartment to the station, presented his ticket, received in exchange a large portmanteau, and drove in a cab to an address Forrester had given him. It was a block of middle- class apartments on the southern fringe of the city. There chanced (or was it chance?) to be an apartment vacant; he interviewed the porter, came to terms, produced his papers for registration, and took up his abode in a comfortable set of rooms on the third floor. There he unlocked the portmanteau, and found it contained clothes, a few Russian books, a brass samovar, and several boxes of a popular brand of Russian cigarettes. These miscellaneous and well-chosen contents rather amused him.

Thus he began life under the new name. He was startled, after a few days, to find how easy it was to assume a fresh identity; he conscientiously tried to forget all about Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill and to remember only Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, and soon the transference came to require surprisingly little effort. Forrester had cautioned him not to be in any great hurry to begin his real work, so at first he merely made small purchases at the bookshop whose address he had been given, without attempting to get to know anyone. Gradually, however, the youthful, studious-looking fellow who bought text-books on economic history (that was the subject finally fixed on) attracted the attention of the bookseller, a small swarthy Jew of considerable charm and culture. His name was Axelstein. A.J. had all along decided that, if possible, he would allow the first move to be made by the other side, and he was pleased when, one afternoon during the slack hours of business, Axelstein began a conversation with him. Both men were exceedingly cautious and only after a longish talk permitted it to be surmised that they were neither of them passionate supporters of the Government. Subsequent talks made the matter less vague, and in the end it all happened much as Forrester had foreshadowed—A.J. was introduced to several other frequenters of the shop, and it was tacitly assumed that he was a most promising recruit to the movement.

A few days later he was admitted to a club to which Axelstein and many of his customers belonged. It met in an underground beer-hall near the Finland station. Over a hundred men and women crowded themselves into the small, unventilated room, whose atmosphere was soon thick with the mingled fumes of beer, makhorka tobacco, and human bodies. Some of the men were factory-workers with hands and clothes still greasy from the machines. Others belonged to the bourgeois and semi-intelligentsia—clerks in government offices, school teachers, book-keepers, and so on. A few others were university students. Of the women, some were factory-workers, some stenographers, but most were just the wives of the men.