by Leo Tolstoy
I suppose my driver felt ashamed.
‘Well, let us try it again, sir!’ he said to me. ‘Others have made their way through and their tracks will be fresh.’
I agreed, and we turned again, facing the wind and struggling forward through the deep snow. I kept my eyes on the side of the road so as not to lose the track left by the tróykas. For some two versts the track was plainly visible, then only a slight unevenness where the runners had gone, and soon I was quite unable to tell whether it was a track or only a layer of driven snow. My eyes were dimmed by looking at the snow monotonously receding under the runners, and I began to look ahead. We saw the third verst-post, but were quite unable to find a fourth. As before we drove against the wind, and with the wind, and to the right and to the left, and at last we came to such a pass that the driver said we must have turned off to the right, I said we had gone to the left, and Alëshka was sure we had turned right back. Again we stopped several times and the driver disengaged his big feet and climbed out to look for the road, but all in vain. I too once went to see whether something I caught a glimpse of was not the road, but hardly had I taken some six steps with difficulty against the wind before I became convinced that similar layers of snow lay everywhere, and that I had seen the road only in my imagination. When I could no longer see the sledge I cried out: ‘Driver! Alëshka!’ but I felt how the wind caught my voice straight from my mouth and bore it instantly to a distance. I went to where the sledge had been – but it was not there; I went to the right, it was not there either. I am ashamed to remember in what a loud, piercing, and even rather despairing voice I again shouted ‘Driver!’ and there he was within two steps of me. His black figure, with the little whip and enormous cap pushed to one side, suddenly loomed up before me. He led me to the sledge.
‘Thank the Lord, it’s still warm,’ he said, ‘if the frost seized us it would be terrible … O Lord!’
‘Give the horses their head: let them take us back,’ I said, having seated myself in the sledge. ‘They will take us back, driver, eh?’
‘They ought to.’
He let go of the reins, struck the harness-pad of the middle horse with the whip, and we again moved on somewhere. We had travelled on for about half an hour when suddenly ahead of us we recognized the connoisseur’s bell and the other two, but this time they were coming towards us. There were the same three tróykas, which having delivered the mail were now returning to the station with relay horses attached. The courier’s tróyka with its big horses and musical bells ran quickly in front, with one driver on the driver’s seat shouting vigorously. Two drivers were sitting in the middle of each of the empty sledges that followed, and one could hear their loud and merry voices. One of them was smoking a pipe, and the spark that flared up in the wind showed part of his face.
Looking at them I felt ashamed that I had been afraid to go on, and my driver probably shared the same feeling, for we both said at once: ‘Let us follow them!’
III
MY driver, before the third tróyka had passed, began turning so clumsily that his shafts hit the horses attached behind it. They all three shied, broke their strap, and galloped aside.
‘You cross-eyed devil! Can’t you see when you’re turning into someone, you devil?’ one of the drivers seated in the last sledge – a short old man, as far as I could judge by his voice and figure – began to curse in hoarse, quivering tones, and quickly jumping out of the sledge he ran after the horses, still continuing his coarse and harsh abuse of my driver.
But the horses did not stop. The driver followed them, and in a moment both he and they were lost in the white mist of driving snow.
‘Vasí-i-li! Bring along the dun horse! I can’t catch them without,’ came his voice.
One of the other drivers, a very tall man, got out of his sledge, silently unfastened his three horses, climbed on one of them by its breeching, and disappeared at a clumsy gallop in the direction of the first driver.
We and the other two tróykas started after the courier’s tróyka, which with its bell ringing went along at full trot though there was no road.
‘Catch them! Not likely!’ said my driver of the one who had run after the horses. ‘If a horse won’t come to other horses, that shows it’s bewitched and will take you somewhere you’ll never return from.’
