‘My God! My God! When will it all end?’ she said in a despairing voice.
They entered the officers’ ward. Martsov was lying on his back, his sinewy arms bare to the elbow thrown back behind his head, and on his yellow face the expression of one who has clenched his teeth to prevent himself from screaming with pain. His sound leg with a stocking on showed from under the blanket and one could see the toes moving spasmodically.
‘Well, how are you?’ asked the sister, raising his slightly bald head with her slender delicate fingers (on one of which Volodya noticed a gold ring) and arranging his pillow.
‘In pain of course!’ he answered angrily. ‘That’ll do — the pillow’s all right!’ and the toes in the stocking moved still faster. ‘How d’you do? What’s your name?’ . . . ‘Excuse me,’ he added, when Kozeltsov had told him. ‘Ah yes, I beg your pardon. One forgets everything here. Why, we lived together,’ he remarked without any sign of pleasure, and looked inquiringly at Volodya.
‘This is my brother, arrived to-day from Petersburg.’
‘H’m! And I have got my discharge!’ said the wounded man, frowning. ‘Oh, how it hurts! If only it would be over quicker!’
He drew up his leg and, moving his toes still more rapidly, covered his face with his hands.
‘He must be left alone,’ said the sister in a whisper while tears filled her eyes. ‘He is very ill.’
While still on the North Side the brothers had agreed to go to the Fifth Bastion together, but as they passed out of the Nicholas Battery it was as if they had agreed not to run unnecessary risks and for each to go his own way.
‘But how will you find it, Volodya?’ said the elder. ‘Look here! Nikolaev shall take you to the Korabelnaya and I’ll go on alone and come to you tomorrow.’
Nothing more was said at this last Parting between the brothers.
XII
The thunder of the cannonade continued with unabated violence. Ekaterina Street, down which Volodya walked followed by the silent Nikolaev, was quiet and deserted. All he could distinguish in the dark was the broad street with its large white houses, many of them in ruins, and the stone pavement along which he was walking. Now and then he met soldiers and officers. As he was passing by the left side of the Admiralty Building, a bright light inside showed him the acacias planted along the side-walk of the streets with green stakes to support them and sickly, dusty leaves. He distinctly heard his own footsteps and those of Nikolaev, who followed him breathing heavily.
He was not thinking of anything: the pretty Sister of Mercy, Martsov’s foot with the toes moving in the stocking, the darkness, the bombs, and different images of death, floated dimly before his imagination. His whole young impressionable soul was weighed down and crushed by a sense of loneliness and of the general indifference shown to his fate in these dangerous surroundings. T shall be killed, I shall suffer, endure torments, and no one will shed a tear!’ And all this instead of the heroic life abounding in energy and sympathy of which he had had such glorious dreams. The bombs whistled and burst nearer and nearer. Nikolaev sighed more and more often, but did not speak. As they were crossing the bridge that led to the Korabelnaya he saw a whistling something fall and disappear into the water near by, lighting the purple waves to a flaming red for a second and then come splashing up again.
‘Just look! Not quenched!’ said Nikolaev in a hoarse voice.
‘No,’ answered Volodya in an involuntarily high-pitched plaintive tone which surprised him.
They met wounded men carried on stretchers and more carts loaded with gabions. In the Korabelnaya they met a regiment, and men on horseback rode past. One of these was an officer followed by a Cossack. He was riding at a trot, but seeing Volodya he reined up his horse, looked in his face, turned away, and rode on, touching his horse with the whip.
‘Alone, alone! No one cares whether I live or not,’ thought the lad, and felt inclined to cry in real earnest.
Having gone up the hill past a high white wall he came into a street of small shattered houses, continually lit up by the bombs. A dishevelled, tipsy woman, coming out of a gate with a sailor, knocked up against Volodya. ‘Because if he’sh an on’ble man,’ she muttered— ‘pardon y’r exshensh offisher!’
The poor lad’s heart ached more and more. On the dark horizon the lightnings flashed oftener and oftener and the bombs whistled and exploded more and more frequently around them. Nikolaev sighed and suddenly began to speak in what seemed to Volodya a lifeless tone.
