The soldiers were bearing the wounded on stretchers, and supporting
them by their arms. It was completely dark in the streets; now and
then, a rare light flashed in the hospital or from the spot where
the officers were seated. The same thunder of cannon and exchange of
rifle-shots was borne from the bastions, and the same fires flashed
against the dark heavens. Now and then, you could hear the trampling
hoofs of an orderly's horse, the groan of a wounded man, the footsteps
and voices of the stretcher-bearers, or the conversation of some of the
frightened female inhabitants, who had come out on their porches to
view the cannonade.
Among the latter were our acquaintances Nikita, the old sailor's widow,
with whom he had already made his peace, and her ten-year-old daughter.
“Lord, Most Holy Mother of God!” whispered the old woman to herself
with a sigh, as she watched the bombs, which, like balls of fire,
sailed incessantly from one side to the other. “What a shame, what a
shame! I-i-hi-hi! It was not so in the first bombardment. See, there it
has burst, the cursed thing! right above our house in the suburbs.”
“No, it is farther off, in aunt Arinka's garden, that they all fall,”
said the little girl.
“And where, where is my master now!” said Nikita, with a drawl, for he
was still rather drunk. “Oh, how I love that master of mine!—I don't
know myself!—I love him so that if, which God forbid, they should
kill him in this sinful fight, then, if you will believe it, aunty, I
don't know myself what I might do to myself in that case—by Heavens, I
don't! He is such a master that words will not do him justice! Would
I exchange him for one of those who play cards? That is simply—whew!
that's all there is to say!” concluded Nikita, pointing at the lighted
window of his master's room, in which, as the staff-captain was
absent, Yunker Zhvadchevsky had invited his friends to a carouse, on
the occasion of his receiving the cross: Sub-Lieutenant Ugrovitch and
Sub-Lieutenant Nepshisetsky, who was ill with a cold in the head.
“Those little stars! They dart through the sky like stars, like stars!”
said the little girl, breaking the silence which succeeded Nikita's
words. “There, there! another has dropped! Why do they do it, mamma?”
“They will ruin our little cabin entirely,” said the old woman,
sighing, and not replying to her little daughter's question.
“And when uncle and I went there to-day, mamma,” continued the little
girl, in a shrill voice, “there was such a big cannon-ball lying in the
room, near the cupboard; it had broken through the wall and into the
room ... and it is so big that you couldn't lift it.”
“Those who had husbands and money have gone away,” said the old woman,
“and now they have ruined my last little house. See, see how they are
firing, the wretches. Lord, Lord!”
“And as soon as we came out, a bomb flew at us, and burst and scattered
the earth about, and a piece of the shell came near striking uncle and
me.”