Fifty-Two Stories

And before his eyes on the road lay only long familiar, uninteresting scenes…To right and left fields of young rye and buckwheat, with hopping rooks; look ahead—you see dust and napes, look behind—you see the same dust and faces…In front march four men with sabers—this was the vanguard. Behind them a crowd of singers, and behind them buglers on horseback. The vanguard and the singers, like torchbearers in a funeral procession, keep forgetting about the regulation distance and march far ahead…Ryabovich is placed by the first gun of the fifth battery. He can see all four of the batteries marching ahead of him. For a civilian, this long, heavy file formed by the moving brigade looks like an intricate and incomprehensible mess; it is incomprehensible why one gun is surrounded by so many people, and why it is pulled by so many horses, entangled in strange harness, as if it were indeed so frightening and heavy. For Ryabovich it was all comprehensible, and therefore extremely uninteresting. He had long known why, at the head of each battery, beside the officer, rides an imposing firemaster, and why he is called the carrier; behind the back of this firemaster he can see the riders of the first, then of the middle team; Ryabovich knows that the horses to the left, which they ride on, are called saddle horses, and to the right, helpers—all very uninteresting. After the riders come two shaft horses. One of them is mounted by a rider with yesterday’s dust on his back and with a clumsy, extremely ridiculous piece of wood on his right leg; Ryabovich knows the purpose of this piece of wood, and to him it does not seem ridiculous. The riders, all of them, mechanically swing their whips and shout now and then. The gun itself is ugly. In front lie sacks of oats covered with canvas, and the gun itself is all hung with kettles, kit bags, pouches, and has the look of a small, harmless animal, surrounded for some unknown reason by people and horses. At its flank, on the leeward side, swinging their arms, march six gunners. Following the gun, new carriers, riders, shaft horses begin again, and behind them drags another gun, as ugly and unimpressive as the first. The second is followed by a third, a fourth; by the fourth an officer, and so on. There are six batteries in a brigade, and four guns in each battery. The file stretches out for half a mile. It ends with a supply train, next to which, his long-eared head thoughtfully lowered, marches a highly sympathetic character—the donkey Magar—whom one of the battery commanders brought from Turkey.

Ryabovich looked indifferently ahead and behind, at the napes and at the faces; any other time he would have dozed off, but now he was all immersed in his new, pleasant thoughts. At first, when the brigade had just set out, he wanted to persuade himself that the incident with the kiss was interesting only as a small, mysterious adventure, that it was essentially worthless, and to think seriously about it was stupid, to say the least; but he soon waved logic away and gave himself up to dreaming…Now he imagined himself in Rabbek’s drawing room next to a girl who resembled the lilac young lady and the blond girl in black; then he closed his eyes and saw himself with another totally unknown girl with very indefinite features; mentally he talked to her, caressed her, leaned down to her shoulder, imagined to himself war and separation, then reunion, a supper with his wife, children…

“Mind the swingletrees!” The command rang out each time they went down a hill.

He, too, cried, “Mind the swingletrees!” and worried that this cry might break up his dream and bring him back to reality…

Passing by some landowner’s estate, Ryabovich looked through the paling into the garden. His eyes caught sight of a long alley, straight as a ruler, sprinkled with yellow sand and lined with young birches…With the avidity of a daydreamer, he pictured to himself a woman’s small feet walking on the yellow sand, and, quite unexpectedly, in his imagination there clearly appeared the girl who had kissed him and whom he had managed to picture to himself yesterday at dinner. This image had stayed in his brain and now did not leave him.

At noon a cry came from the rear by the supply train:

“Attention! Eyes left! Officers!”

In a carriage with a pair of white horses, the brigade general rolled by. He stopped at the second battery and shouted something nobody understood. Several officers rode up to him, Ryabovich among them.

“How’s things? Eh?” asked the general, blinking his red eyes. “Any sick?”

Having received answers, the general, short and skinny, munched, pondered, and said, turning to one of the officers:

“The shaft rider of the third carriage took his knee-guard off and hung it on the front, the canaille. Slap a penalty on him.”

He raised his eyes to Ryabovich and went on:

“And your breeching strap looks much too long…”

After making several more dull observations, the general looked at Lobytko and grinned.