Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

by Leo Tolstoy

  After dinner, Meller-Zakomélsky’s aide-de-camp was announced.

  The aide-de-camp informed the prince that the general, having heard of Hadji Murád’s arrival, was highly displeased that this had not been reported to him, and required Hadji Murád to be brought to him without delay. Vorontsóv replied that the general’s command should be obeyed, and through the interpreter informed Hadji Murád of these orders and asked him to go to Meller with him.

  When Márya Vasílevna heard what the aide-de-camp had come about, she at once understood that unpleasantness might arise between her husband and the general, and in spite of all her husband’s attempts to dissuade her, decided to go with him and Hadji Murád.

  ‘Vous feriez bien mieux de rester – c’est mon affaire, non pas la vôtre.…’

  ‘Vous ne pouvez pas m’empěcher d’aller voir madame la générale!’6

  ‘You could go some other time.’

  ‘But I wish to go now!’

  There was no help for it, so Vorontsóv agreed, and they all three went.

  When they entered, Meller with sombre politeness conducted Márya Vasílevna to his wife and told his aide-de-camp to show Hadji Murád into the waiting-room and not let him out till further orders.

  ‘Please …’ he said to Vorontsóv, opening the door of his study and letting the prince enter before him.

  Having entered the study he stopped in front of Vorontsóv and, without offering him a seat, said:

  ‘I am in command here and therefore all negotiations with the enemy have to be carried on through me! Why did you not report to me that Hadji Murád had come over?’

  ‘An emissary came to me and announced his wish to capitulate only to me,’ replied Vorontsóv growing pale with excitement, expecting some rude expression from the angry general and at the same time becoming infected with his anger.

  ‘I ask you why I was not informed?’

  ‘I intended to inform you, Baron, but …’

  ‘You are not to address me as “Baron”, but as “Your Excellency”!’ And here the baron’s pent-up irritation suddenly broke out and he uttered all that had long been boiling in his soul.

  ‘I have not served my sovereign twenty-seven years in order that men who began their service yesterday, relying on family connexions, should give orders under my very nose about matters that do not concern them!’

  ‘Your Excellency, I request you not to say things that are incorrect!’ interrupted Vorontsóv.

  ‘I am saying what is correct, and I won’t allow …’ said the general, still more irritably.

  But at that moment Márya Vasílevna entered, rustling with her skirts and followed by a modest-looking little lady, Meller-Zakomélsky’s wife.

  ‘Come, come, Baron! Simon did not wish to displease you,’ began Márya Vasílevna.

  ‘I am not speaking about that, Princess.…’

  ‘Well, well, let’s forget it all!… You know, “A bad peace is better than a good quarrel!” … Oh dear, what am I saying?’ and she laughed.

  The angry general capitulated to the enchanting laugh of the beauty. A smile hovered under his moustache.

  ‘I confess I was wrong,’ said Vorontsóv, ‘but—’

  ‘And I too got rather carried away,’ said Meller, and held out his hand to the prince.

  Peace was re-established, and it was decided to leave Hadji Murád with the general for the present, and then to send him to the commander of the left flank.

  Hadji Murád sat in the next room and though he did not understand what was said, he understood what it was necessary for him to understand – namely, that they were quarrelling about him, that his desertion of Shamil was a matter of immense importance to the Russians, and that therefore not only would they not exile or kill him, but that he would be able to demand much from them. He also understood that though Meller-Zakomélsky was the commanding-officer, he had not as much influence as his subordinate Vorontsóv, and that Vorontsóv was important and Meller-Zakomélsky unimportant; and therefore when Meller-Zakomélsky sent for him and began to question him, Hadji Murád bore himself proudly and ceremoniously, saying that he had come from the mountains to serve the White Tsar and would give account only to his Sirdar, meaning the commander-in-chief, Prince Vorontsóv senior, in Tiflis.

