‘Akhmet Khan and Shamil are both my enemies. Tell the prince that Akhmet Khan is dead and I cannot revenge myself on him, but Shamil lives and I will not die without taking vengeance on him,’ said he, knitting his brows and tightly closing his mouth.
‘Yes, yes; but how does he want to revenge himself on Shamil?’ said Vorontsóv quietly to the interpreter. ‘And tell him he may sit down.’
Hadji Murád again declined to sit down, and in answer to the question replied that his object in coming over to the Russians was to help them to destroy Shamil.
‘Very well, very well,’ said Vorontsóv; ‘but what exactly does he wish to do?… Sit down, sit down!’
Hadji Murád sat down, and said that if only they would send him to the Lesghian line and would give him an army, he would guarantee to raise the whole of Daghestan and Shamil would then be unable to hold out.
‘That would be excellent.… I’ll think it over,’ said Vorontsóv.
The interpreter translated Vorontsóv’s words to Hadji Murád.
Hadji Murád pondered.
‘Tell the Sirdar one thing more,’ Hadji Murád began again, ‘that my family are in the hands of my enemy, and that as long as they are in the mountains I am bound and cannot serve him. Shamil would kill my wife and my mother and my children if I went openly against him. Let the prince first exchange my family for the prisoners he has, and then I will destroy Shamil or die!’
‘All right, all right,’ said Vorontsóv. ‘I will think it over.… Now let him go to the chief of the staff and explain to him in detail his position, intentions, and wishes.’
Thus ended the first interview between Hadji Murád and Vorontsóv.
That evening an Italian opera was performed at the new theatre, which was decorated in Oriental style. Vorontsóv was in his box when the striking figure of the limping Hadji Murád wearing a turban appeared in the stalls. He came in with Lóris-Mélikov,15 Vorontsóv’s aide-de-camp, in whose charge he was placed, and took a seat in the front row. Having sat through the first act with Oriental Mohammedan dignity, expressing no pleasure but only obvious indifference, he rose and looking calmly round at the audience went out, drawing to himself everybody’s attention.
The next day was Monday and there was the usual evening party at the Vorontsóvs’. In the large brightly lighted hall a band was playing, hidden among trees. Young women and women not very young wearing dresses that displayed their bare necks, arms, and breasts, turned round and round in the embrace of men in bright uniforms. At the buffet, footmen in red swallow-tail coats and wearing shoes and knee-breeches, poured out champagne and served sweetmeats to the ladies. The ‘Sirdar’s’ wife also, in spite of her age, went about half-dressed among the visitors smiling affably, and through the interpreter said a few amiable words to Hadji Murád who glanced at the visitors with the same indifference he had shown yesterday in the theatre. After the hostess, other half-naked women came up to him and all of them stood shamelessly before him and smilingly asked him the same question: How he liked what he saw? Vorontsóv himself, wearing gold epaulettes and gold shoulder-knots with his white cross and ribbon at his neck, came up and asked him the same question, evidently feeling sure, like all the others, that Hadji Murád could not help being pleased at what he saw. Hadji Murád replied to Vorontsóv as he had replied to them all, that among his people nothing of the kind was done, without expressing an opinion as to whether it was good or bad that it was so.
Here at the ball Hadji Murád tried to speak to Vorontsóv about buying out his family, but Vorontsóv, pretending that he had not heard him, walked away, and Lóris-Mélikov afterwards told Hadji Murád that this was not the place to talk about business.
When it struck eleven Hadji Murád, having made sure of the time by the watch the Vorontsóvs had given him, asked Lóris-Mélikov whether he might now leave. Lóris-Mélikov said he might, though it would be better to stay. In spite of this Hadji Murád did not stay, but drove in the phaeton placed at his disposal to the quarters that had been assigned to him.
XI
ON the fifth day of Hadji Murád’s stay in Tiflis Lóris-Mélikov, the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp, came to see him at the latter’s command.
‘My head and my hands are glad to serve the Sirdar,’ said Hadji Murád with his usual diplomatic expression, bowing his head and putting his hands to his chest. ‘Command me!’ said he, looking amiably into Lóris-Mélikov’s face.
Lóris-Mélikov sat down in an arm-chair placed by the table and Hadji Murád sank onto a low divan opposite and, resting his hands on his knees, bowed his head and listened attentively to what the other said to him.
Lóris-Mélikov, who spoke Tartar fluently, told him that though the prince knew about his past life, he yet wanted to hear the whole story from himself.
‘Tell it me, and I will write it down and translate it into Russian and the prince will send it to the Emperor.’
Hadji Murád remained silent for a while (he never interrupted anyone but always waited to see whether his collocutor had not something more to say), then he raised his head, shook back his cap, and smiled the peculiar childlike smile that had captivated Márya Vasílevna.
‘I can do that,’ said he, evidently flattered by the thought that his story would be read by the Emperor.
‘Thou must tell me’ (in Tartar nobody is addressed as ‘you’) ‘everything, deliberately from the beginning,’ said Lóris-Mélikov drawing a notebook from his pocket.
‘I can do that, only there is much – very much – to tell! Many events have happened!’ said Hadji Murád.
‘If thou canst not do it all in one day thou wilt finish it another time,’ said Lóris-Mélikov.
‘Shall I begin at the beginning?’
‘Yes, at the very beginning … where thou wast born and where thou didst live.’
Hadji Murád’s head sank and he sat in that position for a long time. Then he took a stick that lay beside the divan, drew a little knife with an ivory gold-inlaid handle, sharp as a razor, from under his dagger, and started whittling the stick with it and speaking at the same time.
‘Write: Born in Tselméss, a small aoul, “the size of an ass’s head”, as we in the mountains say,’ he began. ‘Not far from it, about two cannon-shots, lies Khunzákh where the Khans lived. Our family was closely connected with them.
‘My mother, when my eldest brother Osman was born, nursed the eldest Khan, Abu Nutsal Khan. Then she nursed the second son of the Khan, Umma Khan, and reared him; but Akhmet my second brother died, and when I was born and the Khansha bore Bulách Khan, my mother would not go as wet-nurse again. My father ordered her to, but she would not. She said: “I should again kill my own son, and I will not go.” Then my father, who was passionate, struck her with a dagger and would have killed her had they not rescued her from him. So she did not give me up, and later on she composed a song … but I need not tell that.’
‘Yes, you must tell everything. It is necessary,’ said Lóris-Mélikov.
Hadji Murád grew thoughtful. He remembered how his mother had laid him to sleep beside her under a fur coat on the roof of the sáklya, and he had asked her to show him the place in her side where the scar of her wound was still visible.
He repeated the song, which he remembered:
‘My white bosom was pierced by the blade of bright steel,
But I laid my bright sun, my dear boy, close upon it
Till his body was bathed in the stream of my blood.
And the wound healed without aid of herbs or of grass.