by James Hilton
As soon as the door had closed and the two were alone together A.J. could see that something was wrong. The boy’s face was milky pale and his eyes stared fixedly; he was also holding his hand against his chest in a rather peculiar way. “What on earth’s the matter?” A.J. enquired, and for answer Alexis could do nothing but remove his hand and allow a sudden stream of blood to spurt out and stain the carpet.
A.J., in astonished alarm, helped him into the bedroom and laid him on the bed, discovering then that he had been shot in the chest and was still bleeding profusely. The boy did not speak at first; he seemed to have no strength to do anything but smile. When, however, A.J. had tended him a little and had given him brandy, he began to stammer out what had happened. He had, it seemed, fulfilled a secret task given him by revolutionary headquarters. He had shot Daniloff, Minister of the Interior. He had done it by seeking an interview and firing point-blank across the minister’s own study-table. Daniloff, however, had been quick enough to draw a revolver and fire back at his assailant as the latter escaped through a window. A ladder had been placed in readiness by an accomplice, and Alexis had been descending by it when Daniloff’s bullet had struck him in the chest. He had hurried down, unheeding, and had mingled—successfully, he believed—with the crowds leaving a theatre. He had been in great pain by then, and knew that he dare not let himself be taken to a hospital because in such a place his wound would instantly betray him. The only plan he had been able to think of had been a flight to his friend’s apartment, and though that was over a mile from Daniloff’s house, he had walked there, despite his agony, and even in the porter’s office had managed to make his request with-out seeming to arouse suspicion. Now, in his friend’s bedroom, he could only gasp out his story and plead not to be turned away.
There was no question of that, A.J. assured him; no question of that. “You shall stay here, Alexis, till you are well again, but I must go out and find a doctor—I have done all I can myself, I’m afraid.”
The boy shook his head. “No, no, you can’t get a doctor—he’ll ask questions—it’s impossible. But I have a friend—a medical student—I will give you his address—to-morrow you shall fetch him to me—he will take out the bullet—and say nothing…”
“Tell me where he lives and I will fetch him now.”
“No, no—the police would stop you—they will be all everywhere to-night—because of Daniloff.” He added: “I am sorry to be such a bother to you—I wish I could have thought of some other way. If only I had taken better aim I might have killed him instantly.”
“Don’t talk,” A.J. commanded, huskily. “Try to be quiet—then in the morning I will fetch your friend.”
“Yes. I shall be all right when the bullet is taken out.”
“Yes—yes. Don’t talk any more.”
He held the boy in his arms, that boy with the face of an angel, that boy who had just shot a government minister in cold blood; he held him in his arms until past one in the morning, and then, very quietly and apparently with a gradual diminution of pain, the end came.
Till that moment A.J. had felt nothing but, pity for his friend; but afterwards he began to realise that he was himself in an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous situation. How could he explain the death of the boy that night in his apartment? What story could he invent that would not connect himself with the attack on Daniloff? The deep red stain in the midst of his sitting-room carpet faced him as a dreadful reminder of his problems. He had no time to solve them, even tentatively, for less than a quarter of an hour after the boy’s death he heard a loud commotion in the street outside and a few seconds later a vehement banging on the door of the porter’s office. Next came heavy footsteps up the stairs and a sudden pummeling on his own door. He went to open it and saw a group of police officers standing outside, with the porter in custody.
“We understand that a young man visited you a short time ago,” began one of the officers, with curt precision.
“Yes,” answered A.J.
“Is he here now?”
“Yes.”
“We must have a word with him.”
“I am afraid that will be impossible. He is dead.”
“Ah—then, if you will permit us to see the body.”
“Certainly. In there.”
He pointed to the bedroom, but did not follow them. One of the officers stayed behind in the sitting-room. After a few moments the others returned and their leader resumed his questioning. “Now, sir,” he said, facing A.J. rather sternly, “perhaps you will be good enough to explain all this.”
A.J. replied, as calmly as he could: “I will explain all I can, which I am afraid isn’t very much. I was sitting here just over an hour ago, about to go to bed, when the young man was brought up to see me—”
“The porter brought him up?”
“Yes.”
“Continue.”
“I invited him to come in, and as he looked ill, I asked him what was the matter. Besides, of course, it was peculiar his wanting to see me at such a late hour.”
“Very peculiar indeed. You must have been a very intimate friend of his.”
“Hardly that, as a matter of fact. He used to drop and see me now and again, that was all.”
“Continue with the story.”
“Well, as I was saying, I asked him what was the matter, but he didn’t answer. He was holding his hand to his chest—like this.” A.J. imitated the position. “Then he suddenly took his hand away and the result was—that.” He pointed to the stain on the carpet. “Then he collapsed and I took him into my bedroom. I discovered that he had been shot, but I could not get him to explain anything at all about how it had happened. I made him as comfortable as I could and was just about to send for a doctor when he died. That’s all, I’m afraid.”
“You say he told you nothing of what had happened to him?”
“Nothing at all.”
“And you could make no guess?”
