Part 8

The cannon roared with the same violence, but Ekatherinenskaïa Street, through which Volodia went, accompanied by Nikolaïeff, was empty and quiet. He could see in the darkness only the white walls standing in the midst of the great overthrown houses, and the stones of the sidewalk he was on. Sometimes he met soldiers and officers, and going along the left side, near the Admiralty, he noticed, by the bright light of a fire which burned behind a fence, a row of dark-leaved acacias, covered with dust, recently planted along the sidewalk and held up by green painted stakes. His steps and those of Nikolaïeff, who was loudly breathing, resounded alone in the silence. His thoughts were vague. The pretty Sister of Charity, Martzeff’s leg, with his toes moving convulsively in his stocking, the darkness, the shells, the different pictures of death, passed confusedly in his memory. His young and impressionable soul was irritated and wounded by his isolation, by the complete indifference of every one to his lot, although he was exposed to danger. “I shall suffer, I shall be killed, and no one will mourn me,” he said to himself. Where, then, was the life of the hero full of the energetic ardor and of the sympathies he had so often dreamed of? The shells shrieked and burst nearer and nearer, and Nikolaïeff sighed oftener without speaking. In crossing the bridge which led to Korabelnaïa he saw something two steps off plunge whistling into the gulf, illuminating for a second with a purple light the violet-tinted waves, and then bound off, throwing a shower of water into the air.

“Curse it! the villain is still alive,” murmured Nikolaïeff.

“Yes,” answered Volodia, in spite of himself, and surprised at the sound of his own voice, so shrill and harsh.

They now met wounded men carried on stretchers, carts filled with gabions, a regiment, men on horseback. One of the latter, an officer followed by a Cossack, stopped at the sight of Volodia, examined his face, then, turning away, hit his horse with his whip and continued on his way. “Alone, alone! whether I am alive or not, it is the same to all!” said the youth to himself, ready to burst into tears. Having passed a great white wall, he entered a street bordered with little, quite ruined houses, continually lighted up by the flash of the shells. A drunken woman in rags, followed by a sailor, came out of a small door and stumbled against him. “I beg pardon, your Excellency,” she murmured. The poor boy’s heart was more and more oppressed, while the flashes continually lit up the black horizon and the shells whistled and burst about him. Suddenly Nikolaïeff sighed, and spoke with a voice which seemed to Volodia to express a restrained terror.

“It was well worth while to hurry from home to come here! We went on and went on, and what was the use of hurrying?”

“But, thank the Lord! my brother is cured,” said Volodia, in order by talking to drive away the horrible feeling which had got possession of him.

“Finely cured, when he is in a bad way altogether! The well ones would find themselves much better off in the hospital in times like these. Do we, perchance, take any pleasure in being here? Now an arm is lost, now a leg, and then--And yet it is better here in the city than in the bastion, Lord God! On the way a man has to say all his prayers. Ah, scoundrel! it just hummed in my ears,” he added, listening to the sound of a piece of shell which had passed close to him. “Now,” continued Nikolaïeff, “I was told to lead your Excellency, and I know I must do what I am ordered to, but our carriage is in the care of a comrade, and the bundles are undone. I was told to come, and I have come. But if any one of the things we have brought is lost, it is I, Nikolaïeff, who answers for it.”

A few steps farther on they came out on an open space.

“Here is your artillery, your Excellency,” he suddenly said. “Ask the sentinel, he will show you.”

Volodia went forward alone. No longer hearing behind him Nikolaïeff’s sighs, he felt himself abandoned for good and all. The feeling of this desertion in the presence of danger, of death, as he believed, oppressed his heart with the glacial weight of a stone. Halting in the middle of the place, he looked all about him to see if he was observed, and taking his head in both hands, he murmured, with a voice broken by terror, “My God! am I really a despicable poltroon, a coward? I who have lately dreamed of dying for my country, for my Czar, and that with joy! Yes, I am an unfortunate and despicable being!” he cried, in profound despair, and quite undeceived about himself. Having finally overcome his emotion, he asked the sentinel to show him the house of the commander of the battery.

XII.

