“Of course you won’t find any beer here,” remarked Merzlyakov, without raising his eyes from the European Herald.
“Really? You think not?” insisted Lobytko. “Good God, if you dumped me on the moon, I’d find you beer on the spot, and women too! I’ll go off and find some right away… Call me a scoundrel if I don’t!”
He spent a long time dressing and pulling on his tall boots, finished his cigarette in silence and set off.
“Rabbeck, Grabbeck, Labbeck,” he muttered, stopping in the outer room. “I don’t feel like going on my own, damn it. Ryabovich, wouldn’t you like to come for a stroll, eh?”
Getting no answer, he turned back, slowly undressed and put himself to bed. Merzlyakov heaved a sigh, put down the European Herald and blew out the candle.
“Mm-yes,” muttered Lobytko, lighting a cigarette in the dark.
Ryabovich pulled the bedclothes over his head, rolled himself into a ball, and tried to gather together all the fleeting images in his mind’s eye and unite them in a single whole. But nothing came of it. Soon he fell asleep, and his last thought was that someone had caressed him, and made him happy, and that something uncommon, silly, but extraordinarily good and joyful had come into his life. Even in his sleep, that thought never left him.
When he awoke, the sensations of oil on his neck and minty coolness near his lips had vanished, but waves of joy still washed over his heart just as they had the day before. He looked up in delight at the window frames, painted gold by the rising sun, and listened to the street sounds outside. A loud conversation was taking place outside the window. His battery commander, Lebedetsky, who had just caught up with his brigade, was talking with his sergeant major in a very loud voice (being unaccustomed to talking quietly).
“What else?” shouted the commander.
“When they were shoeing the horses yesterday, your Honour, they drove a nail into Pigeon’s foot. The vet’s orderly applied clay and vinegar. They’re leading him on his own for now. And another thing, your Honour, Artificer Artemyev got drunk yesterday and his lieutenant ordered him carried on the limber of a spare gun carriage.”
The sergeant major further reported that Karpov had forgotten the new lanyards for the trumpets and also the tent pegs, and that the officers had spent the previous evening as guests of General Von Rabbeck. During this conversation, the red-bearded face of Lebedetsky appeared at the window. He screwed up his short-sighted eyes to look at the officers’ sleepy faces, and bade them good morning.
“All well here?” he asked.
“The pole saddle horse has a sore shoulder from the new collar.”
The commander sighed, thought a bit, and said in a loud voice:
“I’m just thinking of dropping in on Alexandra Yevgrafovna. I have to pay her a visit. Well, carry on. I’ll catch up with you tonight.”
A quarter of an hour later the brigade set off. As it moved along the road past the general’s barns, Ryabovich glanced sideways at the house. The windows were shuttered – evidently everyone there was still asleep. And the girl who had kissed him last night was sleeping too. He tried to imagine her asleep. Her bedroom window wide open, branches with green leaves looking in, the morning freshness, the scent of poplars, lilac and roses, the bed, the chair with her dress on it, the dress that had rustled last night, her little slippers, her little watch on the table – he could see it all clearly and distinctly, but her own features, her enchanting sleepy smile, those very things that were important and special about her – they eluded his imagination, as quicksilver slips away under one’s finger. A quarter of a mile further on, he looked back. The yellow church, the house, the river and the garden were bathed in sunshine; the river between its bright green banks, reflecting the blue sky and glinting silver here and there in the sunlight, was a very lovely sight. Ryabovich cast a last look at Mestechki and felt very sad, as though parting from something he held very close and dear.
