“Rubbish! You chatter like a starling. Now we’ll put this on the tabouret. Stand up, you ass. I’ll teach you, by Jove!”
With these adjurations to poor Pushkin, Viätkin returned to Romashov, took his stand at the window-sill, and cocked his revolver. As he was not sober, he swung the muzzle of the weapon here and there, and Romashov expected every second that one of them would be killed.
The distance was about five paces. Viätkin was long in taking aim, during which the muzzle described some dangerous curves in the air. At last the shot rang out, and in Pushkin’s right cheek appeared a big black, irregular hole. Romashov was for some moments deafened by the report.
“Well aimed!” shrieked Viätkin, rejoicing. “Here’s your revolver, and don’t forget my friendship. Hurry on now with your uniform jacket and come with us to the mess. Long live the glorious Russian Army!”
“Pavel Pavlich, I really cannot to-day,” protested Romashov weakly. He could not defend himself. In his resistance to the other’s strenuous pressing, he neither found the proper decisive word nor the tone of voice requisite for enforcing respect, and, blaming himself inwardly for his despicable passive weakness, he wearily followed Viätkin, who with his shaky legs bravely stumbled among the cucumbers and turnips in the kitchen-garden.
The officers’ meeting that night was more than usually noisy and stormy, and finally assumed an absolutely mad character. First they caroused at mess, then drove to the railway station to drink wine, after which the orgy proceeded in the officers’ casino. Romashov held aloof at first, was angry with himself for yielding, and experienced the feeling of loathing that overcomes every sober individual in a company of drunkards. The laughter struck him as being artificial, the witticisms poor, and the singing out of tune. But the hot red wine he drank at the station mounted to his head and produced in him a noisy, nervous merriment. A curtain of millions, as it were, of grains of sand dancing round each other was spread before his eyes, which were heavy with wine, and at the same time everything seemed to him so enjoyable, comic, and humorous.
The hours flew like seconds, and it was only when the lamps of the salle-à-manger were lighted that Romashov began to realize how the time had sped and that night had set in.
“Gentlemen,” called some one, “the ladies are waiting for us. Let us be off to Schleyfer’s.”
“Hurrah!—to Schleyfer’s, to Schleyfer’s.”
The proposal was hailed with laughter and jubilation. All got up and the chairs danced along the floor. This evening everything, moreover, went off, as it were, automatically. Outside the mess-room door stood a whole row of phaetons, but nobody knew who ordered them and how they came there. Romashov was for some time tossed between moments of semi-consciousness and the fully wide-awake state and alertness of mind of a sober man. Suddenly he found himself sitting in a carriage beside Viätkin. On the front seat sat a third person whose features Romashov could not distinguish in the darkness of the night, however much he might, by violent jerks of his body sidewards, bend forward to look closely at the unknown. The latter’s face was quite dark. Now it shrunk up to the size of a man’s fist, at another time it stretched itself out awry, and then seemed to Romashov extraordinarily familiar. Romashov suddenly burst out into a roar of laughter that sounded unnatural and idiotic, and did not seem to come from himself, but from some stranger in his immediate vicinity.