The commander of the battery lived in a little two-story house. It was entered through a court-yard. In one of the windows, in which a pane was missing and was replaced by a sheet of paper, shone the feeble light of a candle. The servant, seated in the door-way, was smoking his pipe. Having announced Volodia to his master, he showed him into his room. There, between two windows, beside a broken mirror, was seen a table loaded with official papers, several chairs, an iron bed with clean linen and a rug before it. Near the door stood the sergeant-major, a fine man, with a splendid pair of mustaches, his sword in its belt. On his coat sparkled a cross and the medal of the Hungary campaign. The staff-officer, small in stature, with a swollen and bandaged cheek, walked up and down, dressed in a frock-coat of fine cloth which bore marks of long wear. He was decidedly corpulent, and appeared about forty years old. A bald spot was clearly marked on the top of his head; his thick mustache, hanging straight down, hid his mouth; his brown eyes had an agreeable expression; his hands were fine, white, a little fat; his feet, very much turned out, were put down with a certain assurance and a certain affectation which proved that bashfulness was not the weak side of the commander.

“I have the honor to present myself. I am attached to the Fifth Light Battery--Koseltzoff, the second-ensign,” said Volodia, who, entering the room, recited in one breath this lesson learned by heart.

The commander of the battery replied by a somewhat dry salute, and without offering him his hand begged him to be seated. Volodia then sat down timidly near the writing-table, and in his distraction getting hold of a pair of scissors, began to play with them mechanically. With hands behind his back and with bowed head, the commander of the battery continued his promenade in silence, casting his eyes from time to time on the fingers which continued to juggle with the scissors.

“Yes,” he said, stopping at last in front of the sergeant-major, “from to-morrow on we must give another measure of oats to the caisson horses; they are thin. What do you think of it?”

“Why not? It can be done, your High Excellency; oats are now cheaper,” replied the sergeant-major, his arms stuck to the side of his body and his fingers stirring--an habitual movement with which he usually accompanied his conversation.

“Then there is the forage-master, Frantzone, who wrote me a line yesterday, your High Excellency. He said we must buy axle-trees without fail; they are cheap. What are your orders?”

“Well, they must be bought; there is money,” answered the commander, continuing to walk. “Where are your traps?” he suddenly said, pausing before Volodia.

Poor Volodia, pursued by the thought that he was a coward, saw in each look, in each word, the scorn he must inspire; and it seemed to him that his chief had already discovered his sad secret, and that he was jeering at him. Then he replied in confusion that his things were at Grafskaia, and that his brother would send them to him the following day.

“Where shall we put up the ensign?” the lieutenant-colonel asked the sergeant-major, without listening to the young man’s answer.

“The ensign?” repeated the sergeant-major. A rapid glance thrown on Volodia, and which seemed to say, “What sort of an ensign is that?” finished the disconcerting of the latter. “Down there, your Excellency, with the second-captain. Since the captain is in the bastion his bed is empty!”

“Will that do for you while you are waiting?” asked the commander of the battery. “You must be tired, I think. To-morrow it can be more conveniently arranged for you.”

Volodia arose and saluted.

“Will you have some tea?” added his superior officer. “The samovar can be heated.”

Volodia, who had already reached the door, turned around, saluted again, and went out.

The lieutenant-colonel’s servant conducted him down-stairs, and showed him into a bare and dirty room where different broken things were thrown aside as rubbish, and in which, in a corner, a man in a red shirt, whom Volodia took for a soldier, was sleeping on an iron bed without sheets or coverlid, wrapped in his overcoat.

“Peter Nikolaïevitch”--and the servant touched the sleeper’s shoulder--“get up; the ensign is going to sleep here. It’s Vlang, our yunker,” he added, turning to Volodia.

“Oh, don’t disturb yourself, I beg,” cried the latter, seeing the yunker, a tall and robust young man, with a fine face, but one entirely devoid of intelligence, rise, throw his overcoat over his shoulders, and drowsily go away, murmuring, “That’s nothing; I will go and sleep in the yard.”

XIII.

