by James Hilton
A.J. and Daly were solemnly presented to the princess that morning. She was a thin and sad little thing, wasted by fever and obviously very weak. Stapen treated her with rather absurd decorum, while his wife treated her exactly as if she had been her own child; and the princess showed unmistakable affection for them both.
But the more Stapen outlined the child’s social and dynastic importance the more unwilling A.J. was to encumber himself with her. Yet it became increasingly difficult to convey this to Stapen. It was not only that A.J. did not wish to offend the fellow, but rather that no means existed by which Stapen could be brought to conceive A.J.’s point of view. “He won’t see that we have our own future to think of,” A.J. told Daly. “Frankly, I’m not interested in dynastic intrigues—it doesn’t matter a jot to me that the child’s a princess, next in succession, and so on. All I care about in the world is getting you to safety, and I won’t agree to anything that will lessen the chance of it.”
She smiled. “Very well, then, we shall have to tell Stapen that we can’t take her.”
“Yes, and the sooner the better. I’ll tell him in the morning.”
But in the morning Daly was ill again, after being sick and feverish during the night. Their departure looked as if it must be postponed for another day or two, and so, in the circumstances, there did not seem any particular need to present Stapen with the arranged ultimatum.
By noon the whole situation was changed utterly and for the worse, for Daly was by this time very ill indeed, and A.J., with fair experience of such matters, diagnosed typhus. It was not really astonishing, and yet, for some reason, it was a mischance that he had never even considered.
There was no doctor to attend her; there had been none for the little princess, either. There was no private doctor, in fact, in the whole town. Typhus, spread by the war and nourished by the famine, had overwhelmed Saratof to an extent that A.J. had hardly realised during his few days in the place. The hospitals were full, with patients lying on stretchers between the beds; emergency hospitals were also full, and more were being hastily built; yet still the disease raged and spread, and the death-rate had been steadily and appallingly on the increase for weeks. All the hospitals were being managed by skeleton staffs of doctors and nurses, and it had lately become so difficult to give patients proper attention that many who stayed in their homes with no professional doctoring at all had probably an equal, if not a superior chance of recovery. Stapen evidently thought so, and urged A.J. not to try to get Daly into one of the hospitals. It would have been quite impossible, in any case, for they were State institutions and every patient entering had to pass through a sieve of official enquiries. The same reason had prevented Stapen from trying to find a hospital-bed for the princess, and now, as he comfortingly explained to A.J., he was very glad of it. “The countess will be far better here, just as the princess was,” he assured him, and A.J.’s heart warmed towards the old man for showing such willingness to share the burden of this extra misfortune, though in fact it was Stapen’s wife on whom the burden mostly fell.
A.J., fortunately, was at his best in an emergency of such a kind. He had a fine instinct for doctoring, and had acted as amateur doctor for so long and with such success during a part of his life that he felt none of that vague helplessness that afflicts the complete layman when faced with medical problems. He had also a particular knowledge of typhus itself; he had often diagnosed cases, and was quite familiar with the normal course of the disease. Apart from which, he possessed the proper temperament for living through anxious moments; he was calm, quiet, soothing, and never despondent. Stapen, he soon found, was no use at all except as an amiable figurehead to surround the whole affair with an atmosphere of benignity and goodwill; it was his wife who did and was everything. This hard-faced, dour, and rather truculent woman soon drew from A.J. the deepest admiration; he perceived that it was she, and she alone, who had saved the child’s life. And she tackled this additional job of nursing Daly with an apparent grudgingness which concealed, net so much a warm heart, as a thoroughly efficient soul. J, could well imagine the sort of cook she had been, and be cold also well imagine the sort of butler Stapen had been.
So Saratof, which was to have been but a stage on a final dash to freedom, became instead a last prison closing them round. To A.J., sitting at the bedside, nothing remained but love. He realised, now as never before, how dear she was, and how utterly beyond beauty to him. His mind glowed and throbbed with a hundred memories of her; he saw her dark eyes opening at dawn, and heard her deep tranquil laughter echoing amongst the boles of great trees; he felt again the slumberous passion that had seemed to wrap them both in unity with every little rustling leaf. From his first notice of her in the prison- cell at Khalinsk, everything had had the terrible, lovely reality of a child’s fairy-tale.
A good deal of the time she was in delirium and talked ramblingly, but sometimes her mind cleared for a few moments and she would beg him to look after himself and try not to take the disease from her. She often said: “Oh, I’m so sorry just at the end of our journey—I do feel I ought to be ashamed…”
He comforted her by relating how Denikin’s army was advancing, thus lessening the distance between themselves and safety even while she lay in bed.
Often, in her delirium, she called his name, appealing to him to protect her from shadowy terrors, but sometimes even her delirium was calm and she would talk serenely about all kinds of things. She constantly mentioned the girl, calling her ‘our little princess’ in the way they had joked about her during the barge journey.
