‘Well then, you may find that you have to go back?’ asked the lieutenant.
‘That’s just what we are afraid of. Just fancy, when we had bought the horse and got all we needed – a coffee-pot with a spirit-lamp and other necessary little things – we had no money left at all,’ he said in a low tone, glancing at his comrade, ‘so that if we have to return we don’t at all know how we are to manage.’
‘Didn’t you receive your travelling allowance, then?’ asked Kozeltsóv.
‘No,’ answered the young officer in a whisper, ‘they promised to give it us here.’
‘Have you the certificate?’
‘I know that a certificate is the principal thing, but when I was in Moscow, a senator – he’s my uncle and I was at his house – told me they would give it to me here, or else he would have given it me himself. But will they give me one in Sevastopol?’
‘Certainly they will.’
‘Yes, I think so too,’ said the lad in a tone which showed that, having asked the same question at some thirty other post-stations and having everywhere received different answers, he did not now quite believe anyone.
V
[‘HOW can they help giving it?’ suddenly remarked the officer who had quarrelled with the station-master on the porch and had now approached the speakers, addressing himself partly to the staff-officers who were sitting near by, as to listeners more worthy of attention. ‘Why, I myself wanted to join the active army just as these gentlemen do. I even gave up a splendid post and asked to be sent right into Sevastopol. And they gave me nothing but a hundred and thirty-six rubles for post-horses from Petersburg and I have already spent more than a hundred and fifty rubles of my own money. Only think of it! It’s only eight hundred versts and this is the third month we have been on the way. I have been travelling with these gentlemen here for two months. A good thing I had money of my own, but suppose I hadn’t had any?’
‘The third month? Is it possible?’ someone asked.
‘Yes, and what can one do?’ the speaker continued. ‘You see if I had not wanted to go I would not have volunteered and left a good post, so I haven’t been stopping at places on the road because I was afraid.… It was just impossible. For instance I lived a fortnight in Perekóp, and the station-master wouldn’t even speak to me.… “Go when you like; here are a whole pile of requisition forms for couriers alone.” … It must be my fate.… You see I want – but it’s just my fate. It’s not because there’s a bombardment going on, but it evidently makes no difference whether one hurries or not – and yet how I should like.
The officer was at such pains to explain his delays and seemed so keen to vindicate himself that it involuntarily occurred to one that he was afraid. This was still more evident when he began to ask where his regiment was, and whether it was dangerous there. He even grew pale and his voice faltered when the one-armed officer, who belonged to the same regiment, told him that during those last two days they had lost seventeen officers.
In fact this officer was just then a thorough coward, though six months previously he had been very different. A change had come over him which many others experienced both before and after him. He had had an excellent and quiet post in one of our provincial towns in which there is a Cadet College, but reading in the papers and in private letters of the heroic deeds performed at Sevastopol by his former comrades, he was suddenly inspired by ambition and still more by patriotic heroism.
He sacrificed much to this feeling: his well-established position, his little home with its comfortable furniture painstakingly acquired by five years’ effort, his acquaintances, and his hopes of making a good marriage. He threw all this up, and in February already had volunteered for active service, dreaming of deathless honours and of a general’s epaulettes. Two months after he had sent in his application he received an official inquiry whether he would require assistance from the government. He replied in the negative, and continued to wait patiently for an appointment, though his patriotic ardour had had time to cool considerably during those eight weeks. After another two months he received an inquiry as to whether he belonged to a Freemasons’ Lodge,3 and other similar questions, and having replied in the negative, he at last, in the fifth month, received his appointment. But all that time his friends, and still more that subconscious feeling which always awakens at any change in one’s position, had had time to convince him that he was committing an act of extreme folly by entering the active army. And when he found himself alone, with a dry throat and his face covered with dust, at the first post-station – where he met a courier from Sevastopol who told him of the horrors of the war, and where he had to spend twelve hours waiting for relay horses – he quite repented of his thoughtlessness, reflecting with vague horror on what awaited him, and without realizing it continued on his way as to a sacrifice. This feeling constantly increased during his three months’ travelling from station to station, at which he always had to wait and where he met officers returning from Sevastopol with dreadful stories, and at last this poor officer – from being a hero prepared for desperate deeds, as in the provincial town he had imagined himself to be – arrived in Djánka a wretched coward, and having a month ago come across some young fellows from the Cadet College, he tried to travel as slowly as possible, considering these days to be his last on earth, and at every station put up his bed, unpacked his canteen, played preference, looked through the station complaint-book for amusement, and felt glad when horses were not to be had.
Had he gone at once from home to the bastions he would really have been a hero, but now he would have to go through much moral suffering before he could become such a calm, patient man, facing toil and danger, as Russian officers generally are. But it would by this time have been difficult to reawaken enthusiasm in him.]
VI
‘WHO ordered soup?’ demanded the landlady, a rather dirty, fat woman of about forty, as she came into the room with a tureen of cabbage-soup.
The conversation immediately stopped, and everyone in the room fixed his eyes on the landlady. One officer even winked to another with a glance at her.
‘Oh, Kozeltsóv ordered it,’ said the young officer. ‘We must wake him up.… Get up for dinner!’ he said, going up to the sofa and shaking the sleeper’s shoulder. A lad of about seventeen, with merry black eyes and very rosy cheeks, jumped up energetically and stepped into the middle of the room rubbing his eyes.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ he said to the doctor, whom he had knocked against in rising.
Lieutenant Kozeltsóv at once recognized his brother and went up to him.
‘Don’t you know me?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Ah-h-h!’ cried the younger Kozeltsóv. ‘This is wonderful!’ And he began kissing his brother.
They kissed three times, but hesitated before the third kiss, as if the thought, ‘Why has it to be just three times?’ had struck them both.
‘Well, I am glad!’ said the elder, looking into his brother’s face. ‘Come out into the porch and let’s have a chat.’
‘Yes, come along. I don’t want any soup. You eat it, Féderson,’ he said to his comrade.
‘But you wanted something to eat.’
‘I don’t want anything now.’
Out on the porch the younger one kept asking his brother: ‘Well, and how are you? Tell me how things are!’ and saying how glad he was to see him, but he did not tell him anything about himself.
When five minutes had passed and they had paused for a moment, the elder brother asked why the younger had not entered the Guards as everyone had expected him to do.