Left alone with his thoughts, Volodia at first felt a return of the terror caused by the trouble which agitated his soul. Counting upon sleep to be able to cease thinking of his surroundings and to forget himself, he blew out his candle and lay down, covering himself all up with his overcoat, even his head, for he had kept his fear of darkness since his childhood. But suddenly the idea came to him that a shell might fall through the roof and kill him. He listened. The commander of the battery was walking up and down over his head.

“It will begin by killing him first,” he said to himself, “then me. I shall not die alone!” This reflection calmed him, and he was going to sleep when this time the thought that Sebastopol might be taken that very night, that the French might burst in his door, and that he had no weapon to defend himself, completely waked him up again. He rose and walked the room. The fear of the real danger had stifled the mysterious terror of darkness. He hunted and found to hand only a saddle and a samovar. “I am a coward, a poltroon, a wretch,” he thought again, filled with disgust and scorn of himself. He lay down and tried to stop thinking; but then the impressions of the day passed again through his mind, and the continual sounds which shook the panes of his single window recalled to him the danger he was in. Visions followed. Now he saw the wounded covered with blood; now bursting shells, pieces of which flew into his room; now the pretty Sister of Charity who dressed his wounds weeping over his agony, or his mother, who, carrying him back to the provincial town, praying to God for him before a miraculous image, shed hot tears. Sleep eluded him; but suddenly the thought of an all-powerful Deity who sees everything and who hears every prayer flashed upon him distinct and clear in the midst of his reveries. He fell upon his knees, making the sign of the cross, and clasping his hands as he had been taught in his childhood. This simple gesture aroused in him a feeling of infinite, long-forgotten calm.

“If I am to die, it is because I am useless! Then, may Thy will be done, O Lord! and may it be done quickly. But if the courage and firmness which I lack are necessary to me, spare me the shame and the dishonor, which I cannot endure, and teach me what I must do to accomplish Thy will.”

His weak, childish, and terrified soul was fortified, was calmed at once, and entered new, broad, and luminous regions. He thought of a thousand things; he experienced a thousand sensations in the short duration of this feeling; then he quietly went to sleep, heedless of the dull roar of the bombardment and of the shaking windows.

Lord, Thou alone hast heard, Thou alone knowest the simple but ardent and despairing prayers of ignorance, the confused repentance asking for the cure of the body and the purification of the soul--the prayers which rise to Thee from these places where death resides; beginning with the general, who with terror feels a presentiment of approaching death, and a second after thinks only of wearing a cross of Saint George on his neck, and ending with the simple soldier prostrate on the bare earth of the Nicholas battery, supplicating Thee to grant him for his sufferings the recompense he unconsciously has a glimpse of.

XIV.

The elder Koseltzoff, having met a soldier of his regiment in the street, was accompanied by him to the fifth bastion.

“Keep close to the wall, Excellency,” the soldier said.

“What for?”

“It is dangerous, Excellency. _He_ is already passing over us,” replied the soldier, listening to the whistling of the ball, which struck with a dry sound the other side of the hard road. But Koseltzoff continued on in the middle of the road without heeding this advice. There were the same streets, the same but more frequent flashes, the same sounds and the same groans, the same meeting of wounded men, the same batteries, parapet, and trenches, just as he had seen them in the spring. But now their aspect was more dismal, more sombre and more martial, so to speak. A greater number of houses was riddled, and there were no more lights in the windows--the hospital was the only exception--no more women in the street; and the character of the accustomed, careless life formerly imprinted on everything was effaced, and was replaced by the element of anxious, weary expectation, and of redoubled and incessant effort.

He came at last to the farthermost intrenchment, and a soldier of the P---- regiment recognized his former company chief. There was the third battalion, as could be guessed in the darkness by the constrained murmur of voices and the clicks of the muskets placed against the wall, which the flash of the discharges lit up at frequent intervals.

“Where is the commander of the regiment?” asked Koseltzoff.

“In the bomb-proof with the marines, your Excellency,” replied the obliging soldier. “If you would like to go I will show you the way.”

Passing from one trench to another, he led Koseltzoff to the ditch, where a sailor was smoking his pipe. Behind him was a door, through the cracks of which shone a light.

