And what is energy?”
“Oh, what a wretched existence,” Romashov went on to say with increasing emotion, and without listening to Viatkin.
“To-day we booze at mess till we are drunk; to-morrow we meet at drill—’one, two, left, right’—in the evening we again assemble round the bottle.
Just the same, year in, year out.
That’s what makes up our life. How disgusting!”
Viatkin peered at him with sleepy eyes, hiccoughed, and then suddenly started singing in a weak falsetto:—
“In the dark, stilly forest There once dwelt a maiden,
She sat at her distaff By day and by night. “Take care of your health, my angel, and to the deuce with the rest.
“Romashevich! Romaskovski! let’s go to the board of green cloth. I’ll lend you a——”
“No one understands me, and I have not a single friend here,” sighed Romashov mournfully.
The next moment he remembered Shurochka—the splendid, high-minded Shurochka, and he felt in his heart a delicious and melancholy sensation, coupled with hopelessness and quiet resignation.
He stayed in the mess-room till daybreak, watched them playing schtoss, and now and then took a hand at the game, yet without feeling the slightest pleasure or interest in it.
Once he noticed how Artschakovski, who was playing at a little private table with two ensigns, made rather a stupid, but none the less successful, attempt to cheat.
Romashov thought for a moment of taking up the matter and exposing the fraud, but checked himself suddenly, saying to himself:
“Oh, what’s the use!
I should not improve matters by interfering.”
Viatkin, who had lost, in less than five minutes, his boasted “millions,” sat sleeping on a chair, with his eyes wide open and his face as white as a sheet.
Beside Romashov sat the eternal Lieschtschenko with his mournful eyes fixed on the game.
Day began to dawn.
The guttering candle-ends’ half-extinguished, yellowish flames flickered dully in their sticks, and illumined by their weak and uncertain light the pale, emaciated features of the gamblers.
But Romashov kept staring at the cards, the heaps of silver and notes, and the green cloth scrawled all over with chalk; and in his heavy, weary head the same cruel, torturing thoughts of a worthless, unprofitable life ran incessantly.
X
IT was a splendid, though somewhat chilly, spring morning.
The hedges were in bloom.
Romashov, who was still, as a rule, a slave to his youthful, heavy sleep, had, as usual, overslept himself, and was late for the morning drill.
With an unpleasant feeling of shyness and nervousness, he approached the parade-ground, and his spirits were not cheered by the thought of Captain Sliva’s notorious habit of making a humiliating and painful situation still worse by his abuse and rudeness.
This officer was a survival of the barbaric times when an iron discipline, idiotic pedantry—parade march in three time—and inhuman martial laws were virtually epidemic.
Even in the 4th Regiment, which, from being quartered in a God-forsaken hole, seldom came into contact with civilization, and, moreover, did not bear the reputation for much culture, Captain Sliva was looked upon as a rough and boorish person, and the most incredible anecdotes were current about him.
Everything outside the company, service, and drill-book, and which he was accustomed to call “rot” or “rubbish,” had no existence so far as he was concerned.
After having borne for nearly all his life the heavy burden of military service, he had arrived at such a state of savagery that he never opened a book, and, as far as newspapers were concerned, he only looked at the official and military notices in the Invalid.
He despised with all his innate cynicism the meetings and amusements of society, and there were no oaths, no insulting terms too gross and crude for him to incorporate in his “Soldier’s Lexicon.”
One story about him was that one lovely summer evening, when sitting at his open window, occupied, as usual, with his registers and accounts, a nightingale began to warble.
Captain Sliva got up instantly, and shouted in a towering rage to his servant Sachartschuk,
“Get a stone and drive away that damned bird; it’s disturbing me.”
This apparently sleepy and easy-going man was unmercifully severe to the soldiers, whom he not only abandoned to the ferocity of the “non-coms.,” but whom he himself personally whipped till they fell bleeding to the ground; but in all that concerned their food, clothing, and pay, he displayed the greatest consideration and honesty, and in this he was only surpassed by the commander of the 5th Company.
To the junior officers Captain Sliva was always harsh and stiff, and a certain native, crabbed humour imparted an additional sharpness to his biting sarcasms.
If, for instance, a subaltern officer happened, during the march, to step out with the wrong foot, he instantly bellowed—
“Damnation!
What the devil are you doing? All the company except Lieutenant N. is marching with the wrong foot!”
He was particularly rude and merciless on occasions when some young officer overslept himself or, for some other cause, came too late to drill, which not unfrequently was the case with Romashov.
Captain Sliva had a habit then of celebrating the victim’s advent by forming the whole company into line, and, in a sharp voice, commanding “Attention!” After this he took up a position opposite the front rank, and in death-like silence waited, watch in hand and motionless, while the unpunctual officer, crushed with shame, sought his place in the line.
Now and then Sliva increased the poor sinner’s torture by putting to him the sarcastic question:
“Will your Honour allow the company to go on with the drill?”
For Romashov he had, moreover, certain dainty phrases specially stored up, e.g. “I hope you slept well,” or “Your Honour has, I suppose, as usual, had pleasant dreams?” etc., etc. When all these preludes were finished, he began to shower abuse and reproaches on his victim.
“Oh, I don’t care,” thought Romashov to himself in deep disgust as he approached his company.
“It is no worse to be here than in other places.
All my life is ruined.”
Sliva, Viatkin, Lbov, and the ensign were standing in the middle of the parade-ground, and all turned at once to Romashov as he arrived.
Even the soldiers turned their heads towards him, and with veritable torture Romashov pictured to himself what a sorry figure he cut at that moment.
“Well, the shame I am now feeling is possibly unnecessary or excessive,” he reasoned to himself, trying, as is habitual with timid or bashful persons, to console himself.