Remember these words—your life is at stake, Telegin.... Understand?"
He fell silent.
A fly crawled across his brow.
"Good!" said Telegin.
"It shall be done!" "Get started, then, old boy. I don't know which would be the best way for' you to take—it's a long journey through Svyatoi Krest, via Astrakhan.... Better go along the Don to Tsaritsyn.
And it'll give you a chance to have a look at the rear of the Whites. Get yourself officer's shoulder straps, smarten yourself up. What’ll you have— captain's or a lieutenant colonel's?"
Laughing he laid his hand on Telegin's knee, patting it as if Ivan Ilyich were a child.
"Get a couple of hours' sleep, and I'll write the letter...."
* X *
The three weeks' leave was obtained at last.
Vadim Petrovich Roshchin, worn out, ill, torn by inner conflicts, was at that time in the Volunteer garrison at the station of Velikoknyazheskaya.
There was no serious fighting just then, the Red forces having withdrawn further south, into the struggle with the main forces of Denikin.
Here, among the villages on the rivers Manich and Sal, there were occasional outbursts, but the Cossack punitive detachments of Ataman Krasnov had a sure way of dealing with turbulent spirits—by persuasive words, the knout, or the gallows.
Vadim Petrovich avoided taking part in reprisals, pleading the injury to his head.
He kept away as much as possible from the officers' revels, held to celebrate the victories of Denikin.
And strange to say, in the garrison, as in the field, all treated Roshchin with the utmost caution, with concealed hostility.
Somebody had started the rumour that he was really a Red, and the epithet stuck.
In the trenches at Shablievka, Volunteer Onoli had shot at him.
Roshchin remembered that moment with the utmost clarity: the humming of a shell from the armoured train, the commander's shout: "Lie down!"
The explosion.
And—the delayed revolver shot, the blow, as from a stick, on the back of the head, and the fierce joy in the rolling, Asiatic eyes of Onoli.
There was only one man to believe Roshchin's unsupported word—General Markov.
But he was dead, and Vadim Petrovich decided not to take up the doubtful charge against the young man.
He racked his brains for an answer to the question: why, after all, this hatred of him?
Couldn't everyone see that he was an honest man, that he was completely disinterested, that all his actions were guided by the sole idea of Russia's greatness?
It was not for a general's epaulettes that he had gone to this appalling steppe....
Roshchin lacked the ruthlessly clear vision of things.
His mind coloured the world and events according to what he himself considered the loftiest and the most important.
He did not notice things which did not fit in with his conceptions and only winced when they forced themselves upon him.
In his eyes the world was a finished system.
This was no doubt due to the aristocratic prejudices handed down to him through generation's of complacent landed proprietors.
This vanished race had placed above all blessings such tranquil complacency, applying it to everyone and everything.
Was a peasant being thrashed in the stables? What of it? The peasant would bawl a bit, but after the birching he would repent, and feel all the better for it, since his repentance would be followed by a sensation of peace.
Were bills protested, was the estate going under the hammer? It couldn't be helped!
One could live in the annex, among the dock leaves and gooseberry bushes, without noisy revellings: no doubt this would be better suited to one's old age.... Not one of the blows dealt by fate could shake the complacency of a landed proprietor, once he had adopted a point of view enabling him to see only what was beautiful and lofty.
This lack of a critical attitude towards individuals and their actions was one of Vadim Petrovich's characteristics, too, although the events of the last few years had caused considerable wear and tear to his romanticism, leaving it almost in rags. He was continually being forced to avert his gaze.
And this was why, among other things, he kept away from the officers' mess as much as possible.
To his way of thinking, these people—a handful of officers and cadets—should go clad in white, like crusaders: had they not raised the sword against the insurgent rabble and its leaders—whether the servants and myrmidons of Antichrist or the Germans? It was with such ideas in his head that Roshchin found himself in the Don.
It was shocking to hear, at the officers' drinking bouts, the noisy braggings which accompanied the clinking of glasses, the gloatings over fratricide.
The youthful, once refined, countenances of these "crusaders" were distorted with the impatient desire to murder, to deal out reprisals, to wreak vengeance; raising glasses of almost raw spirits, they sang a dirge to the most insignificant of mortals, one who had been shot down, his remains burnt, the ashes scattered to the winds, like those of the False Dmitri; one who, if all the blood shed in obedience to his feeble will could have been collected in one great lake, would undoubtedly have been drowned in its deep waters by the people.
This funeral dirge seemed to be the only idea in the heads of his brother officers, and again Roshchin "had to avert his gaze.... To clear Russia of the Bolsheviks, to get to Moscow.
Church bells.... Denikin riding into the Kremlin on a white horse.... All that was of course quite easy to understand....
But what next? That was the chief question!
It would have been considered indecent even to mention the Constituent Assembly among officers.
Had it all been a dirge for the dead then?
What was it that drew these people to battle and to death?
Roshchin averted his gaze.... To expose their breasts to the bullets, and then drink raw spirits in the freight vans—that was not heroism. That was old stuff.
The brave and the cowardly—everyone did that.
It had become a commonplace to overcome the fear of death, life had become cheap.
Heroism lay in sacrificing oneself in the name of faith and truth.