Knight Without Armour

He began, too, to breathe with comfort and comprehension the vast easy- going laziness of the country; he perceived why no one ever hurried, why trains were always late, why the word ‘sichass’ (’presently’) was so popular and universal; after all, if people were merely waiting for something to happen, there could be no special urgency about things done in the meantime. And they were waiting for something to happen—the exiles, the soldier-guards, the criminals in their chains, the railway-workers, the prison officials—a calm, passionless anticipation gleamed in their eyes when one caught them sometimes unawares. As the train rumbled eastwards this sense of anticipation and timelessness deepened immeasurably; life was just sunrise and sun-setting; food, drink, talk; the train would pull up in a siding; when would it move out again? ‘Sichass,’ of course; that might be in an hour or two, or perhaps the next day; nobody knew—nobody very much cared. When the train stopped, the prisoners sometimes climbed out and walked about the country near the track, or else lay down in the long grass with the midday sun on their faces. The nights were cold, but no snow had fallen yet. At Omsk, Krasnoiarsk, and other places, some of the men left the train, in charge of Cossack guards. Trigorin explained that they were the milder cases—men who had not definitely committed any crime, but were merely suspected of being ‘dangerous’ or of having ‘dangerous opinions.’ “It is clear,” he declared comfortingly, “that something much more serious is in store for all of us. We shall know when we reach Irkutsk.”

They reached the Siberian capital three weeks after leaving Moscow; the busy city, magnificently situated at the confluence of two rivers, gleamed brightly in the late autumnal sun. The exiles were marched from the station to the central forwarding prison and there split up into several groups. Trigorin was sent off almost immediately; he was bound for Chita, near the Manchurian frontier, and was to travel there with a contingent of local criminals. The other politicals were immensely indignant about this; it was against all the rules to put a political along with criminals, and much as they hated the penal code, such a breach of it stirred them to punctilious anger. The prison governor apologised; he was very sorry, but he could not help it; Trigorin must go with the criminals, but he would be given a separate railway coach. “Besides,” he explained, reassuringly, “they are only local murderers—not bad fellows, some of them.” Trigorin himself did not object at all, and actually rebuked his friends for their uncharitable championship. “Let us not forget,” he said, “that the only person to whom Christ definitely promised paradise was a criminal. He, the greatest of all political prisoners, was actually crucified between two of them.”

A.J.’s other fellow-passengers were also sent away, but whither, he could not discover. He himself was kept at Irkutsk. It was a better managed prison than the Gontcharnaya at Petersburg, but after the easy-going train- journey the return to routine of any kind was irksome. A.J. found most of his fellow-prisoners in a state of depression and melancholy that soon began to affect him also, especially when the freezing up of the river and the first big snowstorm of the season marked the onset of Siberian winter.

The prison governor was a good-tempered, jovial fellow who liked to make the days and nights pass by as pleasantly as possible for Himself and mankind in general. Every morning he would tour the prison and greet the men with a bluff, companionable—“Good morning, boys—how goes it?” He was always particular about their food and the warmth of their rooms, and he would sometimes pay a surprise visit to the kitchens to sample the soup that was being prepared for them. He seemed a little in awe of some of the politicals, but he was on friendly terms with most of the criminals, and enjoyed hearing them give their own accounts of their various crimes. The more bloodthirsty and exciting these were, the better he liked them; he would sometimes, at the end of a particularly thrilling recital, clap a man on the back and exclaim: “Well, you are a fellow, and no mistake! To think of you actually doing all that!”

Naturally, the criminals invented all kinds of incredibilities to please him.