War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [574]
Mavra Kuzminishna opened the door. An officer of about eighteen, with a round face of a type resembling the Rostovs, came into the courtyard.
“They’re gone, dearie. Left yesterday afternoon, if you please,” Mavra Kuzminishna said kindly.
The young officer, standing in the doorway as if undecided whether to go in or not, clucked his tongue.
“Ah, how vexing!” he said. “Yesterday I should have…Ah, what a pity!…”
Mavra Kuzminishna meanwhile was attentively and sympathetically studying the familiar features of the Rostov breed in the young man’s face, and the worn greatcoat and down-at-heel boots he had on.
“What did you want the count for?” she asked.
“Ah, well…nothing to be done!” the officer said vexedly and grasped the door as if intending to leave. Again he stopped in indecision.
“You see?” he said suddenly. “I’m a relative of the count’s, and he’s always been very kind to me. Well, so you see” (he looked at his cloak and boots with a kind and cheerful smile), “I’m a bit shabby, and I’ve got no money; so I wanted to ask the count…”
Mavra Kuzminishna did not let him finish.
“You wait one little minute, dearie. Just one little minute,” she said. And as soon as the officer let go of the gate, Mavra Kuzminishna turned and with a quick, old-womanish step went to her wing in the back yard.
While Mavra Kuzminishna was running to her room, the officer, lowering his head and gazing at his torn boots, strolled about the courtyard, smiling slightly. “What a pity I didn’t find my uncle. But she’s a nice old woman! Where did she run off to? And how am I to find out by what streets it will be closest for me to catch up with my regiment, which must now be approaching the Rogozhsky gate?” the young officer was thinking. Just then Mavra Kuzminishna, with a frightened and at the same time determined face, carrying a folded checkered handkerchief in her hands, came around the corner. While still a few steps away, she unfolded the handkerchief, took a white twenty-five rouble note from it, and hastily handed it to the officer.
“If his excellency had been at home, goodness knows, he’d just have given it to you, since you’re a relation…so, maybe…now…” Mavra Kuzminishna became timid and confused. But the officer, not refusing and not hurrying, took the note and thanked Mavra Kuzminishna. “If the count had been at home,” Mavra Kuzminishna kept saying apologetically. “Christ be with you, dearie! God save you,” she said, bowing and seeing him off. The officer, smiling and shaking his head, as if laughing at himself, ran almost at a trot down the empty street towards the Yauzsky bridge to catch up with his regiment.
And Mavra Kuzminishna went on standing for a long time with moist eyes before the closed gate, pensively shaking her head and feeling a sudden flood of maternal tenderness and pity for the unknown little officer.
XXIII
In an unfinished house on Varvarka Street, with a pot-house on the ground floor, drunken shouting and singing was heard. Some ten factory workers were sitting on benches by the tables in a small, dirty room. Drunk, sweaty, bleary-eyed, straining and opening their mouths wide, they were all singing some song. They sang discordantly, with difficulty, with effort, obviously not because they wanted to sing, but only in order to prove that they were drunk and carousing. One of them, a tall, blond fellow in a clean blue coat, was standing over them. His face with its thin, straight nose would have been handsome, if it were not for the thin, compressed, constantly moving lips and dull, fixed, frowning eyes. He stood over those who were singing, and, evidently imagining something to himself, swung his white arm, bared to the elbow, solemnly and awkwardly above their heads, trying to spread the dirty fingers of his hand unnaturally. The sleeve of his coat kept coming down, and the fellow would carefully push it up again with his left hand, as if there was something especially important in having this white, sinewy, waving arm be unfailingly bared. In the midst of the song,