“Well, don’t they?”
“Possibly, but I can’t be expected to agree to it.”
“I don’t think you care, then, for this little princess?”
“Not a bit. I hate her, even, because I see in her a possible danger to you. It’s all very selfish, I know, but I can’t help it. I won’t even try to help it. The world is so full of misery that one cant—one daren’t—one’s eyes to it all. The most to be done is to make sure of what one loves and never to let it go. All the rest must be put outside—entirely.”
“Do you think Poushkoff felt like that?”
“Probably. He loved you too.”
She smiled and closed her eyes, and he went down to talk to Stapen. Her words, however, had made him rather more friendly towards the old man, who proved, on acquaintance, the pleasantest and simplest of types. His wife, who came in later in the evening after failing to secure any bread, was very different, but perhaps necessarily so in order to strike a balance with a husband of such benignity. She was a shrewd and rather embittered woman, who gave A.J. hut the chilliest of welcomes. A fruitless four-hour wait in a bread- queue had put her into a mood of outspokenness that her husband sought in vain to check; she almost began by saying: “Well, if Denikin’s men are on the way, let hem bring some food with them. For my part, I don’t care whether we are governed by Reds or Whites, so long as working people can get enough to eat.”
Afterwards Stapen apologised for her with stately courtesy. “She was always like that,” he said. “Many’s the time that my dear old master, Prince Borosil, said to me—’Stapen, you should whip her!’—and I promised I would. But, somehow, I could never bring myself to do it.”
In the morning Daly seemed much better, and A.J.’s hopes began to be optimistic again. It was all, of course, a little more difficult now that they had met Stapen. The fellow assumed so completely that they intended to take the child along with them when they made their dash for safety; it was a dream he had been dreaming for months, and now it seemed about to be accomplished he could only build pretty details all around it. Would they take her to Paris? Or to Rome? Or to London? There were royalties and semi-royalties all over Europe who, it appeared, would be delighted to extend unlimited hospitality to such an exalted babe. For she was, Stapen explained in a whisper, within measurable distance of being heir to all the Russias. The Bolsheviks had killed so many of the ex-Emperor’s family and relatives—far more than anyone could estimate exactly—and the careful, systematic process of extermination was still being carried out. “That is why they are always on the watch for the princess,” he added, “but so far I don’t think they have the slightest idea where she is. They have her photograph, of course, but it is bound to be an old one, and she is different now, especially after her illness.”
A.J. and Daly were solemnly presented to the princess that morning. She was a thin and sad little thing, wasted by fever and obviously very weak. Stapen treated her with rather absurd decorum, while his wife treated her exactly as if she had been her own child; and the princess showed unmistakable affection for them both.
But the more Stapen outlined the child’s social and dynastic importance the more unwilling A.J. was to encumber himself with her. Yet it became increasingly difficult to convey this to Stapen. It was not only that A.J. did not wish to offend the fellow, but rather that no means existed by which Stapen could be brought to conceive A.J.’s point of view. “He won’t see that we have our own future to think of,” A.J. told Daly. “Frankly, I’m not interested in dynastic intrigues—it doesn’t matter a jot to me that the child’s a princess, next in succession, and so on. All I care about in the world is getting you to safety, and I won’t agree to anything that will lessen the chance of it.”
She smiled. “Very well, then, we shall have to tell Stapen that we can’t take her.”
“Yes, and the sooner the better. I’ll tell him in the morning.”
But in the morning Daly was ill again, after being sick and feverish during the night. Their departure looked as if it must be postponed for another day or two, and so, in the circumstances, there did not seem any particular need to present Stapen with the arranged ultimatum.
By noon the whole situation was changed utterly and for the worse, for Daly was by this time very ill indeed, and A.J., with fair experience of such matters, diagnosed typhus. It was not really astonishing, and yet, for some reason, it was a mischance that he had never even considered.
There was no doctor to attend her; there had been none for the little princess, either. There was no private doctor, in fact, in the whole town. Typhus, spread by the war and nourished by the famine, had overwhelmed Saratof to an extent that A.J. had hardly realised during his few days in the place. The hospitals were full, with patients lying on stretchers between the beds; emergency hospitals were also full, and more were being hastily built; yet still the disease raged and spread, and the death-rate had been steadily and appallingly on the increase for weeks. All the hospitals were being managed by skeleton staffs of doctors and nurses, and it had lately become so difficult to give patients proper attention that many who stayed in their homes with no professional doctoring at all had probably an equal, if not a superior chance of recovery. Stapen evidently thought so, and urged A.J. not to try to get Daly into one of the hospitals. It would have been quite impossible, in any case, for they were State institutions and every patient entering had to pass through a sieve of official enquiries. The same reason had prevented Stapen from trying to find a hospital-bed for the princess, and now, as he comfortingly explained to A.J., he was very glad of it. “The countess will be far better here, just as the princess was,” he assured him, and A.J.’s heart warmed towards the old man for showing such willingness to share the burden of this extra misfortune, though in fact it was Stapen’s wife on whom the burden mostly fell.
A.J., fortunately, was at his best in an emergency of such a kind. He had a fine instinct for doctoring, and had acted as amateur doctor for so long and with such success during a part of his life that he felt none of that vague helplessness that afflicts the complete layman when faced with medical problems. He had also a particular knowledge of typhus itself; he had often diagnosed cases, and was quite familiar with the normal course of the disease. Apart from which, he possessed the proper temperament for living through anxious moments; he was calm, quiet, soothing, and never despondent. Stapen, he soon found, was no use at all except as an amiable figurehead to surround the whole affair with an atmosphere of benignity and goodwill; it was his wife who did and was everything. This hard-faced, dour, and rather truculent woman soon drew from A.J. the deepest admiration; he perceived that it was she, and she alone, who had saved the child’s life. And she tackled this additional job of nursing Daly with an apparent grudgingness which concealed, net so much a warm heart, as a thoroughly efficient soul. J, could well imagine the sort of cook she had been, and be cold also well imagine the sort of butler Stapen had been.
So Saratof, which was to have been but a stage on a final dash to freedom, became instead a last prison closing them round. To A.J., sitting at the bedside, nothing remained but love. He realised, now as never before, how dear she was, and how utterly beyond beauty to him. His mind glowed and throbbed with a hundred memories of her; he saw her dark eyes opening at dawn, and heard her deep tranquil laughter echoing amongst the boles of great trees; he felt again the slumberous passion that had seemed to wrap them both in unity with every little rustling leaf. From his first notice of her in the prison- cell at Khalinsk, everything had had the terrible, lovely reality of a child’s fairy-tale.