On the road, after that, there was nothing to be seen but the familiar, boring scenes… To the right and left were fields of young rye and buckwheat, with rooks hopping about. Look ahead and all you see is dust and the backs of men’s heads, look back and you see the same dust and faces… Ahead of the column, four men with sabres are marching – they’re the vanguard. Behind them, a crowd of singers, and behind the singers, trumpeters on horseback. The vanguard and the singers, like torchbearers in a funeral cortège, keep forgetting to maintain the regulation distance, and run on a long way ahead… Ryabovich is with the first cannon of the fifth battery. He can see all four batteries ahead of him. For a non-military man, this long, cumbersome procession of a brigade on the move looks like a strange, incomprehensible jumble; you have no idea why a single cannon has so many men around it, and why it’s being drawn by so many horses, wearing a strange tangle of harness, as if the whole thing really was so dreadfully difficult. But Ryabovich understands it all, and so he finds it completely uninteresting. He learned long ago why the officer leading each battery has a sturdy bombardier riding by his side, and why he is called the leader; behind this bombardier he can see the horsemen of the first and then the middle units. Ryabovich knows that the horses on the left, on which they ride, are called saddle horses, while the ones on the right are the draught horses; that’s all very uninteresting. Behind the rider come two pole horses. One of them carries a rider, whose back is covered with yesterday’s dust, and who wears a clumsy-looking, very peculiar piece of wood on his right leg; Ryabovich knows the purpose of that bit of wood, and it doesn’t seem odd to him. The mounted men, every one of them, mechanically wave their whips, and every now and then they shout out something. The cannon itself is an ugly thing. The limber is loaded with sacks of oats, covered with canvas, and the gun is festooned with kettles, soldiers’ knapsacks and bags, so that it looks like a harmless little animal surrounded for no apparent reason by men and horses. On its downwind side, six men are marching and swinging their arms: they are the gunners. Behind this gun come more leaders, horsemen and pole horses, pulling along another cannon as ugly and unimpressive as the first. And a third one follows the second, and then a fourth; beside the fourth cannon rides an officer, and so forth. The brigade consists of six batteries in all, and each battery comprises four cannon. The column stretches for half a mile, with the baggage train bringing up the rear. Beside it, walking deep in thought, with his long-eared head drooping low, comes a very nice-looking beast – Magar the donkey, brought back from Turkey by one of the battery commanders.
Ryabovich looked indifferently ahead and behind him, at the backs of the men’s heads and at their faces. At any other time he would have fallen into a doze, but now he was totally immersed in his new and pleasant thoughts. At first, when the brigade was just setting off, he wanted to persuade himself that the episode of the kiss could only be of interest as a mysterious little adventure; that it was a trivial occurrence, nothing more, and that taking it seriously would be at least stupid, if not worse. But soon he shrugged off all logic, and gave himself over to his dreams… He might picture himself in Von Rabbeck’s drawing room, sitting next to a girl who looked like the one in lilac and the blonde in black; or he would close his eyes and see himself with a different girl, a complete stranger, with very indistinct features; in his imagination he talked with her, caressed her, rested his head on her shoulder, imagined war and separation, and then reunion, dinner with his wife, children…
“To your poles!” The command rang out every time they went downhill.
He, too, would call out “To your poles!”, fearing that his shout might interrupt his dreams and recall him to the present…
Riding past some landowner’s estate on the way, Ryabovich looked over the fence into its garden. He glimpsed a long avenue, straight as a ruler, surfaced with yellow sand and lined by young birch trees… As eagerly as a man in a dream, he imagined little feminine feet walking over the yellow sand, and quite unexpectedly his imagination called up a clear vision of the one who had kissed him, and
whom he had managed to picture at dinner last night. That image stayed in his mind and would not leave him after that.
At noon there was a shout from the rear, by the baggage train:
“Steady! Eyes left! Officers!”
And the brigade general drove past in a carriage drawn by two white horses. He stopped beside the second battery and shouted something that no one could make out. A number of officers galloped up to him, Ryabovich among them.
“Well, how’s it going? What?” asked the general, blinking with reddened eyes. “Any sick?”
On receiving answers to his questions, the general, a skinny little man, chewed and thought a bit, turned to one of the officers and said:
“The rider of one of the pole horses on the number three gun took off his leg guard and hung it on the limber, the swine. Have him punished.”
Then he looked up at Ryabovich and continued:
“Your choke-straps look too long to me…”
After making a few more boring comments, the general looked at Lobytko with a grin.
