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

teachers, book-keepers, and so on. A few others were
university students. Of the women, some were factory-workers, some
stenographers, but most were just the wives of the men.
    A.J. allowed himself to make several friends in that underground beer-
hall, and the reality of its companionship together with the secrecy and
danger of the meeting, made a considerable impression on him. Often news was
received that one or another member had been arrested and imprisoned without
trial. Police spies were everywhere; there was even the possibility, known to
all, that some of the members might themselves be spies or agents
provocateurs. Caution was the universal and necessary watchword, and at any
moment during their sessions members were ready to transform themselves into
a haphazard and harmless group of beer-drinking and card-playing
roisterers.
    It was only by degrees that A.J. came to realise the immensity of the tide
that was flowing towards revolution. That club was only one of hundreds in
Petersburg alone, and Petersburg was only one of scores of Russian cities in
which such clubs existed. The movement was like a great subterranean octopus
stirring ever more restlessly beneath the foundations of imperial government.
An arm cut off here or there had absolutely no effect; if a hundred men were
deported to Siberia a hundred others were ready to step instantly into the
vacant places. Everything was carefully and skilfully organised, and there
seemed to be no lack of money. The Government always declared that it came
from the Japanese, but Axelstein hinted that most of it derived from big
Jewish banking and industrial interests.
    A.J. became rather friendly with an eighteen-year-old university student
named Maronin. He was fair-haired, large-eyed, and delicate-looking, with
thin, artistic hands (he was a fine pianist) and slender nostrils; his father
had been a lawyer in Kieff. The boy did no real work at the university and
had no particular profession in view; he lived every moment for the
revolution he believed to be coming. A.J. found that this intense and
passionate attitude occasioned no surprise amongst the others, though, of
course, it was hardly typical.
    Young Alexis Maronin interested A.J. a great deal. He was such a kindly,
jolly, amusing boy—in England A.J. could have imagined him a popular
member of the sixth-form. In Russia, however, he was already a man, and with
more than an average man’s responsibilities, since he had volunteered
for any task, however dangerous, that the revolutionary organisers would
allot him. Axelstein explained that this probably meant that he would be
chosen for the next ‘decisive action’ whenever that should take
place. “He is just the type,” Axelstein explained calmly.
“Throwing a bomb accurately when you know that the next moment you will
be torn to pieces requires a certain quality of nerve which, as a rule, only
youngsters possess.”
    Regularly every week A.J. transmitted his secret reports and received his
regular payments by a routine so complicated and devious that it seemed to
preclude all possibility of discovery. He found his work extremely
interesting, and his new companions so friendly and agreeable, on the whole,
that he was especially glad that his spying activities were not directed
against them. He was well satisfied to remain personally impartial, observing
with increasing interest both sides of the worsening situation.
    One afternoon he was walking with Maronin through a factory district
during a lock-out; crowds of factory workers—men, women, and
girls—were strolling or loitering about quite peaceably. Suddenly, with
loud shouts and the clatter of hoofs, a troop of Cossacks swept round the
street-corner, their lithe bodies swaying rhythmically from side to side as
they laid about them with their short, leaden-tipped whips. The crowd
screamed and stampeded for safety, but most were hemmed in between the