His completely detached attitude towards life and affairs prompted A.J. to confide in him more than it was his habit to confide in acquaintances. He told him briefly about the ‘daughter’ with whom he had been wandering and from whom he had become separated during the excitements of the day before. What was really on his mind was whether she was likely to have been decently treated by the White soldiers before the proving of her identity. To Oblimov, of course, he merely expressed his anxieties as a father. Oblimov was sympathetic, but hardly reassuring. “What will happen to her depends on what sort of a girl she is,” he declared concisely. “If she is pretty and not pure she will have a very good time. If she is pure and not pretty she will be left alone. But if she is pretty and wishes to remain pure…” He left the sentence unfinished. “Women,” he added, “are really not worth worrying about, anyway, and evidently you think so too, else you would be searching Saratursk for your daughter at this present moment instead of enjoying the sunshine.” A.J. was a little startled by this acuteness. Oblimov laughed and went on: “Brother, you cannot deceive an old soldier. I believe she is not your daughter at all, but your wife or mistress, and you are more than half glad to be rid of her! Don’t be offended—I know you think you are very fond of her and are worried about her safety. But I can see that deep down in your heart you do not care.”
He went on talking about women in general, and A.J. went on listening until both occupations were suddenly interrupted by a sound that came to them very clearly across the valley. It was the sharp rattle of machine-gun fire. Oblimov, all his professional instincts aroused, scented the air like a startled hound. “It looks as if the battle’s moving back on the village,” he said. “Let’s go down a little and see if we can judge what’s happening.”
They picked their way amongst the trees till they reached a small clearing whence could be seen the whole of the valley. Machine-gun and rifle- fire was by that time intense, and a thin chain of white smoke ringed the town on the further side. Already a few cavalry wagons were leaving Saratursk by the mountain road. By late afternoon the battle was over and its results were obvious; the Reds had retaken the town and the Whites were in full retreat to the east. “Now,” advised Oblimov, “we had better move along ourselves. If the Whites are pursued too hard, some of them may hide in these woods, and it would be just as well for us not to be found with them.” So they descended the hillside and walked boldly into Saratursk. There was no danger of their being noticed or questioned; the recaptured town was in far too much uproar and chaos. The earlier victory of the Whites had been due largely to the poisoning of the water that the Red soldiers had drunk; many more men had died of that than of battle-wounds, and the survivors were disposed to take revenge. The whole place, they said, was White in sympathy, and it was certainly true that the more prosperous shopkeepers and private citizens had loaded gifts upon White officers. Now they wished they had been more discreet. As the victorious Reds lurched into the town, drunk with that highly dangerous mixture of triumph and fatigue, the shopkeepers put up their shutters and made themselves as inconspicuous as possible. All the omens were for an exciting night.
Oblimov soon joined his soldier companions, but A.J. preferred to mingle with the crowd that surged up and down the main street. It was a hot, swaying, tempestuous, and increasingly bad-tempered multitude. The market-place, packed with wounded Reds for whom there was no hospital accommodation and hardly any but the most elementary medical treatment, acted as a perpetual incitement to already inflamed passions. Amidst this acre of misery the town doctor and a few helpers worked their way tirelessly, but there was little that could be done, since the retreating Whites had commandeered all medical supplies—even to bandages and surgical instruments. This was bad enough, but even worse to many was the fact that the Whites seemed also to have drunk the whole town dry. There was not a bottle of beer or a dram of vodka in any of the inns, and the litter of empty bottles in all the gutters told its own significant tale. The first ‘incident’ was caused by this. A few soldiers, refusing to believe that there was absolutely no drink to be had at all, insisted on inspecting the cellar of one of the inns. There they found a couple of bottles of champagne. They drank without much enthusiasm, for they preferred stronger stuff, and then wrecked the inn-keeper’s premises. The news of the affair soon spread and led to a systematic search, not only of inns, but of private houses. In many cases the terrified occupants handed over any liquor they possessed; where they did not, or had none to hand over, the soldiers usually went about smashing pictures and furniture amidst wild shouts and caperings. All this time the town was becoming more crowded; soldiers were still pouring in from the west, and these later arrivals, having endured more prolonged hardships, were in fiercer moods. Towards eight o’clock the rumour went round that a certain local lawyer had been responsible for the poisoning of the water-supply the day before. The man, who was hiding in his house, was dragged out into the middle of the street and clubbed to death. This only whetted appetites; between eight and midnight, perhaps a dozen citizens, mostly shopkeepers and professional men, were killed in various ways and places. Then the even more exciting rumour gained currency that a whole houseful of Whites, including high-born officers and ladies, were in hiding about a mile out of the town, their retreat having been cut off by the Reds’ rapid advance. The village schoolmaster saved his life by giving details of this illustrious colony; it included, he said, no less a personage than the Countess Marie Alexandra Adraxinc, well known in pre-Revolution Petersburg society, and distantly connected with the family of the ex-Emperor. She had been passing as a peasant, continued the informative schoolmaster, and had caused a great sensation among the White officers by declaring and establishing her true identity. Many of them had known her in former times, and a great party had been held both in her honour and to celebrate the glorious White victory of Saratursk. And it was the effects of this and similar parties that had helped towards the equally glorious Red victory that had so immediately followed.
Some of the crowd were for marching on the house and storming it, but the Red leader, a shrewd, capable fellow, was impressed by the political importance of the prisoners and anxious to act with due circumspection. Let a few local shopkeepers be butchered by all means, but countesses and highly-placed White officers were too valuable to be wasted on the mob. Besides, being a person of good memory and methodical mind, he seemed to recollect that there had already been some bother about that particular countess; she had been captured in Siberia, hadn’t she, and had been on her way to Moscow in charge of some local commissar when, somehow or other, the two had escaped from the train and had not been heard of since? The beautiful countess and the susceptible commissar—what a theme for a comic opera! General Polahkin, whose victory over the Whites had been due partly to military ability but chiefly to the sudden and almost miraculous repair of a couple of machine-guns, smiled to himself as he gave orders that the house should be surrounded, arid that, if its occupants gave themselves up, they should be conducted unharmed to the town jail.
This operation was carried out without a hitch, and towards three o’clock in the morning the little procession entered the town. There were about a dozen White officers, whose resplendent uniforms and dejected faces contrasted piquantly with the shabby greatcoats and triumphant faces of their guards. There were five women also—dressed in a weird assortment of clothes, some of them walking painfully in ballroom slippers, and all rather pale and weary-looking. All except one gave occasional terrified glances at the jeering crowds that lined the streets to the prison entrance. The exception was the woman whose name everyone now knew—the woman who (according to a story that was being improved on, saga-Eke, with every telling) had beguiled a commissar into escaping with her and had then, somehow or other, escaped from him! The crowd were not disposed to be too unfriendly towards such a magnificent adventuress, and if she had only played the actress well enough, they were quite drunk enough to have cheered her. But she did not act the right part, and her appearance, too, was disappointingly unromantic. She gazed ahead with calm and level eyes, as if she were not caring either for them or for anything in the world.