Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

what is the matter with that confounded Nepshisétsky? He may not be ill at all; and they’ll go and kill a man because of him⁠—they certainly will. However, if they don’t kill me I shall surely be recommended for promotion. I saw how pleased the Regimental Commander was when I said, ‘Allow me to go if Lieutenant Nepshisétsky is ill.’ If I’m not made a Major, then I’ll get the Order of Vladímir for certain. Why, I am going to the bastion for the thirteenth time. Oh dear, the thirteenth! unlucky number! I am certain to be killed; I feel I shall;⁠ ⁠… but somebody had to go: the company can’t go with only an Ensign. Supposing something was to happen.⁠ ⁠… Why, the honour of the regiment, the honour of the army is at stake. It is my duty to go. Yes, my sacred duty.⁠ ⁠… But I have a presentiment.”

The Lieutenant-Captain forgot that it was not the first time he had felt this presentiment: that, in a greater or lesser degree, he had it whenever he was going to the bastion, and he did not know that, more or less strongly, everyone has such forebodings before going into action. Having calmed himself by appealing to his sense of duty⁠—which was highly developed in him and very strong⁠—the Lieutenant-Captain sat down to the table and began writing a farewell letter to his father. Ten minutes later, having finished his letter, he rose from the table, his eyes wet with tears, and, repeating mentally all the prayers he knew, he began to dress. His rather tipsy and rude servant lazily handed him his new cloak (the old one, which the Lieutenant-Captain usually wore at the bastion, was not mended).

“Why is my cloak not mended? You do nothing but sleep,” said Miháylof angrily.

“How sleep?” grumbled Nikíta; “one does nothing but run about like a dog the whole day⁠—gets fagged, and mayn’t even fall asleep!”

“I see you are again drunk.”

“It’s not on your money if I am, so you needn’t scold me.”

“Hold your tongue, blockhead!” shouted the Lieutenant-Captain, ready to strike the man.

Upset before, he was now quite out of patience and offended at the rudeness of Nikíta, whom he was fond of, and even spoilt, and who had lived with him for the last twelve years.

“Blockhead? blockhead?” repeated the servant. “And why do you, sir, abuse me and call me blockhead? You know what times these are? It is not right to scold.”

Miháylof remembered where he was going, and felt ashamed.

“But you know, Nikíta, you would try anyone’s patience!” he said mildly. “That letter on the table to my father you may leave where it is; don’t touch it,” he added, reddening.

“Yes, sir,” said Nikíta, becoming sentimental under the influence of the vodka he had drunk, as he said, on his own money, and blinking with an evident inclination to weep.

But when, at the porch, the Lieutenant-Captain said “Goodbye, Nikíta,” Nikíta burst into forced sobs and rushed to kiss his master’s hand, saying “Goodbye, sir,” in a broken voice. A sailor’s widow who also stood at the porch could not, as a woman, help joining in this tender scene, and began wiping her eyes on her dirty sleeve, saying something about people who, though they were gentlefolks, took such sufferings upon themselves, while she, poor woman, was left a widow. And she told the tipsy Nikíta for the hundredth time about her sorrows; how her husband had been killed in the first bandagement, and how her hut had been shattered (the one she lived in now was not her own), and so on. After his master was gone, Nikíta lit his pipe, asked the landlady’s little girl to go for some vodka, very soon left off crying, and even had a quarrel with the old woman about a pail which he said she had smashed.

“But perhaps I shall only be wounded,” reasoned the Lieutenant-Captain with himself, arriving at the bastion with his company in the twilight. “But where? and how?⁠—here or here?” he said to himself, mentally pointing to his chest and his stomach. “Supposing it were here” (he thought of his thighs) “and went right round?⁠ ⁠… But suppose it’s here, and with a piece of a bomb, then it’s all up.”

The Lieutenant-Captain, passing along the trenches, safely reached the lodgments. It was in perfect darkness that he and a sapper-officer set the men to their work, after which he sat down in a hole under the breastwork. There was little firing; only now and again on our side or his there was a lightning flash, and the brilliant fuse of a bomb formed a fiery arc on the dark, star-speckled sky. But all the bombs fell far beyond or far to the right of the lodgment where the Lieutenant-Captain sat in his hole. He drank some vodka, ate some cheese, smoked a cigarette, prayed, and felt inclined for sleep.

V

Prince Gáltsin, Lieutenant-Colonel Nefyórdof, and Praskoúhin, whom no one had invited and with whom no one spoke, but who yet stuck to them, went to Kaloúgin’s to tea.

“But you did not finish telling me about Váska Méndel,” said Kaloúgin, when he had taken off his cloak, and sat in a soft easy-chair by the window unbuttoning the collar of his clean, starched shirt. “How did he get married?”

“It was a joke, my boy!⁠ ⁠… Je vous dis, il y avait un temps, on ne parlait que de ça à Petersbourg,”37 said Prince Gáltsin, laughing, as he jumped up from the piano-stool and sat down near Kaloúgin on the windowsill,38 “a capital joke. I know all about it.”⁠ ⁠… And he told, amusingly, cleverly, and with animation, some love story which we will omit, as it does not interest us.

It was noticeable that not only Prince Gáltsin but each of these gentlemen who established themselves, one on the windowsill, another with his legs in the air, and a third by the piano, seemed quite different people