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

the rings of the bit went to the closed stable where the horse he was to harness was standing by himself.

“What, feeling lonely, feeling lonely, little silly?” said Nikíta in answer to the low whinny with which he was greeted by the good-tempered, medium-sized bay stallion, with a rather slanting crupper, who stood alone in the shed. “Now then, now then, there’s time enough. Let me water you first,” he went on, speaking to the horse just as to someone who understood the words he was using, and having whisked the dusty, grooved back of the well-fed young stallion with the skirt of his coat, he put a bridle on his handsome head, straightened his ears and forelock, and having taken off his halter led him out to water.

Picking his way out of the dung-strewn stable, Mukhórty frisked, and making play with his hind leg pretended that he meant to kick Nikíta, who was running at a trot beside him to the pump.

“Now then, now then, you rascal!” Nikíta called out, well knowing how carefully Mukhórty threw out his hind leg just to touch his greasy sheepskin coat but not to strike him⁠—a trick Nikíta much appreciated.

After a drink of the cold water the horse sighed, moving his strong wet lips, from the hairs of which transparent drops fell into the trough; then standing still as if in thought, he suddenly gave a loud snort.

“If you don’t want any more, you needn’t. But don’t go asking for any later,” said Nikíta quite seriously and fully explaining his conduct to Mukhórty. Then he ran back to the shed pulling the playful young horse, who wanted to gambol all over the yard, by the rein.

There was no one else in the yard except a stranger, the cook’s husband, who had come for the holiday.

“Go and ask which sledge is to be harnessed⁠—the wide one or the small one⁠—there’s a good fellow!”

The cook’s husband went into the house, which stood on an iron foundation and was iron-roofed, and soon returned saying that the little one was to be harnessed. By that time Nikíta had put the collar and brass-studded bellyband on Mukhórty and, carrying a light, painted shaft-bow in one hand, was leading the horse with the other up to two sledges that stood in the shed.

“All right, let it be the little one!” he said, backing the intelligent horse, which all the time kept pretending to bite him, into the shafts, and with the aid of the cook’s husband he proceeded to harness. When everything was nearly ready and only the reins had to be adjusted, Nikíta sent the other man to the shed for some straw and to the barn for a drugget.

“There, that’s all right! Now, now, don’t bristle up!” said Nikíta, pressing down into the sledge the freshly threshed oat straw the cook’s husband had brought. “And now let’s spread the sacking like this, and the drugget over it. There, like that it will be comfortable sitting,” he went on, suiting the action to the words and tucking the drugget all round over the straw to make a seat.

“Thank you, dear man. Things always go quicker with two working at it!” he added. And gathering up the leather reins fastened together by a brass ring, Nikíta took the driver’s seat and started the impatient horse over the frozen manure which lay in the yard, towards the gate.

“Uncle Nikíta! I say, Uncle, Uncle!” a high-pitched voice shouted, and a seven-year-old boy in a black sheepskin coat, new white felt boots, and a warm cap, ran hurriedly out of the house into the yard. “Take me with you!” he cried, fastening up his coat as he ran.

“All right, come along, darling!” said Nikíta, and stopping the sledge he picked up the master’s pale thin little son, radiant with joy, and drove out into the road.

It was past two o’clock and the day was windy, dull, and cold, with more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit of frost. Half the sky was hidden by a lowering dark cloud. In the yard it was quiet, but in the street the wind was felt more keenly. The snow swept down from a neighbouring shed and whirled about in the corner near the bathhouse.

Hardly had Nikíta driven out of the yard and turned the horse’s head to the house, before Vasíli Andréevich emerged from the high porch in front of the house with a cigarette in his mouth and wearing a cloth-covered sheepskin coat tightly girdled low at his waist, and stepped onto the hard-trodden snow which squeaked under the leather soles of his felt boots, and stopped. Taking a last whiff of his cigarette he threw it down, stepped on it, and letting the smoke escape through his moustache and looking askance at the horse that was coming up, began to tuck in his sheepskin collar on both sides of his ruddy face, clean-shaven except for the moustache, so that his breath should not moisten the collar.

“See now! The young scamp is there already!” he exclaimed when he saw his little son in the sledge. Vasíli Andréevich was excited by the vodka he had drunk with his visitors, and so he was even more pleased than usual with everything that was his and all that he did. The sight of his son, whom he always thought of as his heir, now gave him great satisfaction. He looked at him, screwing up his eyes and showing his long teeth.

His wife⁠—pregnant, thin and pale, with her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl so that nothing of her face could be seen but her eyes⁠—stood behind him in the vestibule to see him off.

“Now really, you ought to take Nikíta with you,” she said timidly, stepping out from the doorway.

Vasíli Andréevich did not answer. Her words evidently annoyed him and he frowned angrily and spat.

“You have money on you,” she continued in the same plaintive voice. “What if the weather gets worse! Do take him, for goodness’ sake!”

“Why?