On emerging from this house of pain, you will infallibly experience a sensation of pleasure, you will inhale the fresh air more fully, you will feel satisfaction in the consciousness of your health, but, at the same time, you will draw from the sight of these sufferings a consciousness of your nothingness, and you will go calmly and without any indecision to the bastion.
“What do the death and sufferings of such an insignificant worm as I signify in comparison with so many deaths and such great sufferings?” But the sight of the clear sky, the brilliant sun, the fine city, the open church, and the soldiers moving about in various directions soon restores your mind to its normal condition of frivolity, petty cares, and absorption in the present alone.
Perhaps you meet the funeral procession of some officer coming from the church, with rose-colored coffin, and music and fluttering banners; perhaps the sounds of firing reach your ear from the bastion, but this does not lead you back to your former thoughts; the funeral seems to you a very fine military spectacle, and you do not connect with this spectacle, or with the sounds, any clear idea of suffering and death, as you did at the point where the bandaging was going on.
Passing the barricade and the church, you come to the most lively part of the city. On both sides hang the signs of shops and inns. Merchants, women in bonnets and kerchiefs, dandified officers,—everything speaks to you of the firmness of spirit, of the independence and the security of the inhabitants.
Enter the inn on the right if you wish to hear the conversations of sailors and officers; stories of the preceding night are sure to be in progress there, and of Fenka, and the affair of the 24th, and of the dearness and badness of cutlets, and of such and such a comrade who has been killed.
“Devil take it, how bad things are with us to-day!” ejaculates the bass voice of a beardless naval officer, with white brows and lashes, in a green knitted sash.
“Where?” asks another.
“In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer, and you are certain to look at the white-lashed officer with great attention, and even with some respect, at the words, “in the fourth bastion.” His excessive ease of manner, the way he flourishes his hands, his loud laugh, and his voice, which seems to you insolent, reveal to you that peculiar boastful frame of mind which some very young men acquire after danger; nevertheless, you think he is about to tell you how bad the condition of things on the fourth bastion is because of the bombs and balls. Nothing of the sort! things are bad because it is muddy. “It's impossible to pass through the battery,” says he, pointing at his boots, which are covered with mud above the calf. “And my best gun-captain was killed to-day; he was struck plump in the forehead,” says another. “Who's that? Mitiukhin?” “No!... What now, are they going to give me any veal? the villains!” he adds to the servant of the inn. “Not Mitiukhin, but Abrosimoff. Such a fine young fellow!—he was in the sixth sally.”
At another corner of the table, over a dish of cutlets with peas, and a bottle of sour Crimean wine called “Bordeaux,” sit two infantry officers; one with a red collar, who is young and has two stars on his coat, is telling the other, with a black collar and no stars, about the affair at Alma. The former has already drunk a good deal, and it is evident, from the breaks in his narrative, from his undecided glance expressive of doubt as to whether he is believed, and chiefly from the altogether too prominent part which he has played in it all, and from the excessive horror of it all, that he is strongly disinclined to bear strict witness to the truth. But these tales, which you will hear for a long time to come in every corner of Russia, are nothing to you; you prefer to go to the bastions, especially to the fourth, of which you have heard so many and such diverse things. When any one says that he has been in the fourth bastion, he says it with a peculiar air of pride and satisfaction; when any one says, “I am going to the fourth bastion,” either a little agitation or a very great indifference is infallibly perceptible in him; when any one wants to jest about another, he says, “You must be stationed in the fourth bastion;” when you meet litters and inquire whence they come, the answer is generally, “From the fourth bastion.” On the whole, two totally different opinions exist with regard to this terrible bastion; one is held by those who have never been in it, and who are convinced that the fourth bastion is a regular grave for every one who enters it, and the other by those who live in it, like the white-lashed midshipman, and who, when they mention the fourth bastion, will tell you whether it is dry or muddy there, whether it is warm or cold in the mud hut, and so forth.
During the half-hour which you have passed in the inn, the weather has changed; a fog which before spread over the sea has collected into damp, heavy, gray clouds, and has veiled the sun; a kind of melancholy, frozen mist sprinkles from above, and wets the roofs, the sidewalks, and the soldiers' overcoats.