  VII

  THE wounded Avdéev was taken to the hospital – a small wooden building roofed with boards at the entrance of the fort – and was placed on one of the empty beds in the common ward. There were four patients in the ward: one ill with typhus and in high fever; another, pale, with dark shadows under his eyes, who had ague, was just expecting another attack and yawned continually; and two more who had been wounded in a raid three weeks before: one in the hand – he was up – and the other in the shoulder. The latter was sitting on a bed. All of them except the typhus patient surrounded and questioned the newcomer and those who had brought him.

  ‘Sometimes they fire as if they were spilling peas over you, and nothing happens … and this time only about five shots were fired,’ related one of the bearers.

  ‘Each man gets what fate sends!’

  ‘Oh!’ groaned Avdéev loudly, trying to master his pain when they began to place him on the bed; but he stopped groaning when he was on it, and only frowned and moved his feet continually. He held his hands over his wound and looked fixedly before him.

  The doctor came, and gave orders to turn the wounded man over to see whether the bullet had passed out behind.

  ‘What’s this?’ the doctor asked, pointing to the large white scars that crossed one another on the patient’s back and loins.

  ‘That was done long ago, your honour!’ replied Avdéev with a groan.

  They were scars left by the flogging Avdéev had received for the money he drank.

  Avdéev was again turned over, and the doctor probed in his stomach for a long time and found the bullet, but failed to extract it. He put a dressing on the wound, and having stuck plaster over it went away. During the whole time the doctor was probing and bandaging the wound Avdéev lay with clenched teeth and closed eyes, but when the doctor had gone he opened them and looked around as though amazed. His eyes were turned on the other patients and on the surgeon’s orderly, though he seemed to see not them but something else that surprised him.

  His friends Panóv and Serógin came in, but Avdéev continued to lie in the same position looking before him with surprise. It was long before he recognized his comrades, though his eyes gazed straight at them.

  ‘I say, Peter, have you no message to send home?’ said Panóv.

  Avdéev did not answer, though he was looking Panóv in the face.

  ‘I say, haven’t you any orders to send home?’ again repeated Panóv, touching Avdéev’s cold, large-boned hand.

  Avdéev seemed to come to.

  ‘Ah!… Panóv!’

  ‘Yes, I’m here … I’ve come! Have you nothing for home? Serógin would write a letter.’

  ‘Serógin …’ said Avdéev moving his eyes with difficulty towards Serógin, ‘will you write?… Well then, write so: “Your son,” say, “Peter, has given orders that you should live long.7 He envied his brother” … I told you about that today … “and now he is himself glad. Don’t worry him.… Let him live. God grant it him. I am glad!” Write that.’

  Having said this he was silent for some time with his eyes fixed on Panóv.

  ‘And did you find your pipe?’ he suddenly asked.

  Panóv did not reply.

  ‘Your pipe … your pipe! I mean, have you found it?’ Avdéev repeated.

  ‘It was in my bag.’

  ‘That’s right!… Well, and now give me a candle to hold … I am going to die,’ said Avdéev.

  Just then Poltorátsky came in to inquire after his soldier.

  ‘How goes it, my lad! Badly?’ said he.

  Avdéev closed his eyes and shook his head negatively. His broad-cheeked face was pale and stern. He did not reply, but again said to Panóv:

 
; ‘Bring a candle.… I am going to die.’

  A wax taper was placed in his hand but his fingers would not bend, so it was placed between them and held up for him.

  Poltorátsky went away, and five minutes later the orderly put his ear to Avdéev’s heart and said that all was over.

  Avdéev’s death was described in the following manner in the report sent to Tiflis:

  ‘23rd Nov. – Two companies of the Kurín regiment advanced from the fort on a wood-felling expedition. At midday a considerable number of mountaineers suddenly attacked the wood-fellers. The sharpshooters began to retreat, but the 2nd Company charged with the bayonet and overthrew the mountaineers. In this affair two privates were slightly wounded and one killed. The mountaineers lost about a hundred men killed and wounded.’

  VIII

  ON the day Peter Avdéev died in the hospital at Vozdvízhensk, his old father with the wife of the brother in whose stead he had enlisted, and that brother’s daughter – who was already approaching womanhood and almost of age to get married – were threshing oats on the hard-frozen threshing-floor.

