While we of the artillery were busy about the guns, disposing the
limbers and caissons, and picketing the horses, the foot-soldiers had
stacked their arms, piled up bonfires, made shelters of boughs and
cornstalks, and were cooking their grits.
It began to grow dark. Across the sky swept bluish-white clouds. The
mist, changing into fine drizzling fog, began to wet the ground and
the soldiers' cloaks. The horizon became contracted, and all our
surroundings took on gloomy shadows. The dampness which I felt through
my boots and on my neck, the incessant motion and chatter in which I
took no part, the sticky mud with which my legs were covered, and my
empty stomach, all combined to arouse in me a most uncomfortable and
disagreeable frame of mind after a day of physical and moral fatigue.
Velenchúk did not go out of my mind. The whole simple story of his
soldier's life kept repeating itself before my imagination.
His last moments were as unclouded and peaceful as all the rest of his
life. He had lived too honestly and simply for his artless faith in the
heavenly life to come, to be shaken at the decisive moment.
"Your health," said Nikoláïef, coming to me. "The captain begs you to
be so kind as to come and drink tea with him."
Somehow making my way between stacks of arms and the camp-fires,
I followed Nikoláïef to where Captain Bolkhof was, and felt a glow
of satisfaction in dreaming about the glass of hot tea and the gay
converse which should drive away my gloomy thoughts.
"Well, has he come?" said Bolkhof's voice from his cornstalk wigwam, in
which the light was gleaming.
"He is here, your honor,"[15] replied Nikoláïef in his deep bass.
In the hut, on a dry _burka,_ or Cossack mantle, sat the captain in
_négligé,_ and without his cap. Near him the samovar was singing, and a
drum was standing, loaded with lunch. A bayonet stuck into the ground
held a candle.
"How is this?" he said with some pride, glancing around his comfortable
habitation. In fact, it was so pleasant in his wigwam, that, while we
were at tea I absolutely forgot about the dampness, the gloom, and
Velenchúk's wound. We talked about Moscow and subjects that had no
relation to the war or the Caucasus.
After one of the moments of silence which sometimes interrupt the most
lively conversations, Bolkhof looked at me with a smile.
"Well, I suppose our talk this morning must have seemed very strange to
you?" said he.
"No. Why should it? It only seemed to me that you were very frank; but
there are things which we all know, but which it is not necessary to
speak about."
"Oh, you are mistaken! If there were only some possibility of
exchanging this life for any sort of life, no matter how tame and mean,
but free from danger and service, I would not hesitate a minute."
"Why, then, don't you go back to Russia?" I asked.
"Why?" he repeated. "Oh, I have been thinking about that for a long
time. I can't return to Russia until I have won the Anna and Vladímir,
wear the Anna ribbon around my neck, and am major, as I expected when I
came here."
"Why not, pray, if you feel that you are so unfitted as you say for
service here?"
"Simply because I feel still more unfitted to return to Russia the same
as I came. That also is one of the traditions existing in Russia which
were handed down by Passek, Sleptsof, and others,--that you must go to
the Caucasus, so as to come home loaded with rewards. And all of us are
expecting and working for this; but I have been here two years, have
taken part in two expeditions, and haven't won any thing. But still,
I have so much vanity that I shall not go away from here until I am,
major, and have the Vladímir and Anna around my neck. I am already
accustomed to having every thing avoid me, when even Gnilokishkin gets
promoted, and I don't. And so how could I show myself in Russia before
the eyes of my elder, the merchant Kotelnikof, to whom I sell wheat, or
to my aunty in Moscow, and all those people, if I had served two years
in the Caucasus without getting promoted? It is true that I don't wish
to know these people, and, of course, they don't care very much about
me; but a man is so constituted, that though I don't wish to know them,
yet on account of them I am wasting my best years, and destroying all
the happiness of my life, and all my future."
[Footnote 15: _váshie blagoródié._]