II
In the besieged town of Sevastopol a regimental band played on the boulevard near the pavilion, and crowds of women and military men strolled along the paths making holiday. The bright spring sun had risen in the morning above the English entrenchments, had reached the bastions, then the town, the Nicholas Barracks, shining with equal joy on all, and was now sinking towards the distant blue sea, which, rocking in even motion, glittered with silvery light.
A tall infantry officer with a slight stoop, drawing on a presentable though not very white glove, passed out of the gate of one of the small sailors’ houses built on the left side of the Morskáya Street, and, gazing thoughtfully at the ground, ascended the hill towards the boulevard. The expression of his plain face did not reveal great intellectual power, but rather good-nature, common-sense, honesty, and an inclination towards respectability. He was badly built, and seemed a bit shy and awkward in his movements. He wore a nearly new cap, a thin cloak of a rather peculiar lilacky shade, from under which was visible a gold watch-chain, trousers with foot-straps, and clean, shiny calfskin boots. He might have been a German (but that his features indicated his purely Russian origin), or an adjutant, or a regimental quartermaster (but in that case he would have had spurs), or an officer transferred for the campaign from the cavalry or the Guards. He was, in fact, an officer who had exchanged from the cavalry, and as he ascended the hill towards the boulevard, he was thinking of a letter he had received from proprietor of the government of T⸺, and of his great friend, that comrade’s wife, the pale, blue-eyed Natásha. He recalled one part of the letter, where his comrade wrote:—
“When we receive the Invalide, Póupka” (so the retired Uhlan called his wife) “rushes headlong into the hall, seizes the paper, and runs with it to a seat in the arbour or the drawing-room (in which, you remember, we spent such jolly winter evenings when your regiment was stationed in our town), and reads of your heroic deeds with an ardour you cannot imagine. She often speaks of you. ‘There now,’ she says, ‘Miháylof is a darling. I am ready to cover him with kisses when I see him. He is fighting on the bastions, and is certain to get a St. George’s Cross, and they’ll write about him in the papers,’ etc., etc., so that I am beginning to be quite jealous of you.”
In another place he wrote: “The papers reach us awfully late, and though there are plenty of rumours, one cannot believe them all. For instance, those young ladies with music you know of were saying yesterday that Napoleon has been captured by our Cossacks and sent to St. Petersburg; but you can guess how much of this I believe. One fresh arrival from Petersburg tells us for certain (he is sent by the Minister on special business, a capital fellow, and now there is no one in the town you can’t think what a resource he is to us), that we have taken Eupatoria, so that the French are cut off from Balaclava, and that we lost 200 in the affair and the French as many as 15,000. The wife was in such raptures that she caroused all night, and said that a presentiment made her certain you have distinguished yourself in that affair.”
In spite of the words and expressions I have purposely underlined, and the whole tone of the letter, Lieutenant-Captain Miháylof thought with an inexpressibly melancholy pleasure of his pale-faced provincial friend, and how in the evening he used to sit with her in the arbour talking sentiment. He thought of his kind comrade the Uhlan; how the latter used to get angry and lose when they played cards in the study for kopeck points, and how his wife used to laugh at him. He recalled the friendship these people had for him (perhaps he thought there was something more on the side of the pale-faced friend): these people and their surroundings flitted through his memory in a wonderfully sweet, joyously rosy light, and, smiling at the recollection, he put his hand to the pocket where this dear letter lay.
From these recollections Lieutenant-Captain Miháylof involuntarily passed to dreams and hopes. “How surprised and pleased Natásha will be,” he thought as he passed along a narrow side-street, “when she reads in the Invalide of my being the first to climb on the cannon, and receiving the St. George! I ought to be made full Captain on that former recommendation. Then I may easily become Major already this year by seniority, because so many of our fellows have been killed, and no doubt many more will be killed this campaign. Then there’ll be more fighting, and I, as a well-known man, shall be entrusted with a regiment … then Lieutenant-Colonel, the order of St. Anne … a Colonel” … and he was already a General, honouring with a visit Natásha, the widow of his comrade (who would be dead by that time according to the daydream), when the sounds of the music on the boulevard reached his ears more distinctly, a crowd of people appeared before his eyes, and he awoke on the boulevard a Lieutenant-Captain of infantry as before.