XI
HIS face was not swarthy and lean with a straight nose, as I had expected judging by his hair and figure. It was a round, jolly, very snub-nosed face, with a large mouth and bright light-blue eyes. His cheeks and neck were red, as if rubbed with a flannel; his eyebrows, his long eyelashes, and the down that smoothly covered the bottom of his face, were plastered with snow and were quite white. We were only half a mile from our station and we stopped.
‘Only be quick about it!’ I said.
‘Just one moment,’ replied Ignát, springing down and walking over to Philip.
‘Let’s have it, brother,’ he said, taking the mitten from his right hand and throwing it down with his whip on the snow, and tossing back his head he emptied at a gulp the glass that was handed to him.
The innkeeper, probably a discharged Cossack, came out with a half-bottle in his hand.
‘Who shall I serve?’ said he.
Tall Vasíli, a thin, brown-haired peasant, with a goatee beard, and the advice-giver, a stout, light-haired man with a thick beard framing his red face, came forward and also drank a glass each. The little old man too went over to the drinkers, but was not served, and he went back to his horses, which were fastened behind the sledge, and began stroking one of them on the back and croup.
The little old man’s appearance was just what I had imagined it to be: small, thin, with a wrinkled livid face, a scanty beard, sharp little nose, and worn yellow teeth. He had a new driver’s cap on, but his coat was shabby, worn, smeared with tar, torn on one shoulder, had holes in the skirt, and did not cover his knees and the homespun trousers which were tucked into his huge felt boots. He himself was bent double, puckered up, his face and knees trembled, and he tramped about near the sledge evidently trying to get warm.
‘Come, Mítrich, you should have a glass; you’d get fine and warm,’ said the advice-giver.
Mítrich’s face twitched. He adjusted the harness of one of his horses, straightened the bow above its head, and came over to me.
‘Well, sir,’ he said, taking the cap off his grey head and bending low, ‘we have been wandering about together all night, looking for the road: won’t you give me enough for a small glass? Really sir, your honour! I haven’t anything to get warm on,’ he added with an ingratiating smile.
I gave him a quarter-ruble.4 The innkeeper brought out a small glass of vodka and handed it to the old man. He took off his mitten, together with the whip that hung on it, and put out his small, dark, rough, and rather livid hand towards the glass; but his thumb refused to obey him, as though it did not belong to him. He was unable to hold the glass and dropped it on the snow, spilling the vodka.
All the drivers burst out laughing.
‘See how frozen Mítrich is, he can’t even hold the vodka.’
But Mítrich was greatly grieved at having spilt the vodka.
However, they filled another glass for him and poured it into his mouth. He became cheerful in a moment, ran into the inn, lit his pipe, showed his worn yellow teeth, and began to swear at every word he spoke. Having drained the last glass, the drivers returned to their tróykas and we started again.
The snow kept growing whiter and brighter so that it hurt one’s eyes to look at it. The orange-tinted reddish streaks rose higher and higher, and growing brighter and brighter spread upwards over the sky; even the red disk of the sun became visible on the horizon through the blue-grey clouds; the sky grew more brilliant and of a deeper blue. On the road near the settlement the sledge tracks were clear, distinct, and yellowish, and here and there we were jolted by cradle-holes in the road; one could feel a pleasant lightness and freshness in the tense, frosty air.
My tróyka went very fast. The head of the shaft-horse, and its neck with its mane fluttering around the bow, swayed swiftly from side to side almost in one place under the special bell, the tongue of which no longer struck the sides but scraped against them. The good off-horses tugged together at the frozen and twisted traces, and sprang energetically, while the tassel bobbed from right under the horse’s belly to the breeching. Now and then an off-horse would stumble from the beaten track into the snowdrift, throwing up the snow into one’s eyes as it briskly got out again. Ignát shouted in his merry tenor; the dry frosty snow squeaked under the runners; behind us two little bells were ringing resonantly and festively, and I could hear the tipsy shouting of the drivers. I looked back. The grey shaggy off-horses, with their necks outstretched and breathing evenly, their bits awry, were leaping over the snow. Philip, flourishing his whip, was adjusting his cap; the little old man, with his legs hanging out, lay in the middle of the sledge as before.
Two minutes later my sledge scraped over the boards before the clean-swept entrance of the station house, and Ignát turned to me his snow-covered merry face, smelling of frost.
‘We’ve got you here after all, sir!’ he said.
1 A tróyka is a three-horse sledge, or, more correctly, a team of three horses.
2 An artél was a voluntary association of workers, which had a manager, contracted as a unit, and divided its earnings among its members.
3 The women take their clothes to rinse in lakes or streams, where they beat them with wooden beetles.
4 At that time about sixpence.
TWO HUSSARS
A STORY
‘Jomini and Jomini –
Not half a word of vodka.’ – D. DAVÝDOV.1
1 From The Song of an old Hussar, in which the great days of the past are contrasted with the trivial present. D. V. Davýdov is referred to in War and Peace.
EARLY in the nineteenth century, when there were as yet no railways or macadamized roads, no gaslight, no stearine candles, no low couches with sprung cushions, no unvarnished furniture, no disillusioned youths with eye-glasses, no liberalizing women philosophers, nor any charming dames aux camélias of whom there are so many in our times, in those naïve days, when leaving Moscow for Petersburg in a coach or carriage provided with a kitchenful of home-made provisions one travelled for eight days along a soft, dusty, or muddy road and believed in chopped cutlets, sledge-bells, and plain rolls; when in the long autumn evenings the tallow candles, around which family groups of twenty or thirty people gathered, had to be snuffed; when ball-rooms were illuminated by candelabra with wax or spermaceti candles, when furniture was arranged symmetrically, when our fathers were still young and proved it not only by the absence of wrinkles and grey hair but by fighting duels for the sake of a woman and rushing from the opposite corner of a room to pick up a bit of a handkerchief purposely or accidentally dropped; when our mothers wore short-waisted dresses and enormous sleeves and decided family affairs by drawing lots, when the charming dames aux camélias hid from the light of day – in those naïve days of Masonic lodges,1 Martinists,2 and Tugendbunds,3 the days of Milorádoviches4 and Davýdovs5 and Púshkins – a meeting of landed proprietors was held in the Government town of K—, and the nobility elections6 were being concluded.
I
‘WELL, never mind, the saloon will do,’ said a young officer in a fur cloak and hussar’s cap, who had just got out of a post-sledge and was entering the best hotel in the town of K—.
‘The assembly, your Excellency, is enormous,’ said the boots, who had already managed to learn from the orderly that the hussar’s name was Count Túrbin, and therefore addressed him as ‘your Excellency’.