Ouranov had little money, but he did not go hungry. The seven soldiers of his escort had taken a curious fancy to him. They called him their captain, and saw to it that he always had food and shelter. There was much in him that they did not understand, but also something that attracted them peculiarly. During the first part of the southward expedition he had naturally taken command, for he knew the land far better than they, and was in less danger of losing the track. After that it had seemed natural that he should go on telling them when and where to halt, where to stay for the nights, and so on. They let him do that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that they thought him a little mad. They had a nickname for him which meant ’The man who has forgotten how to talk.’ It was an obvious exaggeration, since he did talk whenever there was need for it; yet even on such occasions it was as if he were thinking out the words, and as if each word cost him effort. They told one another that this was because he had been exiled by himself and had been left alone so long. By the time of reaching Yakutsk the legend had grown; Ouranov, they were saying, had been such a dangerous revolutionary that, by the ex- Emperor’s personal order, he had been sent to the remotest and most terrible spot in all Siberia. And after a week of gossip in Yakutsk it was easy to say and believe that he had been ten years utterly alone in Russkoe Yansk, and that he had not spoken a word during the whole of that time. So now, when the soldiers saw him reading a book or making pencil notes on paper, they said he must be learning language over again.
At last came the long-awaited steamer, an old paddle-boat, built in Glasgow in the ’seventies, towing behind it a couple of odorous and verminous convict-barges. Fifteen hundred persons crammed themselves into the boat and another thousand into the barges. There was nowhere to sleep except on the bare boards of the deck or in the foul and pestilential holds; men and women sickened, died, and were dropped overboard during that month of weary chug-chugging upstream through a forlorn land.
By August the exiles were in Irkutsk. The city was in chaos; its population had been increased threefold; it was the neck of the channel through which Siberia was emptying herself of the accumulated suffering of generations. From all directions poured in an unceasing flood of returning exiles and refugees—not only from Yakutsk and the Arctic, but from Chita and the Manchurian border, from the Baikal mines and the mountain-prisons of the Yablonoi. In addition, there were German, Austrian, and Hungarian war- prisoners, drifting slowly westward as the watch upon them dissolved under the distant rays of Petrograd revolution; and nomad traders from the Gobi, scraping profit out of the pains and desires of so many strangers; and Buriat farmers, rich after years of war-profiteering; and Cossack officers, still secretly loyal to the old régime: Irkutsk was a magnet drawing together the whole assortment, and drawing also influenza and dysentery, scurvy and typhus, so that the hospitals were choked with sick, and bodies were thrown, uncoffined and by scores, into huge open graves dug by patient Chinese.
On a warm August afternoon A.J. wandered about the Irkutsk railway depot, threading his way amongst the refugees and listening for a few odd moments to various political speeches that were being made by soldiers. He was dressed in a nondescript, vaguely military uniform which he had acquired at Yakutsk as soon as the cold weather had begun to recede; he might have been taken for a Russian soldier, though not, at a second glance, for a very ordinary one. His fine teeth, spare figure, and close-cropped hair and beard, would all have marked him from a majority. His features, lined and rugged, were not without a look of gentleness and pity; but as he wandered about the station and freight- yards he seemed really to have no more than the shadow of any quality; all was obscured by a look of uncomprehendingness that did not quite amount to bewilderment.
The seven Cossacks who had been with him for so many weeks were also on the platform, very dejected because they had been ordered east, while he, of course, must take the first train in the other direction, He joined them for a final meal of tea and black bread before their train arrived. “You must go to Petrograd,” one of them told him earnestly. “All the exiles are going there to work for the new government; Kerensky will find you a job—perhaps he will make you an inspector of taxes.”
“No, no,” interrupted another. “Our brother is surely fitted to be something better than an inspector of taxes. He has books—he must be a great scholar; I should think Kerensky might make him a postmaster, for a postmaster, after all, has to know how to read and write.”
They argued thus until the train arrived, and A.J. stayed with them, smiling at their remarks occasionally, but saying very little. There was a great rush for seats on the train, and when at last the seven soldiers had all crowded into a coach they leaned out of the open window and kissed him—their captain, their legend, the man whom they would remember and wonder at until the end of their lives. And he, when their train had gone, strolled away still half smiling.
He lay at night, like thousands of others, in any sheltered corner he could find, with a little bundle of all his possessions for a pillow. After three more days a train came in from the east; it was grotesquely full already, but he managed to find a place in a cattle-truck.
The train was very long, and between the first coach next to the engine and the last cattle-truck at the rear the whole world lay in mad microcosm. For the first coach was a dining-car, smooth-running and luxurious; you could look through the windows and see military officers, spattered with gold braid, picking their teeth after fried chicken and champagne, while attendants in evening-dress hovered about them obsequiously. Next came the first-class coach in which these magnates lived when they were not eating and drinking; and next the second-class coaches, containing those who were not fortunate enough to be high military officers; they were not allowed to use the dining-car, but the attendants would sometimes, at an extortionate price, supply them with food and drink. After that carne the third-class coaches, crammed with soldiers of the Revolution, who bought or commandeered food at wayside stations; and last, comprising two-thirds of the whole train, were the cattle-trucks, packed from floor to roof with refugees and peasants and returning exiles—folk who had spent their last paper rouble on a railway ticket, or else had smuggled themselves on board with no ticket at all, and who had nothing to eat except the food they could bargain for, or the ghastly tit-bits they could rake out of rubbish-bins behind the station refreshment-rooms.
A.J. spent hours in his corner of the truck, watching through the slats the constant procession of miles. He was half oblivious of those about him, of babies who screamed and were sick, of women who moaned with hunger, of men who chattered or quarrelled or were noisily companionable. In a similar way he half noticed the changes that had taken place since he had last moved over the scene—the extraordinary evidences of a new Siberia that had sprung up ribbon-like along the thin line of the railway, the new factories and freight-yards, the trams in the streets of Omsk, the steel bridges that had replaced wooden ones.
The journey was tiring, but worse for others than for himself, for his body, like his mind, seemed only capable of half-sensations. For years he had been unaware of this, but now, in a world of men and women, he perceived and was puzzled by it; he found himself doing things in a curious dream-like way, as if part of him were asleep and were obeying the other part automatically. Even when he talked, he heard his own voice as if it were another person speaking; and when he felt tiredness, or hunger, or a physical ache, the sensation came to him slowly, incompletely, almost at secondhand.