Knight Without Armour

She gave him a single quick glance that somehow expressed the utter simplicity of their relationship. Their lives had been knit together perfectly and completely; to have shared hunger and thirst and tiredness, to have hidden in dark thickets from enemies, to have washed in mountain streams and slept under high trees—all had built up, during those few hurried weeks, a tradition of love as elemental as the earth on which they had lain together.

When she was asleep he stared at the slowly passing landscape till he was drowsy himself. A little man next to him, who had been sleeping, then awoke and produced a small plug of chewing tobacco which he asked A.J. to share. A.J. thanked him but declined, and this led to conversation. There was something in the little man’s soft lilting voice that sounded vaguely familiar, and it soon appeared that it was he who had shouted down to the bandits in confirmation of A.J.’s own account of himself. As this intervention had quite probably saved the situation, A.J. felt grateful to him, though his appearance was far from pleasant. He was dirty and very verminous, and had only one eye; the other, he declared proudly, had been knocked out by a woman. He did not explain when or how. He was full of melancholy indignation over the cowardice of the others in dealing with the bandits. “Nobody but me had the courage to say a word to them,” he kept repeating, and it was undoubtedly true. “Just me—little Gregorovitch with the one eye—all the rest were afraid to speak.” A man some distance away shouted to him to stop talking, and added, for A.J.’s benefit: “Don’t listen to him, brother. He’s only a half-wit. The other half came out with his eye.” There was laughter at that, after which the little man fell into partial silence for a while, muttering only very quietly to himself. A.J. was inclined to believe the diagnosis correct; the man’s remaining eye held all the hot, roving mania of the semi-insane.

Later the little man began to talk again. He seemed to have something on his mind, to be nourishing some vast and shadowy grievance against the world in general, and from time to time he would scan the horizon eagerly with his single eye. His talk was at first so idle and disjointed that A.J. had much difficulty in comprehending him; it was as if the man’s brain, such as it might be, were working only fitfully. But by degrees it all worked itself out into something as understandable as it ever would be. He had been a soldier, conscribed to fight the Germans; he had fought them for two years without being injured—the eye (once again his plaintiveness soared momentarily into pride) was not a war-wound, but the work of a woman. (And once again, also, he forbore to explain when or how.) After the Revolution he had tried to get back home, but he had lost his papers, and apparently nothing could be done without papers. All he knew was his own name—Gregorovitch—and the name of his village—Krokol; and these two names, it appeared, hadn’t been enough for the authorities. With rather wistful indignation he described his visit to a government office in Petrograd, whither he had drifted after the collapse of the battle-fronts. “I should be glad,” he had said, “if you could tell me my full name and how I can get home. I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye, and I live at Krokol.”

“Krokol?” the clerk had said. (The little man imitated the mincing, educated tones of the bureaucrat with savage exaggeration.) “Krokol? Never heard of it? How do you spell it?”

“I don’t spell it,” Gregorovitch had replied.

“Don’t spell it? And why not?”

“Because I don’t spell anything. But I can describe it to you—it is a village with a wide street and a tiny steepled church.”

“I am afraid,” the clerk had then answered, “we can do nothing for you. Good-day.”

The little man’s eye burned with renewed fever as he recited this oft-told plaint. “Is it not scandalous,” he asked, “that in a free country no one can tell you who you are or where you come from?”

That had taken place a year before, and since then Gregorovitch had been travelling vaguely about in search of Krokol. He had just got on trains anywhere, hoping that sometime he might reach a place where Krokol was known. Occasionally he left the trains and walked, and always he hoped that just over the horizon he would come across the little steepled village.