by James Hilton
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.”
She continued: “I stayed on our estates as long as I could; I never believed our old servants would turn against me, but they did, in the end—they were intimidated, no doubt. Then there seemed nothing left but to clear out of the country altogether, which my friends had been urging me to do for a Ion, while. A few of them who were plotting against the Reds asked for my support, and I gave it to some extent, but my real desire was to get away—out of it all—utterly. When I was taken prisoner I was terribly disappointed at first, as you can imagine. Then a mood came on me in which nothing seemed to matter at all. Even when I tried to bribe you and you refused, I didn’t find myself caring very much. But now I’m beginning to care again—a little—and it hurts—it’s really more convenient not to have any hopes and fears. But I want to live—oh, I do want us both to live—we must—mustn’t we?”
“Yes,” he replied, and the word, as he uttered it, seemed a keystone set upon his life. Then he began to tell her, quite simply and dispassionately, of his own years of exile, though not of anything previous to that. As it was, the accounting was like turning old keys in rusty locks; to no one ever before had he spoken of those bitter years that had frozen his soul with their silence just as hers had been numbed by grief.
All morning they trudged from ridge to ridge, skirting Saratursk at a wide radius, and then making in a southwest direction. He kept a continually watchful look-out, for he thought it more than possible that the Reds would resume their search of the forests. Nobody, however, appeared within sight until mid-afternoon, when they saw, far off on a hillside, a man gathering small timber for fuel. They were so hungry by then that A.J. took the risk of walking up to him and, posing as a soldier who had lost his way, asking to buy food and drink. The man was quite cordial, and took A.J. to his tiny cottage half a mile away, where he lived with his wife and a large family amidst conditions of primitive savagery. It seemed a pity to take food from such people, but the man was glad to sell eggs, tea, and bread at the prices A.J. offered. It was hard, indeed, to escape from his good-natured friendliness, and especially from his offer to show the way in person for few had been made when A.J.’s desire to be unaccompanied almost offensively clear, the man’s puzzlement changed to a gust of amusement. “Ah, I begin to see how it is, comrade,” he chuckled. “You have a woman waiting for you out there in the woods, eh? Oh, don’t be afraid—I shan’t say anything! You’re not the first soldier who’s deserted the Red army and taken to the hills with a woman. But I’ll give you this bit of advice—if you do happen to meet anyone else at the same game, be careful—for they shoot at sight. They’re wild as wolves, many of’ em.”
A.J. thanked the fellow and was glad to walk away with an armful of food and nothing worse than a roar of laughter behind him. When he rejoined his companion they continued their walk for a mile or so and then sat down to eat, drink, and rest. It was already late afternoon and they had had nothing since the few crusts of bread at early morning. A.J. now gathered sticks for a small fire, on which he boiled eggs and made tea. The resulting meal lifted them both to an extraordinary pitch of happiness; as they sat near the smoking embers while the first mists of twilight dimmed the glades, a strange peacefulness fell upon them, and they both knew, even without speaking, that neither would have chosen to be anywhere else in the world. All around them lay enemies; to- morrow might see them captured, imprisoned, or dead; there might be horror in the future to balance all the horrors of the past; yet the tiny oasis of the present, with themselves at the core of it, was a sheer glow of perfection.
They were so tired that they did not move before darkness came, and then merely lay clown on the brown leaves. The evening air was chilly, and they clung together for warmth with their two great-coats huddled over them. All the small and friendly sounds of the forest wrapped them about: an owl hooted very far away; a mouse rustled through the near undergrowth; a twig broke suddenly aloft and fell with a tiny clatter to the ground. She kissed him with a grave, peaceful passion that seemed a living part of all the copious, cordial nature that surrounded them; they hardly spoke; to love seemed as simple and as speechless as to be hungry and thirsty and tired. That night he could almost have blessed the chaos that had brought them both, out of a whole world, together.
On the fifth day they fell in with a peasant who told them of a quick way into the plains. He was a bent and gnarled fellow of an age that looked to be anything between sixty and eighty, and with the manner of one to whom Bolshevism and revolution were merely the pranks of a young and foolish generation. He was full of chatter, and told A.J. all his family affairs, besides pointing to a small timbered roof on a distant hillside that was his own. He had left a sick daughter alone in that hut with five small children; her husband was a soldier, fighting somewhere or other—or perhaps dead—no news had been received for many months. “Of course he will never come back—they never do. She has had no baby now for over two years—is it not dreadful? And she would make a good wife for any man when she is in good health—oh yes, a very good wife.”
