D'you know what's the matter?
Unpleasant rumours are going the rounds about our Commander in Chief, Sorokin.... That was a comrade from the Special Department who's just returned from headquarters.
Now you know why Gimza is like a bear with a sore head...."
The stars were already growing pale in the dawn.
The cock crowed again among the carts.
Dew fell on the sleeping camp.
Telegin went to his compartment, drew off his boots, and let himself down with a sigh on to his bunk, making the springs squeal.
It sometimes seemed to Telegin as if the brief happiness of his life had been a mere dream in the green steppe, going on to the accompaniment of revolving wheels.... His life had once been peaceful and successful: student days, Petersburg, vast and fathomless, his work, the carefree company of the eccentrics he had lodged in his flat on Vasilyevsky Island.
The future had then seemed as clear as daylight.
He had never so much as thought about it. The years seemed to have flitted at an easy, leisurely pace over his head.
Ivan Ilyich had known that, like thousands of his kind, he would conscientiously fulfil the task before him, and that on looking back—when his hair had gone grey, on what he had done, he would see that he had traversed a. long road without deviating into any dangerous paths.
And then Dasha had broken imperiously into the simple prose of his life, a fearful joy shining from her grey eyes.
Even then, in his secret soul, a brief doubt had raised its head for a moment: happiness was not for him!
But he had chased the doubt away, intending, as soon as the war should have passed, to make a nest of happiness for Dasha.
Even when the edifice of empire had crumbled, and all was confusion, even when the people, a hundred and fifty million strong, roared out their wrath and pain, Ivan Ilyich went on believing that the storm would pass, and the meadow in front of Dasha's door would gleam peacefully after the rain.
And here he was—once more occupying a bunk in a troop train—yesterday's battle behind him, tomorrow's battle before him.
It was now clear that there would be no return to the past.
He was ashamed to remember how, a year ago, he had fussed over the furnishing of a flat on Kameno-Ostrov Street, getting a mahogany bedstead for Dasha to bear her dead baby on.
Dasha had been the first to be caught in the whirlpool.
The "hoppers" who had leaped upon her near the Summer Park, the dead baby with its hair standing on end, hunger, darkness, decrees every word of which breathed wrath and hate—that was what the revolution had meant for her.
At night it had whistled over the roofs, blowing against the frozen windowpanes crying "Not-one-of-us!" to Dasha in the voices of the blizzard.
Ivan Ilyich had come home in high spirits, one grey Petersburg spring day, with a damp wind blowing, the eaves dripping, and icicles crashing down from the dilapidated pipes. His coat was unbuttoned and he had looked at Dasha with eyes even brighter than usual. Dasha seemed to shrink under his gaze and said, muffled tip to her chin in her shawl:
"I wish I could dash out my brains against the wall, Ivan, so that I could forget everything for ever.... Then I might be a companion to you again. I simply can't go on lying down in that terrible bed every night, and facing the accursed day every morning.... I simply can't....
Don't think it's good things and all that, I'm pining for.... I only want to be able to breathe freely.... I don't want crumbs.... I've stopped loving you. I'm very sorry!"
When she had finished speaking, she turned away.
Dasha had always been austere about her emotions.
Now she had become cruel.
"Perhaps we'd better part for a time, Dasha," he had said.
And then, for the first time in the whole winter, he had seen the joyous upward flight of her brows, the strange gleam of hope in her eyes, as a piteous tremor passed across her poor, thin face....
"I think it would be better for us to part, Ivan...."
Then it was that he had begun to make determined applications through Rublev to be accepted in the Red Army, and in the end of March he left with a troop train for the south.
Dasha had seen him off at the October station, crying bitterly as the window of his compartment floated past her, and covering her face with her shawl.
Since then Ivan Ilyich had covered hundreds and hundreds of miles, but neither battle, fatigue, nor deprivation, could drive away the memory of that beloved, tear-stained face among the women crowding in front of the grimy wall of the station.
Dasha had bidden him farewell as if it were for ever.
He racked his brains to discover in what way he had failed her.
The reason for her ceasing to love him, must, of course, ultimately be found in himself—after all, she was not the only woman whose baby had died.
And it could not have been the revolution which had alienated her.... He could think of more than one couple who had actually drawn closer in these difficult, perturbed times. How, then, had he been at fault?
Sometimes a wave of indignation would rise up in him: all right, my dear, try and find another man to dance round you as I did! The world is going to pieces, and all she thinks about is her own feelings. It's sheer self-indulgence—the whims of a woman used to white rolls, and unable to stomach bread made of rye and chaff.
But if all this was true—and it was, of course—the inference to be drawn was that Ivan Ilyich himself was a paragon of virtue, and not to love him was a crime.
And this brought Ivan Ilyich up sharp, every time....
"After all, what is there so special about me?
Physically healthy— granted.
Remarkable for brains and charm? Why no, no more than the next man. A hero—a great man?
An attractive male?
No, no.... An ordinary, decent citizen, like a million others...." He had drawn a lucky ticket in the lottery of life; a charming girl, endowed with infinitely more fire and brains than himself, head and shoulders above him, had unaccountably fallen in love with him, and as unaccountably fallen out of love.
He asked himself whether the reason did not lie in the fact that he was not big enough for the times, that he even fought in a commonplace manner, as if it were bookkeeping, or copying names into files that he was engaged upon.
He had known men who, whether they were good or bad, were forced to be reckoned with, striding like giants over a bloody battlefield....
"Ivan Ilyich, why can't you hate the foe with all your might, why can't you at least be really terrified of death?"
All this grieved Ivan Ilyich to the soul.
He was utterly unconscious of the fact that he had become one of the most reliable, intelligent, and courageous members of the regiment.