Knight Without Armour

Cautiously he climbed to the summit of the first ridge. There moonlight helped him by showing a vague outline of the next one. He paused a moment to munch a little bread he had managed to save; there was still some left. At the next stream he filled his water-bottle to the brim. On the top of the second ridge he saw cigarette wrappings that had been thrown away by the soldiers, and that was heartening, for it showed that he was in the right direction. Twice after that he imagined he was lost, and the second time he had just decided to stay where he was until dawn, when he caught a distant glimpse of a pale clearing that seemed somehow familiar. He walked towards it, and there, glossy under the moonlight, lay that steep valley with the wilderness of thickets like a dark velvet patch at the upper end of it. He stumbled over the turf with tingling excitement in his blood, and all at once and surprisingly for the first time the thought came to him that she might not be there. What if she were not? If she had grown tired or terrified of waiting—if she had wildly sought to escape on her own—if she had lost hope of his ever returning? He gave a low whistle across the empty valley, and at once a hundred voices answered, so that he shivered almost in fear himself. Then he smiled; they were only owls. He reached the edge of the thickets and plunged into them, not caring that the brambles tore at his clothes and face and hands. In a little while he dared to speak—he shouted softly: “I’m coming—don’t be afraid—I’m coming. Tell me where you are.” And a voice, very weary and remote, answered him.

When he came at last to that little hollow of dead leaves she sprang up and clung to him with both arms, sobbing and laughing at the same time. “Darling—darling,” she whispered hysterically, and he felt all the ice in his soul break suddenly into the flow of spring. “Were you thinking I wouldn’t come?” he stammered, dazed with the glory of her welcome. She could not answer, but she was all at once calmed. Then he stooped and kissed her lips, and they were like the touch of sleep itself. “You must be so tired,” she said, and he answered: “I am—yes, I am.” There was a curious serenity about her that made him feel a child again—a child to whom most things are simple and marvellous.

They shared food and water and then lay down together on the bed of leaves until morning.

The chorus of birds awoke him at sunrise; he looked up and saw the blue sky between the branches and then looked down and saw her sleeping. He memorised her features as he might have done the contours of some friendly, familiar land; he saw her wide, round eyelids, and her slender nose, and her lips a little parted as she slept. He wondered if she were really beautiful, as one may wonder if a loved scene is really beautiful; for to him, as she lay there, she meant so much more than beauty. He saw her as the centre of a universe, and all else—those years of exile and loneliness and wandering—dissolved into background.

Then, as if aware that he was thinking about her so intensely, she wakened and smiled.

They finished what remained of the food and then talked over what was to be done next. Their immediate aim, of course, was to get as far away as possible from Saratursk, and for this the soldier disguise seemed the safest, though later it might be advisable to drop it. Even more pressing might soon be problems of food and shelter, since they could not expect to leave the forest for several days and the warm and dry weather had already lasted exceptionally.

As they set out under the trees that early morning they talked as they had never done before—about themselves, She told him of her family, of which, she believed, she might be the only survivor: her mother was dead; her father and two brothers had certainly been killed by the Reds; and among other relatives there were few whom she could be sure were still alive. They had all, of course, lost their money and possessions. Almost as an afterthought she told him that she had been married, and that her husband had been killed in Galicia fighting the Austrians. “Almost as soon as the war began, that was. We had been married four years, but we had no children. I am glad.”