Left alone with his thoughts, Volodia at first felt a return of the
terror caused by the trouble which agitated his soul. Counting upon
sleep to be able to cease thinking of his surroundings and to forget
himself, he blew out his candle and lay down, covering himself all up
with his overcoat, even his head, for he had kept his fear of darkness
since his childhood. But suddenly the idea came to him that a shell
might fall through the roof and kill him. He listened. The commander of
the battery was walking up and down over his head.
“It will begin by killing him first,” he said to himself, “then me. I
shall not die alone!” This reflection calmed him, and he was going to
sleep when this time the thought that Sebastopol might be taken that
very night, that the French might burst in his door, and that he had no
weapon to defend himself, completely waked him up again. He rose and
walked the room. The fear of the real danger had stifled the mysterious
terror of darkness. He hunted and found to hand only a saddle and a
samovar. “I am a coward, a poltroon, a wretch,” he thought again, filled
with disgust and scorn of himself. He lay down and tried to stop
thinking; but then the impressions of the day passed again through his
mind, and the continual sounds which shook the panes of his single
window recalled to him the danger he was in. Visions followed. Now he
saw the wounded covered with blood; now bursting shells, pieces of which
flew into his room; now the pretty Sister of Charity who dressed his
wounds weeping over his agony, or his mother, who, carrying him back to
the provincial town, praying to God for him before a miraculous image,
shed hot tears. Sleep eluded him; but suddenly the thought of an
all-powerful Deity who sees everything and who hears every prayer
flashed upon him distinct and clear in the midst of his reveries. He
fell upon his knees, making the sign of the cross, and clasping his
hands as he had been taught in his childhood. This simple gesture
aroused in him a feeling of infinite, long-forgotten calm.
“If I am to die, it is because I am useless! Then, may Thy will be done,
O Lord! and may it be done quickly. But if the courage and firmness
which I lack are necessary to me, spare me the shame and the dishonor,
which I cannot endure, and teach me what I must do to accomplish Thy
will.”
His weak, childish, and terrified soul was fortified, was calmed at
once, and entered new, broad, and luminous regions. He thought of a
thousand things; he experienced a thousand sensations in the short
duration of this feeling; then he quietly went to sleep, heedless of the
dull roar of the bombardment and of the shaking windows.
Lord, Thou alone hast heard, Thou alone knowest the simple but ardent
and despairing prayers of ignorance, the confused repentance asking for
the cure of the body and the purification of the soul--the prayers which
rise to Thee from these places where death resides; beginning with the
general, who with terror feels a presentiment of approaching death, and
a second after thinks only of wearing a cross of Saint George on his
neck, and ending with the simple soldier prostrate on the bare earth of
the Nicholas battery, supplicating Thee to grant him for his sufferings
the recompense he unconsciously has a glimpse of.