From the time he began following the others my driver seemed more cheerful and talkative, a fact of which I naturally took advantage, as I did not yet feel sleepy. I began asking where he came from, and why, and who he was, and it turned out that like myself he was from Túla province, a serf from Kirpíchnoe village, that they were short of land there and had had bad harvests since the cholera year. He was one of two brothers in the family, the third having gone as a soldier; that they had not enough grain to last till Christmas, and had to live on outside earnings. His youngest brother was head of the house, being married, while he himself was a widower. An artél2 of drivers came from their village to these parts every year. Though he had not driven before, he had taken the job to help his brother, and lived, thank God, quite well, earning a hundred and twenty assignation rubles a year, of which he sent a hundred home to the family; and that life would be quite good ‘if only the couriers were not such beasts, and the people hereabouts not so abusive’.
‘Now why did that driver scold me so? O Lord! Did I set his horses loose on purpose? Do I mean harm to anybody? And why did he go galloping after them? They’d have come back of themselves, and now he’ll only tire out the horses and get lost himself,’ said the God-fearing peasant.
‘And what is that black thing there?’ I asked, noticing several dark objects in front of us.
‘Why, a train of carts. That’s pleasant driving!’ he went on, when we had come abreast of the huge mat-covered wagons on wheels, following one another. ‘Look, you can’t see a single soul – they’re all asleep. Wise horses know of themselves … you can’t make them miss the way anyhow … We’ve driven that way on contract work ourselves,’ he added, ‘so we know.’
It really was strange to see those huge wagons covered with snow from their matted tops to their very wheels, and moving along all alone. Only in the front corner of the wagon did the matting, covered two inches thick with snow, lift a bit and a cap appear for a moment from under it as our bells tinkled past. The large piebald horse, stretching its neck and straining its back, went evenly along the completely snow-hidden road, monotonously shaking its shaggy head under the whitened harness-bow, and pricking one snow-covered ear when we overtook it.
When we had gone on for another half-hour the driver again turned to me.
‘What d’you think, sir, are we going right?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered.
‘At first the wind came that way, and now we are going right under the wind. No, we are not going where we ought, we are going astray again,’ he said quite calmly.
One saw that, though he was inclined to be a coward, yet ‘death itself is pleasant in company’ as the saying is, and he had become quite tranquil now that there were several of us and he no longer had to lead and be responsible. He made remarks on the blunders of the driver in front with the greatest coolness, as if it were none of his business. And in fact I noticed that we sometimes saw the front tróyka on the left and sometimes on the right; it even seemed to me that we were going round in a very small circle. However, that might be an optical illusion, like the impression that the leading tróyka was sometimes going uphill, and then along a slope, or downhill, whereas I knew that the steppe was perfectly level.
After we had gone on again for some time, I saw a long way off, on the very horizon as it seemed to me, a long, dark, moving stripe; and a moment later it became clear that it was the same train of wagons we had passed before. The snow was still covering their creaking wheels, some of which did not even turn any longer, the men were still asleep as before under the matting, and the piebald horse in front blew out its nostrils as before, sniffed at the road, and pricked i
ts ears.
‘There, we’ve turned and turned and come back to the same wagons!’ exclaimed my driver in a dissatisfied voice. ‘The courier’s horses are good ones, that’s why he’s driving them so recklessly, but ours will stop altogether if we go on like this all night.’
He cleared his throat.
‘Let us turn back, sir, before we get into trouble!’
‘No! Why? We shall get somewhere.’
‘Where shall we get to? We shall spend the night in the steppe. How it is blowing! … O Lord!’
Though I was surprised that the driver of the front tróyka, having evidently lost the road and the direction, went on at a fast trot without looking for the road, and cheerfully shouting, I did not want to lag behind them.
‘Follow them!’ I said.
My driver obeyed, whipping up his horses more reluctantly than before, and did not turn to talk to me any more.
