by James Hilton
For the passengers in the box-cars, however, such consolations were not available. They were wet, cold, miserable, ravenous with hunger, and stranded in an unknown land. It was the little one-eyed man, who, still dreaming of Krokol, gave them their first lift of hope when, for a few seconds, the rain slackened. During that interval he alone chanced to be searching the horizon with his single eye and saw the towers and roofs of a town in the far distance. It gave him no thrill, for the place was decidedly not Krokol, but the others, when he told them, were swept into a flurry of anticipation. A town—perhaps a large town—food—shelter—warmth—their cravings soared dizzily as they began in frantic haste to gather up their bundles and clamber out of the train. How even a large town could instantly supply the wants of a thousand starving and penniless refugees was a question that did not, in that first intoxicating moment, occur to them.
A.J. shared, though more soberly, the general jubilation, but he had the more reason to, since money was in his pocket and he could buy if there were anything at all to be bought. Daly, tired and chilled, summoned all her strength for the effort, and they climbed out of the train with the others and began the dismal trek over the fields. To those already weak and feverish, it was a perilous journey. The rain continued to fall in heavy slanting swathes, through which, from time to time, the distant town showed like a mocking mirage; and the dry brown dust of the steppes had been transformed to a jelly of squelching mud, into which the feet sank ankle-deep with every pace. After the first mile the procession had thinned out into a trail of weary, mud- smeared stragglers, floundering along at scarcely a mile an hour.
It was dark when A.J. and Daly reached the outskirts of the town, and he had had to lift her practically every step during that last half-mile. She was so obviously on the verge of collapse that when he saw a large barn not far away he made for it eagerly, anxious to reach any place where she could rest out of the rain. There were already several shelterers in the barn—women and children, mostly, to whom weariness had grown to mean more than hunger, cold, or any other feeling. He laid her gently on a heap of sodden straw; the others were too tired to speak, and so was she. “Wait here till I come back,” he whispered, and she gave him a faintly answering smile.
Then, bracing himself for the renewed buffeting of rain and wind, he struggled on into the town. It seemed fairly large, but he looked vainly for shop-signs or public notices from which he might learn its name. The streets were deserted in the downpour, but it was good, anyhow, to leave the mud and reach the firm foothold of paved roads. And he had roubles in his pocket—that, in the circumstances, was the most cheering thing of all.
He walked so quickly that he arrived at the apparent centre of the town well ahead of the others, many of whom had committed the tactical error of knocking at the first habitations they came to and begging for food. The cottagers, fearing invasion by a seemingly vast rabble, had replied by barricading their doors and refusing even to parley. A.J. had guessed that this would happen, and his own plan was based on it, though perhaps it was not much of a plan in any event. He passed the church and the town-hall, noticing that most of the shops were closed and shuttered and that even those whose windows were on view looked completely empty of foods. Soon he came to a district of small houses such as might belong to better-class artisans or factory-workers. He turned down a deserted street, passing house after house that looked as if it might be equally deserted, till at length he saw one whose chimney showed a thin curl of ascending smoke. He tapped quietly on the front door. After a pause it was opened very cautiously by an elderly respectable-looking woman, but his hopes fell heavily as he observed her. The too vivid eyes and jutting cheek-bones told the tale he had feared most, and her first words, in answer to his question, confirmed it. The whole town, she told him quite simply, was half- starving. Factories had closed down; men scoured the countryside every day in quest of food which became ever scarcer and dearer; food-shops opened only twice a week, and there were long queues for even the scanty allowance permitted by the new rationing system.
A.J. mentioned that he had a little money and was prepared to pay generously for food and shelter for himself and his wife, but the woman shook her head, “We have no food,” she said “no matter what you were to offer us for it We haven’t had a meal since the day before yesterday and as soon as the rain stops my daughters and myself are going to take turns in the bread-queue. The shop opens to-morrow morning but to be in time for anything we shall have to wait all night.”
