Akhiz was a Tartar from Astrakhan—a young, genial, magnificently
strong and excessively dirty monster, six feet five in height and
correspondingly large in face and mouth. His perfectly spaced teeth glittered
like gems whenever he smiled, which was fairly often. His wife, small, fat,
and of the same race, was less genial, but almost more dirty, and their five
children, ranging from a baby to a six-year-old, were noisy, good-looking,
and full of ringworm.
The position of Akhiz in the scheme of things was simple enough. He went
up and down the Volga with his timber-barge. He had been doing so for exactly
twenty-six years—since, in fact, the day he had been born on just a
similar barge on that same Volga. He was not a man of acute intelligence; he
could handle the rafts and work the small steam-engine and strike a bargain
and play intricate games with dice, but that was almost all. Above everything
else, he was incurious—as incurious about his two passengers as he was
about the various excitements and convolutions that had interfered with the
timber trade during recent years.
A.J. and Daly settled down effortlessly to the tranquil barge life; they
had been travelling so long and so far and so cumbrously that the large,
spacious existence in swollen mid-stream seemed the most perfect and
enchanting rest. Even the stuffy cabin, swarming with children and fleas, did
not trouble them, though there was no privacy in it, and Akhiz and his family
conducted themselves at all times with completely unembarrassed freedom..
They rather liked Akhiz, however, and soon found it possible to behave before
him with no greater restraints than before some large and good-humoured
dog.
Every evening, at dusk, the barge drifted in to the bank and was moored
for the night. Akhiz was aware of every current and backwater, and showed
great skill in manoeuvring the rafts into place. It was typical of him that
he knew practically nothing of the land beyond the banks; he did not know
even the names of most of the villages that were passed. With an instinct for
adapting himself to circumstances without understanding them, he managed
somehow or other never to be short of food, even though the country near by
was famine- stricken; fortunately, he and his family could eat almost
anything—queer-looking roots and seeds that A.J. would have liked to
know more about, if Akhiz had been intelligent enough to be questioned. A.J.
and Daly still had ample food for themselves; at first they were afraid of
what Akhiz might deduce from their luxurious provender, but they very soon
realised that it was the way of Akhiz to notice as little as possible and
never to make any kind of deduction at all. Once they went so far as to share
with him a tin of corned beef; he was hugely delighted, but completely and
almost disappointingly indifferent as to how they had come to possess such a
rarity.
It was so restful and satisfying to be on the barge that during their
first night aboard they hardly gave thought to the dangers that might still
be ahead. Dawn, however, brought a more dispassionate outlook; it was obvious
then to both of them that their escape would soon be discovered and that
efforts would be made to recapture them. A.J.’s immediate fear was of
Samara, which they must reach during the first day’s journey; it seemed
to him that the authorities there were likely to be especially vigilant and
would probably suspect some method of escape by river. During that first day,
as the wooded bluffs passed slowly by on either side, he debated in his mind
whether he should take Akhiz somewhat into his confidence. Daly favoured
doing so, and A.J. accordingly broached the matter as delicately as he knew
how. But delicacy was quite wasted on Akhiz; he had to be told outright that
his two passengers were escaping from enemies who wanted to kill them, and
that anywhere, especially at Samara and the big towns, he might be questioned
by the authorities. They half expected Akhiz to be furious and threaten to
turn them ashore, but instead he took it all in with a comprehension so mild
and casual that they could only wonder at first if it were comprehension at
all. “I don’t think he really understands what we’ve been
getting at,” A.J. said, but there he certainly did Akhiz an injustice,
for about an hour later the huge fellow, beaming all over his face, drew them
to the far end of the barge and showed them a small and inconspicuous gap
which he had arranged amongst the piled tree-trunks. “If anyone comes
to ask for you, my wife will say nobody here,” he explained, in broken
Russian. “You will go in there—see?—and I will put the logs
back in their places—so. Plenty of room for you in behind there.”