IV
THE storm grew more and more violent, and the snow fell dry and fine. I thought it was beginning to freeze: my cheeks and nose felt colder than before, and streams of cold air made their way more frequently under my fur coat, so that I had to wrap it closer around me. Sometimes the sledge bumped on the bare ice-glazed ground from which the wind had swept the snow. As I had already travelled more than five hundred versts without stopping anywhere for the night, I involuntarily kept closing my eyes and dozing off, although I was much interested to know how our wandering would end. Once when I opened my eyes I was struck for a moment by what seemed to me a bright light falling on the white plain; the horizon had widened considerably, the lowering black sky had suddenly vanished, and on all sides slanting white streaks of falling snow could be seen. The outlines of the front tróykas were more distinct, and as I looked up it seemed for a minute as though the clouds had dispersed, and that only the falling snow veiled the sky. While I was dozing the moon had risen and was casting its cold bright light through the tenuous clouds and the falling snow. The only things I saw clearly were my sledge, the horses, my driver, and the three tróykas in front of us: the courier’s sledge in which a driver still sat, as before, driving at a fast trot; the second, in which two drivers having laid down the reins and made a shelter for themselves out of a coat sat smoking their pipes all the time, as could be seen by the sparks that flew from them; and the third in which no one was visible, as probably the driver was lying asleep in the body of the sledge. The driver of the first tróyka, however, at the time I awoke, occasionally stopped his horses and sought for the road. As soon as we stopped the howling of the wind sounded louder and the vast quantity of snow borne through the air became more apparent. In the snow-shrouded moonlight I could see the driver’s short figure probing the snow in front of him with the handle of his whip, moving backwards and forwards in the white dimness, again returning to his sledge and jumping sideways onto his seat, and again amid the monotonous whistling of the wind I heard his dexterous, resonant cries urging on the horses, and the ringing of the bells. Whenever the driver of the front tróyka got out to search for some sign of a road or haystacks, there came from the second tróyka the bold, self-confident voice of one of the drivers shouting to him:
‘Hey, Ignéshka, you’ve borne quite to the left! Bear to the right, facing the wind!’ Or: ‘What are you twisting about for, quite uselessly? Follow the snow, see how the drifts lie, and we’ll come out just right.’ Or: ‘Take to the right, to the right, mate! See, there’s something black – it must be a post.’ Or: ‘What are you straying about for? Unhitch the piebald and let him run in front, he’ll lead you right out onto the road. That would be better.’
But the man who was giving this advice not only did not unhitch one of his own side-horses or get out to look for the road, but did not show his nose from under his sheltering coat, and when Ignáshka, the leader, shouted in reply to one of his counsels that he should take on the lead himself if he knew which way to go, the advice-giver replied that if he were driving the courier’s tróyka he would take the lead and take us right onto the road. ‘But our horses won’t take the lead in a snow storm!’ he shouted – ‘they’re not that kind of horses!’
‘Then don’t bother me!’ Ignáshka replied, whistling cheerfully to his horses.
The other driver in the second sledge did not speak to Ignáshka at all, and in general took no part in the matter, though he was not asleep, as I concluded from his pipe being always alight, and because, whenever we stopped, I heard the even and continuous sound of his voice. He was telling a folk tale. Only once, when Ignáshka stopped for the sixth or seventh time, he apparently grew vexed at being interrupted during the pleasure of his drive, and shouted to him:
‘Hullo, why have you stopped again? Just look, he wants to find the road! He’s been told there’s a snow storm! The surveyor himself couldn’t find the road now. You should drive on as long as the horses will go, and then maybe we shan’t freeze to death … Go on, do!’
‘I daresay! Didn’t a postillion freeze to death last year?’ my driver remarked.
The driver of the third sledge did not wake up all the time. Once when we had stopped the advice-giver shouted:
‘Philip! Hullo, Philip!’ and receiving no reply remarked: ‘Hasn’t he frozen, perhaps?… Go and have a look, Ignáshka.’
Ignáshka, who found time for everything, walked up to the sledge and began to shake the sleeping man.
‘Just see what half a bottle of vodka has done! Talk about freezing!’ he said, shaking him.
The sleeper grunted something and cursed.
‘He’s alive, all right,’ said Ignáshka, and ran forward again. We drove on, and so fast that the little off-side sorrel of my tróyka, which my driver continually touched with the whip near his tail, now and then broke into an awkward little gallop.
