War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [440]
“Father, angel, dearest!” she murmured, wiping her tears with her fingers.
“Hurrah!” came from all sides.
For a moment the crowd stood in one place; but then again it rushed forward.
Petya, forgetting himself, clenched his teeth, rolled his eyes out wildly, and rushed forward, working with his elbows and shouting “Hurrah!” as if he was ready to kill himself and everyone else at that moment, but exactly the same wild faces came at him from the sides, with the same shouts of “Hurrah!”
“So this is what the sovereign is!” Petya thought. “No, it’s impossible for me to hand him a petition myself, it’s too bold!” In spite of which, he made his way forward just as desperately, and saw, flashing between the backs of those ahead of him, an empty space and a passage laid with red cloth; but just then the crowd heaved backwards (the policemen ahead shoved back those who got too close to the procession; the sovereign passed from the palace to the cathedral of the Dormition), and Petya unexpectedly received such a blow in the ribs from the side, and was so squeezed, that everything suddenly went dim in his eyes, and he lost consciousness. When he came to, some clergyman with a clump of graying hair tied behind, in a shabby blue cassock, probably a beadle, was holding him under the arm with one hand and protecting him from the pressing crowd with the other.
“The young gentleman has been crushed!” the beadle was saying. “Such goings on!…ease up…he’s crushed, crushed!”
The sovereign went into the cathedral of the Dormition. The crowd subsided again, and the beadle led Petya, pale and barely breathing, to the Tsar-Cannon.33 Several persons felt sorry for Petya, and suddenly the whole crowd turned to him, and now there was a crush around him. Those who stood near attended to him, unbuttoned his frock coat, sat him up on the cannon, and reproached somebody—whoever had crushed him.
“You could crush somebody to death that way. What is it! Committing murder! See, the dear heart, he’s gone white as a sheet,” voices said.
Petya soon recovered, the color returned to his face, the pain disappeared, and for this temporary unpleasantness he acquired a place on the cannon from which he hoped to see the sovereign, who should be coming back that way. Petya was no longer thinking of petitioning. If only he could see him, he would consider himself happy!
During the service in the cathedral of the Dormition—which was a combined prayer service on the occasion of the sovereign’s arrival, and a prayer of thanksgiving for the concluding of peace with the Turks—the crowd spread out; hawkers appeared, offering kvass, gingerbread, poppy-seed cakes, which Petya especially fancied, and ordinary conversations were heard. One merchant’s wife displayed her torn shawl, telling how much she had paid for it; another said that today all silk fabrics had become expensive. The beadle, Petya’s savior, talked with an official about just who and who were serving that day with the bishop. The beadle several times repeated the word “concelebration,” which Petya did not understand. Two young tradesmen bantered with servant girls who were cracking nuts. All this talk, especially the bantering with the girls, which for a boy of Petya’s age was especially alluring, all this talk did not concern Petya now; he sat on his lofty cannon, as excited as ever at the thought of the sovereign and of his love for him. The feeling of pain and fear, when he was being crushed, blended with the feeling of rapture, and increased in him still more the awareness of the importance of this moment.
Suddenly cannon shots were heard from the embankment (the shooting was in celebration of the peace with the Turks), and the crowd swiftly rushed to the embankment to watch how they were shooting. Petya also wanted to run there, but the beadle, having taken the young gentleman under his protection, would not let him. The shooting was still going on when officers, generals, gentlemen-in-waiting came running out of the cathedral, then others came out less hurriedly, then