by James Hilton
“I should be a spy, in fact?”
“In a way, yes, but you would not be betraying anybody. You would merely make your confidential reports to our headquarters—you would not be working either for or against the revolutionaries themselves. We take no sides, of course—we merely want to know what is really happening.”
“I see. And the danger would be that the revolutionaries would find me out and think I was betraying them to the Russian police?”
“The danger, my friend, would be twofold, and I’m not going to try to minimise it in the least. There would be, of course, the danger you mention, but there would be the even greater danger that the Russian police would take you for a genuine revolutionary and deal with you accordingly. And you know what ‘accordingly’ means.”
“But in that case I suppose I should have to tell them the real truth?”
“Not at all—that is just what you would not have to do. You would have to keep up your pretence and accept whatever punishment they gave you. If you did tell them the truth, the British authorities would merely arch their eyebrows with great loftiness and disown you. I want you to be quite clear about that. We should, in the beginning, provide you with passport and papers proving you to be a Russian subject, and after that, if anything ever went wrong, you would have to become that Russian subject—completely. Do you see? We could not risk trouble with the Russian Government by having anything to do with you.”
“It seems rather a one-sided arrangement.”
“It is, as I can say from experience, having worked under it for the best part of my life. On the other hand, it has certain advantages which probably appeal to people like you and me rather more than to most others. It is interesting, adventurous, and quite well paid. It is also emphatically a job for the Cat that Walks by Itself—you remember Kipling’s story?—and I should imagine both of us are that type of animal.”
“Maybe.”
“Mind you, I don’t want to persuade you at all—and I do want you to have time to think the whole thing over very carefully before coming to a decision. Unless, of course, you feel that you may as well say ‘No’ straight away?”
A.J. shook his head. “I’ll think it over, as you suggest.”
“Then we’d better meet again to-morrow.” He gave A.J. an address, and the arrangement was made. A.J. did not sleep well that night. When he tried to look at the future quite coolly, when he asked himself whether his ambition really was to be a Secret Service spy in a Russian revolutionary club, the answer was neither yes nor no, but a mere gasp of incredulity. It was almost impossible to realise that such an extraordinary doorway had suddenly opened into his life. It was not impossible, however, to grasp the fact that if he did not accept Stanfield’s offer he would have to leave Russia in two days’ time, with very poor and uncertain prospects.
He called in the morning at the address Stanfield had given him—a well-furnished apartment in one of the better-class districts. Stanfield was there, together with another man, introduced as Forrester. “Well,” began Stanfield, “have you made up your mind?”
A.J. answered, with a wry smile: “I don’t feel in the least like jumping at the job, but I’m aware that I must either take it or leave Russia.”
“And you’re as keen as all that on not leaving Russia?”
“I rather think I am.”
“That means you’ll take on the job.”
“I suppose it does.”
Here Forrester intervened with: “I suppose Stanfield gave you details of what you’d have to do?”
“More or less—yes.”
“You’d have to be the young intellectual type—your accent and manner would pass well enough, I daresay. But what about enthusiasm for the cause—can you act?” He added, slyly: “Or perhaps you would not need to act very much, eh?”
“As an Englishman in Russia,” answered A.J. cautiously, “I have always felt that I ought to avoid taking sides in Russian politics. You can judge from that, then, how much I should have to act.”
Forrester nodded. “Good, my friend—a wise and admirable reply. I should think he would do, wouldn’t you, Stanfield?”
The latter said: “I thought so all along. Still, we mustn’t persuade him. It’s risky work and he knows some of the more unpleasant possibilities. It’s emphatically a game of heads somebody else wins and tails he loses.”
“Oh yes,” Forrester agreed. “Most decidedly so. The pay, by the way, works out at about fifty pounds a month, besides expenses and an occasional bonus.”
“That sounds attractive,” said A.J.
“Attractive?” Forrester turned again to Stanfield. “Did you hear that? He says the pay’s attractive! You know Stanfield, it’s the money that most people go for in, this job, yet I really do believe our friend here is an exception! He only admits that the money’s attractive!” With a smile, he swung round to A.J. “I’m rather curious to know what it is that weighs most with you in this business. Is it adventure?”
“I don’t know,” answered A.J. “I really don’t know at all.”
So they had to leave that engrossing problem and get down to definite talk about details. That definite talk lasted several hours, after which A.J. was offered lunch. Then, during the afternoon, the talk was resumed. It was all rather complicated. He was to be given a Russian passport (forged, of course, though the ugly word was not emphasised) establishing him to be one Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, a student. He must secure rooms under that name in a part of the city where he was not known; he must pose as a young man of small private means occupied in literary work of some kind. To assist the disguise he must cultivate a short beard and moustache. Then he must frequent a certain bookshop (its address would be given him) where revolutionaries were known to foregather, and must cautiously make known his sympathies so that he would be invited to join a society. Once in the society, it would be his task to get to know all he could concerning its aims, personnel, and the sources from which it obtained funds; such information he would transmit at intervals to an agent in Petersburg whose constantly changing address would be given him from time to time. It would not be expected, nor would it even be desirable, that he should take any prominent or active part in the revolutionary movement; he must avoid, therefore, being elected to any position of authority. “We don’t want you chosen to throw bombs at the Emperor,” said Forrester, “but supposing anyone else throws them, then we do want to know who he is, who’s behind him, and all that sort of thing. Get the idea?”