“You’re looking very glum today, Lieutenant Lobytko,” he said. “Missing Lopukhova, are you? Eh? Gentlemen, he’s pining for Lopukhova!”
Lopukhova was a very tall, plump lady, well beyond her fortieth year. The general, who had a fondness for large women, however old they were, suspected his officers of sharing his tastes. The officers smiled respectfully. Pleased with having said something very witty and cutting, the general gave a loud guffaw, touched his driver on the back and saluted. The carriage rolled on…
“Everything I dream about now, which all seems so unearthly and impossible to me at present, is actually very commonplace,” thought Ryabovich, gazing at the clouds of dust rising behind the general’s carriage. “It’s all very ordinary, and everyone goes through it… That general, for instance, was in love once, and now he’s married with children. Captain Wachter is married and beloved too, though the back of his head is very ugly and red and he has no waist… Salmanov is coarse and too much of a Tartar, but he had a love affair which ended in marriage… I’m just the same as everybody else, and sooner or later I’ll have the same experience as everybody else…”
And the idea that he was an ordinary man, and living an ordinary life, cheered and consoled him. He could be as bold as he liked now, picturing her and his own happiness, with no constraint on his imagination…
When the brigade arrived at its destination that evening, and the officers were resting in their tents, Ryabovich, Merzlyakov and Lobytko sat around a box eating their supper. Merzlyakov ate without haste, chewing slowly and reading the European Herald on his knees. Lobytko talked non-stop and kept filling up his beer glass, while Ryabovich, his head confused from dreaming all day long, drank and said nothing. After three glasses he felt tipsy, weak and irresistibly impelled to share his new feelings with his comrades.
“An odd thing happened to me at those Rabbecks’…” he began, trying to sound indifferent and ironical. “You know, I went to the billiard room…”
And he told the story of the kiss in great detail. A minute later he was done, and stopped talking… During that minute he had related everything, and he was terribly surprised to find that the story had taken so little time to tell. He had thought that he could have gone on telling about that kiss till morning. Having heard him out, Lobytko (who was a great liar, and therefore never believed anyone else) looked suspiciously at him and grinned. Merzlyakov raised his eyebrows, never taking his eyes off the European Herald, and said calmly:
“Extraordinary!… Throwing herself on a man’s neck without saying anything… Must be off her head.”
“Yes, I suppose she must…” agreed Ryabovich.
“The same sort of thing happened to me once…” said Lobytko, with a scared look. “I was on my way to Kovno last year… Took a second-class ticket… the carriage was full to bursting, and there was no chance of sleeping. I slipped the conductor half a rouble… He took my baggage and showed me to a compartment… I lay down and covered myself with a blanket… It was quite dark, you see. Suddenly I felt someone touching me on the shoulder and breathing in my face. I made a movement with my hand and felt someone’s elbow… I opened my eyes, and just imagine – a woman! Dark eyes, lips as red as a prime salmon, nostrils dilated with passion, breasts like buffers…”
“Excuse me,” Merzlyakov interrupted coolly. “I understand about the breasts, but how could you have seen her lips in the dark?”
Lobytko began prevaricating and laughing at Merzlyakov’s slow-wittedness. It made Ryabovich wince. He walked away from the box, lay down and swore never to open his heart again.
Camp life began… One day followed another, all much the same. All this time Ryabovich felt, thought and behaved like a man in love. Every morning when the orderly brought him water to wash with, and he poured cold water over his head, he remembered that something good and warm had entered his life.