He thanked her and went on to another house a little further along the street. There he was told a similar tale. He entered another street. In all he tried nearly a dozen houses before he found one whose occupants, very cautiously and grudgingly, offered a little bread and a promise of shelter in return for a quite fantastic sum of money. He gave them something on account, took a piece of the bread, and hastened back to the other side of the town. There he found rioting already going on between the invading refugees and the local inhabitants; several persons had been seriously hurt. He reached the barn where women were still sheltering, took Daly in his arms, helped her to her feet, and almost carried her across the town. He dared not offer her the bread until they were well away from the others.
At last, at last, he had her safely under the roof of the cottage, and its occupiers, with a promise of more money, were lighting a fire.
They were curious people, and he could not at first place them. There seemed to be a mother, two sons, and two daughters, all living in four small rooms; their name was Valimoff. They had much better manners and cleaner habits than were usual amongst working people; they were secretive, too, about their personal affairs, though inquisitive enough about A.J.’s. When later in the evening news reached them of the rioting at the other end of the town, Madame Valimoff asked A.J. if he were one of the refugees from the train. He said yes, he was. She replied severely: “We should have had nothing to do with you if we had known that. Why can’t you wretched people stay in your own towns, the same as we have to stay in ours?”
But soon a small wood fire was burning in the hearth and a scanty meal of black bread and thin soup was being prepared. The two travellers ate, drank, and dried themselves as well as they could, but A.J. s pleasure at such comparative good fortune was offset by anxiety about Daly. She seemed to have taken a bad chili, and he promised a further bribe to one of the daughters of the house in return for the loan of dry clothes. The daughter, a clean and neatly-dressed girl, helped him to prepare a bed near the fire, and Daly, by that time feverishly tired, was helped into it. She was soon asleep. He sat up for a time by the fire, and towards midnight the girl entered the room and brought him a small tumbler of vodka. The gift was so unexpectedly welcome that he was profuse in his thanks, and he was still more astonished when she went on: “You see, sir, I think I know who you are. You are Count Adraxine.”
“What?” he cried, and was about to make an indignant denial; then he checked himself and added more cautiously: “Why, whatever makes you think that?”
“I remember the Countess, sir. I used to be a maid at Baron Morvenstein’s house in Moscow, and I remember her quite distinctly.”
He still stared in bewilderment, and she continued: “You need not be afraid, sir—we are all very happy to be of service to you and the Countess.”
The revelation had been so sudden that, coming with the vodka after all the hardships and adventures of the day, it made him a little dizzy. Then, before his uncertain eyes, a curious pageant was enacted. The rest of the household, which till then had been rather unfriendly and had bargained greedily for every rouble, came into the room and were solemnly and separately presented to him by the girl, whose name was Annetta. They all bowed or curtseyed, and stared hard at the woman asleep in bed. Then they said polite things, and he said (or thought he said—he was too dazed to be sure of it) polite things in return. And afterwards, which was more to the point, Annetta brought him a second glass of vodka.
She to
ld him that they had all been servants in big houses until the Revolution; the men had been footmen and the girls lady’s-maids. Madame Valimoff had been a housekeeper. They had all saved money, so that the loss of their jobs had not meant instant poverty; besides, their masters and mistresses had been generous with farewell gifts. But much more important than money, Annetta confessed, was the fact that they had managed to hoard up supplies of food.
After she had gone, A.J. sat for another hour in front of the fire. The vodka had set the blood tingling in his veins; his mind was still bewildered. He partly undressed and lay down in the bed beside Daly; he went to sleep and awoke to find himself somehow in her arms. She was asleep then, and fever-hot; the fire in the hearth was smouldering; rain was still falling outside. How fortunate was their lot compared with that of the night before…Then she awoke and he told her all that had happened. She was quietly astonished and confirmed the one fact confirmable—that she had, on several occasions before her marriage, visited Baron Morvenstein’s house in Moscow. He listened to her, yet all the time he was thinking of something rather different; he was thinking how strange, yet how natural, that they should both be lying together, he and she, ex-commissar and ex-countess, there in a workman’s cottage in a town whose name they did not yet know. (Which reminded him that he must ask Annetta in the morning.) He said: “Of course, they take me for the Count—which is funny, in a way.”
