Knight Without Armour

A.J. allowed himself to make several friends in that underground beer- hall, and the reality of its companionship together with the secrecy and danger of the meeting, made a considerable impression on him. Often news was received that one or another member had been arrested and imprisoned without trial. Police spies were everywhere; there was even the possibility, known to all, that some of the members might themselves be spies or agents provocateurs. Caution was the universal and necessary watchword, and at any moment during their sessions members were ready to transform themselves into a haphazard and harmless group of beer-drinking and card-playing roisterers.

It was only by degrees that A.J. came to realise the immensity of the tide that was flowing towards revolution. That club was only one of hundreds in Petersburg alone, and Petersburg was only one of scores of Russian cities in which such clubs existed. The movement was like a great subterranean octopus stirring ever more restlessly beneath the foundations of imperial government. An arm cut off here or there had absolutely no effect; if a hundred men were deported to Siberia a hundred others were ready to step instantly into the vacant places. Everything was carefully and skilfully organised, and there seemed to be no lack of money. The Government always declared that it came from the Japanese, but Axelstein hinted that most of it derived from big Jewish banking and industrial interests.

A.J. became rather friendly with an eighteen-year-old university student named Maronin. He was fair-haired, large-eyed, and delicate-looking, with thin, artistic hands (he was a fine pianist) and slender nostrils; his father had been a lawyer in Kieff. The boy did no real work at the university and had no particular profession in view; he lived every moment for the revolution he believed to be coming. A.J. found that this intense and passionate attitude occasioned no surprise amongst the others, though, of course, it was hardly typical.

Young Alexis Maronin interested A.J. a great deal. He was such a kindly, jolly, amusing boy—in England A.J. could have imagined him a popular member of the sixth-form. In Russia, however, he was already a man, and with more than an average man’s responsibilities, since he had volunteered for any task, however dangerous, that the revolutionary organisers would allot him. Axelstein explained that this probably meant that he would be chosen for the next ‘decisive action’ whenever that should take place. “He is just the type,” Axelstein explained calmly. “Throwing a bomb accurately when you know that the next moment you will be torn to pieces requires a certain quality of nerve which, as a rule, only youngsters possess.”

Regularly every week A.J. transmitted his secret reports and received his regular payments by a routine so complicated and devious that it seemed to preclude all possibility of discovery. He found his work extremely interesting, and his new companions so friendly and agreeable, on the whole, that he was especially glad that his spying activities were not directed against them. He was well satisfied to remain personally impartial, observing with increasing interest both sides of the worsening situation.

One afternoon he was walking with Maronin through a factory district during a lock-out; crowds of factory workers—men, women, and girls—were strolling or loitering about quite peaceably. Suddenly, with loud shouts and the clatter of hoofs, a troop of Cossacks swept round the street-corner, their lithe bodies swaying rhythmically from side to side as they laid about them with their short, leaden-tipped whips. The crowd screamed and stampeded for safety, but most were hemmed in between the Cossacks and the closed factory-gates. A.J. and Maronin pressed themselves against the wall and trusted to luck; several horsemen flashed past; whips cracked and there were terrifying screams; then all was over, almost as sharply as it had begun. A girl standing next to Maronin had been struck; the whip had laid open her cheek from lip to ear. A.J. and Maronin helped to carry her into a neighbouring shop, which was already full of bleeding victims. Maronin said: “My mother was blinded like that—by a Cossack whip,”—and A.J. suddenly felt as he had done years before when he had decided to fight Smalljohn’s system at Barrowhurst, and when he had seen the policeman in Trafalgar Square twisting the suffragette’s arm—only a thousand times more intensely.