“My baba. She is dying. I am taking her to a doctor,” the peasant replied.
Here I groaned louder than ever. I was suffocating. My heart was thumping with dread of a sudden exposure and discovery. Every particle of time seemed an age.
The sentry who had stopped us apparently talked the matter over with some of his comrades, to the accompaniment of my loud moans. Without uncovering my face he issued a pass to the moujik.
My heart beat joyfully as the horse started off at a rapid pace. For a while I still held my breath, hardly daring to believe that I had left Bolshevik territory behind me with so little difficulty.
After some time we arrived at Kornilov’s front. The posts along it were held by officers, of whom his force was almost exclusively composed. At one such post we were stopped by an imperative “Halt!”
The driver was about to repeat the story of his sick baba when I surprised him by throwing off the fur coat, then the shawl, and jumping out of the vehicle, heaving a deep sigh of relief. I could not help laughing.
The moujik must have thought me mad at first. The officers at the post could not understand it either.
“What the devil!” a couple of them muttered under their breath. I proceeded very coolly to pay the fifty roubles to the peasant, and thereupon to dismiss him, to his great amazement.
“I shall get to the city all right from here,” I informed him.
“The deuce you will!” blurted out the officer in charge. “Who are you?”