About a week after the onset of the fever she appeared to become very much better, and A.J. began to hope that the crisis was passing. She talked to him that day quite lucidly about their plans for escape; the Whites, he told her, were now only forty or fifty miles to the south, so that they might count themselves fortunate, even in the delay. Then she asked suddenly: “Where can we be married, do you think?”
He answered: “In Odessa, perhaps or Constantinople, at any rate.”
She smiled, and seemed very happy in contemplation of it. After a pause she went on to ask if he had yet told Stapen that he did not intend to take the child with them.
He answered that he hadn’t, but that he would do so whenever the matter became urgent.
She said: “I suppose we can’t possibly take her with us?”
“Do you want to?” he asked; and she replied: “I would like to, if we could, but of course it’s for you to decide. It’s you who’d have all the bother of both of us, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t bother I’d mind. It’s danger—to you.”
“Do you think there would he much danger?”
“More than I’d care to risk.”
“I know. I agree. We won’t have her.”
“I wish we could, for your sake.”
“Oh no, it doesn’t matter. I don’t quite know why I’m worrying you so much about it.”
“You’re really keen on having her, then, if we could?”
She answered then, almost sobbing: “Terribly, darling—terribly. And I don’t know why.”
A few hours later the sudden improvement in her condition disappeared with equal suddenness, and the fever, after its respite, seemed to attack her with renewed venom. To A.J. the change was the bitterest of blows, and all the old iron rage stalked through his veins again. He could not look at the rapidly recovering child downstairs without a clench of dislike; but for her, he worked it out, they would never have called at Stapen’s house, and Daly would never have been ill. (Yet that, he knew in his heart, was far from certain; the whole district was typhus-ridden, and it was impossible to establish how and from whom contagion had been passed.)
On the tenth day he knew that the crisis was approaching; if she survived it, she would almost certainly recover. He was at her bedside hour after hour, helping in ail the details of nursing; Stapen’s wife and himself, though they rarely exchanged more than sharp question and answer, were grim
ly together in the struggle. And it was not only a struggle against disease, for every day the search for the barest essentials of food was a battle in itself. Only rarely could milk be obtained, while nourishing soups and other invalid delicacies were quite beyond possibility. The last of the food that he had brought with him from Novarodar had long since been consumed, so that now he too was relying on the acquisitive efforts of Stapen’s wife. Sometimes she went out early in the morning, with the temperature far below freezing- point, and came back at dusk, after tramping many miles—with nothing. A.J. never offered her copious sympathy, as Stapen did, yet there was between them always a secret comprehension of the agonies of the day. When he looked up from Daly’s flushed and twitching face it was often to sec Stapen’s wife gazing from the other side of the bed with queer, companionable grimness.
Once while Daly was sleeping they held a curious whispered conversation across the bed. She asked him how he intended to proceed when Daly was better, and then, after he had explained to her his plans, she said: “You’ll find the child a nuisance—perhaps a danger, too. There’s a very strict watch on all the frontiers.”
“I know that.”
“I wonder you bother to take her with you at all.”
“Oh?” He was surprised, and waited for her to continue. She said, after a pause: “Look after your own affairs—that would be my advice, if you asked for it.”
“And the child?”
“She can stay here.”
“For how long?”
“For always, if necessary. I don’t see that it matters whether she’s here or in a king’s palace, so long as she’s happy. And the way the world is just now, princesses haven’t much chance of happiness.”
“What would your husband say to that, I wonder?”
“Oh, him?”
She uttered the monosyllable with such overwhelming emphasis that it was not even contemptuous.
Neither of them pursued the argument farther. Yet it was strange how the problem of the child was growing in importance; hardly an hour passed now without some delirious mention of it by Daly. It seemed to be on her mind to the exclusion of all other problems. On the twelfth day she suddenly became clear-headed and told A.J. that she was going to get better. Then, with her next breath, she said: “But if I don’t, you will take the girl with you alone, won’t you?”
That word ’alone’—his first glimpse into another world—sank on his heart till he could scarcely reason out an answer of any kind.
She went on: “will you promise that—to take her with you alone—if—if I don’t—”
“But You are—oh, you are going to get better!”
“Darling, yes, of course I am. But still, I want your promise.”
He could do nothing but assent. But a moment later he said: “She would be all right, you know, left here—the Stapens would give her a good home.”
“But she’s ours—the only thing we can call ours, anyway. I’m pretending she belongs to us—I want somebody to belong to us. Do you understand?”
He nodded desperately.
“And so you do promise, then?”
“Yes, yes. You can trust me.”
She seemed to be suddenly calmed. In a few moments she went to sleep, and slept so peacefully that A.J.’s hopes surged again as he watched her. Then about midnight she woke up and touched his hand. “Dear,” she whispered, “I am quite happy. It has all been wonderful, hasn’t it?” He laid his cheek against her arm, and when he looked up she had closed her eyes. She never opened them to consciousness again. She died at a few minutes to one on that morning of the fourth of December nineteen hundred and eighteen.
