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

them seem larger and giving the face a general look of coarseness and lack of freshness. His small eyes were hazel, with a daring and even insolent expression: he had very thick but not broad moustaches, the ends of which were bitten off, and his chin, and especially his jaws, were covered with an exceedingly strong, thick, black, two-days-old beard.

This officer had been wounded in the head by a bomb splinter on the 10th of May and still wore a bandage; but having felt well again for the last week, he had left the hospital at Simferópol and was now on his way to rejoin his regiment, stationed somewhere in the direction whence the firing came⁠—but whether in Sevastopol itself, on the North Side, or at Inkerman, no one had yet been able to tell him for certain. Already the frequent firing, especially at times when no hills intercepted it and when the wind carried it this way, sounded exceedingly distinct and seemed quite near. Now an explosion shook the air and made one start involuntarily; now sounds less loud followed each other in quick succession like the roll of drums, broken now and then by a startling boom; now again all these sounds mingled into a kind of rolling crash, like peals of thunder when a storm is raging in all its fury and rain has just begun to fall in torrents. Everyone was saying (and besides one could hear for oneself) that a terrific bombardment was going on. The officer kept telling his orderly to drive faster; he seemed in a hurry to get to his destination. They met a train of Russian peasants’ carts that had taken provisions to Sevastopol and were now on their way back laden with sick and wounded soldiers in grey uniforms, sailors in black cloaks, volunteers with red fezzes on their heads, and bearded militiamen. The officer’s trap had to stand still in the thick, motionless cloud of dust raised by this train of carts, and the officer, frowning and blinking while his eyes filled with dust, sat looking at the faces of the sick and wounded who were passing.

“There’s a soldier of our company! That one who is so weak,” said the Orderly, turning to his master and pointing to a cart laden with wounded men then just passing them.

A bearded Russian with a felt hat sat sideways in the front of the cart plaiting the lash of a whip, the handle of which he held to his side with his elbow. Behind him in the cart five or six soldiers, lying and sitting in different positions, were being jolted along. One, with a bandaged arm and his cloak thrown loosely over his shirt, though he looked pale and thin, sat upright in the middle of the cart and raised his hand as if to salute the officer, but remembering, probably, that he was wounded, pretended he only meant to scratch his head. A man lay beside him on the bottom of the cart, of whom all that was visible was his two hands holding on to the sides of the cart, and his lifted knees swaying this way and that like rags. A third, with a swollen face and with a soldier’s cap shaking on the top of his bandaged head, sat sideways with his feet hanging out, and, leaning his elbows on his knees, seemed to be dozing. The officer addressed him: “Dolzhnikóf!” he cried.

“Here!” said the soldier, opening his eyes and taking off his cap, and answering in such a loud, abrupt bass that it sounded as if twenty soldiers had shouted all together.

“When were you wounded, lad?”

The soldier’s leaden eyes with their swollen lids brightened up; he had evidently recognised his officer.

“Good day, y’r ’onor!” said the soldier in the same abrupt bass.

“Where is your regiment stationed now?”

“In Sevastopol. We were going to move on Wednesday, y’r ’onor!”

“Where to?”

“Don’t know, y’r ’onor⁠—to the North Side, maybe.⁠—Now they’re firing right across, y’r ’onor,” he added in a long-drawn tone, replacing his cap: “mostly bombs⁠—they reach right across the bay. He’s giving it us awful hot now⁠ ⁠…”

What the soldier said further could not be heard, but the expression of his face and his bearing showed that his words, spoken with the bitterness of one suffering, were not reassuring.

The officer in the trap, Lieutenant Kozeltsóf, was not an everyday sort of man. He was not one of those who live and act this way or that because others live and act so; he did what he liked, and others followed his example, and felt sure it was right. He had a nature endowed with many minor gifts: he could sing well, played the guitar, talked smartly and wrote very easily (especially official papers, the knack of writing which he had gained when he was adjutant of his battalion); but the most remarkable characteristic of his nature was his ambitious energy, which, though chiefly founded on those same minor talents, was in itself a marked and striking feature. He had ambition of a kind most often found in male circles, especially military, and this had become so much a part of his life that he could imagine no other line than to dominate or to perish. Ambition was at the root even of his inward impulses, and in his private thoughts he liked to put himself first when he compared himself with others.

“It’s likely I should pay attention to the chatter of a Tommy!” muttered the Lieutenant, with a feeling of heaviness and apathy at heart and a certain dimness of thought, left by the sight of the convoy of wounded men, and by the words of the soldier, enforced as they were by the sounds of the cannonade.

“Funny fellow that Tommy! Now then, Nikoláyef, get on!⁠ ⁠… are you asleep?” he added rather fretfully, as he arranged the skirt of his cloak.

Nikoláyef jerked the reins, clicked his tongue, and the trap rolled on at a trot.

“We’ll only stop just to feed