“Absolutely none—it seemed a complete mystery to me during the very short time I had for thinking about it.”
“You know who the young man is?”
“I know his name. He is Alexis Maronin.”
“And your name?”
“Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov.”
“How did you come to know Maronin?”
“We met in connection with some work I am engaged upon. I am writing a book of history and Maronin was interested in the same period. We used to meet occasionally for an exchange of ideas.”
“What was he by profession?”
“A student, I rather imagined. He was always very reserved about himself and his affairs.”
“Were you surprised to see him an hour ago when he came here?”
“I certainly was.”
“You know it is against police rules for strangers to be admitted at that hour?”
“Yes.”
“Had the porter ever admitted visitors to your apartment at such a time before?”
A.J., from the porter’s woebegone appearance, guessed that he had already made the fullest and most abject confession, so he replied: “Yes, he had—but not very often.”
“Had he ever admitted Maronin before at such a late hour?”
“I believe so—once.”
“Why, then, were you surprised to see him when he came to- night?”
A.J. answered, with an effort of casualness: “Because on that last occasion when he paid me a call after permitted hours I gave the boy such a scolding for breaking rules and leading me into possible trouble, that I felt quite sure he had learned a lesson and would not do so again.”
“I see…And you still say that you have not the slightest idea how Maronin met with his injury?”
“Not the slightest.”
“May we examine your passport?”
“Certainly.”
He produced it and handed it over. While it was being closely inspected two police officers carried the boy’s body to a waiting ambulance below. Finally the
leading officer handed the passport back to A.J. with the words: “That will be all for the present, but we may wish to question you again.” The police then departed, but A.J. was under no illusion that danger had departed with them. When he looked out of his sitting-room window he could see and hear the march of a patient watcher on the pavement below.
He drank some brandy to steady his nerves and spent the rest of the night in his easiest armchair. He did not care to enter the bedroom. Now that the police had left him, personal apprehensions were again overshadowed by grief.
He had fallen into a troubled doze when he was awakened by the sound of scuffling on the landing outside, punctuated by shrill screams from the woman who usually came in the mornings to clear up his room and prepare breakfast. She was evidently being compelled to give up her keys, and a moment later the door was unlocked and two police guards strode into the room. They were of a very different type from those of the previous visit. Huge, shaggy fellows, blustering in manner and brutal in method, A.J. recognised their class from so many stories he had heard in that underground beer-hall. “You are to come with us immediately,” one of them ordered gruffly. “Take any extra clothes and personal articles that you can put into a small parcel.” A.J. felt a sharp stab of panic; the routine was dreadfully familiar. “By whose orders?” he asked, feeling that a show of truculence might have some effect with men who were obviously uneducated; but the only reply was a surly: “You’ll find that out in good time.”
The men were armed with big revolvers, apart from which they were of such physique that resistance was out of the question. A.J. gathered together a few possessions and accompanied his two escorts to a pair-horse van waiting at the kerbside. This they bade him enter, one of them getting inside with him, while the other took the reins. The inside was almost pitch dark. After a noisy rattling drive of over half an hour the doors were opened and A.J. was ushered quickly into a building whose exterior he had no time to recognise. The two guards led him into a large bleak room unfurnished except for a desk and a few chairs. A heavily-built and dissipated-looking man sat at the desk twirling his moustache. When A.J. was brought in the man put on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and stared fiercely.
“You are Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov?” he queried; and to A.J.’s affirmative, merely replied: “Take him away.”
The guards continued their Journey with him along many corridors and across several courtyards. He knew that he was in a prison, though which one out of the many in Petersburg he had no idea. At last one of the guards unlocked and opened a door and pushed him into a room already occupied by what at first seemed a large crowd. But that was because, in the dim light admitted by a small and heavily-barred window, it was difficult to distinguish the inhabitants from their bundles of clothing.
They had seemed asleep when A.J. entered, but as soon as the guards retired and the door was relocked they all burst into sudden chatter. A.J., dazed and astonished, found himself surrounded by gesticulating men and youths, all eager to know who he was, why he had been sent there, and so on. He told them his name, but thought it wiser to say that no charge had been made against him so far. They said: “Ah, that is how it very often happens. They do not tell you anything.” They even laughed when he asked the name of the prison; it amused them to have to supply such information. It was the Gontcharnaya, they said.
Altogether there were a score or more inhabitants of that room. About half were youths of between seventeen and twenty-one. One of them told A.J. he had already been imprisoned for two months without knowing any charge against him, and there was a steady hopelessness in his voice as he said so. “These people are not all politicals,” he went on, whispering quietly amidst the surrounding chatter. “Some are criminals—some probably government agents sent to spy on us—who knows?—there is always that sort of thing going on. A fortnight ago two fellows were taken away—we don’t know where, of course—nothing has happened since then until you came.”