She shivered with laughter. “Isn’t it all funny? Isn’t everything rather a bad joke? Everything except—” And she cast over him again the spell of her own dark and sleepy passion.
In the morning they both rose late, the household evidently preferring not to waken them. As soon, however, as they were up and dressed, Annetta appeared with a pot of steaming coffee, fresh rolls made of white flour, and cherry jam. It was miraculous, and they guzzled over it like children at a party.
Thus, for the time, they settled down with the Valimoffs in that once- prosperous town (whose name, by the way, was Novarodar). Daly, as A.J. had suspected, had caught a severe chill, and only very slowly recovered. But the Valimoffs did not appear to mind the delay; on the contrary, they showed every sign of wishing it to continue. Nor, now that they knew or thought they knew the identity of their guests, would they accept a single rouble in payment. A.J. was grateful, but he found it perplexingly difficult to like them for it all. Their obsequiousness got on his nerves, and he was a little disconcerted, at times, by the utter ruthlessness of their attitude towards their less fortunate neighbours. The cottage was certainly a treasure-trove; it contained sacks of white flour, dozens of tins of meat, fruit, and vegetables, and large quantities of wines and spirits. Knowing what servants were, A.J. was of the opinion that most of it had been systematically thieved during the decade preceding the Revolution. Anyhow, it was there; fortunately, in the house of the Valimoffs, stowed away carefully in wardrobes and cupboards, while the rest of the town raked for potato peelings in rubbish-heaps. A.J. had ample evidence of this, for the took many walks about the streets. Sometimes, fresh from an almost luxurious meal, he would pass the bread-queue, stretching its unhappy length for nearly a quarter of a mile along the main street. He saw women who had been waiting for many hours faint and shriek hysterically when they were told that nothing was left for them. The Valimoffs were careful never to give any cause of suspicion to their neighbours; they took turns in the bread-queues themselves, and they banged the door relentlessly on every beggar—more relentlessly, indeed, than they need have done. They seemed quite confident that A.J. could be trusted with their secret; they had his secret in return, and doubtless felt it to be sufficient security. What puzzled him most was why they should trouble to be so generous; he hardly thought it could be because they hoped for future favours, for they probably knew how slender were the chances of the old aristocracy ever getting back their former possessions. He knew, too, that it could not be from any altruistic notion of helping a stranger, since before they had identified him they had been eager to drive the hardest of bargains. In the end he was forced to the conclusion that their motive was one of simple snobbery—they were just delighted to be in a position to help a Count and Countess. They had lived so comfortably (and perhaps thieved so comfortably too) in a world of superiors and inferiors that now, when that world seemed completely capsized, they clung to any floating shred of it with a fervour born of secret panic.
Novarodar was Red, but not as Red as many other places; its geographical position had kept it so far out of the battle area, and also, owing to its small importance as a railway centre, it had escaped Czecho-Slovak occupation. The Valimoffs, of course, dreamed secret dreams ’of the day when they should see the Revolution overthrown, the Imperial flag floating again over the town hall, and strings of leading Reds lined up in the market square before a firing squad. Perhaps, too, they envisaged a certain bitter prestige appertaining to them when all Novarodar should learn that they, the Valimoffs, had given shelter to two such illustrious persons as Count and Countess Adraxine.
