Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 02.djvu/551

 Rh But again the dignity of the commander of the battalion seemed to demand that he should interrupt and propose a new question.

"Was it not a fine engagement we had to-day?"

The adjutant of the battalion was a young ensign, who had but lately been promoted from yunker,—a modest and quiet lad, with a bashful and good-naturedly pleasant face. I had seen him before at Bolkhóv's. The young man used to call on him often, when he would bow, take a seat in the corner, for hours roll cigarettes and smoke them in silence, get up again, salute, and walk away. He was a type of a poor Russian yeoman, who had selected the military career as the only possible one with his culture, and who placed the calling of an officer higher than anything else in the world,—a simple-hearted, pleasing type in spite of its ridiculous inseparable appurtenances, the tobacco-pouch, the dressing-gown, the guitar, and the moustache brush, with which we are accustomed to connect it. They told of him in the army that he had boasted of being just, but severe with his orderly, that he had said, "I rarely punish, but when I am provoked they had better look out," and that, when his drunken orderly had stolen a number of things of him and had even begun to insult him, he had brought him to the guard-house, and ordered him to be chastised, but that when he saw the preparations for the punishment, he so completely lost his composure that he was able only to say, "Now, you see—I can—" and that in utter confusion he ran home, and never again was able to look straight into the eyes of his Chernóv. His comrades gave him no rest, and teased him about it, and I had several times heard the simple-minded lad deny the allegation, and, blushing up to his ears, insist that it was not only not true, but that quite the opposite was the fact.

The third person, Captain Trosénko, was an old Caucasus soldier in the full sense of the word, that is, a man