In the evenings, when his fellow officers began talking about love and women, he would listen to them, move closer, and wear the sort of expression that soldiers have when they listen to accounts of battles in which they themselves have taken part. And in the evenings when the tipsy officers went out on the town to play Don Juan, with the “setter” Lobytko at their head, Ryabovich, who took part in these excursions, invariably felt sad, deeply guilty, and mentally begged her for forgiveness… In his idle hours, or when lying awake at night, when he felt like remembering his childhood, his father and mother, and everything that was near and dear to him, he always remembered Mestechki too, and the strange horse, and Von Rabbeck and his wife who looked like Empress Eugénie, and the dark room, and the bright crack in the doorway…
On 31st August he returned from camp, not with the whole brigade but just with two batteries. All the way he was in an anxious reverie, as though he was on his way home. He passionately wanted to see the peculiar horse again, and the church, and the insincere Von Rabbeck family, and that dark room. An “inner voice”, which so often deceives lovers, somehow seemed to whisper to him that he was sure to see her… And he was tormented by all sorts of questions – how would he meet her? What would he talk about with her? Had she forgotten the kiss? At worst, he thought, even if he never met her, it would be nice for him just to walk through that dark room and remember…
That evening, the familiar church and white barns appeared on the horizon. Ryabovich’s heart pounded… He took no notice of the officer riding beside him, who was telling him something; he forgot everything, and stared longingly at the river glistening in the distance, and the house roof, and the dovecote with doves circling above it in the light of the setting sun.
He rode up to the church and then listened to the billeting officers, expecting at any moment to see a horseman appear from beyond the fence and invite the officers to tea; but the billeting officers finished their briefing, the officers dismounted and strolled into the village, and no horseman appeared…
“Now Rabbeck will hear about our arrival from his peasants, and send someone for us,” thought Ryabovich, entering his hut and not understanding why one fellow officer was lighting a candle, while the orderlies were hurriedly setting the samovars…
He became intensely anxious. He lay down, then got up and looked out of the window in case the horseman was on his way. But there was no horseman to be seen. He lay down again. Half an hour later he got up and, unable to bear the tension, went out and walked over to the church. The square by the church fence was dark and deserted… Three soldiers were standing by the downhill path, not talking. When they saw Ryabovich, they hastily drew themselves up and saluted. He returned their salute and started down along the path he remembered so well.
The whole sky over the far bank was bathed in crimson. The moon was rising. Two peasant women were moving about in a kitchen garden, talking in loud voices and picking cabbage leaves. Beyond the kitchen gardens, a few huts showed as dark shapes in the fields… On the near bank, everything was the same as last May
: the path, the bushes, the willows overhanging the water… but now there was no sound from the bold nightingale, and no scent of poplars and young grass.
He went down to the river. Before him were the white shapes of the general’s bath house and some bath sheets hanging on the parapet of a little bridge. He walked onto the bridge, stood there a moment, and quite needlessly fingered one of the sheets. It felt cold and rough. He looked down at the water… The river was running fast, gurgling almost inaudibly around the piles of the bath-house. The reddish moon was reflected in the water near the left bank; little ripples ran across its reflection, stretching it out, breaking it up, and looking as if they were trying to carry it away…
“How stupid! How stupid!” thought Ryabovich, gazing at the running water. “How pointless it all is!”
Now that he no longer expected anything, the story of the kiss, his impatience, his vague hopes and his disappointment appeared before him in a clear light. He no longer found it strange that he had given up on the general’s horseman, and that he would never again see the girl who had accidentally kissed him instead of someone else. On the contrary, it would have been strange if he had seen her…
The water ran on, no one knew where or why. It was running just as it had in May. The water in May had run into a big river, from the river to the sea, then it had evaporated and turned into rain, and perhaps the very same water was now once more running past Ryabovich’s eyes. What for? What was the point?
And the whole world, and the whole of life, appeared to Ryabovich to be an incomprehensible and pointless joke… Raising his eyes from the water and gazing up at the sky, he remembered once more how fate in the person of an unknown woman had accidentally caressed him; he remembered his summer dreams and imaginings; and his life seemed to him extraordinarily impoverished, shabby and colourless…
When he returned to his hut, he found none of his comrades there. The orderly reported that they had all gone off to visit “General Fon-tryabkin” who had sent a horseman to invite them… For a moment Ryabovich’s heart leapt for joy; but he quelled it at once and put himself to bed. As if to spite his fate, as if he wanted to upset it, he did not go to the general’s.