Considering their plight the majority of the prisoners were cheerful; they laughed, played with cards and dice, sang songs, and exchanged anecdotes. One of them, a Jew, had an extensive repertoire of obscenity, and whenever the time fell heavily somebody would shout: “Tell us another story, Jewboy.” Another prisoner spent most of his time crouched in a corner, silent and almost motionless; he was ill, though nobody could say exactly what was the matter with him. He could not take the prison food, and so had practically to starve. The food was nauseating enough to anyone in good health, since apart from black bread it consisted of nothing but a pailful of fish soup twice a day, to be shared amongst all the occupants. A.J. could not stomach it till his third day, and even then it made him heave; it smelt and tasted vilely and looked disgusting when it was brought in with fish-heads floating about on its greasy surface. It was nourishing, however, and to avoid it altogether would have been unwise. There were no spoons or drinking vessels; each man dipped his own personal mug or basin into the pail and took what he wanted, and the same mugs, unwashed, served for the tea which the men were allowed to make for themselves.
At night they slept on planks ranged round the wall a foot from the floor. The cracks in the planks were full of bugs. Most of the men were extremely verminous; indeed, it was impossible not to be so after a few days in such surroundings. A smell of dirty clothes and general unwholesomeness was always in the air, mixed with the stale fish smell from the soup-pail and other smells arising from the crude sanitary methods of the place.
The warders were mostly quite friendly and could be bribed to supply small quantities of such things as tea, sugar, and tobacco (to be chewed, not smoked). The entire prison routine was an affair of curious contrasts—it was slack almost to the point of being good-humoured, yet, beyond it all, there was a sense of complete and utter hopelessness. One felt the power of authority as a shapeless and rather muddled monster, not too stern to be sometimes easy-going, but quite careless enough to forget the existence of any individual victim. Most hopeless of all was the way in which some of the victims accepted the situation; they did not complain, they did not show anger, indignation, or even (it seemed) much anxiety. When the warders unlocked the door twice a day their eyes lifted up, with neither hope nor fear, but with just a sort of slow, smouldering fever. And when the man in the corner grew obviously very ill, they did what they could for him, shrugged their shoulders, went on with their card playing, and let him die. After all, what else was possible? Only in the manner and glances of a few of the youngsters did there appear any sign of fiercer emotions.
One of the prisoners, a political, had a passion for acquiring information on every possible subject. Most of the others disliked him, and A.J., to whom he attached himself as often as he could, found him a great bore. “I am always anxious to improve my small knowledge of the world,” he would say, as a preface to a battery of questions. “You are a person of education, I can see—can you tell me whether Hong Kong is a British possession?” Something stirred remotely in A.J.’s memory; he said, Yes, he believed it was. “And is Australia the largest island in the world?” Yes, again; he believed so. “Then, sir, if you could further oblige me—what is the smallest island?” A.J. could never quite decide whether the man were an eccentric or a half-wit. He afterwards learned that he had aimed a bomb at a chief of police in Courland.
All this time A.J. was immensely worried about his own position, which, from conversation with other prisoners, he gathered might be very serious. There were, apparently, few limits to the power of the police; they might keep arrested persons in prison without trial for any length of time, or, at any moment, if they so desired, they might send them into exile anywhere in the vast region between the Urals and the Far East.
For five weeks nothing happened; no one either left or joined the prisoners. Then, on the thirty-eighth day (A.J. had kept count) one of the warders, during his morning visit, singled out A.J. and another prisoner to accompany him. From the fact that the two were ordered to carry their bundle
s with them, the rest of the prisoners drew the likeliest conclusion, and there were many sentimental farewells between friends. The jailer obligingly waited till all this was finished; he did not mind; time was of little concern to him or to anyone else at the Gontcharnaya. Then, with a good-humoured shrug of the shoulders, he relocked the door and led the two prisoners across courtyards and along corridors into the room that A.J. had visited on first entering the prison. The same man was there behind the desk, twirling his moustache upwards almost to meet the bluish pouches under his eyes.
He dealt first with the other prisoner, verifying tree man’s name and then declaring, with official emphasis: “You are found guilty of treason against the government and are sentenced to exile. That is all.” The man began to speak, but a police guard who was in the room dragged him roughly away. When the shouts of both had died down in the distance, the man behind the desk turned to A.j. “You are Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov? You too are found guilty of treason. Your sentence is exile—”
“But what is the charge? What am I accused of? Surely—”
“Silence! Take him away!”
A police guard seized him by the arms and dragged him towards the door and out into the corridor. A.J. did not shout or struggle; he was suddenly dumbfounded, and into the vacuum of bewilderment came slowly, like pain, the clutchings of a dreadful panic. Although he had had exile in mind for weeks, it had been a blow to hear the word actually pronounced over him.
Outside in the corridor the rough manners of the police guard changed abruptly to a mood of almost fatherly solicitude. “I wouldn’t worry so much if I were you,” he remarked soothingly. “Personally, I should much prefer exile to being herded in jail with criminals and such-like. I always think it is a great scandal to mix up decent fellows like yourself with that scum.” He went on to give A.J. some practical advice. “As an exile you are entitled to a fair amount of luggage, though the authorities will try to do you out of your privileges if they can. I suggest that you make out a list of everything you want to take with you, and I will see that the things are collected from where you have been living.”