He grinned with immense geniality and bared his arms to show them his bulging
muscles. “Nobody move those logs but me,” he declared proudly,
and it was satisfactory to be able to believe it.
The presence of such an improvised hiding-place for use in an emergency
gave them a feeling of comfort and security, and to A.J.’s further
relief the barge did not even put in at Samara, owing to high dock-charges,
but went on several miles below the town to a deserted and lonely reach,
where no stranger came on board and no suspicious inspection seemed to be
taking place from either bank.
They reached Syzran on the fifth day, passing under the great steel
railway bridge on which, but a few yards above them, Red sentries were
keeping guard, and reaching the end of the long river-loop. The air turned
colder, but there was no further snowfall, and during the day-time the sun
shone with a fierceness that was quite cheerful, even though it did not lift
the temperature much above freezing-point. Already round the edges of the
backwaters ice had begun to form. A.J. and Daly used sometimes to choose a
sheltered and sunny place among the tree-trunks from which to watch the
slowly-changing panorama; it was bitterly cold in the open air, but for a
time that was preferable to the fetid atmosphere of the cabin. The river was
so wide that they were safe from observation, and the country, especially on
the left bank, so lonely that often whole days passed without sound or sight
of any human existence on land. Compared with the chaos of which their
memories were full, the barge-life seemed a kind and leisurely heaven.
A.J.’s normally robust health benefited a great deal from the rest and
the cold, keen air; at dusk and dawn he sometimes helped Akhiz with the
rafts, and was amused to give proof that his own personal strength was not so
very much inferior to that of the Tartar monster.
He would, indeed, have been very happy but for renewal of his anxiety
about Daly’s health; the strain of the journey seemed again to be
weighing heavily on her. Yet she was very cheerful and full of optimism. They
began now to talk as they had hardly dared to do before—of their
possible plans after reaching safety. Denikin’s outposts, A.J.
believed, could not be much more distant than a few days’ journey from
Saratof; it would probably be best to leave the river there and cross that
final danger- zone on foot and by night. Then it seemed to occur to them both
simultaneously that they would be passing through the town of Saratof, and
that somewhere in it lived the ex-butler and the little princess of whom the
Valimoffs had so carefully informed them. Should they take the trouble and
incur all the possible extra risks that a visit might involve? A.J. decided
negatively, yet from that moment they began to feel that the ex-butler and
the child were really living people, not merely abstractions talked about by
somebody else. They even began to imagine what the girl might be
like—dark or fair, pretty or plain, well-bred or spoilt.
One cold sunny afternoon, as they sat together on the timber with no sound
about them save the swish of the water and the occasional distant cry of a
curlew, A.J. told her, quite suddenly and on impulse, that he had been born
in England and had lived there during early youth. She was naturally
astonished, and still more so when he told her the entire story of his early
life and of the affairs that had led to his loss of nationality and
subsequent exile. “But you are really English for all that?” she
queried, and he replied that he was not sure how the technical position
stood—there was little he could prove after so many years.
“Perhaps I am as I feel,” he said, “and that is no
nationality at all.”
It was curious how their life in the future, that was to be so strange and
different from any life they had known together so far, seemed as much an end
as a beginning. They tried not to admit it, yet the feeling was there with
them both; it was so hard to think of a world that did not consist entirely
of the dangers of the next hour and mile, of a life in which most things
could be bought for money, in which day after day would bring peaceful,
prophesiable happenings, and every night a bed and sleep. She said to him
once: “Dear, what shall we do? Shall we live in Paris? Would you like
to live in Paris?”
“I think I would like to live anywhere.”
“Anywhere with me?”
“I meant that. I can’t imagine life without you.”
“Can you imagine life without all this worry and
adventure?”
“Hardly—yet. I don’t know.”
“How long will it take—the rest of the journey—it we
have luck?”
“We shall be in Saratof within a week or so. Allow another week for
reaching the Whites. I suppose then we could get through to Rostov or Odessa,
and there are boats from those places to Constantinople, but we might have to
wait some time to get one. There would be passport formalities and all that
sort of thing.”
