Hadji Murad, a Chechen Dzhigit, by Leo Tolstoy

Hadji Murad a Chechen “dzhigit” by Leo Tolstoy BΔNDΔNNΔ BOOKS • 2012 • SΔNTΔ BΔRBΔRΔ 1 Introduction, notes, glossary copyright © 2012 Bandanna Books Text based on the translation of Aylmer Maude Cover art: Eugene Lanceray, The House of Prince Semyon Vorontsov TWOHOURREADS.COM DON’T PANIC: THE PROCRASTINATOR’S GUIDE TO WRITING AN EFFECTIVE TERM PAPER. Steven Posusta AREOPAGITICA: FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. John Milton* THE APOLOGY OF SOCRATES, & THE CRITO. Plato* LEAVES OF GRASS, 1855 edition. Walt Whitman* THE FIRST DETECTIVE: THREE STORIES. EDGAR ALLAN POE Shakespeare. Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor GANDHI ON THE GITA. Gandhi’s Bhagavad Gita THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL, William Blake SAPPHO: THE POEMS* ITALIAN FOR OPERA LOVERS. Italian opera terms DANTE & HIS CIRCLE. D. G. Rossetti. Italian love sonnets VITA NUOVA, Dante’s tribute to Beatrice GHAZALS OF GHALIB. Indian wit THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TOLSTOY. Leo Tolstoy HADJI MURAD, A CHECHEN “DZHIGÍT” Leo Tolstoy TWO-DAY READS Shakespeare: Seven Plays with Transgender Characters, plus Hamlet Shakespeare: Hamlet Director’s Playbook (auditions, budget, etc.) MITOS Y LEYENDAS/MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF MEXICO. Bilingual THE BEECHERS THROUGH THE 19TH CENTURY UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, Harriet Beecher Stowe FRANKENSTEIN, Mary Shelley AURORA LEIGH, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Check www.bandannabooks.com for complete listings and descriptions *Supplements for teachers available 2 Contents Introduction Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII Chapter XIX Chapter XX Chapter XXI Chapter XXII Chapter XXIII Chapter XXIV Chapter XXV Glossary 5 I was returning… 8 At the advanced fort… 16 The windows of the barracks… 21 After the three sleepless… 26 Early in the morning… 31 Young Vorontsov was… 37 The wounded Avdeyev… 43 On the day Peter Avdeyev died… 46 Michael Semyenovich Vorontsov… 50 When, next day, Hadji Murad… 56 In the ifth day of Hadji… 61 “But enough! It is time… 66 When Loris-Melikov entered… 70 On 20th December… 75 The report was dispatched… 79 In obedience to… 92 The aoul which had… 97 On the morning after… 99 Hadji Murad’s family… 104 Hadji Murad had been… 111 Life in our advanced forts… 117 Not having attained… 121 By midnight his decision… 125 Butler’s only consolation… 129 Hadji Murad was allowed… 134 143 3 to Tonia, for her insatiable curiosity 4 Introduction After a period of intense spiritual and ethical research and writing, resulting in his rationalist re-interpretation of the Gospels (see The Gospel According to Tolstoy, Bandanna Books, 2012). Leo Tolstoy returned to iction, at which he had earned a worldwide reputation based on his monumental War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Near the end of his long life, in 1904, he wrote yet another story of the Caucasus, an area he knew from his own military experiences there in his twenties (the 1850s), participating in incursions into the Caucasus area. The Russian long-term strategy in the Caucacus had developed into a continuing effort to unite Orthodox Christian Russia itself with the Christian nation of Georgia. The area in between, however, had long been settled by various ethnic groups of the Muslim faith, often at odds with each other, among which were the Chechens. This story, though told as iction, is about a real Chechen leader, a cultural hero (dzhigít), Hadji Murad, who had been active at the time, but whom Tolstoy had never personally met. A Muslim revivalist movement uniting the ethnic groups against the Russians is described by Aylmer Maude, the translator: There was a Murid movement which appears to have been almost identical with Sui’ism, and to have existed from the third century of the Mohammedan era. That movement, going beyond the Shariát (the written law), inculcated the Tarikát (the Path) leading to the higher life. It also proclaimed the equality of all Mussulmans, rich and poor alike, and enjoined temperance, abstinence, self-denial, and the renunciation of the good things of both worlds, that man may make himself “free to receive worthily the love towards God.” In Muridism a teacher was called a Murshíd (“one who shows” the way), while a Murid was a disciple or follower (“one who desires” to ind the way). Such was Muridism for several centuries: a peaceful, religious movement of a highly spiritual character; but 5 within the last few generations the struggle against Russia had given a new quality to the movement, and from being spiritual it had become strongly political. As early as 1785 Mansúr, a leader of unknown origin, appeared in the Caucasus preaching the Ghazavát, or Holy War, against the inidels; and from 1830 onwards, when Kazi-Mullá, the irst Imám (uniting in himself supreme spiritual and temporal power) took the ield, Muridism became identiied with the ierce struggle for independence carried on by the native tribes against the Russian invaders. Mansúr and Kazi-Mullá are both mentioned in Tolstoy’s story, in which also Hadji Murád tells of the part he took in the execution or assassination of Kazi-Mullá’s successor, Hamzád. Shamil, too, who