“Can we go in?”

“I will announce you;” and the sailor entered the bomb-proof, where two voices could be heard.

“If Prussia continues to keep neutral, then Austria--” said one of them.

“What is Austria good for when the slavs--” said the other.--“Ah yes! ask him to come in,” added this same voice.

Koseltzoff, who had never before put his foot in these bomb-proof quarters, was struck by their elegance. A polished floor took the place of boards, a screen hid the entrance door. In a corner was a great icon representing the holy Virgin, with its gilt frame lighted by a small pink glass lamp. Two beds were placed along the wall, on one of which a naval officer was sleeping in his clothes, on the other, near a table on which two open bottles of wine were standing, sat the new regimental chief and an aide-de-camp. Koseltzoff, who was not bashful, and who felt himself in nowise guilty, either towards the State or towards the chief of the regiment, felt, nevertheless, at the sight of the latter--his comrade until very recently--a certain apprehension.

“It is strange,” he thought, seeing him rise to listen to him. “He has commanded the regiment scarcely six weeks, and power is already visible in his bearing, in his look, in his clothes. Not a long while ago this same Batretcheff amused himself in our quarters, wore for whole weeks the same dark calico shirt, and ate his hash and his sour cream without inviting any one to share it, and now an expression full of hard pride can be read in his eyes, which say to me, ‘Although I am your comrade, for I am a regimental chief of the new school, you may be sure I know perfectly well that you would give half your life to be in my place.’”

“You have been treating yourself to a rather long absence,” said the colonel, coldly, looking at him.

“I have been ill, colonel, and my wound is not yet altogether healed.”

“If that’s so, what did you come back for?” Koseltzoff’s corpulence inspired his chief with defiance. “Can you do your duty?”

“Certainly I can.”

“All right. Ensign Zaïtzeff will conduct you to the ninth company, the one you have already commanded. You will receive the order of the day. Be so good as to send me the regimental aide-de-camp as you go out,” and his chief, bowing slightly, gave him to understand by this that the interview was ended.

On his way out Koseltzoff muttered indistinct words and shrugged his shoulders several times. It might readily be believed that he felt ill at ease, or that he was irritated, not exactly against his regimental chief, but rather against himself and against all his surroundings.

XV.

Before going to find his officers he went to look up his company. The parapets built of gabions, the trenches, the cannon in front of which he passed, even the fragments and the shells themselves over which he stumbled, and which the flashes of the discharges lighted up without pause or relaxation, everything was familiar to him, and had been deeply engraven on his memory three months before, during the fortnight he had lived in the bastion. Notwithstanding the dismal side of these memories, a certain inherent charm of the past came out of them, and he recognized the places and things with an unaffected pleasure, as if the two weeks had been full of only agreeable impressions. His company was placed along the covered way which led to the sixth bastion.

Entering the shelter open on one side, he found so many soldiers there that he could scarcely find room to pass. At one end burned a wretched candle, which a reclining soldier was holding over a book that his comrade was spelling out. Around him, in the twilight of a thick and heavy atmosphere, several heads could be seen turned towards the reader, listening eagerly. Koseltzoff recognized the A B C of this sentence: “P-r-a-y-e-r a-f-t-e-r s-t-u-d-y. I give Thee thanks, my Cre-a-tor.”

“Snuff the candle!” some one shouted. “What a good book!” said the reader, preparing to go on. But at the sound of Koseltzoff’s voice calling the sergeant-major it was silent. The soldiers moved, coughed, and blew their noses, as always happens after an enforced silence. The sergeant-major arose from the middle of the group, buttoning his uniform, stepping over his comrades, and trampling on their feet, which for lack of room they did not know where to stow, approached the officer.

“How do you do, my boy? Is this our company?”

“Health to your Excellency! We congratulate you on your return,” replied the sergeant-major, gayly and good-naturedly. “You are cured, Excellency? God be praised for that! for we missed you a good deal.”

Koseltzoff, it was evident, was beloved by his company. Voices could immediately be heard spreading the news that the old company chief had come back, he who had been wounded--Mikhaïl Semenovitch Koseltzoff. Several soldiers, the drummer among others, came to greet him.