“And from Constantinople?”
“That again depends. Don’t let’s look too far ahead. At
present I’ve got my mind on Saratof.”
“Saratof and our little princess.”
“No.” He smiled. “I don’t propose to have anything
to do with her royal highness. And in any case she isn’t
ours
.”
“Nevertheless, I shall always think of her as ours, even if we never
see her.”
One evening in mid-November when the barge tied up near a small village,
A.J. heard a few men talking to Akhiz. They were saying that the war in
Europe was over and that Germany had surrendered to the French and British,
but the information did not create the expected sensation. Akhiz was unaware
of a European war as distinct from any other war; the world, seen from his
timber- barge, seemed always full of fighting, and he was entirely
uninterested in details.
They passed Volshk on the fourteenth day, but by that time the clearing
horizon of the future was dimmed again, for Daly was ill. It was the cold,
she confessed abjectly, and bade A.J. not to worry about her; she would be
all right again when they reached a warmer climate. In former times, she
said, she had never been able to endure the Russian winters; she had always
gone either abroad or to the Crimea. Besides, she had possessed furs in those
days—“and now,” she added, half-laughing, “only Red
generals dare show them.” She was still very cheerful, and inclined to
joke about her own weakness, but A.J. was uneasy, because he knew that the
cold was not excessive for the country and the time of the year, and that
there were at least five hundred miles to be traversed before they could
expect warmer weather.
The trouble was that the only alternative to the open air was the
atmosphere of the cabin, which was always so sickening that it was quite as
much as they could do to sleep in it during the nights.
They reached Saratof on the twentieth day, in the midst of a heavy
snowstorm. A.J. had been a little apprehensive of the landing, which was just
as well, for it enabled him to spy out Red soldiers, suspiciously armed and
eager, waiting on the quay at which the barge was to berth. He saw them out
of the cabin window, and there was just time to warn Akhiz and hurry Daly and
himself to the arranged refuge amongst the timber. Akhiz fulfilled his part
to perfection, pulling a huge log back to cover up the entrance to the
hiding- place. It was all accomplished in good time and without mishap; again
A.J.’s chief fear was for Daly, who shivered in his arms with an
unhappy mingling of fear and cold. A.J. whispered to reassure her; it was
only a precaution, he said; the soldiers on the quay might not be in search
of them at all; and in any case, there was no reason yet to be
alarmed—they had come successfully through many worse crises. But Daly
would not or could not be comforted; she whispered: “Oh, my darling,
I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I haven’t any nerve left at
all—I can’t help it—I’m just more terrified than
I’ve ever been!”
They felt the barge bumping against the quayside; they heard sharp voices
questioning Akhiz and the latter’s slow, good-tempered answers; then
they heard footsteps scampering on deck and over the piled timber. A.J. could
not hear much that was said, but from the whole manner of the proceeding he
guessed that a search was, after all, to be made.
About a quarter of an hour later voices came quite near to them. One said:
“Well, you know, this may be all right as far as we’ve seen, but
look at all this timber—anyone could hide amongst it.”
A.J.’s arm tightened round Daly, and from her sudden stillness he
thought she must be half-fainting.
Another voice said: “Yes, of course, that’s true. And this
fellow’s been putting in for nights at all kinds of lonely
places—nothing at all to stop anybody from coming aboard while
he’s been asleep.”
Akhiz said: “Timber very heavy to move.”
“She had a man with her.”
Akhiz repeated: “Timber very heavy.”
“Yes, you fool, you’ve said it once.”
Then from various sounds and movements it was apparent that a few of the
men were trying to move some of the logs.
Later a voice said: “Well, how
do
you move the stuff
then?”
“Big crane comes along,” said Akhiz.
“Well, keep a look-out when you unload, that’s all. I
don’t suppose anyone can be here, but still, as I say, keep a look-
out.”