CHAPTER II
He is six years old. They are watching the procession from an ancient gilded coach with mica windows, which is as clumsy and jolting as a farmer’s cart. The inside is hung with clove-coloured velvet and brocade curtains. Here he sits on his grandmother’s knee amidst downy cushions, with his nurses, and maids, plump as pillows. His mother, the Tsaritsa Eudoxia, is there too, dressed in a stomacher and a pearl-embroidered gown. Her round white countenance, like the eager face of a child, wore a look of continuous surprise.
Through the curtain and the open window of the coach, he witnesses the triumphal procession of the troops on their return from the Azov campaign. He is delighted with the regular lines of the regiments as they march past, the brass guns flashing in the sunshine, and the shields with their roughly drawn allegories. He remembers two of them. One pictured a pair of Turks chained together, bearing the inscription:—
“Calamity overtook us
When Azov was lost to us.”
The other depicted upon a sea of startling blue the god Neptune, a red-hued man astride a monster with green scales. He is made to brandish a harpoon and say:—
“We compliment you on the taking of Azov and tender you our submission.”
He admires the German scholar Vinnius, attired in Roman military dress, who is declaiming Russian verses by the aid of a tube, four yards long. In the ranks, side by side with the common soldiers’ walks a bombardier of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. He wears a dark green coat with red lapels and a three-cornered hat. He is taller than the rest, and is conspicuous from a distance. Alexis knows him to be his father, but his face is so youthful, almost child-like, that he seems in reality only an elder brother, a dear comrade, a little boy just like himself. It feels very stuffy in the carriage among the downy pillows and plump nurses. He longs to get out into the sunshine, and join that bright, curly-headed, quick-eyed boy.