“Oh, I’m all right. Are you tired?”
“Just a bit.”
“Then go to sleep now, if you like. At night it may be chilly and you’ll be kept awake.”
She gave him a single quick glance that somehow expressed the utter simplicity of their relationship. Their lives had been knit together perfectly and completely; to have shared hunger and thirst and tiredness, to have hidden in dark thickets from enemies, to have washed in mountain streams and slept under high trees—all had built up, during those few hurried weeks, a tradition of love as elemental as the earth on which they had lain together.
When she was asleep he stared at the slowly passing landscape till he was drowsy himself. A little man next to him, who had been sleeping, then awoke and produced a small plug of chewing tobacco which he asked A.J. to share. A.J. thanked him but declined, and this led to conversation. There was something in the little man’s soft lilting voice that sounded vaguely familiar, and it soon appeared that it was he who had shouted down to the bandits in confirmation of A.J.’s own account of himself. As this intervention had quite probably saved the situation, A.J. felt grateful to him, though his appearance was far from pleasant. He was dirty and very verminous, and had only one eye; the other, he declared proudly, had been knocked out by a woman. He did not explain when or how. He was full of melancholy indignation over the cowardice of the others in dealing with the bandits. “Nobody but me had the courage to say a word to them,” he kept repeating, and it was undoubtedly true. “Just me—little Gregorovitch with the one eye—all the rest were afraid to speak.” A man some distance away shouted to him to stop talking, and added, for A.J.’s benefit: “Don’t listen to him, brother. He’s only a half-wit. The other half came out with his eye.” There was laughter at that, after which the little man fell into partial silence for a while, muttering only very quietly to himself. A.J. was inclined to believe the diagnosis correct; the man’s remaining eye held all the hot, roving mania of the semi-insane.
Later the little man began to talk again. He seemed to have something on his mind, to be nourishing some vast and shadowy grievance against the world in general, and from time to time he would scan the horizon eagerly with his single eye. His talk was at first so idle and disjointed that A.J. had much difficulty in comprehending him; it was as if the man’s brain, such as it might be, were working only fitfully. But by degrees it all worked itself out into something as understandable as it ever would be. He had been a soldier, conscribed to fight the Germans; he had fought them for two years without being injured—the eye (once again his plaintiveness soared momentarily into pride) was not a war-wound, but the work of a woman. (And once again, also, he forbore to explain when or how.) After the Revolution he had tried to get back home, but he had lost his papers, and apparently nothing could be done without papers. All he knew was his own name—Gregorovitch—and the name of his village—Krokol; and these two names, it appeared, hadn’t been enough for the authorities. With rather wistful indignation he described his visit to a government office in Petrograd, whither he had drifted after the collapse of the battle-fronts. “I should be glad,” he had said, “if you could tell me my full name and how I can get home. I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye, and I live at Krokol.”
“Krokol?” the clerk had said. (The little man imitated the mincing, educated tones of the bureaucrat with savage exaggeration.) “Krokol? Never heard of it? How do you spell it?”
“I don’t spell it,” Gregorovitch had replied.
“Don’t spell it? And why not?”
“Because I don’t spell anything. But I can describe it to you—it is a village with a wide street and a tiny steepled church.”
“I am afraid,” the clerk had then answered, “we can do nothing for you. Good-day.”
The little man’s eye burned with renewed fever as he recited this oft-told plaint. “Is it not scandalous,” he asked, “that in a free country no one can tell you who you are or where you come from?”
That had taken place a year before, and since then Gregorovitch had been travelling vaguely about in search of Krokol. He had just got on trains anywhere, hoping that sometime he might reach a place where Krokol was known. Occasionally he left the trains and walked, and always he hoped that just over the horizon he would come across the little steepled village.
A.J. was interested enough to question him minutely about Krokol, but it was soon obvious why the clerk at Petrograd had been so impatient. Gregorovitch could give nothing but the vaguest description that might have applied to a thousand or ten thousand villages throughout the length and breadth of the country. Even the name, without a spelling, was a poor clue, since local people often called their villages by names unidentifiable in maps or gazetteers. Nor had Gregorovitch a notion whether Krokol was near or far from the sea, near or far from any big city, near or far from any railway or river. All he could supply was that repeated and useless mention of the wide street and the steepled church.
A.J. questioned him further about his family, but again his replies were valueless; he could only say that he had a brother named Paul and a sister named Anna. Of any family name he was completely ignorant, and was, indeed, completely convinced that it was unnecessary. “Is it not enough,” he asked, “that I am little Gregorovitch with the one eye? Everyone in Krokol knows me.”
He went on quietly protesting in this way until the train came to a slow standstill in the midst of the burning steppe. The halt was for no apparent reason save the whim of the engine-driver and fireman, who climbed down from their cab and lazed picturesquely on the shady side of the train. The air, motionless as the train itself, soon became hot and reeking inside the car, and those whose heads chanced to be in sunlight twitched and fidgeted under the glare. Movement, with its own particular discomforts, had somehow kept at bay the greater tortures of hunger and thirst; but now these two raged and stormed in a world to themselves. Water—bread—the words became symbols of all that a human being could live and die for. A scuffle suddenly arose at one end of the car; a man was drinking out of a bottle and his neighbour, unable to endure the sight, attacked him with instant and ungovernable fury. For a few seconds everyone was shouting at once, till at last the assailant was overborne, and was soon sobbing to himself, aware that he had behaved shamefully. And the others, beyond their anger, seemed not unwilling to be sorry for him. Then, with a sharp lurch, the train began to move again and the resulting breath of air took away the keener pangs for another interval.
Towards evening they reached a small station called Minarsk, where they were shunted into a siding and given water, but no food. The satisfaction of thirst, however, put everyone in a good humour for a time; chatter became quite animated, and noisy fraternisation went on between the occupants of the car and the swarming refugees from the station. A.J. was now beginning to know the circumstances and personalities of many more of his fellow-travellers. Besides the little man with one eye, there was a large family of exiles returning from Irkutsk and hoping to reach Kharkoff; there were others seeking family or friends, some whose villages had been destroyed in the fighting between Reds and Whites, some who travelled in the despairing belief that any place must be better than the one they had left. One old pock-faced and long-limbed Tartar confessed to a passionate love of travel for its own sake; his home had been on the Kirghiz plains, but he had never, in those old days, been able to afford the luxury of a third-class ticket. Since the Revolution, however, it had become increasingly easy to board trains without a ticket at all, and his life had become correspondingly and increasingly enjoyable. He had already (he told A.J.) been as far north as Archangel, as far east as Tomsk, and as far south as Merv. Now he was taking a westward trip; he hoped to visit Kiev and make a pilgrimage to the monastery there. He was quite happy. He chewed a little tobacco, but had had no food for days and did not seem greatly to mind hunger, thirst, or any other physical hardship.