“Well, here’s luck!” said Bertram.
He spoke the words heartily, and gripped Christy’s hand, but, at the back of his brain, as it were, was a sense of envy. Envy of Christy, his best friend! Inconceivable, that—and yet there was the thought nagging at him. Janet had been very kind to him in her rooms at Battersea Park. She had once made his heart thump by a cry of regret that they had not met and married before Joyce came along. What were her words? He remembered them.
“A pity, Sir Faithful, that you didn’t marry me instead of Joyce! I understand you better. And you were my first Dream Knight, in the days when you kissed me in Kensington Gardens.”
He leaned out of the carriage window, and gripped Christy’s hand again.
“Give my love to Janet. Tell her that I’ve killed self-pity. She’ll understand!”
“Take care of yourself!” said Christy, and then sloped away from the Kazansky station, with his pipe in his mouth.
The journey began, and continued, day after day, with many halts in the middle of Russian forests and the open countryside. Snow lay heavily on the branches of fir-trees, and thick on the ground, so that a traveller’s eyes tired of the white monotony. Every twenty versts or so they reached a Russian village, with its low roofed wooden houses, surrounded by high stockades. Peasants were shovelling snow to make pathways to their village. They gathered in the station yards to stare at the train, kept back from too near approach by soldiers of the Red Army who looked half frozen and half starved. In many stations were refugee trains without engines, with snow up to the axle wheels of their closed trucks, in which families were densely crowded, lying together all hugger-mugger, for warmth’s sake. It seemed as though they had been there for months. There was no apparent prospect of these trains ever moving. Those who died were buried in pits by the railway track. Across the flat snow-fields there were here and there processions of men, women and children, crawling like ants on the march, black against the whiteness of their way. They, too, were refugees from Famine—without much hope ahead, thought Bertram, remembering The End of the Journey, in Petrograd. He wondered how many would lie down to die in the snow.
“They are wonderful in endurance,” said Nadia, to whom he put the question, as they stood together in the corridor, looking out of window. “In every village they pass they get a bit of bread from those who can ill spare it. So they live from place to place. Those who are strong.”
He had many talks like this with Nadia in the corridor, or in her compartment, with the two other ladies, belonging, like herself, to the old régime, once ladies in waiting of the Imperial Court. The Colonel of the A. R. A. had provided food for the party, mostly tinned stuff which Dr. Weekes and Bertram, appointing themselves cooks, heated up in enamel saucepans over tins of solid alcohol. It made the time pass, and was more comforting than cold food.
At night, in the darkness of the corridor, Nadia stood by his side, and sometimes they held hands, like children when the lights are out.