Read Online Knight Without Armour by James Hilton - Free Book Online

had begun to
give him a remarkably different appearance, Forrester again photographed him,
and a few days later handed him his new passport and papers of identity. It
gave him a shock, at first, to see himself so confidently described as
‘Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov,’ born at such and such a place and on
such and such a date. “You must get used to thinking of yourself by
that name,” Forrester told him. “And you must also make it your
business to know something about your own past life. Your parents, of course,
are both dead. You have just a little money of your own—enough to save
you from having to work for a living you are a studious, well-educated
person, at present engaged in writing a book about—what shall we
say?—something, perhaps, with a slightly subversive
flavour—political economy, perhaps, or moral philosophy. Oh, by the
way, you may permit yourself to know a little French and German—as
much, in fact, as you do know. But not a word of English. Remember
that most of all.”
    The next morning A.J. was made to change into a completely different
outfit of clothes. He was also given three hundred roubles in cash, a small
trunk-key, and a luggage ticket issued at the Moscow station. After breakfast
he said good-bye to Forrester and Stanfield, walked from their apartment to
the station, presented his ticket, received in exchange a large portmanteau,
and drove in a cab to an address Forrester had given him. It was a block of
middle- class apartments on the southern fringe of the city. There chanced
(or was it chance?) to be an apartment vacant; he interviewed the porter,
came to terms, produced his papers for registration, and took up his abode in
a comfortable set of rooms on the third floor. There he unlocked the
portmanteau, and found it contained clothes, a few Russian books, a brass
samovar, and several boxes of a popular brand of Russian cigarettes. These
miscellaneous and well-chosen contents rather amused him.
    Thus he began life under the new name. He was startled, after a few days,
to find how easy it was to assume a fresh identity; he conscientiously tried
to forget all about Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill and to remember only Peter
Vasilevitch Ouranov, and soon the transference came to require surprisingly
little effort. Forrester had cautioned him not to be in any great hurry to
begin his real work, so at first he merely made small purchases at the
bookshop whose address he had been given, without attempting to get to know
anyone. Gradually, however, the youthful, studious-looking fellow who bought
text-books on economic history (that was the subject finally fixed on)
attracted the attention of the bookseller, a small swarthy Jew of
considerable charm and culture. His name was Axelstein. A.J. had all along
decided that, if possible, he would allow the first move to be made by the
other side, and he was pleased when, one afternoon during the slack hours of
business, Axelstein began a conversation with him. Both men were exceedingly
cautious and only after a longish talk permitted it to be surmised that they
were neither of them passionate supporters of the Government. Subsequent
talks made the matter less vague, and in the end it all happened much as
Forrester had foreshadowed—A.J. was introduced to several other
frequenters of the shop, and it was tacitly assumed that he was a most
promising recruit to the movement.
    A few days later he was admitted to a club to which Axelstein and many of
his customers belonged. It met in an underground beer-hall near the Finland
station. Over a hundred men and women crowded themselves into the small,
unventilated room, whose atmosphere was soon thick with the mingled fumes of
beer, makhorka tobacco, and human bodies. Some of the men were
factory-workers with hands and clothes still greasy from the machines. Others
belonged to the bourgeois and semi-intelligentsia—clerks in government
offices, school