Knight Without Armour

He was right; Tarkarovsk was still Red, though the town and district were being rapidly prepared for evacuation. The two jolting vehicles drove up to the railway station towards dawn, after a journey of nightmare weariness. Hour after hour the Commissar and his prisoner had been bumped along over the interminable Siberian plain, and now, at the station, with limbs sore and aching, they had to begin the next and perhaps more arduous task of finding scats on the train. The station was swarming with refugees from the surrounding country, most of them in a pitiable condition, and all frantically anxious to be out of the way when the White troops should enter. There had been no trains since the previous evening, though several were rumoured to be on their way. The stationmaster bowed respectfully when A.J. presented his papers; yes, he should certainly be given a compartment in the next train, but would there be any next train—that was the real question? “I cannot, you see, invent a train, Commissar—not being God, that is to say.” A.J. detected a slight impertinence behind the man’s outward obsequiousness. Of course the Whites were coming and the Reds were leaving; the fellow was adroitly trimming his sails to catch the new wind.

Throughout the hardships of the journey and now amidst the throng and scurry of the railway platform, the woman prisoner preserved a calm that had in it still that same slight touch of mockery. Of course it was not her place to worry about the train or the White advance; if the latter arrived before the former, the advantage would all be hers. She could afford to watch with equanimity and even exultation the growing congestion of the station precincts and the increasing anxiety on the faces of the two Red guards. Yet for all that, her attitude was no more than calm; it was as if she were neither hoping nor fearing anything at all. She sat on her bundle of possessions and watched the frantic pageant around her with a sleepy, almost mystical detachment. Even when, at three in the afternoon, the stationmaster came shouting the news that the train was arriving after all, she did not move or betray by a murmur that the matter concerned her; and this attitude, because it so queerly accorded with his own, stirred in A.J. a slight and puzzled attention.

The train arrived at half-past four, already full, with Red soldiers and refugees crouching between and on the roofs of the coaches. The two guards, doubtfully assisted by the stationmaster, opened the door of a second-class compartment (there was no first-class on the train) and drove its occupants on to the platform at the point of the revolver. They were refugees from Omsk, and pity for them was tempered with indignation at the horrible state in which they had left the compartment. They had ripped up the cushioned seats to make puttees to wind round their legs; they had scattered filth of every description all over the floor; and they (or some previous occupants) had also stripped the compartment bare of every detachable object. The two guards worked for half an hour to make the place habitable, and even then its interior atmosphere was still unpleasant.

The train left Tarkarovsk about dusk and crawled slowly westward. A.J., his prisoner, and the guards made a frugal breakfast of coffee and black bread. Both guards were huge fellows—one of a typical peasant type, and the other of superior intelligence but less likeable. As for the prisoner, her attitude remained exactly the same. At the first station west of Tarkarovsk news came that the Whites were on the point of entering that town; the train had apparently escaped by only the narrowest of margins. Yet the woman betrayed no suspicion of disappointment. She obeyed all A.J.’s requests with unassuming calmness; she sat where he told her to sit, ate when he told her to eat, and so on. He had now time to notice her appearance. She was perhaps under thirty years of age, though her type was that whose years are difficult to guess. Her hair was smooth and jet-black, framing a face of considerable beauty. Her lips had the clean, accurate curvings of the thoroughbred, and her eyes, when they were in repose, held a rather sleepy, mystical look. And she was not only calm; she was calming.