V
IT was I think already near midnight when the little old man and Vasíli, who had gone after the runaway horses, rode up to us. They had managed to catch the horses and to find and overtake us; but how they had managed to do this in the thick blinding snow storm amid the bare steppe will always remain a mystery to me. The old man, swinging his elbows and legs, was riding the shaft-horse at a trot (the two side-horses were attached to its collar: one dare not let horses loose in a snow storm). When he came abreast of us he again began to scold my driver.
‘Look at the cross-eyed devil, really …’
‘Eh, Uncle Mítrich!’ the folk-tale teller in the second sledge called out: ‘Are you alive? Get in here with us.’
But the old man did not reply and continued his abuse. When he thought he had said enough he rode up to the second sledge.
‘Have you caught them all?’ someone in it asked.
‘What do you think?’
His small figure threw itself forward on the back of the trotting horse, then jumped down on the snow, and without stopping he ran after the sledge and tumbled in, his legs sticking out over its side. The tall Vasíli silently took his old place in the front sledge beside Ignáshka, and the two began to look for the road together.
‘How the old man nags … Lord God!’ muttered my driver.
For a long time after that we drove on without stopping over the white waste, in the cold, pellucid, and quivering light of the snow storm. I would open my eyes and the same clumsy snow-covered cap and back would be jolting before me: the same low shaft-bow, under which, between the taut leather reins and always at the same distance from me, the head of our shaft-horse kept bobbing with its black mane blown to one side by the wind. Looking across its back I could see the same little piebald off-horse on the right, with its tail tied up short, and the swingletree which sometimes knocked against the front of the sledge. I would look down – there was the same scurrying snow through which our runners were cutting, and which the wind resolutely bore away to one side. In front, always at the same distance away, glided the first tróyka, while to right and left everything glimmered white and dim. Vainly did my eye look for any new object: neither post, nor hayst
ack, nor fence was to be seen. Everywhere all was white and fluctuating: now the horizon seemed immeasurably distant, now it closed in on all sides to within two paces of me; suddenly a high white wall would seem to rise up on the right and run beside the sledge, then it would suddenly vanish and rise again in front, only to glide on farther and farther away and again disappear. When I looked up it would seem lighter for a moment, as if I might see the stars through the haze, but the stars would run away higher and higher from my sight and only the snow would be visible, falling past my eyes onto my face and the collar of my fur cloak. The sky everywhere remained equally light, equally white, monotonous, colourless, and constantly shifting. The wind seemed to be changing: now it blew in my face and the snow plastered my eyes, now it blew from one side and annoyingly tossed the fur-collar of my cloak against my head and mockingly flapped my face with it; now it howled through some opening. I heard the soft incessant crunching of the hoofs and the runners on the snow, and the clang of the bells dying down when we drove through deep drifts. Only now and then, when we drove against the snow and glided over bare frozen ground, did Ignáshka’s energetic whistling and the sonorous sound of the bell with its accompanying bare fifth reach me, and give sudden relief to the dismal character of the desert; and then again the bells would sound monotonous, playing always with insufferable precision the same tune, which I involuntarily imagined I was hearing. One of my feet began to feel the frost, and when I turned to wrap myself up better, the snow that had settled on my collar and cap shifted down my neck and made me shiver, but on the whole I still felt warm in my fur cloak, and drowsiness overcame me.
VI
RECOLLECTIONS and pictures of the distant past superseded one another with increasing rapidity in my imagination.
‘That advice-giver who is always calling out from the second sledge – what sort of fellow can he be?’ I thought. ‘Probably red-haired, thick-set, and with short legs, like Theodore Filípych, our old butler.’ And I saw the staircase of our big house and five domestic serfs with heavy steps bringing a piano from the wing on slings made of towels, and Theodore Filípych with the sleeves of his nankeen coat turned up, holding one of the pedals, running forward, lifting a latch, pulling here at the slings, pushing there, crawling between people’s legs, getting into everybody’s way, and shouting incessantly in an anxious voice: