“Why in the devil are you going, then? Gentlemen, really I don’t understand that,” continued the commissary. “It seems to me, if I could, I would go back to Petersburg on foot. I have had my bellyful of this cursed existence.”
“But what are you grumbling at?” asked the elder Koseltzoff. “You are leading a very enviable life here.”
The commissary, surprised, cast a look at him, turned around, and addressing Volodia, said, “This constant danger, these privations, for it is impossible to get anything—all that is terrible. I really cannot understand you, gentlemen. If you only got some advantage out of it! But is it agreeable, I ask you, to become at your age good-for-nothing for the rest of your days?”
“Some try to make money, some serve for honor,” replied Koseltzoff the elder, vexed.
“What is honor when there is nothing to eat?” rejoined the commissary, with a disdainful smile, turning towards the officer of the wagon-train, who followed his example. “Wind up the music-box,” he said, pointing to a box. “We’ll hear ‘Lucia;’ I like that.”
“Is this Vassili Mikhaïlovitch a brave man,” Volodia asked his brother, when, twilight having fallen, they rolled again along the Sebastopol road.
“Neither good nor bad, but a terribly miserly fellow. As to the commissary, I can’t bear to see even his picture. I shall knock him down some day.”
IX.
When they arrived, at nightfall, at the great bridge over the bay, Volodia was not exactly in bad humor, but a terrible weight lay on his heart. Everything he saw, everything he heard, harmonized so little with the last impressions that had been left in his mind by the great, light examination-hall with polished floor, the voices of his comrades and the gayety of their sympathetic bursts of laughter, his new uniform, the well-beloved Czar, whom he was accustomed to see during seven years, and who, taking leave of them with tears in his eyes, had called them “his children”—yes, everything he saw little harmonized with his rich dreams sparkling from a thousand facets.
“Here we are!” said his brother, getting out of the carriage in front of the M—— battery. “If they let us cross the bridge we will go straight to the Nicholas barracks. You will stop there until to-morrow morning. As for me, I shall go back to my regiment to find out where the battery is, and to-morrow I will go and hunt you up.”