His shirt, which he had probably been searching for lice, lay beside him.
Feeling that someone's eyes were on him he raised his head slowly, and gave a slow, childish smile.
Telegin recognized him. He was a man from his own company—Mishka Solomin, a peasant from the country round Elets, who had joined the Red Guard as a volunteer, and come to the Caucasus with the army of Sievers.
He met Telegin's eyes for the space of a second, and immediately lowered his own, as if embarrassed, and it was only then that Ivan Ilyich remembered that Mishka Solomin was famous in the company as a maker of verse and a hard drinker, though he was seldom seen actually drunk.
He languidly hitched the coat off his shoulders, and began putting on his shirt.
Ivan Ilyich climbed up the embankment to the passenger carriage, where an oil lamp burned vigilantly in the window of the compartment occupied by the commander of the regiment, Sergei Sergeyevich Sapozhkov. From the top of the embankment the stars could be more clearly descried and the dying camp-fires were reddish spots on the ground below.
"Come in, Telegin, there's plenty of hot water," said Sapozhkov, leaning out of the window, a pipe with a curving stem between his teeth.
The oil lamp, fixed to the wall, shed a dim light over the shabby second-class compartment, with rifles hanging from hooks, and books and military maps scattered about.
Sergei Sergeyevich Sapozhkov, in a soiled calico shirt and braces, turned towards Telegin as the latter entered.
"Want a drink?"
Ivan Ilyich seated himself on the edge of the bunk.
Through the open window came the cold night air, bringing with it the clucking of a quail.
A soldier, stumbling half asleep out of the neighbouring van, to relieve nature, stumped past the window.
A balalaika trilled softly.
A cock crowed from somewhere quite near—it was past midnight.
"What was that—a cock?" asked Sapozhkov, and he stopped busying himself with the kettle.
His eyes were inflamed and crimson blotches stood out on his gaunt cheeks. Fumbling behind him on the seat he found his pince-nez, and put them on to look at Telegin. "How comes it that there is a live cock in the regiment?"
"Refugees again—I reported to the Commissar.
Twenty carts loaded with women and children. It's a hell of a business!" said Telegin, stirring the tea in his mug.
"Where are they from?"
"Privolnaya.
There was a whole train of them, but they were attacked by Cossacks on the way.
Outsiders, all of them, the poorest of the poor.
Two Cossack officers formed a detachment from men in the village, carried out a raid in the night, broke up the Soviet, hung a certain number of people...."
"In a word, the usual story," said Sapozhkov, dropping out each syllable separately.
He seemed to be extremely drunk, and had called Telegin just to have someone to unburden himself to.... Ivan Ilyich felt as if his whole being were humming with exhaustion, but it was so nice to rest on a cushioned seat and sip tea, that he did not go, though there was nothing much to be expected from a conversation with Sergei Sergeyevich.
"Where's your wife, Telegin?"
"In Petersburg."
"Queer chap.
In peacetime you'd have made a perfectly prosperous citizen, with a virtuous wife, two virtuous children, and a gramophone.... What the devil made you join the Red Army?
You'll be killed, you know...."
"I've told you already...."
"You're not manoeuvring to get into the Party, are you?"
"If the cause requires it, I'll join the Party."
Sapozhkov narrowed his eyes behind his blurred glasses. "You could boil me three times over, but you'd never make a Communist of me," he said.
"If anyone's queer, it's you, Sergei Sergeyevich."
"Not at all.
It's just that my brain isn't made for dialectics. I'm a savage, really, always ready to bolt back to the forest.
H'm! So you consider me a queer chap!" He chuckled with evident satisfaction. "I've been fighting for the Soviets since October.
H'm. Have you read Kropotkin?"
"No, I haven't."
"That's obvious.... It's all such a bore, old man.... The bourgeois world is infernally base and tedious. And if we win, the communist world will be tedious and mediocre, too—virtuous and tedious... but Kropotkin was a dear old man ... poetry, dreams, classless society....
A most highly-cultured old gent.
'Give people anarchist liberty, loosen the bonds of the world's greatest evil, great cities, and classless humanity will build a pastoral paradise, since the basic motive power of mankind is love for one's neighbour...' ha-ha!"
Sapozhkov laughed shrilly, as if mocking an invisible opponent, the pince-nez dancing on the bony bridge of his nose.
Still laughing, he stooped and brought from under the seat a tin canister of spirits. Pouring some into a cup, he took a drink and nibbled at a bit of sugar with a crunching sound.
"The tragedy of us Russian intellectuals, old boy, is that we grew up in the peaceful lap of serfdom, and the revolution, as well as almost frightening us to death, has given us a kind of cerebral nausea.... Such delicate folks ought not to be frightened so badly, ought they?
We settled down in our snug arbours, to listen to the birds singing, and we said to ourselves:
'Now wouldn't it be nice if a way could be found to make everybody happy?' And that's the kind of people we are.... The western intellectuals are brainy folk, the cream of the bourgeoisie, they carry out rigidly-defined tasks—to advance science and industry, to spread the consoling illusions of idealism through the world.... The intellectuals there know what they live for. But here—oh, my!
Whom do we serve?