A.J. thanked the fellow and was glad to walk away with an armful of food and nothing worse than a roar of laughter behind him. When he rejoined his companion they continued their walk for a mile or so and then sat down to eat, drink, and rest. It was already late afternoon and they had had nothing since the few crusts of bread at early morning. A.J. now gathered sticks for a small fire, on which he boiled eggs and made tea. The resulting meal lifted them both to an extraordinary pitch of happiness; as they sat near the smoking embers while the first mists of twilight dimmed the glades, a strange peacefulness fell upon them, and they both knew, even without speaking, that neither would have chosen to be anywhere else in the world. All around them lay enemies; to- morrow might see them captured, imprisoned, or dead; there might be horror in the future to balance all the horrors of the past; yet the tiny oasis of the present, with themselves at the core of it, was a sheer glow of perfection.
They were so tired that they did not move before darkness came, and then merely lay clown on the brown leaves. The evening air was chilly, and they clung together for warmth with their two great-coats huddled over them. All the small and friendly sounds of the forest wrapped them about: an owl hooted very far away; a mouse rustled through the near undergrowth; a twig broke suddenly aloft and fell with a tiny clatter to the ground. She kissed him with a grave, peaceful passion that seemed a living part of all the copious, cordial nature that surrounded them; they hardly spoke; to love seemed as simple and as speechless as to be hungry and thirsty and tired. That night he could almost have blessed the chaos that had brought them both, out of a whole world, together.
On the fifth day they fell in with a peasant who told them of a quick way into the plains. He was a bent and gnarled fellow of an age that looked to be anything between sixty and eighty, and with the manner of one to whom Bolshevism and revolution were merely the pranks of a young and foolish generation. He was full of chatter, and told A.J. all his family affairs, besides pointing to a small timbered roof on a distant hillside that was his own. He had left a sick daughter alone in that hut with five small children; her husband was a soldier, fighting somewhere or other—or perhaps dead—no news had been received for many months. “Of course he will never come back—they never do. She has had no baby now for over two years—is it not dreadful? And she would make a good wife for any man when she is in good health—oh yes, a very good wife.”
A.J. made some sympathetic remark and the old man continued: “But what are young men nowadays? Mere adventurers pretending to want to see the world! What is the world, after all? When you have seen one forest you have seen them all, and one field is very much like another. I myself am quite happy to have been no further than Vremarodar, seventy versts away.” He chuckled amidst the odorous depths of a heavy matted beard and still continued: “I don’t suppose you’d ever guess my age, either, brother. I’m a hundred and three, though people don’t always believe me when I tell them. You see my youngest daughter’s only thirty-five, and people say it’s impossible.” He chuckled again, “but it isn’t impossible, I assure you—I’m not the sort of fellow to tell you a lie. Why, look at me now, still fit and hearty, as you can see, and if there was a pretty woman about, and my honour as a man depended on it, I don’t know but what…” His chuckles boiled over into resonant laughter. “Mind you, I’m not what I used to be, by a long way, and I think it’s a girl’s duty to look after her father when he lives to be my age, don’t you? She’s not a bad girl, you know, but she’s inclined to be lazy and I have to thrash her now and again. Not that I like doing it, but women—well, you know all about them, I daresay. Ah well, there’s your path—it leads out into a long valley and at the end of that there are the plains as far as you can sec. Good- day to you, brother, and to you too, madam.”
The next day they reached the edge of the forests and saw the plains stretching illimitably into the hazy distance. But before descending, it was necessary to make arrangements. It was certain that they would meet man’’ strangers once they left the hillsides, and with the prospect, too, of colder weather, they could no longer rely on sleeping out of doors. A soldier’s disguise, for the woman especially, seemed therefore likely to be a source of danger, and A.J. decided that it would be Better for them to resume their peasant roles. In his own case the change was inconsiderable, since so many peasants wore army clothes whenever they could acquire them; and as for Daly, she had only to change into the female attire that she had been carrying with her all the way from Saratursk.
The change was made, and on the seventh day, very early in the morning, they left the forests. The sky was fine, but clouds were already massing on the horizon for a thunderstorm that would doubtless Tiring to an end the long spell of fine weather. It was still hard to make more than the sketchiest plan of campaign. Amidst those lonely Ural foothills there had been an atmosphere of being out of the world, removed from many of its bewilderments and troubled by nothing more complicated than the elemental problem of the hunted eluding the hunter. In the plains, however, all problems were subtler and more intricate—as intricate, at least, as the political and military situation of the country generally. At Saratursk, before the escape, A.J. had tried to visualise what was happening as a whole, and not merely locally, but it had been difficult owing to the wildness of the rumours that gained credence. Every morning there had come a fresh crop of them—that the German Kaiser had committed suicide, that Lenin had been shot in Moscow by a young girl, that a British army was invading from Archangel, that the Japanese were approaching from the east along the line of the Trans-Siberian; there had been no lack of such sensational news, much of which was always more likely to be false than true. It seemed, however, fairly probable that Czecho-Slovak detachments were by this time in full occupation of great lengths of the Trans- Siberian, and it was also possible (as rumour alleged) that they had pushed up the Volga and captured Sembirsk and Kazan. The repulse of the Whites from Saratursk would appear, in that case, to have been a merely isolated and local affair—as local, in fact, as the Red Terror that had followed it. But then, all Russia was seething with such local affairs, and the history of the whole country could scarcely be more than the sum-total of them. A village here might be Red, or there White, and a stranger could hardly tell which until he took the risk of entering it. The Czechs, despite their imposing position on the map, held merely the thin line of the railway; a few versts on either side of the track their sway ended, and the brigandage of Red and White soldiery went on without interruption.
So much A.J. had in mind, though there was little he knew for certain. If there had been any fixed battle-line between Red and White, it would have been a straightforward task, despite the danger of it, to make for the nearest point of that line and cross over. As it was, however, there could be no advantage in joining up with some small and local White colony which, in a few days or weeks, might surrender to the Reds and be massacred.