Knight Without Armour

About himself—that was the question. Who was he? Who was he supposed to be? Why was he being taken to Khalinsk? And why the finery of a frock-coated railway station reception at such an hour? Then, alone in the rather dingy bedroom as the first light of dawn paled against the edges of the window-blinds, it occurred to him that the contents of his pockets might afford a clue. He examined them; he found a thick wallet containing a large sum in paper money and several official documents. One was a letter from Petrograd addressed to a Colonel Nikolai Andreveff, of Krasnoiarsk, appointing him Commissar of the town and district of Khalinsk, Western Siberia. And another was from the local council of Khalinsk, tendering their best respects and expressing sincere appreciation of’ the privilege conferred on them by the Petrograd government. A.J. read them through, put them back in the wallet, and then sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. He was still in his dark dream, and he dared not try to waken. There was no help for it; from the moment the frock-coat had entered the train at Tarkarovsk, a third identity had descended on him like a sealed doom.

So he became Nikolai Andreyeff, Commissar of Khalinsk, and he began to wonder whether he would be fortunate enough to arrange an escape before he was found out. As it chanced, it became increasingly impossible to arrange an escape; but then, on the other hand, he was not found out. Both time and place were, in fact, especially favourable to the impersonation; Khalinsk was a small town, well away from the main avenues of Siberian communication, and too remote at first even to be affected seriously by the Revolution itself. Most of its inhabitants, some ten thousand or so in number, were quietly and prosperously bourgeois; the surrounding district provided abundant food, and though the usual exchange of exports and imports with European Russia had been impeded, that had meant to the folk of Khalinsk no greater privations than a shortage of cotton-thread and Ford motor parts, and the necessity to use their best butter as axle-grease for farm-wagons. Khalinsk, indeed, was a little island of normality in the midst of a rising sea of chaos, and its new Commissar fitted into its peaceful scheme of things without much difficulty. Everyone agreed that he was a ‘queer’ man with ‘queer’ ways, but most were glad, in their bourgeois hearts, that Petrograd had not sent them a fire- eater. About a week after his arrival news came that his wife and child had died of typhus in Vladivostok, and Khalinsk people felt much sympathy for the quiet, rarely-speaking man who had to sit in his office signing travel-passes while his family were buried at the other end of a continent. When someone ventured to express that sympathy, all he received was a patient ’Thank you—it is most kind of you’—courteously given, but somehow not an encouragement to continue.

Once a visitor to Khalinsk who had known of Colonel Andreyeff in Krasnoiarsk commented that he would hardly have recognised him for the same man. “He was a wild fellow in those days—always ready to crack a joke—or another man’s head, for that matter. And now look at him!”

Khalinsk looked at him quite often, for the commissary office was in the centre of the town, adjoining the court-house and the prison, and the Commissar walked between his office and his hotel four times a day. In the hotel he had rooms of his own and took all his meals in private. But Khalinsk people could see him in their streets, and behind his desk whenever they had business with him; he presided, too, in the local courthouse, and paid official visits to the prison. His justice was firm, and the town’s young bloods soon learned that they could play no tricks with the new ruler; yet it was noticed and commented upon that in court he always looked as if he were only half attending and didn’t really care what happened.