A.J. made some sympathetic remark and the old man continued: “But what are young men nowadays? Mere adventurers pretending to want to see the world! What is the world, after all? When you have seen one forest you have seen them all, and one field is very much like another. I myself am quite happy to have been no further than Vremarodar, seventy versts away.” He chuckled amidst the odorous depths of a heavy matted beard and still continued: “I don’t suppose you’d ever guess my age, either, brother. I’m a hundred and three, though people don’t always believe me when I tell them. You see my youngest daughter’s only thirty-five, and people say it’s impossible.” He chuckled again, “but it isn’t impossible, I assure you—I’m not the sort of fellow to tell you a lie. Why, look at me now, still fit and hearty, as you can see, and if there was a pretty woman about, and my honour as a man depended on it, I don’t know but what…” His chuckles boiled over into resonant laughter. “Mind you, I’m not what I used to be, by a long way, and I think it’s a girl’s duty to look after her father when he lives to be my age, don’t you? She’s not a bad girl, you know, but she’s inclined to be lazy and I have to thrash her now and again. Not that I like doing it, but women—well, you know all about them, I daresay. Ah well, there’s your path—it leads out into a long valley and at the end of that there are the plains as far as you can sec. Good- day to you, brother, and to you too, madam.”
The next day they reached the edge of the forests and saw the plains stretching illimitably into the hazy distance. But before descending, it was necessary to make arrangements. It was certain that they would meet man’’ strangers once they left the hillsides, and with the prospect, too, of colder weather, they could no longer rely on sleeping out of doors. A soldier’s disguise, for the woman especially, seemed therefore likely to be a source of danger, and A.J. de
cided that it would be Better for them to resume their peasant roles. In his own case the change was inconsiderable, since so many peasants wore army clothes whenever they could acquire them; and as for Daly, she had only to change into the female attire that she had been carrying with her all the way from Saratursk.
The change was made, and on the seventh day, very early in the morning, they left the forests. The sky was fine, but clouds were already massing on the horizon for a thunderstorm that would doubtless Tiring to an end the long spell of fine weather. It was still hard to make more than the sketchiest plan of campaign. Amidst those lonely Ural foothills there had been an atmosphere of being out of the world, removed from many of its bewilderments and troubled by nothing more complicated than the elemental problem of the hunted eluding the hunter. In the plains, however, all problems were subtler and more intricate—as intricate, at least, as the political and military situation of the country generally. At Saratursk, before the escape, A.J. had tried to visualise what was happening as a whole, and not merely locally, but it had been difficult owing to the wildness of the rumours that gained credence. Every morning there had come a fresh crop of them—that the German Kaiser had committed suicide, that Lenin had been shot in Moscow by a young girl, that a British army was invading from Archangel, that the Japanese were approaching from the east along the line of the Trans-Siberian; there had been no lack of such sensational news, much of which was always more likely to be false than true. It seemed, however, fairly probable that Czecho-Slovak detachments were by this time in full occupation of great lengths of the Trans- Siberian, and it was also possible (as rumour alleged) that they had pushed up the Volga and captured Sembirsk and Kazan. The repulse of the Whites from Saratursk would appear, in that case, to have been a merely isolated and local affair—as local, in fact, as the Red Terror that had followed it. But then, all Russia was seething with such local affairs, and the history of the whole country could scarcely be more than the sum-total of them. A village here might be Red, or there White, and a stranger could hardly tell which until he took the risk of entering it. The Czechs, despite their imposing position on the map, held merely the thin line of the railway; a few versts on either side of the track their sway ended, and the brigandage of Red and White soldiery went on without interruption.
So much A.J. had in mind, though there was little he knew for certain. If there had been any fixed battle-line between Red and White, it would have been a straightforward task, despite the danger of it, to make for the nearest point of that line and cross over. As it was, however, there could be no advantage in joining up with some small and local White colony which, in a few days or weeks, might surrender to the Reds and be massacred.
The two of them talked the matter over during that early morning descent to the plains, and she said at length, putting it far more concisely than he would care to have done: “The whole question is really—am I to escape alone, or are you to come with me? You are to come with me, of course, and that means we must go right away—out of the whole area of these local wars.” Then she looked at him and laughed rather queerly. “Oh, it all comes to this, I suppose, that what I want more than anything in the world is to be with you. Can’t You believe me? In a way I’m enjoying every minute of all this—it’s an adventure I don’t want ever to end; but if it must end, then let anything end it rather than separation. Promise that wherever we go and whatever happens to us, it will be together!”
“That is all I hoped you would say,” he answered. “We will make south for the railway, then, and take a train, if there are trains, towards Kazan. And there, if the situation remains the same, we can join the Czechs.”
The hill country ended with disconcerting abruptness; by noon they were crossing land so level that it looked like a sea, with the horizon of hills as a coastline in the rearward distance. It was dizzily hot; the threatened storm had passed over with a few abortive thunderclaps. The earth was caked and splitting after weeks without rain; dust filled eyes and nostrils at the slightest breath of wind; the crops were withering in the unharvested fields.
