War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [264]
“How can they not only live here, but even laugh?” thought Rostov, still sensing that smell of dead flesh he had picked up in the soldiers’ section, and still seeing around him those envious looks that had followed after him on both sides and the face of the young soldier with rolled-up eyes.
Denisov, the blanket pulled over his head, was asleep in bed, though it was nearly noon.
“Ah! Rostov! Greetings, greetings!” he shouted, in the same voice he used in the regiment; but Rostov noticed sadly that, behind this habitual casualness and liveliness, some new, bad, hidden feeling showed in the expression of Denisov’s face, in his intonations and words.
His wound, despite its insignificance, still had not healed, though it was now six weeks since he was wounded. His face had the same pale swollenness of all the hospital faces. But it was not this that struck Rostov: what struck him was that Denisov did not seem glad to see him and smiled at him unnaturally. Denisov did not ask about the regiment, nor about the general course of affairs. When Rostov mentioned it, Denisov did not listen.
Rostov even noticed that Denisov found it unpleasant to be reminded of the regiment and generally of that other, free life that went on outside the hospital. It seemed he was trying to forget that former life and was interested only in his case with the provision officials. To Rostov’s question about how the case stood, he immediately pulled from under the pillow a paper he had received from the commission and the draft of his reply to it. When he started reading his paper, he became animated and particularly drew Rostov’s attention to the biting remarks in it directed at his enemies. Denisov’s hospital friends, who surrounded Rostov as a newly arrived person from the free world, gradually began to disperse as soon as Denisov started reading his paper. From their faces, Rostov understood that these gentlemen had all heard the story more than once already and were tired of it. Only the man in the next bed, a fat uhlan, stayed sitting on his cot, frowning gloomily and smoking his pipe, and little one-armed Tushin went on listening, shaking his head disapprovingly. In the middle of the reading, the uhlan interrupted Denisov.
“In my view,” he said, turning to Rostov, “he ought simply to beg the sovereign for mercy. They say there will be lots of rewards now, and surely he’d be forgiven…”
“Me beg the sovereign!” Denisov said in a voice which he wanted to endow with its former energy and ardor, but which rang with futile irritability. “For what? If I were a robber, I’d ask for mercy, but I’m on trial because I brought the robbers to light. Let them take me to court, I’m not afraid of anybody; I’ve served the tsar and the fatherland honorably, and didn’t steal! To demote me and…Listen, I just write to them straight out, here’s what I write: ‘If I were an embezzler…’”
“It’s cleverly written, there’s no saying it’s not,” said Tushin. “But that’s not the point, Vassily Dmitrich,” he also turned to Rostov, “a man ought to submit, but Vassily Dmitrich here doesn’t want to. The auditor told you your case was going badly.”
“Well, let it go badly,” said Denisov.
“The auditor wrote a petition for you,” Tushin went on, “and you ought to sign it, and, see, you can send it with him” (he pointed to Rostov). “He’s surely got a hand in at the staff. There couldn’t be a better chance.”
“Yes, but I told you I won’t go roveling,” Denisov interrupted and continued reading the letter.
Rostov did not dare to persuade Denisov, though he felt instinctively that the way suggested by Tushin and the other officers was the surest, and though he would have considered himself very happy if he could have been of help to Denisov: he knew Denisov’s inflexible will and righteous ardor.
When the reading of Denisov’s venomous papers, which lasted more than an hour, was over, Rostov said nothing and spent the rest of the day in a very sad state of mind, in the company of Denisov’s hospital friends, who