A.J. got the idea, and left the two men towards evening, after Stanfield had taken his photograph with an ordinary camera. That night and much of the next day he spent in packing. He had told the porter and the woman who looked after his room that he might be leaving very soon, so they were not surprised by his preparations for departure. In the evening, following instructions, he gave the two of them handsome tips, said good-bye, and drove to the Warsaw station. There he left his bags in the luggage office, giving his proper name (which was, in fact, on all the luggage labels as well). After sauntering about the station for a short time he left it and walked to Stanfield’s address. There he handed over to Forrester his English passport and luggage tickets. He rather expected to see Forrester burn the passport, but the latter merely put it in his pocket and soon afterwards left the house. Stanfield smiled. “Forrester’s a thorough fellow,” he commented. “He doesn’t intend to have the Russian police wondering what’s happened to you. To-night, my friend, though it may startle you to know it, Mr. A.J. Fothergill will leave Russia. He will collect his luggage at the Warsaw station, he will board the night express for Germany, his passport will be stamped in the usual way at Wierjbolovo and Eydkuhnen, but in Berlin, curiously enough if anyone bothered to make enquiries, all trace of him would be lost. How fortunate that your height and features are reasonably normal and that passport photographs are always so dreadfully bad!”
After an hour or so Forrester returned and informed A.J. that he was to stay with them i
n their apartment for a fortnight at least, and that during that time he must consider himself a prisoner. The rather amusing object of the interval was to give time for his beard and moustache to grow. A.J. rather enjoyed the fortnight, for both Forrester and Stanfield were excellent company, and there was a large library of books for him to dip into. The two men came in and went out at all kinds of odd hours, and had their needs attended to by a queer-looking man-servant who was evidently trustworthy, since they spoke freely enough in front of him.
At the end of the fortnight, by which time A.J.’s face had begun to give him a remarkably different appearance, Forrester again photographed him, and a few days later handed him his new passport and papers of identity. It gave him a shock, at first, to see himself so confidently described as ‘Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov,’ born at such and such a place and on such and such a date. “You must get used to thinking of yourself by that name,” Forrester told him. “And you must also make it your business to know something about your own past life. Your parents, of course, are both dead. You have just a little money of your own—enough to save you from having to work for a living you are a studious, well-educated person, at present engaged in writing a book about—what shall we say?—something, perhaps, with a slightly subversive flavour—political economy, perhaps, or moral philosophy. Oh, by the way, you may permit yourself to know a little French and German—as much, in fact, as you do know. But not a word of English. Remember that most of all.”
The next morning A.J. was made to change into a completely different outfit of clothes. He was also given three hundred roubles in cash, a small trunk-key, and a luggage ticket issued at the Moscow station. After breakfast he said good-bye to Forrester and Stanfield, walked from their apartment to the station, presented his ticket, received in exchange a large portmanteau, and drove in a cab to an address Forrester had given him. It was a block of middle- class apartments on the southern fringe of the city. There chanced (or was it chance?) to be an apartment vacant; he interviewed the porter, came to terms, produced his papers for registration, and took up his abode in a comfortable set of rooms on the third floor. There he unlocked the portmanteau, and found it contained clothes, a few Russian books, a brass samovar, and several boxes of a popular brand of Russian cigarettes. These miscellaneous and well-chosen contents rather amused him.
Thus he began life under the new name. He was startled, after a few days, to find how easy it was to assume a fresh identity; he conscientiously tried to forget all about Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill and to remember only Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, and soon the transference came to require surprisingly little effort. Forrester had cautioned him not to be in any great hurry to begin his real work, so at first he merely made small purchases at the bookshop whose address he had been given, without attempting to get to know anyone. Gradually, however, the youthful, studious-looking fellow who bought text-books on economic history (that was the subject finally fixed on) attracted the attention of the bookseller, a small swarthy Jew of considerable charm and culture. His name was Axelstein. A.J. had all along decided that, if possible, he would allow the first move to be made by the other side, and he was pleased when, one afternoon during the slack hours of business, Axelstein began a conversation with him. Both men were exceedingly cautious and only after a longish talk permitted it to be surmised that they were neither of them passionate supporters of the Government. Subsequent talks made the matter less vague, and in the end it all happened much as Forrester had foreshadowed—A.J. was introduced to several other frequenters of the shop, and it was tacitly assumed that he was a most promising recruit to the movement.
A few days later he was admitted to a club to which Axelstein and many of his customers belonged. It met in an underground beer-hall near the Finland station. Over a hundred men and women crowded themselves into the small, unventilated room, whose atmosphere was soon thick with the mingled fumes of beer, makhorka tobacco, and human bodies. Some of the men were factory-workers with hands and clothes still greasy from the machines. Others belonged to the bourgeois and semi-intelligentsia—clerks in government offices, school teachers, book-keepers, and so on. A few others were university students. Of the women, some were factory-workers, some stenographers, but most were just the wives of the men.
