Knight Without Armour

He drank some brandy to steady his nerves and spent the rest of the night in his easiest armchair. He did not care to enter the bedroom. Now that the police had left him, personal apprehensions were again overshadowed by grief.

He had fallen into a troubled doze when he was awakened by the sound of scuffling on the landing outside, punctuated by shrill screams from the woman who usually came in the mornings to clear up his room and prepare breakfast. She was evidently being compelled to give up her keys, and a moment later the door was unlocked and two police guards strode into the room. They were of a very different type from those of the previous visit. Huge, shaggy fellows, blustering in manner and brutal in method, A.J. recognised their class from so many stories he had heard in that underground beer-hall. “You are to come with us immediately,” one of them ordered gruffly. “Take any extra clothes and personal articles that you can put into a small parcel.” A.J. felt a sharp stab of panic; the routine was dreadfully familiar. “By whose orders?” he asked, feeling that a show of truculence might have some effect with men who were obviously uneducated; but the only reply was a surly: “You’ll find that out in good time.”

The men were armed with big revolvers, apart from which they were of such physique that resistance was out of the question. A.J. gathered together a few possessions and accompanied his two escorts to a pair-horse van waiting at the kerbside. This they bade him enter, one of them getting inside with him, while the other took the reins. The inside was almost pitch dark. After a noisy rattling drive of over half an hour the doors were opened and A.J. was ushered quickly into a building whose exterior he had no time to recognise. The two guards led him into a large bleak room unfurnished except for a desk and a few chairs. A heavily-built and dissipated-looking man sat at the desk twirling his moustache. When A.J. was brought in the man put on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and stared fiercely.

“You are Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov?” he queried; and to A.J.’s affirmative, merely replied: “Take him away.”

The guards continued their Journey with him along many corridors and across several courtyards. He knew that he was in a prison, though which one out of the many in Petersburg he had no idea. At last one of the guards unlocked and opened a door and pushed him into a room already occupied by what at first seemed a large crowd. But that was because, in the dim light admitted by a small and heavily-barred window, it was difficult to distinguish the inhabitants from their bundles of clothing.

They had seemed asleep when A.J. entered, but as soon as the guards retired and the door was relocked they all burst into sudden chatter. A.J., dazed and astonished, found himself surrounded by gesticulating men and youths, all eager to know who he was, why he had been sent there, and so on. He told them his name, but thought it wiser to say that no charge had been made against him so far. They said: “Ah, that is how it very often happens. They do not tell you anything.” They even laughed when he asked the name of the prison; it amused them to have to supply such information. It was the Gontcharnaya, they said.

Altogether there were a score or more inhabitants of that room. About half were youths of between seventeen and twenty-one. One of them told A.J. he had already been imprisoned for two months without knowing any charge against him, and there was a steady hopelessness in his voice as he said so. “These people are not all politicals,” he went on, whispering quietly amidst the surrounding chatter. “Some are criminals—some probably government agents sent to spy on us—who knows?—there is always that sort of thing going on. A fortnight ago two fellows were taken away—we don’t know where, of course—nothing has happened since then until you came.”