As distance increased between themselves and the mountains, they found tracks widening into roads, and roads becoming more frequented. Every side- track yielded its stragglers, most of whom were peasants carrying all their worldly goods on their backs. Where they had come from and where they were bound for were problems that were no more soluble after, as often happened, they had unburdened their secrets to the passing stranger. But many were too ill and dejected even to give the usual greeting as they passed, and some showed all the outward signs of prolonged hardships and semi-starvation.
For every passer-by in the opposite direction there were at least a dozen, bound, like themselves, for the railway twenty miles to the south. The chance of getting aboard a train did not, in such circumstances, seem very promising, and still less attractive was the prospect of camping out for days or weeks on the railway platforms, as thousands of refugees were doing. A.J. learned this from a youth with whom, along the road, he effected an exchange of a couple of eggs in return for a small quantity of butter made from sunflower- seeds. The boy—for he was scarcely more—seemed so knowledgeable and intelligent that A.J. was glad enough to agree when he suggested pooling resources for a small roadside meal. The stranger hardly got the better of the bargain, since his own provender included white bread (an almost incredible luxury) and part of a cooked chicken; but he only laughed when A.J. apologised. He was a merry, pink-checked youth, eager to treat A.J. with roguish bonhomie and the woman with a touch of gallantry. He was eighteen, he said, and his life had been fairly adventurous. At sixteen he had been a cadet in an Imperial training-school for officers, but the Revolution had happened just in time to fit in conveniently with his own reluctance to die in a trench fighting the Germans. He seemed also to have quarrelled with his family, for he said he neither knew nor cared what had happened to them. He had joined the revolutionaries at the age of seventeen, doubtless to save his own skin, and in a single year had risen to be a military commissar. But even that, in the end, had become too tedious and exacting, for in his heart he had always pined for something more individually adventurous. Presently the had found it. He had become a train-bandit. He admitted this quite frankly, and with a joyous taking of risks in so doing. “It suits me,” he explained, “because I’m a bad lot—I always was.”
It appeared that he had been the leader of a group of bandits operating on the Cheliabinsk-Ufa line before the advance of the Czechs had put an end to such enterprise. His colleagues had since dispersed, and he himself was now at a loose end, but he rather thought there was a good chance of successful banditry on the Ekaterinburg-Sarapul line, which was still to a large extent in the hands of the Reds. All he needed were ’a few suitable companions; the rest would be easy. There was a steep incline not far away where west-bound trains always slowed down. One man could jump into the engine-cab and make the driver pull up; the others would then go through the train, coach by coach and compartment by compartment. It was the usual and almost always successful method. A.J. expressed surprise that the passengers, many of whom were doubtless well armed, did not put up a fight. The boy laughed. “You must remember that it’s in the middle of the night, when most of them are asleep and none of them feel particularly brave. Besides, some of them do try their tricks, but we try ours first. If you shoot straight once you don’t often have any trouble with the rest.” He spoke quite calmly, and not without a certain half-humorous relish. “After all,” he then went on, as if feeling instinctively some need to defend himself, “it’s not a bad death—being shot. Better than starvation or typhus. A good many people in this country, I should reckon, have got to die pretty soon, and the lucky ones are those that get a bullet through the heart.” Looked at in such a way, the situation undoubtedly showed him in the guise of a public benefactor. And he added: “I suppose you don’t feel you’re the sort of fellow to join forces with me?”
When A.J. smiled and shook his he
ad, the boy smiled back quite amicably. “That’s all right—only I thought I’d just put it to you. You look the sort of man I’d like to work with, that’s all. Anyhow, I can help you with a bit of advice. There’s not a thousand to one chance of your getting on board a train at Novochensk. The station’s already cram-full. But if you go about three versts to the east you’ll come to that incline I was talking about—where the trains all slow up. There you might manage it.”
“I suppose the trains are full too.”
“Absolutely, but they’ll make room for you and your lady if you shout that you’ve got food. Show them a loaf of bread and they’ll pull you into the cars even if they murder you afterwards.”
A.J. thanked him for the excellent-sounding advice, and after a little further conversation the eighteen-year-old bandit shouldered his bundle and departed. Following his suggestion, they reached the railway late that evening at a point a few miles east of the railway station. It was too dark to see exactly where they were, and they were just preparing to sleep on the parched ground until morning when, from the very far distance, came the sound of a train. It was a weird noise amidst the silence of the steppes—rather like the breathing of a very tired and aged animal. Once or twice, as the wind veered away, the sound disappeared altogether for a time, and they listened for it intermittently for nearly half an hour before they first saw the tiny sparkle of a headlight on the horizon. They perceived then that they were on the ridge of some low downs, which the train would have to surmount—that, presumably, being the incline they had been told about. And soon, to confirm this assumption, the breathing of the engine became a kind of hoarse pant as the rising gradient was encountered. More and more asthmatic grew the panting, until, with a sudden sigh, it ceased altogether, and a sharp jangle of brakes showed that the train was locked at a standstill.