That day, remote as it seemed, looked infinitely more so after an event which took place in mid-September. That was the capture of Kazan by the Bolsheviks. The new army, under Trotsky, drove out the Czechs after a two-day fight, thereby changing the entire military and political situation. With the Czechs in retreat down the Volga it was no longer likely that the pincers would close and the British troops from Archangel link up with the Czech drive from the south. The news of the fall of Kazan caused great commotion in Novarodar, for it was hoped that the Bolshevist victory would mean the release of quantities of food that had been hitherto held up. Its first effect, however, was disappointingly contrary. Hundreds of White refugees, many belonging to wealthy families, streamed into the town from Kazan, where they had been living for some time under Czech protection. The whole situation was further complicated by exceptionally heavy rainfall, which had flooded the surrounding country and made all the roads to the south of the town impassable. Many White refugees, caught between the floods and the Bolsheviks, preferred to remain in the town and come to terms with its inhabitants, whose redness did not preclude the acceptance of large bribes for temporary shelter. Thus Novarodar actually received more mouths for feeding instead of more food to feed them, and the plight of those who had little money became much worse than before.
To A.J., living through those strange days while Daly slowly recuperated, it seemed impossible to state any sort of case or draw any sort of moral from the chaos that was everywhere. It was as if the threads of innumerable events had got themselves tied up in knots that no historian would ever unravel. The starved townspeople, the wealthy refugees, the poverty-stricken refugees, the youths of seventeen and eighteen in civilian clothes who had obviously been Imperialist cadets, the streams of ragged, famished, diseased, and homeless wanderers who passed into the town as vaguely and with as little reason as they passed out of it—all presented a nightmare pageant of the inexplicable. Novarodar’s small-town civilisation had crumbled instantly beneath that combined onslaught of flood, famine, and invasion; all the niceties of metropolitan life—cafés, cinemas, electric light, shop-windows—had disappeared in quick succession, leaving the place more stark and dreary than the loneliest village of the steppes.
Daly grew gradually stronger, though the strain of recent weeks had been more considerable than either A.J. or herself had supposed. A.J. was divided between two desires—to give her ample time to rest and recover, and to continue the journey. He did not like the way events were developing in Novarodar, especially when, towards the end of the month, came further news that the Bolshevik army had taken Sembirsk. At last, to his great relief, Daly seemed well enough again to face the risks of travel—so much the more formidable now that the cold weather had arrived. Their plans were of necessity altered owing to the Czech retreat; indeed, it had been a bitter disappointment to have to stay in Novarodar day after day and know that every hour put extra miles between themselves and safety. The nearest city now at wh
ich they could hope to link up with the Whites was Samara, some two hundred miles distant.
Meanwhile affairs at Novarodar very rapidly worsened. As the inflowing stream of refugees continued, the last skeleton organisation of the town collapsed; bread-riots took the place of the bread-queues, and the main streets were the scenes of frequent clashes between Red police and bands of White fugitives. It looked, indeed, as if the latter were planning a coup d’état; so many had entered the town that they stood a good chance, if they were to try. The inhabitants, starved and dispirited, were hardly in a mood to care what happened, so long as, somehow or other, they received supplies of food.
Then came news that the Bolsheviks were moving down the Volga towards Samara. This sent a wave of panic amongst the White refugees, for, unless they got away quickly eastward, there was every possibility of their being trapped. Yet eastward lay the floods, still rising, that had turned vast areas into lakeland and swamps. Some took the risk of drowning and starvation and set out, but for most there began a period of anxious tension, with one eye on the floodwater and the other on the maps which showed the rapid Red advance. A shower of rain was enough to plunge the town in almost tangible gloom, and groups of White cadets, a little scared beyond their boyish laughter, climbed the church tower at all times of the day and scanned impatiently that horizon of inundated land. Even the local inhabitants were beginning to be apprehensive. Their position was a ticklish one, and the worried expression on the faces of local Soviet officials was wholly justified. Was it wise to have been so complacent with the White refugees? The latter were too numerous now to be intimidated, but at first, when they had begun to enter the town, would it not have been better to have been more severe? Troubled by these and similar misgivings, and with their eyes fixed feverishly on the war-map, the Novarodar Soviet, from being mildly pink, flushed to deep vermilion in almost record time.