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

“This is my brother, arrived today from Petersburg.”

“H’m! And I have got my discharge,” said the wounded man, frowning. “Oh, how it hurts; if only it would be over quicker.”

He drew up his leg and, moving his toes still more rapidly, covered his face with his hands.

“He must be left alone,” said the Sister in a whisper, while tears filled her eyes: “he is very ill.”

While yet on the North Side the brothers had decided to go to the Fifth Bastion together, but on leaving the Nicholas Battery it was as though they had agreed not to expose themselves to needless danger, and, without mentioning the matter, they decided to go each his own way.

“Only, how will you find it, Volódya?” said the elder. “Look here! Nikoláyef shall take you to the Korábelnaya, and I’ll go on alone and come to you tomorrow.”

Nothing more was said at this last parting between the brothers.

The thunder of the cannonade continued with unabated violence. Ekateríninskaya Street, down which Volódya walked followed by the silent Nikoláyef, was quiet and deserted. In the dark he could distinguish only the broad street with white walls of large houses many of which were in ruins, and the stone pavement along which he was walking. Now and then he met some soldiers and officers. As he was passing by the left side of the Admiralty Building a bright light inside showed him the acacias planted along the sidewalk of the streets, with green stakes to support them, and sickly, dusty leaves. He distinctly heard his own footsteps and those of Nikoláyef, who followed him breathing heavily. He was not thinking of anything: the pretty Sister of Mercy, Mártsof’s foot with the toes moving in the stocking, the darkness, the bombs, and different images of death, floated dimly before his imagination. The whole of his young, impressionable soul was weighed down and crushed by a sense of loneliness, and of the general indifference shown to his fate in these dangerous surroundings. “I shall be killed; I shall suffer, endure torments, and no one will shed a tear!” And all this in place of the hero’s life, full of energy and evoking sympathy, that had figured in his beautiful dreams. The bombs burst and whistled nearer and nearer. Nikoláyef sighed more and more often but did not speak. As they were crossing the bridge that led to the Korábelnaya he saw a whistling something fall and disappear into the water nearby, lighting for a second the lilac waves to a flaming red, and then come splashing up again.

“Look there! it was not extinguished,” said Nikoláyef in a hoarse voice.

“Yes,” answered Volódya, in an involuntarily high-pitched, plaintive tone which surprised him.

They met wounded men carried on stretchers, and more carts loaded with gabions; on the Korábelnaya they met a regiment, and men on horseback rode past. One of these was an officer followed by a Cossack. He was riding at a trot; but seeing Volódya he stopped his horse near him, looked in his face, turned away, and, touching his horse with the whip, rode on.

“Alone, alone! no one cares whether I exist or not,” thought the lad, and felt inclined to cry in real earnest.

At the top of the hill, past a high wall, he entered a street of small shattered houses continually lit up by the bombs. A dishevelled, tipsy woman, coming out of a gate with a sailor, knocked up against Volódya.

“Then if he’sh a man o’ ’onor,” she muttered⁠—“pardon y’r exshensh offisher!”

The poor lad’s heart ached more and more. On the dark horizon the lightnings flashed more and more frequently, and the bombs whistled and exploded more and more often around them. Nikoláyef sighed, and suddenly began to speak in an awe-restrained tone, as it seemed to Volódya.

“There now, and we were in such a hurry to get here! Always push on and push on! This is a fine place to hurry to!”

“Well, but if my brother had recovered his health,” answered Volódya, hoping by conversation to disperse the dreadful feeling that had seized him.

“Health indeed! Where’s his health when he’s quite ill? Even them as is really well had best lie in hospital these times. Not much pleasure to be got. All you get is to have a leg or arm carried off! It’s done before you know where you are! Here, even in the town, what horrors! but what’s it like at the baksions! One says all the prayers one knows going there. See the beastly thing how it twangs past you!” he added, listening to the buzzing of a flying fragment.

“Now,” continued Nikoláyef, “I’m to show y’r honor the way. Our business is in course to obey orders: what’s ordered has to be done; but the trap’s been left with some Tommie or other, and the bundle’s untied.⁠ ⁠… ‘Go! go!’ but if something’s lost, why Nikoláyef answers for it!”

After a few steps more, they came to the square. Nikoláyef was silent, but kept sighing.

Then he said suddenly, “There, y’r honor, there’s where your antillary’s stationed. Ask the sentinel, he’ll show you.”

Again a few steps, and Volódya no longer heard Nikoláyef sighing behind him. Then he suddenly felt himself quite, utterly, alone. This sense of loneliness, face to face, as it seemed to him, with death, pressed like a heavy, cold stone on his heart. He stopped in the midst of the square, glanced round to see if anyone were looking, grasped his head and thought with horror⁠—

“O Lord! am I really a vile, miserable coward⁠ ⁠… when it’s for my Fatherland, for the Tsar, for whom I used to long to die? No! I am a miserable, wretched being!” And Volódya, filled with despair and disappointed with himself, asked the sentinel the way to the house of the Commander of the battery and went where he was directed.

The dwelling of the Commander of the battery, which the sentinel showed him, was a small two-storied