A.J. took the child with him and set out from Saratof. There was a look of nothingness in his eyes and the sound of nothingness in his voice. Bitter weather had put a stop to Denikin’s advance, and the fugitives who passed him by along the roads were freezing as well as starving. He neither feared nor hoped; he pushed on, mile after mile over the snowbound, famine-stricken country; he was an automaton merely, and when he reached the Bolshevik lines the same automatism functioned to plan the necessary details of the final adventure. But it was no adventure, after all; he crossed over without a thrill, and was soon heading for the coast through a country harried by White Cossacks as well as by universal foes that knew and cared for no frontiers.
Soon, in some city full of White generals, his course of action should have been fairly simple. An interview at headquarters, the production of certain papers of identification with which Stapen had provided him, and the child would doubtless be taken off his hands and placed in the exalted groove to which her birth and the circumstances of the times entitled her. He had no relish for the task of surrender and explanation, nor yet was he reluctant to perform it; he cared simply nothing for the child, and as little for any praises that might be awaiting him as her deliverer.
The long journey from Saratof had been full of hardships, and the child, barely recovered from her earlier illness, was soon ailing again. Suddenly one morning, waking up in a small-town inn where they had both slept huddled together on the floor, A.J. knew that he was ill himself. He had scarcely strength to move, and fell in the roadway outside when he tried to resume the journey southward.
There was an American Relief detachment stationed in the town—a tiny fragment of the teeming wealth of the Far West, transferred bodily, as if by some miracle, to become an object of amazement on the stricken plains of Russia. The detachment had built itself hutments on the outskirts of the town; there were large hospital-wards, cleansing stations, and distributing depots for food and clothing. Outside the huts all was age-old and primeval; inside them, the white-coated surgeons and their enthusiastic helpers bustled about in a constant whirr of hygiene and efficiency. When A.J. and the child were carried into the examination room, particulars concerning them were neatly taken down by a Harvard graduate and filed away in an immense card- indexing cabinet. A.J. gave his assumed name, and when he was asked for an address he shook his head. He was then asked other questions—his age, profession, and where he had come from—but he was too ill to answer in detail, even if he had wished to. When, however, a separate card was filled in for the child and the latter was assumed to be his, he made an effort to explain something, but the Harvard graduate, knowing Russian imperfectly, did not fully comprehend, and A.J., seeing a whole world swimming round about him in vast circles of incredibility, was barely coherent. At last the Harvard man said: “You mean that the girl is not your child?” A.J. nodded. “Who is she then?” But he could only shake his head in reply, and they asked him no further questions. An hour later, when he was being undressed, the papers in his pocket were discovered, examined, found incomprehensible, and placed efficiently in the fumigating oven alongside his clothes and bundle of possessions. After a complete cleansing the whole lot were then made into a paper parcel, neatly ticketed, and put aside. The parcel was handed to him a month later when he left hospital after as near a death from typhus as two cheerful nurses from Ohio had ever watched for.
During delirium the had suddenly astonished these nurses by murmuring a few phrases in English, and this, on being reported to the higher authorities, had caused some little sensation. The Harvard graduate went even so far as to take a card from the filing-cabinet, inscribe in the ‘profession’ column the words ’speaks a little English—perhaps a waiter,’ and then replace the card in the filing-cabinet. When, after his delirium, the patient recovered consciousness, the nurses naturally addressed him in English; he would not answer at first, but on being told of his ravings, admitted that he knew the language. He would not, however, tell them anything more about himself, and firmly declined to converse. He soon gained a mysterious reputation, and several doctors, including one very eminent psycho- analyst from Boston, paid him special visits. The psycho-analyst said that he must have been blown up in the war, and specified the exact sections of his brain that had suffered most damage.
Once during Isis illness he had
enquired about the child, but his questions could not be answered, being outside the province of the hospital staff. They assured him, however, that all children received by the relief detachments were splendidly looked after and that he had nothing at all to worry about. He was not worrying, as it happened. When he left the hospital he called at the relief headquarters to make further enquiry; the Harvard graduate turned up his card in the filing-cabinet, turned up the girl’s card, and declared, with business-like promptness, that she had been sent away. Then, seeing his own note on the man’s card, he added: “Ah, you’re the chap who speaks a little English, aren’t you? You won’t mind if I drop the Russian, then, eh?”
“I don’t mind,” A.J. said.
So they talked, or rather the Harvard graduate talked, in English. He explained that all orphaned children were being transferred to a big children’s camp in the Crimea, run by the Americans in connection with several American charitable organisations. There the children were being housed, fed, clothed, and looked after at American expense, and an attempt was even being made to get certain families in America to adopt individual children. “So far the response has been very gratifying,” declared the young man, toying with his horn-rimmed spectacles. “Of course it depends on our State Department how many are allowed to go, but I believe permission has already been given for the first batch.”
A.J. nodded.
“It would be possible, no doubt,” continued the young man agreeably, “to trace any particular child.”