Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

The sledges, with their songs and bells, driving every vehicle they met quite onto the pavements, dashed through the whole town right to the town gates. Not a little astonished were the tradesmen and passersby who did not know them, and especially those who did, when they saw the nobles driving through the streets in broad daylight with songs, gipsy women, and tipsy gipsy men.

When they had passed the town gates the troikas stopped, and all began bidding the Count farewell.

Ilyín, who had had plenty to drink at the leave-taking and who had been driving the sledge all the way, suddenly became very sad, begged the Count to stay another day, and when he found this was impossible, rushed quite unexpectedly at his new friend, kissed him, and promised with tears to try, as soon as he got back, to exchange into the hussar regiment the Count was serving in. The Count was particularly gay; he tumbled the cavalryman, who had become very familiar in the morning, into a snow-heap; set Blücher at the Captain of Police, took Styóshka in his arms and wanted to carry her off to Moscow, and at last, jumping into his sledge, made Blücher, who wished to stand up in the middle, sit down by his side. Sáshka jumped onto the box, after having again asked the cavalryman to get back the Count’s cloak from them, and to send it on. The Count cried, “Drive on!” took off his cap, waved it over his head, and whistled postboy-like to the horses. The troikas drove off their different ways.

A monotonous, snowy plain stretched far ahead, with a dirty, yellow road winding through it. The bright sunshine⁠—playfully sparkling on the thawing snow, which was coated with a transparent icy crust⁠—pleasantly warmed one’s face and back. The steam rose thick from the sweating horses. The bell tinkled. A peasant with a loaded sledge that kept gliding to the side of the road, got hurriedly out of the way, jerking his rope-reins and splashing with his wet bast-shoes as he ran along the thawing road. A fat, red-faced peasant woman, holding a baby wrapped in the bosom of her sheepskin cloak, sat in another laden sledge, and whipped a thin-tailed, jaded, white horse with the ends of the reins. The Count suddenly remembered Anna Fyódorovna.

“Drive back!” cried he.

The driver did not at once understand.

“Turn back! Drive back to town! Be quick!”

The troika passed the town gates once more, and drove briskly up to the wooden porch of Mrs. Záytsef’s house. The Count ran quickly up the steps, passed through the vestibule and the drawing-room, and having found the widow still asleep, took her in his arms, lifted her off the bed, kissed her sleepy eyes, and ran quickly back. Anna Fyódorovna, half awake, only licked her lips and asked, “What has happened?” The Count jumped into the sledge, shouted to the driver, and without further delay, and without even thinking about Loúhnof, or the widow, or Styóshka, but only of what awaited him in Moscow, he left the town of K⁠⸺ forever.

More than twenty years had gone by. Much water had flowed away; many people had died, many been born, many had grown up, many grown old; still more ideas had been born and had died; much that was old and beautiful, and much that was old and bad, had perished, much that was beautiful and new had grown up, and still more that was immature, monstrous, and new, had come into God’s world.

Count Fyódor Toúrbin had been killed long ago in a duel, by some foreigner he had horsewhipped in the street. His son, as like him as one drop of water to another, was a handsome youth, already twenty-three years old, and serving in the Horse Guards. But morally the young Toúrbin did not in the least resemble his father. There was not a shade of the impetuous, passionate, and, to speak frankly, dissolute propensities of the past age. His distinguishing characteristics were intellect, education, and the gifted nature he had inherited; combined with love of propriety and of the comforts of life, a practical way of looking at men and things, reasonableness and foresight. The young Count got on well in the service; at twenty-three he was already a lieutenant. At the commencement of military operations he made up his mind that he would be more likely to get advancement if he exchanged into the active army, and he entered an hussar regiment as captain, and was soon in command of a squadron.

In May 1848195 the S⁠⸺ hussar regiment was marching to the campaign through the K⁠⸺ Government, and the very squadron that young Count Toúrbin commanded had to spend the night in the village of Morózovka, Anna Fyódorovna’s estate.

Anna Fyódorovna was still living, but was already so far from young that she did not even consider herself young, which means a good deal for a woman. She had grown very fat, which is said to make a woman younger, but deep, soft wrinkles were apparent on her white plumpness. She never went to town now, it was even difficult for her to get into her carriage, but she was still as kindhearted and still just as silly as ever (now that her beauty no longer biases one, the truth may be told). With her lived her twenty-three-year-old daughter Lisa, a Russian country belle, and her brother, our acquaintance the cavalryman, who had good-naturedly squandered the whole of his little property, and had found a home for his old age with Anna Fyódorovna. The hair on his head was quite grey, his upper lip had fallen in, but the moustache above it was still carefully blackened. Not only his forehead and cheeks but even his nose and neck were wrinkled, and his back was bent, yet in the movements of his feeble, crooked legs, the manner of a cavalryman was still perceptible.

The family and those of the household