  There had been a heavy fall of snow the previous night, followed towards morning by a severe frost. The old man woke when the cocks were crowing for the third time, and seeing the bright moonlight through the frozen window-panes got down from the stove, put on his boots, his sheepskin coat and cap, and went out to the threshing-floor. Having worked there for a couple of hours he returned to the hut and awoke his son and the women. When the woman and the girl came to the threshing-floor they found it ready swept, with a wooden shovel sticking in the dry white snow, beside which were birch brooms with the twigs upwards and two rows of oat-sheaves laid ears to ears in a long line the whole length of the clean threshing-floor. They chose their flails and started threshing, keeping time with their triple blows. The old man struck powerfully with his heavy flail, breaking the straw, the girl struck the ears from above with measured blows, and the daughter-in-law turned the oats over with her flail.

  The moon had set, dawn was breaking, and they were finishing the line of sheaves when Akím, the eldest son, in his sheepskin and cap, joined the threshers.

  ‘What are you lazing about for?’ shouted his father to him, pausing in his work and leaning on his flail.

  ‘The horses had to be seen to.’

  ‘ “Horses seen to!” ’ the father repeated, mimicking him. ‘The old woman will look after them.… Take your flail! You’re getting too fat, you drunkard!’

  ‘Have you been standing me treat?’ muttered the son.

  ‘What?’ said the old man, frowning sternly and missing a stroke.

  The son silently took a flail and they began threshing with four flails.

  ‘Trak, tapatam … trak, tapatam … trak …’ came down the old man’s heavy flail after the three others.

  ‘Why, you’ve got a nape like a goodly gentleman!… Look here, my trousers have hardly anything to hang on!’ said the old man, omitting his stroke and only swinging his flail in the air so as not to get out of time.

  They had finished the row, and the women began removing the straw with rakes.

  ‘Peter was a fool to go in your stead. They’d have knocked the nonsense out of you in the army, and he was worth five of such as you at home!’

  ‘That’s enough, father,’ said the daughter-in-law, as she threw aside the binders that had come off the sheaves.

  ‘Yes, feed the six of you and get no work out of a single one! Peter used to work for two. He was not like …’

  Along the trodden path from the house came the old man’s wife, the frozen snow creaking under the new bark shoes she wore over her tightly wound woollen leg-bands. The men were shovelling the unwinnowed grain into heaps, the woman and the girl sweeping up what remained.

  ‘The Elder has been and orders everybody to go and work for the master, carting bricks,’ said the old woman. I’ve got breakfast ready.… Come along, won’t you?’

  ‘All right.… Harness the roan and go,’ said the old man to Akím, ‘and you’d better look out that you don’t get me into trouble as you did the other day!… I can’t help regretting Peter!’

  ‘When he was at home you used to scold him,’ retorted Akím. ‘Now he’s away you keep nagging at me.’

  ‘That shows you deserve it,’ said his mother in the same angry tones. ‘You’ll never be Peter’s equal.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said the son.

  ‘ “All right,” indeed! You’ve drunk the meal, and now you say “all right!” ’

  ‘Let bygones be bygones!’ said the daughter-in-law.

  The disagreements between father and son had begun long ago – almost from the time Peter went as a soldier. Even then the old man felt that he had parted with an eagle for a cuckoo. It is true that it was right – as the old man understood it – for a childless man to go in place of a family man. Akím had four children and Peter had none; but Peter was a worker like his father, skilful, observant, strong, enduring, and above all industrious. He was always at work. If he happened to pass by where people were working he lent a helping hand as his father would have done, and took a turn or two with the scythe, or loaded a cart, or felled a tree, or chopped some wood. The old man regretted his going away, but there was no help for it. Conscription in those days was like death. A soldier was a severed branch, and to think about him at home was to tear one’s heart uselessly. Only occasionally, to prick his elder son, did the father mention him, as he had done that day. But his mother often thought of her younger son, and for a long time – more than a year now – she had been asking her husband to send Peter a little money, but the old man had made no response.

