“Our company consists of at least a hundred men, and each of them is a creature with thoughts, feelings, experience of life, personal sympathies and antipathies. Do I know anything about them? No, nothing, except their faces. I see them before me as they stand in line every day, drawn up from right to left: Sóltyss, Riaboschápka, Yégoroff, Yaschtschischin, etc., etc.—mere sorry, grey figures. What have I done to bring my soul nearer to their souls, my Ego to theirs? Nothing.”
He involuntarily called to mind a rough night at the end of autumn, when (as was his custom) he was sitting drinking in the mess-room with a few comrades. Suddenly the pay-sergeant Goumeniuk, of the 9th Company, rushed into the room, and breathlessly called to his commander—
“Your Excellency, the recruits are here.”
Yes, there they stood in the rain, in the barrack-yard, driven together like a herd of frightened animals without any will of their own, which with cowed, suspicious glances gazed at their tormentors. “Each individual,” thought Romashov, as he slowly and carefully inspected their appearance, “has his own characteristic expression of countenance. This one, for instance, is most certainly a smith; that is, doubtless, a jolly chap who plays his accordion with some talent; that one with the shrewd features can both read and write, and looks as if he were a polevói.”[8] And one felt that these poor recruits who, a few days ago, had been violently seized whilst their wives and children were crying and lamenting, had tried, with tears in their voices, to join in the coarse songs of their wild, drunken brothers in misfortune. But a year later they stood like soldiers in long rigid rows—grey, sluggish, apathetic figures, all cast, as it were, in the same mould. But they never left their homes of their own free will. Their Ego resented it. And yet they went. Why all this inconsistency? How can one not help thinking of that old and well-known story about the cock who fought desperately with his wings and resisted to the uttermost when his beak was pressed against a table, but who stood motionless, hypnotized, when some one drew a thick line with a piece of chalk across the table from the tip of his beak.
Romashov threw himself on the bed.
“What is there left for you to do under the circumstances?” he asked himself in bitter mockery. “Do you think of resigning? But, in that case, where do you think of going? What does the sum of knowledge amount to that you have learnt at the infants’ school, the Cadet School, at the Military Academy, at mess? Have you tried the struggle and seriousness of life? No, you have been looked after and your wants supplied, as if you were a little child, and you think perhaps, like a certain schoolgirl, that rolls grow on trees. Go out into the world and try. At the very first step you would slip and fall; people would trample you in the dust, and you would drown your misery in drink. And besides, have you ever heard of an officer leaving the service of his own free will? No, never. Just because he is unfit for anything he will not give up his meagre bread-and-butter. And if any one is forced into doing this, you will soon see him wearing a greasy old regimental cap, and accepting alms from people in the street. I am a Russian officer of gentle birth, comprenez-vous? Alas, where shall I go—what will become of me?”
“Prisoner, prisoner!” cried a clear female voice beneath the window.
Romashov jumped up from his bed and rushed to the window. Opposite him stood Shurochka. She was protecting her eyes from the sun with the palm of her hand, and pressing her rosy face against the window pane, exclaiming in a mocking tone:—
“Oh, give a poor beggar a copper!”
Romashov fumbled at the window-catch in wild eagerness to open it, but he remembered in the same moment that the inner window had not been removed. With joyous resolution he seized the window-frame with both hands, and dragged it to him with a tremendous tug. A loud noise was heard, and the whole window fell into the room, besprinkling Romashov with bits of lime and pieces of dried putty. The outer window flew up, and a stream of fresh air, charged with joy and the perfume of flowers, forced its way into the room.