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

themselves be caught. The old man ran after them, and in one moment horses and man vanished in the white darkness of the snowstorm.

“Vassily⁠—y! give us the bay here; there’s no catching them like this,” we heard his voice again.

One of the drivers, a very tall man, got out of the sledge, unyoked his three horses, pulled himself up by the head onto one of them, and crunching over the snow at a shuffling gallop vanished in the same direction.

In company with the two other sledges we pushed on without a road, following the express sledge which ran ahead at full gallop with its ringing bells.

“What! he catch them!” said my driver, referring to the man who had run to catch the horses. “If it won’t join the other horses of itself⁠—it’s a vicious beast⁠—it’ll lead him a fine dance, and he won’t catch it.”

From the time that he turned back, my driver seemed in better spirits and was more conversational, and as I was not sleepy I did not fail of course to take advantage of it. I began asking him where he came from, how he came here, and what he was; and soon learned that he was from my province, a Tula man, a serf from the village of Kirpitchny, that they had too little land, and that the corn had given up yielding any crop at all ever since the cholera year. There were two brothers at home, a third had gone for a soldier; they hadn’t bread enough to last till Christmas, and lived on what they could earn. His younger brother, he told me, was the head of the house because he was married, while he himself was a widower. Every year gangs of men from his village came here as drivers, though he hadn’t himself ever been a driver before; but now he had gone into the posting service so as to be a help to his brother. That he earned, thank God, one hundred and twenty roubles a year here, and sent a hundred of them home, and that it would be a pleasant life, too, “but the mail men were a brutal lot, very, and, indeed, all the people in these parts were a rough lot.”

“Now, why did that driver abuse me? Lord, ’a’ mercy on us! Did I set the horses loose on purpose? Am I a man to do anyone a mischief? And what did he gallop after them for? They’d have got home by themselves. He’s only wearing out his horses, and he’ll be lost himself too,” repeated the God-fearing peasant.

“And what’s that blackness?” I asked, noticing several black objects ahead of us.

“Why, a train of wagons. That’s a pleasant way of travelling!” he went on, as we overtook the huge wagons on wheels, covered with hemp sacking, following one another. “Look, not a man to be seen⁠—they’re all asleep. The clever mare knows the way of herself, there’s no making her stray off the road.⁠ ⁠… I’ve driven with a train of wagons too,” he added, “so I know.”

Truly it was strange to look at those huge wagons, covered with snow from their sacking top down to the wheels, moving along quite alone. But in the corner of the foremost the snow-covered sacking was lifted a little on two fingers, and a cap emerged from it for an instant when our bells were ringing close to the wagons. The big, piebald horse, stretching its neck and dragging with its back, stepped evenly along the completely buried road, and rhythmically shook its shaggy head under the whitened yoke. It pricked up one snowy ear as we came up to it.

After we had driven on another half-hour, my driver addressed me again.

“Well, what do you think, sir, are we going right?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“The wind was this way, sir, before, but now we’re going with our backs to the weather. No, we’re not going the right way, we’re astray again,” he concluded with complete serenity.

It was clear that though he was very timorous, even death, as they say, is pleasant in company; he had become perfectly composed since we were a large party, and he had not to be the guide and responsible person. With great coolness he made observations on the mistakes of the driver of the foremost sledge, as though he had not the slightest interest in the matter. I did notice, indeed, that the foremost sledge was sometimes visible in profile on my left, sometimes on the right; it positively seemed to me as though we were going round in a very small space. This might, however, have been an illusion of the senses, just as sometimes it looked to me as though the first sledge were driving uphill, or along a slope, or downhill, though the steppe was everywhere level.

We had driven on a good while longer, when I discerned⁠—far away, it seemed to me, on the very horizon⁠—a long black moving streak. But a minute later it was evident to me that this was the same train of wagons we had overtaken before. Just as before, the snow lay on the creaking wheels, some of which did not turn at all, indeed. As before, all the men were asleep under the sacking covers, and as before, the piebald horse in front, with inflated nostrils, sniffed out the road and pricked up its ears.

“There, we’ve gone round and round, and we’ve come back to the same wagons again!” said my driver in a tone of dissatisfaction. “The mail horses are good ones, and so he can drive them in this mad way; but ours will come to a dead stop if we go on like this all night.”

He cleared his throat.

“Let us turn back, sir, before we come to harm.”

“What for? Why, we shall get somewhere.”

“Get somewhere! Why, we shall spend the night on the steppe. How the snow does blow!⁠ ⁠… Lord, ’a’ mercy on us!”

Though I was surprised that the foremost driver, who had