Knight Without Armour

Some of the crowd were for marching on the house and storming it, but the Red leader, a shrewd, capable fellow, was impressed by the political importance of the prisoners and anxious to act with due circumspection. Let a few local shopkeepers be butchered by all means, but countesses and highly-placed White officers were too valuable to be wasted on the mob. Besides, being a person of good memory and methodical mind, he seemed to recollect that there had already been some bother about that particular countess; she had been captured in Siberia, hadn’t she, and had been on her way to Moscow in charge of some local commissar when, somehow or other, the two had escaped from the train and had not been heard of since? The beautiful countess and the susceptible commissar—what a theme for a comic opera! General Polahkin, whose victory over the Whites had been due partly to military ability but chiefly to the sudden and almost miraculous repair of a couple of machine-guns, smiled to himself as he gave orders that the house should be surrounded, arid that, if its occupants gave themselves up, they should be conducted unharmed to the town jail.

This operation was carried out without a hitch, and towards three o’clock in the morning the little procession entered the town. There were about a dozen White officers, whose resplendent uniforms and dejected faces contrasted piquantly with the shabby greatcoats and triumphant faces of their guards. There were five women also—dressed in a weird assortment of clothes, some of them walking painfully in ballroom slippers, and all rather pale and weary-looking. All except one gave occasional terrified glances at the jeering crowds that lined the streets to the prison entrance. The exception was the woman whose name everyone now knew—the woman who (according to a story that was being improved on, saga-Eke, with every telling) had beguiled a commissar into escaping with her and had then, somehow or other, escaped from him! The crowd were not disposed to be too unfriendly towards such a magnificent adventuress, and if she had only played the actress well enough, they were quite drunk enough to have cheered her. But she did not act the right part, and her appearance, too, was disappointingly unromantic. She gazed ahead with calm and level eyes, as if she were not caring either for them or for anything in the world.

When the captives were safely locked in the prison, the crowd, suffering a kind of reaction, began a systematic looting of the shops. They were, in truth, disconcerted by the tameness of what had promised to be highly exciting, and now worked out their spleen as best they could. Po did not object; loot was, after all, the perquisite of the poorly-paid soldier. By dawn the town presented a forlorn appearance; every window in the main street had been smashed and the gutters were full of broken glass and miscellaneous articles that had been stolen, broken, and then thrown away. Some of the local peasants, professing violently Red feelings, had taken part in the looting, and they, perhaps, had made most out of it, since they had homes in which they could store whatever they took. One small cottage attracted attention by having the end of a piano sticking out of the doorway; the acquirer could not play, but banged heavily with his fists to indicate his delight.

The following day was to some extent anti-climax; the revellers were tired and spent most of the time sleeping off the effects of the carousal. In the afternoon, however, fresh Red reinforcements arrived from the west—men of even more violent temperament than those already in possession, and accompanied, moreover, by several fluent and apparently professional orators who harangued the crowd in the market-place with unceasing eloquence. Polahkin, it soon appeared, was unpopular with these new arrivals; they doubted his ‘redness,’ and were particularly incensed because he had permitted the White captives to retain their lives.