Velenchuk, half turning round to him, was about to raise his hand to his cap, but dropped it again.
“Seems to me you hadn’t your sleep out after yesterday—falling asleep when you are once up! It’s not thanks the likes of you get for such goings on.”
“May I die, Theodor Maksimov, if a drop has passed my lips; I don’t myself know what happened to me,” answered Velenchuk. “Much cause I had for revelling,” he muttered.
“Just so; but we have to answer to the authorities because of the likes of you, and you continue—it’s quite scandalous!” the eloquent Maksimov concluded in a calmer tone.
“It’s quite wonderful, lads,” Velenchuk went on after a moment’s silence, scratching his head and addressing no one in particular; “really quite wonderful, lads! Here have I been serving for the last sixteen years, and such a thing never happened to me. When we were ordered to appear for muster I was all right, but at the ‘park,’ there it suddenly clutches hold of me, and clutches and clutches, and down it throws me, down on the ground and no more ado—and I did not myself know how I fell asleep, lads! That must have been the trances,” he concluded.
“True enough, I hardly managed to wake you,” said Antonov, as he pulled on his boot. “I had to push and push, just as if you’d been a log!”
“Fancy now,” said Velenchuk, “if I’d been drunk now! …”
“That’s just like a woman we had at home,” began Chikin; “she hardly got off the stove for two years. Once they began waking her—they thought she was asleep—and she was already dead. She used to be taken sleepy that way. That’s what it is, old fellow!”
“Now then, Chikin, won’t you tell us how you set the tone during your leave of absence?” said Maksimov, looking at me with a smile as if to say: “Would you, too, like to hear the stupid fellow?”
“What tone, Theodor Maksimov?” said Chikin, giving me a rapid side-glance. “In course I told them what sort of a Caw-cusses we’d got here.”
“Well, yes, how did you do it? There! don’t give yourself airs; tell us how you administrated it to them.”
“How should I administrate it? In course they asked me how we live,” Chikin began rapidly, with the air of a man recounting something he had repeated several times before. “ ‘We live well, old fellow,’ says I. ‘Provisions in plenty we get: morning and night a cup of chokelad for every soldier lad, and at noon barley broth before us is set, such as gentlefolks get, and instead of vodka we get a pint of Modera wine from Devirier, such as costs forty-four—with the bottle ten more!’ ”
“Fine Modera!” Velenchuk shouted louder than anyone, rolling with laughter: “that’s Modera of the right sort!”
“Well, and what did you tell them about the Asiaites?” Maksimov went on to ask, when the general mirth had subsided a little.
Chikin stooped over the fire, poked out a bit of charcoal with a stick, put it to his pipe, and long continued puffing at his shag as though not noticing the silent curiosity awakened in his hearers. When he had at last drawn enough smoke he threw the bit of charcoal away, pushed his cap yet farther back, and, stretching himself, continued with a slight smile—
“Well, so they asked, ‘What’s that Cherkes fellow or Turk as you’ve got down in your Caw-cusses,’ they say, ‘as fights?’ and so I says, ‘Them’s not all of one sort; there’s different Cherkeses, old fellow. There’s the Wagabones, them as lives in the stony mountains and eat stones instead of bread. They’re big,’ says I, ‘as big as a good-sized beam, they’ve one eye in the forehead, and wear burning red caps,’ just such as yours, old fellow,” he added, turning to the young recruit, who really wore an absurd cap with a red crown.
At this unexpected sally the recruit suddenly collapsed, slapped his knees, and burst out laughing and coughing so that he hardly managed to utter in a stifled voice, “Them Wagabones is the right sort!”
“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘there’s also the Mopingers,’ ” continued Chikin, making his cap slip onto his forehead with a movement of his head: “ ‘these others are little twins, so big … all in pairs,’ says I, ‘they run about hand in hand at such a rate,’ says I, ‘that you couldn’t catch ’em on a horse!’—‘Then how’s it, lad,’ they say, ‘how’s them Mopingers, be they born hand in hand?’ ” He said this in a hoarse bass, pretending to imitate a peasant. “ ‘Yes,’ says I, ‘he’s naturally like that. Tear their hands apart, and they’ll bleed just like a Chinaman: take a Chinaman’s cap off, and it’ll bleed.’—‘And tell us, lad, how do they fight?’—‘That’s how,’ says I, ‘they catch you and rip your belly up and wind your bowels round your arm, and wind and wind. They go on winding and you go on laughing till your breath all goes.’ ”
“Well, and did they believe you, Chikin?” said Maksimov with a slight smile, while all the rest were dying with laughter.
“Such queer people, Theodor Maksimov, they believe everything. On my word they do. But when I told them about Mount Kazbec, and said that the snow didn’t melt on it all the summer, they mocked at me! ‘What are you bragging for, lad,’ they says; ‘a big mountain and the snow on it don’t melt? Why, lad, when the thaw sets in here, every tiny bit of a hillock thaws first, while the snow still lies in the hollows.’ There now!” Chikin concluded with a wink.
V
The bright disk of the sun, shining through the milky-white mist, had already risen to a considerable height. The purple-grey horizon gradually widened, but though it had receded considerably, it was still as sharply outlined by a deceptive white wall of mist.
Beyond the felled wood a good-sized plain