  The Kúrenkovs were a well-to-do family and the old man had some savings hidden away, but he would on no account have consented to touch what he had laid by. Now however the old woman having heard him mention their younger son, made up her mind to ask him again to send him at least a ruble after selling the oats. This she did. As soon as the young people had gone to work for the proprietor and the old folk were left alone together, she persuaded him to send Peter a ruble out of the oats-money.

  So when ninety-six bushels of the winnowed oats had been packed onto three sledges lined with sacking carefully pinned together at the top with wooden skewers, she gave her husband a letter the church clerk had written at her dictation, and the old man promised when he got to town to enclose a ruble and send it off to the right address.

  The old man, dressed in a new sheepskin with a homespun cloak over it, his legs wrapped round with warm white woollen leg-bands, took the letter, placed it in his wallet, said a prayer, got into the front sledge, and drove to town. His grandson drove in the last sledge. When he reached town the old man asked the inn-keeper to read the letter to him, and listened to it attentively and approvingly.

  In her letter Peter’s mother first sent him her blessing, then greetings from everybody and the news of his godfather’s death, and at the end she added that Aksínya (Peter’s wife) had not wished to stay with them but had gone into service, where they heard she was living honestly and well. Then came a reference to the present of a ruble, and finally a message which the old woman, yielding to her sorrow, had dictated with tears in her eyes and the church clerk had taken down exactly, word for word:

  ‘One thing more, my darling child, my sweet dove, my own Peterkin! I have wept my eyes out lamenting for thee, thou light of my eyes. To whom hast thou left me?…’ At this point the old woman had sobbed and wept, and said: ‘That will do!’ So the words stood in the letter; but it was not fated that Peter should receive the news of his wife’s having left home, nor the present of the ruble, nor his mother’s last words. The letter with the money in it came back with the announcement that Peter had been killed in the war, ‘defending his Tsar, his Fatherland, and the Orthodox Faith’. That is how the army clerk expressed it.

  The old woman, when this news reached her, wept for as long as she could spare time, and then set to work again.
The very next Sunday she went to church and had a requiem chanted and Peter’s name entered among those for whose souls prayers were to be said, and she distributed bits of holy bread to all the good people in memory of Peter, the servant of God.

  Aksínya, his widow, also lamented loudly when she heard of the death of her beloved husband with whom she had lived but one short year. She regretted her husband and her own ruined life, and in her lamentations mentioned Peter’s brown locks and his love, and the sadness of her life with her little orphaned Vánka, and bitterly reproached Peter for having had pity on his brother but none on her – obliged to wander among strangers!

  But in the depth of her soul Aksínya was glad of her husband’s death. She was pregnant a second time by the shopman with whom she was living, and no one would now have a right to scold her, and the shopman could marry her as he had said he would when he was persuading her to yield.

  IX

  MICHAEL Semënovich Vorontsóv, being the son of the Russian Ambassador, had been educated in England and possessed a European education quite exceptional among the higher Russian officials of his day. He was ambitious, gentle and kind in his manner with inferiors, and a finished courtier with superiors. He did not understand life without power and submission. He had obtained all the highest ranks and decorations and was looked upon as a clever commander, and even as the conqueror of Napoleon at Krásnoe.8

  In 1852 he was over seventy, but young for his age, he moved briskly, and above all was in full possession of a facile, refined, and agreeable intellect which he used to maintain his power and strengthen and increase his popularity. He possessed large means – his own and his wife’s (who had been a Countess Branítski) – and received an enormous salary as Viceroy, and he spent a great part of his means on building a palace and laying out a garden on the south coast of the Crimea.

  On the evening of December the 4th, 1852, a courier’s troyka drew up before his palace in Tiflis. An officer, tired and black with dust, sent by General Kozlóvski with the news of Hadji Murád’s surrender to the Russians, entered the wide porch, stretching the stiffened muscles of his legs as he passed the sentinel. It was six o’clock, and Vorontsóv was just going in to dinner when he was informed of the courier’s arrival. He received him at once, and was therefore a few minutes late for dinner.