His features were not dark, dry, and regular, as I had reason to expect
from his hair and build. His face was round, jolly, with a snub nose
and a big mouth, and clear-shining eyes, blue and round. His cheeks and
neck were like well-worn cloth. His eyebrows, his long eyelashes, and
the beard which evenly covered the lower part of his face, were crusted
thick with snow, and perfectly white.
The distance to the station was all of a half-verst, and we stopped.
"Only be quick about it," I said.
"Just a minute," replied Ignashka, springing down from his seat, and
going up to Filipp.
"Let us have it, brother," said he, taking the glass in his right hand;
and throwing his mitten and whip down on the snow, tipping back his
head, he drank down at a gulp the glass of vodka.
The inn-keeper, who must have been a discharged Cossack, came, with a
bottle in his hand, out of the door.
"Who have you got there?" he asked.
The tall Vasíli, a lean, blond muzhík with a goatee, and the fat
mentor, with white eyebrows, and a thick white beard framing his ruddy
face, came up and also drank a glass. The little old man joined the
group of drinkers; but no one offered him any thing, and he went off
again to his horses, fastened behind, and began to stroke one of them
on the back and side.
The little old man was pretty much what I had imagined him to be;
small, ugly, with wrinkled, strongly marked features, a thin little
beard, a sharp nose, and worn yellow teeth. He wore a driver's cap,
perfectly new; but his sheepskin jacket[20] was old, soiled with oil,
and torn on the shoulders and flaps, and did not cover his knees or his
hempen trousers tucked into his huge felt boots. He himself was bent,
and frowned all the time, and, with trembling lips and limbs, tramped
around his sledge in his efforts to keep warm.
"Well, Mitritch, you ought to have a drink; it would warm you up," said
the mentor to him.
Mitritch gave a start. He arranged the horses' harness, straightened
the bell-bow, and then came to me.
"Say, bárin," said he, taking his cap off from his white hair and
bowing very low, "all night long we have been wandering together; we
have found the road. We would seem to deserve a bit of a drink. Isn't
that so, sir, your eminence?[21] just enough to get warmed," he added
with an obsequious smile.
I gave him a quarter-ruble. The inn-keeper brought out a glass of
vodka, and handed it to the old man. He laid aside his mitten and whip,
and took the glass in his small, dark hand, bony and somewhat bluish;
but strangely enough he could not control his thumb. Before he had
lifted the glass to his lips, he dropped it in the snow, spilling the
wine.
All the drivers burst out laughing.
"See, Mitritch-to is half-frozen like; he can't hold his wine."
But Mitritch was greatly vexed because he had spilt the wine.
They brought him, however, another glass, and poured it into his mouth.
He immediately became jolly, went into the inn, lighted his pipe, began
to show his yellow worn teeth, and to scold at every word. After they
had taken their last drinks, the drivers came back to their troikas,
and we set off.
The snow kept growing whiter and brighter, till it made one's eyes ache
to look at it. The orange-colored reddish streaks stretched brighter
and brighter, higher and higher, across the heavens; now the red circle
of the sun appeared on the horizon through the bluish clouds; the blue
sky came out in constantly increasing brilliancy and depth. On the road
around the station the tracks were clear, distinct, and yellow; in some
places were cradle-holes. In the frosty, bracing atmosphere, there was
a pleasant exhilaration and freshness.
My troïka glided along very swiftly. The head of the shaft-horse,
and the neck with the mane tossing up to the bell-bow, constantly
made the same quick, swinging motions under the hunting-bell, the
tongue of which no longer struck, but scraped around the rim. The
good side-horses, in friendly rivalry tugging at the frozen twisted
traces, energetically galloped on, the tassels striking against their
ribs and necks. Occasionally the off-horse would plunge into some
drift, and kick up the snow, filling the eyes with the fine powder.
Ignashka kept shouting in his gay tenor. The runners creaked over the
dry, frosty snow. Behind us, with a loud festival sound, rang the two
sledge-chimes; and the voices of the drivers, made jolly by wine, could
be heard.
I looked back: the gray shaggy side-horses arching their necks,
regularly puffing out the breath, with their curved bits, galloped over
the snow. Filipp was flourishing his whip and adjusting his cap. The
little old man, with his legs hanging out, was reclining as before in
the middle of his sledge.
At the end of two minutes the sledge scraped against the boards of the
well-cleared entrance of the station-house; and Ignashka turned to me,
his jolly face covered with snow, where his breath had turned to ice,
and said,--
"Here we are, bárin!"
[Footnote 20: _polushúbchishka._]
[Footnote 21: _bátiushka, váshe siátelstvo._]