“How do you do, Obanetchouk?” said Koseltzoff. “Are you safe and sound? How do you do, children?” he then added, raising his voice.

The soldiers replied in chorus,

“Health to your Excellency!”

“How goes it, children?”

“Badly, your Excellency. The French have the upper hands. He fires from behind the intrenchments, but he doesn’t show himself outside.”

“Now, then, who knows? perhaps I shall have the chance of seeing him come out of the intrenchments, children. It won’t be the first time we have fought him together.”

“We are ready to do our best, your Excellency,” said several voices at the same time.

“He is very bold, then?”

“Terribly bold,” replied the drummer in a low tone, but so as to be heard, and speaking to another soldier, as if to justify his chief for having made use of the expression, and to persuade his comrade that there was nothing exaggerated nor untrue in it.

Koseltzoff left the soldiers in order to join the officers in the barracks.

XVI.

The great room of the barracks was filled with people--a crowd of naval, artillery, and infantry officers. Some were sleeping, others were talking, seated on a caisson or on the carriage of a siege-gun. The largest group of the three, seated on their cloaks spread on the ground, were drinking porter and playing cards.

“Ah! Koseltzoff’s come back! Bravo! And your wound?” said divers voices from different sides.

Here also he was liked, and they were rejoiced at his return.

After having shaken hands with his acquaintances, Koseltzoff joined the gay group of card-players. One of them, thin, with a long nose, and a large mustache which encroached on his cheeks, cut the cards with his white, slender fingers on one of which was a great seal ring. He seemed disturbed, and dealt with an affected carelessness. On his right, lying half raised on his elbow, a gray-haired major staked and paid a half-ruble every time with exaggerated calmness. On his left, crouching on his heels, an officer with a red and shining face joked and smiled with an effort, and when his card was laid down, one of his hands moved in the empty pocket of his trousers. He played a heavy game, but without any money--a fact which visibly irritated the dark officer with the handsome face. Another officer, pale, thin, and bald, with an enormous nose and a large mouth, walking about the room with a bundle of bank-notes in his hand, counted down the money on the bank and won every time.

Koseltzoff drank a small glass of brandy and sat down beside the players.

“Come, Mikhaïl Semenovitch, come; put up your stake!” said the officer who was cutting the cards; “I’ll bet you have brought back a lot of money.”

“Where could I have got it? On the contrary, I spent my last penny in town!”

“Really! You must have fleeced some one at Sympheropol, I’m sure!”

“What an idea!” replied Koseltzoff, not wanting his words to be believed, and unbuttoning his uniform, to be more comfortable, he took a few old cards.

“I have nothing to risk, but, devil take me! who can foresee luck? A gnat can sometimes accomplish wonders! Let’s go on drinking to keep our courage up.”

Shortly after he swallowed a second small glass of brandy, a little porter into the bargain, and lost his last three rubles, while a hundred and fifty were charged to the account of the little officer with the sweat-moistened face.

“Have the kindness to send me the money,” said the banker, interrupting the deal to look at him.

“Allow me to put off sending it until to-morrow,” replied the one addressed, rising. His hand was nervously moving in his empty pocket.

“Hum!” said the banker, spitefully throwing the last cards of the pack right and left. “We can’t play in this way,” he rejoined; “I will stop the game. It can’t be done, Zakhar Ivanovitch. We are playing cash down, and not for credit.”

“Do you distrust me? That would be strange indeed!”

“From whom have I to get eight rubles?” the major who had just won asked at this moment. “I have paid out more than twenty, and when I win I get nothing.”

“How do you think I can pay you when there is no money on the table?”

“That’s nothing to me!” cried the major, rising. “I am playing with you, and not with this gentleman!”

“As long as I tell you,” said the perspiring officer--“as long as I tell you I will pay you to-morrow, how do you dare insult me?”

“I’ll say what I like. This is no way of doing!” cried the major, excited.

“Come, be quiet, Fédor Fédorovitch!” shouted several players at once, turning around.