‘There now, and we were in such a hurry to leave home! “We must go! We must go!” Fine place to hurry to! [Wise gentlemen when they are the least bit wounded lie up quietly in ‘orspital. It’s so nice, what better can you want?]’
‘Well, but if my brother had recovered his health,’ answered Volodya, hoping by conversation to disperse the dreadful feeling that had seized him.
‘Health indeed! Where’s his health, when he’s quite ill? Even them as is really well had best lie in ‘orspital these times. Not much pleasure to be got. All you get is a leg or an arm carried off. It’s done before you know where you are! It’s horrible enough even here in the town, but what’s it like at the baksions! You say all the prayers you know when you’re going there. See how the beastly thing twangs past you!’ he added, listening to the buzzing of a flying fragment.
‘Now,’ he continued, ‘I’m to show y’r honour the way. Our business is o’ course to obey orders: what’s ordered has to be done. But the trap’s been left with some private or other, and the bundle’s untied. . . . “Go, go!” but if something’s lost, why Nikolaev answers for it!’
A few more steps brought them to a square. Nikolaev did not speak but kept sighing. Then he said suddenly:
‘There, y’r honour, there’s where your antillaries stationed. Ask the sentinel, he’ll show you.’ A few steps farther on Volodya no longer heard Nikolaev sighing behind him. He suddenly felt himself utterly and finally deserted. This sense of loneliness, face to face as it seemed to him with death, pressed like a heavy, cold stone on his heart. He stopped in the middle of the square, glanced round to see if anyone was looking, seized his head and thought with horror:
‘O Lord, am I really a vile, miserable coward . . . when it’s for my Fatherland, for the Tsar for whom I used to long to die? Yes! I am a miserable, wretched being!’ And Volodya, filled with despair and disappointed at himself, asked the sentinel the way to the house of the commander of the battery and went where he was directed.
XIII
The commander of the battery lived in a small two-storied house with an entrance from the yard, which the sentinel pointed out. The faint light of a candle shone through a window patched up with paper. An orderly, who sat on the steps smoking his pipe, went in to inform the commander of the battery of Voldya’s arrival and then showed him into the room. In the room, under a broken mirror between two windows, was a table littered with official papers; there were also several chairs and an iron bedstead with clean bedding, with a small rug beside it.
Just beside the door stood a handsome sergeant-major with large moustaches, wearing side-arms, and with a cross and an Hungarian medal1 on his uniform. A staff-officer, a short man of about forty in a thin old cloak and with a swollen cheek tied round with a bandage, was pacing up and down the room.
I have the honour to report myself, Ensign Kozeltsov, secundus, ordered to join the Fifth Light
1 That is, a medal granted for service in the suppression of the Hungarian rising in 1849, when Nicholas I helped Austria to suppress the insurgent Hungarians. Artillery,’ said Volodya on entering the room, repeating the sentence he had been taught.
The commander answered his greeting dryly and without shaking hands asked him to take a seat.
Volodya sat down shyly on a chair by the writing table, and began playing with a pair of scissors his hand happened to fall on. The commander, with his hands at his back and with drooping head, continued to pace the room in silence as if trying to remember something, only now and then glancing at the hand that was playing with the scissors.
The commander of the battery was rather stout, with a large bald patch on his head, thick moustaches hanging straight down over his mouth, and pleasant hazel eyes. His hands were plump, well-shaped, and clean, his small feet were much turned out and he trod with firmness in a way that indicated that he was not a diffident man.
‘Yes,’ he said, stopping opposite the sergeant-major, ‘the ammunition horses must have an extra peck beginning from to-morrow. They are getting very thin. Don’t you think so?’
‘Well, we can manage an extra peck, your honour! Oats are a bit cheaper now,’ answered the sergeant-major, standing at attention but moving his fingers, which evidently liked to aid his conversation by gestures. ‘Then our forage-master, Frantchuk, sent me a note from the convoy yesterday that we must be sure, your Excellency, to buy axles there. They say they can be got cheap. Will you give
