‘In my opinion we’d better turn back,’ remarked Alëshka. ‘There’s no sense in getting lost!’
‘O Lord! Just look how the snow is driving, nothing of the road to be seen, and it’s closing my eyes right up … O Lord!’ muttered the driver.
We had not been going a quarter of an hour before the driver handed the reins to Alëshka, clumsily liberated his legs, and making the snow crunch with his big boots went to look for the track.
‘What is it? Where are you going? Are we off the road?’ I asked. But the driver did not answer and, turning his face away from the wind which was beating into his eyes, walked away from the sledge.
‘Well, is there a road?’ I asked when he returned.
‘No, there’s nothing,’ he answered with sudden impatience and irritation, as if I were to blame that he had strayed off the track, and having slowly thrust his big legs again into the front of the sledge he began arranging the reins with his frozen gloves.
‘What are we to do?’ I asked when we had started again.
‘What are we to do? We’ll drive where God sends us.’
And though we were quite evidently not following a road, we went on at the same slow trot, now through dry snow five inches deep, and now over brittle crusts of frozen snow.
Though it was cold, the snow on my fur collar melted very quickly; the drift along the ground grew worse and worse, and a few dry flakes began to fall from above.
It was plain that we were going heaven knows where, for having driven for another quarter of an hour we had not seen a single verst-post.
‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked the driver again. ‘Shall we get to the station?’
‘What station? We shall get back, if we give the horses their head they will take us there, but hardly to the next station – we might just perish.’
‘Well then, let us go back,’ I said. ‘And really …’
‘Then I am to turn back?’ said the driver.
‘Yes, yes, turn back!’
The driver gave the horses the reins. They began to run faster, and though I did not notice that we were turning, I felt the wind blowing from a different quarter, and we soon saw the windmills appearing through the snow. The driver cheered up and began to talk.
‘The other day the return sledges from the other station spent the whole night in a snow storm among haystacks and did not get in till the morning. Lucky that they got among those stacks, else they’d have all been frozen, it was so cold. As it is one of them had his feet frozen, and was at death’s door for three weeks with them.’
‘But it’s not cold now, and it seems calmer,’ I said. ‘We might perhaps go on?’
‘It’s warm enough, that’s true, but the snow is drifting. Now that we have it at our back it seems easier, but the snow is driving strongly. I might go if it were on courier-duty or something of the kind, but not of my own free will. It’s no joke if a passenger gets frozen. How am I to answer for your honour afterwards?’
II
JUST then we heard behind us the bells of several tróykas1 which were rapidly overtaking us.
‘It’s the courier’s bell,’ said my driver. ‘There’s no other like it in the district.’
And in fact the bell of the front tróyka, the sound of which was already clearly borne to us by the wind, was exceedingly fine: clear, sonorous, deep, and slightly quivering. As I learnt afterwards it had been chosen by men who made a hobby of tróyka bells. There were three bells – a large one in the middle with what is called a crimson tone, and two small ones tuned to a third and a fifth. The ringing of that third and of the quivering fifth echoing in the air was extraordinarily effective and strangely beautiful in that silent and deserted steppe.
‘The post is going,’ said my driver, when the first of the three tróykas overtook us. ‘How is the road? Is it usable?’ he called out to the driver of the last sledge, but the man only shouted at his horses and did not reply.
The sound of the bells was quickly lost in the wind as soon as the post sledges had passed us.
I suppose my driver felt ashamed.
‘Well, let us try it again, sir!’ he said to me. ‘Others have made their way through and their tracks will be fresh.’
I agreed, and we turned again, facing the wind and struggling forward through the deep snow. I kept my eyes on the side of the road so as not to lose the track left by the tróykas. For some two versts the track was plainly visible, then only a slight unevenness where the runners had gone, and soon I was quite unable to tell whether it was a track or only a layer of driven snow. My eyes were dimmed by looking at the snow monotonously receding under the runners, and I began to look ahead. We saw the third verst-post, but were quite unable to find a fourth. As before we drove against the wind, and with the wind, and to the right and to the left, and at last we came to such a pass that the driver said we must have turned off to the right, I said we had gone to the left, and Alëshka was sure we had turned right back. Again we stopped several times and the driver disengaged his big feet and climbed out to look for the road, but all in vain. I too once went to see whether something I caught a glimpse of was not the road, but hardly had I taken some six steps with difficulty against the wind before I became convinced that similar layers of snow lay everywhere, and that I had seen the road only in my imagination. When I could no longer see the sledge I cried out: ‘Driver! Alëshka!’ but I felt how the wind caught my voice straight from my mouth and bore it instantly to a distance. I went to where the sledge had been – but it was not there; I went to the right, it was not there either. I am ashamed to remember in what a loud, piercing, and even rather despairing voice I again shouted ‘Driver!’ and there he was within two steps of me. His black figure, with the little whip and enormous cap pushed to one side, suddenly loomed up before me. He led me to the sledge.
‘Thank the Lord, it’s still warm,’ he said, ‘if the frost seized us it would be terrible … O Lord!’
‘Give the horses their head: let them take us back,’ I said, having seated myself in the sledge. ‘They will take us back, driver, eh?’
‘They ought to.’
He let go of the reins, struck the harness-pad of the middle horse with the whip, and we again moved on somewhere. We had travelled on for about half an hour when suddenly ahead of us we recognized the connoisseur’s bell and the other two, but this time they were coming towards us. There were the same three tróykas, which having delivered the mail were now returning to the station with relay horses attached. The courier’s tróyka with its big horses and musical bells ran quickly in front, with one driver on the driver’s seat shouting vigorously. Two drivers were sitting in the middle of each of the empty sledges that followed, and one could hear their loud and merry voices. One of them was smoking a pipe, and the spark that flared up in the wind showed part of his face.
Looking at them I felt ashamed that I had been afraid to go on, and my driver probably shared the same feeling, for we both said at once: ‘Let us follow them!’
III
MY driver, before the third tróyka had passed, began turning so clumsily that his shafts hit the horses attached behind it. They all three shied, broke their strap, and galloped aside.
‘You cross-eyed devil! Can’t you see when you’re turning into someone, you devil?’ one of the drivers seated in the last sledge – a short old man, as far as I could judge by his voice and figure – began to curse in hoarse, quivering tones, and quickly jumping out of the sledge he ran after the horses, still continuing his coarse and harsh abuse of my driver.
But the horses did not stop. The driver followed them, and in a moment both he and they were lost in the white mist of driving snow.