A.J. allowed himself to make several friends in that underground beer- hall, and the reality of its companionship together with the secrecy and danger of the meeting, made a considerable impression on him. Often news was received that one or another member had been arrested and imprisoned without trial. Police spies were everywhere; there was even the possibility, known to all, that some of the members might themselves be spies or agents provocateurs. Caution was the universal and necessary watchword, and at any moment during their sessions members were ready to transform themselves into a haphazard and harmless group of beer-drinking and card-playing roisterers.
It was only by degrees that A.J. came to realise the immensity of the tide that was flowing towards revolution. That club was only one of hundreds in Petersburg alone, and Petersburg was only one of scores of Russian cities in which such clubs existed. The movement was like a great subterranean octopus stirring ever more restlessly beneath the foundations of imperial government. An arm cut off here or there had absolutely no effect; if a hundred men were deported to Siberia a hundred others were ready to step instantly into the vacant places. Everything was carefully and skilfully organised, and there seemed to be no lack of money. The Government always declared that it came from the Japanese, but Axelstein hinted that most of it derived from big Jewish banking and industrial interests.
A.J. became rather friendly with an eighteen-year-old university student named Maronin. He was fair-haired, large-eyed, and delicate-looking, with thin, artistic hands (he was a fine pianist) and slender nostrils; his father had been a lawyer in Kieff. The boy did no real work at the university and had no particular profession in view; he lived every moment for the revolution he believed to be coming. A.J. found that this intense and passionate attitude occasioned no surprise amongst the others, though, of course, it was hardly typical.
Young Alexis Maronin interested A.J. a great deal. He was such a kindly, jolly, amusing boy—in England A.J. could have imagined him a popular member of the sixth-form. In Russia, however, he was already a man, and with more than an average man’s responsibilities, since he had volunteered for any task, however dangerous, that the revolutionary organisers would allot him. Axelstein explained that this probably meant that he would be chosen for the next ‘decisive action’ whenever that should take place. “He is just the type,” Axelstein explained calmly. “Throwing a bomb accurately when you know that the next moment you will be torn to pieces requires a certain quality of nerve which, as a rule, only youngsters possess.”
Regularly every week A.J. transmitted his secret reports and received his regular payments by a routine so complicated and devious that it seemed to preclude all possibility of discovery. He found his work extremely interesting, and his new companions so friendly and agreeable, on the whole, that he was especially glad that his spying activities were not directed against them. He was well satisfied to remain personally impartial, observing with increasing interest both sides of the worsening situation.
One afternoon he was walking with Maronin through a factory district during a lock-out; crowds of factory workers—men, women, and girls—were strolling or loitering about quite peaceably. Suddenly, with loud shouts and the clatter of hoofs, a troop of Cossacks swept round the street-corner, their lithe bodies swaying rhythmically from side to side as they laid about them with their short, leaden-tipped whips. The crowd screamed and stampeded for safety, but most were hemmed in between the Cossacks and the closed factory-gates. A.J. and Maronin pressed themselves against the wall and trusted to luck; several horsemen flashed past; whips cracked and there were terrifying screams; then all was over, almost as sharply as it had begun. A girl standing next to Maronin had been struck; the whip had laid open her
cheek from lip to ear. A.J. and Maronin helped to carry her into a neighbouring shop, which was already full of bleeding victims. Maronin said: “My mother was blinded like that—by a Cossack whip,”—and A.J. suddenly felt as he had done years before when he had decided to fight Smalljohn’s system at Barrowhurst, and when he had seen the policeman in Trafalgar Square twisting the suffragette’s arm—only a thousand times more intensely.
Throughout the summer he went on making his reports, attending meetings, arguing with Axelstein, and cultivating friendship with the boy Alexis. There was something very pure and winsome about the latter—the power of his single burning ideal gave him an air of otherworldliness, even in his most natural and boyish moments. His hatred of the entire governmental system was terrible in its sheer simplicity; it was the system he was pledged against; mere individuals, so far as they were obeying orders, roused in him only friendliness and pity. The Cossack guards who had slashed the crowd with their whips were to him as much victims as the crowd itself, and even the Emperor, he was ready to admit, was probably a quite harmless and decent fellow personally. The real enemy was the framework of society from top to bottom, and in attacking that enemy, it might and probably would happen that the innocent would have to suffer. Thus he justified assassinations of prominent officials; as human beings they were guiltless and to be pitied, but as cogs in the detested machine there could be no mercy for them.
About midnight one October evening A.J. was reading in his sitting-room and thinking of going to bed when the porter tapped at his door with the message that a young man wished to see him. Such late visits were against police regulations, but the chance of a good tip had doubtless weighed more powerfully in the balance. A.J. nodded, and the porter immediately ushered in Maronin, who had been standing behind him in the shadow of the landing.