Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1887
Source: Original Text from Gutenberg.org
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
His features were not dark, dry, and regular, as I had reason to expect from his hair and build. His face was round, jolly, with a snub nose and a big mouth, and clear-shining eyes, blue and round. His cheeks and neck were like well-worn cloth. His eyebrows, his long eyelashes, and the beard which evenly covered the lower part of his face, were crusted thick with snow, and perfectly white.
The distance to the station was all of a half-verst, and we stopped.
"Only be quick about it," I said.
"Just a minute," replied Ignashka, springing down from his seat, and going up to Filipp.
"Let us have it, brother," said he, taking the glass in his right hand; and throwing his mitten and whip down on the snow, tipping back his head, he drank down at a gulp the glass of vodka.
The inn-keeper, who must have been a discharged Cossack, came, with a bottle in his hand, out of the door.
"Who have you got there?" he asked.
The tall Vasíli, a lean, blond muzhík with a goatee, and the fat mentor, with white eyebrows, and a thick white beard framing his ruddy face, came up and also drank a glass. The little old man joined the group of drinkers; but no one offered him any thing, and he went off again to his horses, fastened behind,* and began to stroke one of them on the back and side.
The little old man was pretty much what I had imagined him to be; small, ugly, with wrinkled, strongly marked features, a thin little beard, a sharp nose, and worn yellow teeth. He wore a driver's cap, perfectly new; but his sheepskin jacket[20] was old, soiled with oil, and torn on the shoulders and flaps, and did not cover his knees or his hempen trousers tucked into his huge felt boots. He himself was bent, and frowned all the time, and, with trembling lips and limbs, tramped around his sledge in his efforts to keep warm.
"Well, Mitritch, you ought to have a drink; it would warm you up," said the mentor to him.
Mitritch gave a start. He arranged the horses' harness, straightened the bell-bow, and then came to me.
"Say, bárin," said he, taking his cap off from his white hair and bowing very low, "all night long we have been wandering together; we have found the road. We would seem to deserve a bit of a drink. Isn't that so, sir, your eminence?[21] just enough to get warmed," he added with an obsequious smile.
I gave him a quarter-ruble. The inn-keeper brought out a glass of vodka, and handed it to the old man. He laid aside his mitten and whip, and took the glass in his small, dark hand, bony and somewhat bluish; but strangely enough he could not control his thumb. Before he had lifted the glass to his lips, he dropped it in the snow, spilling the wine.
All the drivers burst out laughing.
"See, Mitritch-to is half-frozen like; he can't hold his wine."
*
But Mitritch was greatly vexed because he had spilt the wine.
They brought him, however, another glass, and poured it into his mouth. He immediately became jolly, went into the inn, lighted his pipe, began to show his yellow worn teeth, and to scold at every word. After they had taken their last drinks, the drivers came back to their troikas, and we set off.
The snow kept growing whiter and brighter, till it made one's eyes ache to look at it. The orange-colored reddish streaks stretched brighter and brighter, higher and higher, across the heavens; now the red circle of the sun appeared on the horizon through the bluish clouds; the blue sky came out in constantly increasing brilliancy and depth. On the road around the station the tracks were clear, distinct, and yellow; in some places were cradle-holes. In the frosty, bracing atmosphere, there was a pleasant exhilaration and freshness.
My troïka glided along very swiftly. The head of the shaft-horse, and the neck with the mane tossing up to the bell-bow, constantly made the same quick, swinging motions under the hunting-bell, the tongue of which no longer struck, but scraped around the rim. The good side-horses, in friendly rivalry tugging at the frozen twisted traces, energetically galloped on, the tassels striking against their ribs and necks. Occasionally the off-horse would plunge into some drift, and kick up the snow, filling the eyes with the fine powder. Ignashka kept shouting in his gay tenor. The runners creaked over the dry, frosty snow. Behind us, with a loud festival sound, rang the two sledge-chimes; and the voices of the drivers, made jolly by wine, could be heard.
*
I looked back: the gray shaggy side-horses arching their necks, regularly puffing out the breath, with their curved bits, galloped over the snow. Filipp was flourishing his whip and adjusting his cap. The little old man, with his legs hanging out, was reclining as before in the middle of his sledge.
At the end of two minutes the sledge scraped against the boards of the well-cleared entrance of the station-house; and Ignashka turned to me, his jolly face covered with snow, where his breath had turned to ice, and said,—
"Here we are, bárin!"