Knight Without Armour

A.J. was interested enough to question him minutely about Krokol, but it was soon obvious why the clerk at Petrograd had been so impatient. Gregorovitch could give nothing but the vaguest description that might have applied to a thousand or ten thousand villages throughout the length and breadth of the country. Even the name, without a spelling, was a poor clue, since local people often called their villages by names unidentifiable in maps or gazetteers. Nor had Gregorovitch a notion whether Krokol was near or far from the sea, near or far from any big city, near or far from any railway or river. All he could supply was that repeated and useless mention of the wide street and the steepled church.

A.J. questioned him further about his family, but again his replies were valueless; he could only say that he had a brother named Paul and a sister named Anna. Of any family name he was completely ignorant, and was, indeed, completely convinced that it was unnecessary. “Is it not enough,” he asked, “that I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye? Everyone in Krokol knows me.”

He went on quietly protesting in this way until the train came to a slow standstill in the midst of the burning steppe. The halt was for no apparent reason save the whim of the engine-driver and fireman, who climbed down from their cab and lazed picturesquely on the shady side of the train. The air, motionless as the train itself, soon became hot and reeking inside the car, and those whose heads chanced to be in sunlight twitched and fidgeted under the glare. Movement, with its own particular discomforts, had somehow kept at bay the greater tortures of hunger and thirst; but now these two raged and stormed in a world to themselves. Water—bread—the words became symbols of all that a human being could live and die for. A scuffle suddenly arose at one end of the car; a man was drinking out of a bottle and his neighbour, unable to endure the sight, attacked him with instant and ungovernable fury. For a few seconds everyone was shouting at once, till at last the assailant was overborne, and was soon sobbing to himself, aware that he had behaved shamefully. And the others, beyond their anger, seemed not unwilling to be sorry for him. Then, with a sharp lurch, the train began to move again and the resulting breath of air took away the keener pangs for another interval.

Towards evening they reached a small station called Minarsk, where they were shunted into a siding and given water, but no food. The satisfaction of thirst, however, put everyone in a good humour for a time; chatter became quite animated, and noisy fraternisation went on between the occupants of the car and the swarming refugees from the station. A.J. was now beginning to know the circumstances and personalities of many more of his fellow-travellers. Besides the little man with one eye, there was a large family of exiles returning from Irkutsk and hoping to reach Kharkoff; there were others seeking family or friends, some whose villages had been destroyed in the fighting between Reds and Whites, some who travelled in the despairing belief that any place must be better than the one they had left. One old pock-faced and long-limbed Tartar confessed to a passionate love of travel for its own sake; his home had been on the Kirghiz plains, but he had never, in those old days, been able to afford the luxury of a third-class ticket. Since the Revolution, however, it had become increasingly easy to board trains without a ticket at all, and his life had become correspondingly and increasingly enjoyable. He had already (he told A.J.) been as far north as Archangel, as far east as Tomsk, and as far south as Merv. Now he was taking a westward trip; he hoped to visit Kiev and make a pilgrimage to the monastery there. He was quite happy. He chewed a little tobacco, but had had no food for days and did not seem greatly to mind hunger, thirst, or any other physical hardship.

The train remained in the siding until dawn, by which time cheerfulness had sunk to zero again, for the night air had been bitterly cold. To most had come the realisation that summer was practically over, and that to hunter and thirst would soon be added that more terrible enemy—winter. The transition between the seasons was always very short in that part of the country, so that when, soon after dawn, the sun did not appear and the cold wind still blew, it seemed as if winter had come in a single night.