Left alone with his own thoughts, Volodya's first sensation was a fear
of the incoherent, forlorn state of his own soul. He wanted to go to
sleep, and forget all his surroundings, and himself most of all. He
extinguished the candle, lay down on the bed, and, taking off his coat,
he wrapped his head up in it, in order to relieve his terror of the
darkness, with which he had been afflicted since his childhood. But all
at once the thought occurred to him that a bomb might come and crush
in the roof and kill him. He began to listen attentively; directly
overhead, he heard the footsteps of the battery commander.
“Anyway, if it does come,” he thought, “it will kill any one who is
upstairs first, and then me; at all events, I shall not be the only
one.”
This thought calmed him somewhat.
“Well, and what if Sevastopol should be taken unexpectedly, in the
night, and the French make their way hither? What am I to defend myself
with?”
He rose once more, and began to pace the room. His terror of the actual
danger outweighed his secret fear of the darkness. There was nothing
heavy in the room except the samovár and a saddle. “I am a scoundrel, a
coward, a miserable coward!” the thought suddenly occurred to him, and
again he experienced that oppressive sensation of scorn and disgust,
even for himself. Again he threw himself on the bed, and tried not to
think.
Then the impressions of the day involuntarily penetrated his
imagination, in consequence of the unceasing sounds, which made the
glass in the solitary window rattle, and again the thought of danger
recurred to him: now he saw visions of wounded men and blood, now
of bombs and splinters, flying into the room, then of the pretty
little Sister of Mercy, who was applying a bandage to him, a dying
man, and weeping over him, then of his mother, accompanying him to
the provincial town, and praying, amid burning tears, before the
wonder-working images, and once more sleep appeared an impossibility to
him.
But suddenly the thought of Almighty God, who can do all things, and
who hears every supplication, came clearly into his mind. He knelt
down, crossed himself, and folded his hands as he had been taught to do
in his childhood, when he prayed. This gesture, all at once, brought
back to him a consoling feeling, which he had long since forgotten.
“If I must die, if I must cease to exist, ‘thy will be done, Lord,’”
he thought; “let it be quickly; but if bravery is needed, and the
firmness which I do not possess, give them to me; deliver me from shame
and disgrace, which I cannot bear, but teach me what to do in order to
fulfil thy will.”
His childish, frightened, narrow soul was suddenly encouraged; it
cleared up, and caught sight of broad, brilliant, and new horizons.
During the brief period while this feeling lasted, he felt and thought
many other things, and soon fell asleep quietly and unconcernedly, to
the continuous sounds of the roar of the bombardment and the rattling
of the window-panes.
Great Lord! thou alone hast heard, and thou alone knowest those ardent,
despairing prayers of ignorance, of troubled repentance, those
petitions for the healing of the body and the enlightenment of the
mind, which have ascended to thee from that terrible precinct of death,
from the general who, a moment before, was thinking of his cross of the
George on his neck, and conscious in his terror of thy near presence,
to the simple soldier writhing on the bare earth of the Nikolaevsky
battery, and beseeching thee to bestow upon him there the reward,
unconsciously presaged, for all his sufferings.