For instance: I come to the parade-ground and make a justifiable remark about you. At once you are ready to answer your commanding officer in a silly, insolent manner. Can that be called military tact and discipline? No.
Such a thing is incredible, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” The latter words were roared by Shulgovich with such deafening violence that his victim felt a tremor under his knee-cap.
Romashov looked gloomily away, and no power in the world, thought he, should induce him to look at the Colonel straight in his basilisk face.
“Where’s my Ego now?” he asked himself ironically.
“Here the only thing to do is to suffer, keep silent, and stand at attention.”
“It does not matter now how I obtained my information about you. It is quite sufficient I know all your sins. You drink.
You, a mere boy—a callow creature that has but lately left school—swig schnapps like a cobbler’s apprentice.
Hold your tongue, don’t try to defend yourself, I know everything—and much more than you think.
Well, God forbid!—if you are bent on going down the broad path you are welcome to do it, so far as I’m concerned.
Still, I’ll give you a warning: drink has made more than one of your sort acquainted with the inside of a prison.
Lay these words of mine to heart.
My long-suffering is great, but even an angel’s patience can be exhausted.
The officers of a regiment are mutually related as members of one family; but don’t forget that an unworthy member who tarnishes the honour of the family is ruthlessly cast out.”
“Here I stand paralysed with fright, and my tongue is numbed,” thought Romashov, as he stared, as though hypnotized, at the little silver ring in the Colonel’s ear. “At this moment I ought to tell him straight out that I do not in the least degree value the honour of belonging to this worthy family, and that I shall be delighted to leave it to enter the reserves; but have I the courage to say so?”
His lips moved, he found a difficulty in swallowing, but he stood still, as he had throughout the interview.
“But let us,” continued Shulgovich in the same harsh tone, “examine more closely your conduct in the past.
In the previous year—practically as soon as you entered the service, you requested leave on account of your mother’s illness, nay, you even produced a sort of letter about it.
Well, in such cases an officer cannot, you know, openly express his doubts as to the truth of a comrade’s word.
But I take this opportunity of telling you in private that I had my own opinion then about that story. You understand?”
Romashov had for a long time felt a tremor in his right knee. This tremor was at first very slight, in fact scarcely noticeable, but it very soon assumed alarming proportions, and finally extended over the whole of his body.
This feeling grew very painful at the thought that Shulgovich might possibly regard his nervousness as proceeding from fear; but when his mother’s name was mentioned, a consuming heat coursed through Romashov’s veins, and his intense nervous tremor ceased immediately.
For the first time during all this painful scene he raised his eyes to his torturer and looked him defiantly straight in the face.
And in this look glittered a hatred, menace, and imperious lust of vengeance from the insulted man, so intense and void of all fear that the illimitable distance between the omnipotent commander and the insignificant sub-lieutenant, who had no rights at all, was absolutely annihilated.
A mist arose before Romashov’s eyes, the various objects in the room lost their shape, and the Colonel’s gruff voice sounded to him as if from a deep abyss.
Then there suddenly came a moment of darkness and ominous silence, devoid of thoughts, will, or external perception, nay, even without consciousness. He experienced only a horrible certainty that, in another moment, something terrible and maniacal, something irretrievably disastrous, would happen.
A strange, unfamiliar voice whispered in his ear:
“Next moment I will kill him,” and Romashov was slowly but irresistibly forced to fix his eyes on the Colonel’s bald head.
Afterwards, as if in a dream, he became aware, although he could not understand the reason, of a curious change in his enemy’s eyes, which, in rapid succession, reflected wonder, dread, helplessness, and pity. The wave of destruction that had just whelmed through Romashov’s soul, by the violence of natural force, subsided, sank, and disappeared in space.
He tottered, and now everything appeared to him commonplace and uninteresting.
Shulgovich, in nervous haste, placed a chair before him, and said, with unexpected but somewhat rough kindness—
“The Devil take you! what a touchy fellow you are! Sit down and be damned to you!
But you are all alike.
You look at me as if I were a wild beast.
‘The old fossil goes for us without rhyme or reason.’
And all the time God knows I love you as if you were my own children.
Do you think I have nothing to put up with, either?
Ah, gentlemen, how little you know me!
It is true I scold you occasionally, but, damn it all! an old fellow has a right to be angry sometimes.
Oh, you youngsters!
Well, let us make peace.
Give me your hand and come to dinner.”
Romashov bowed without uttering a syllable, and pressed the coarse, cold, hairy hand.
His recollection of the past insult to some extent faded, but his heart was none the lighter for this.
He remembered his proud, inflated fancies of that very morning, and he now felt like a little pale, pitiful schoolboy, like a shy, abandoned, scarcely tolerated brat, and he thought of all this with shame and mortification.
Also, whilst accompanying Shulgovich to the dining-room, he could not help addressing himself, as his habit was, in the third person—
“And a shadow rested on his brow.”
Shulgovich was childless.
In the dining-room, his wife—a fat, coarse, self-important, and silent woman—awaited him. She had not a vestige of neck, but displayed a whole row of chins.
Notwithstanding her pince-nez and her scornful mien, there was a certain air of vulgarity about her countenance, which gave the impression of its being formed, at the last minute, hurriedly and negligently, out of dough, with raisins or currants instead of eyes.
Behind her waddled, dragging her feet, the Colonel’s old mother—a little deaf, but still an active, domineering, venomous old hag.