succeeded Hamzád and was the greatest of the Imáms, igures as one of the principal characters in the story. Tolstoy seems artless in the infectious spirit of life in his writings. He himself questioned this quality in What Is Art? Curiosity and keen observation and, in this case, good memory, serve him well. His ability to “inhabit” his characters, including those of another culture, may rival that ability in Shakespeare, so that we readers feel that we know the characters and the world they inhabit as well as the author does. Brief history lesson: This episode occurs right between two important European events: the revolutions of 1848, and the Crimea War. 1848 saw: an uprising within the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; the Communist Manifesto is published; French king Louis Philippe abdicates and a republic is declared, sparking other revolutions; Hungarian Revolution begins (Russian troops are sent to quell it); Italian uniication is set back by Austria; Switzerland ratiies a constitution and becomes a federal republic; Dutch constitution revised; Second French Republic declared; Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria abdicates; general revolts throughout the German states. And Metternich resigns in 1848, signalling the end of his framework devised at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which had stabilized Europe after Napoleon by supporting conservative governments within then-current boundaries. And afterward, the Crimean War pitted Russia against 6 Britain, Franch, and the Ottoman Empire. Russia lost. In the aftermath, European interest in affairs in the Caucasus seemed to evaporate, and Russia continued its earlier push. A few points on language: Some words in this story describing the place, clothing, implements appear to be Tartar, though Hadji Murad himself was Chechen. Tatar, or the Tartar language, was introduced into schools by Catherine the Great in the Eighteenth Century, as a diplomatic or second language for communicating with the various ethnic groups inhabiting the Caucasus and other areas. Russia had already begun expansionist incursions into the Caucasus region, as this story demonstrates. Hadji Murad presumably spoke Tatar as well as his native tongue; he himself lived in a culture that had probably existed in that same area for several thousand years, and still retained tribal or clan structure alongside the more recent Muslim religion. His homeland is now called Chechnya, and it’s still in the news for its uneasy relationship with Russia. You’ll also notice conversations in French. French at the time was lingua franca for diplomacy and had been taken up by the upper classes, ever since Peter the Great set Russia on a course of “Europeanizing.” A Glossary is provided, including notes on historical events and personalities of the times. Sasha Newborn April 2012 7 Chapter I I was returning home by the ields. It was midsummer; the hay harvest was over, and they were just beginning to reap the rye. At that season of the year there is a delightful variety of lowers—red white and pink scented tufty clover; milk-white oxeye daisies with their bright yellow centres and pleasant spicy smell; yellow honey-scented rape blossoms; tall campanulas with white and lilac bells, tulip-shaped; creeping vetch; yellow red and pink scabious; plantains with faintly-scented neatlyarranged purple, slightly pink-tinged blossoms; cornlowers, bright blue in the sunshine and while still young, but growing paler and redder towards evening or when growing old; and delicate quickly-withering almond-scented dodder lowers. I gathered a large nosegay of these different lowers, and was going home, when I noticed in a ditch, in full bloom, a beautiful thistle plant of the crimson kind, which in our neighborhood they call “Tartar,” and carefully avoid when mowing—or, if they do happen to cut it down, throw out from among the grass for fear of pricking their hands. Thinking to pick this thistle and put it in the center of my nosegay, I climbed down into the ditch, and, after driving away a velvety bumble-bee that had penetrated deep into one of the lowers and had there fallen sweetly asleep, I set to work to pluck the lower. But this proved a very dificult task. Not only did the stalk prick on every side—even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my hand—but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly ive minutes, breaking the ibers one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the stalk was all frayed, and the lower itself no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful. Moreover, owing to a coarseness and stiffness, it did not seem in place among the delicate blossoms of my nosegay. I felt sorry to have vainly destroyed a lower that looked beautiful in its proper place, and I threw it away. “But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!” thought I 8 to myself, recollecting the effort it had cost me to pluck the lower. The way home led across black-earth ields that had just been plowed up. I ascended the dusty path. The plowed ield belonged to a landed proprietor, and was so large that on both sides and before me to the top of the hill nothing was visible but evenly furrowed and moist earth. The land was well tilled, and nowhere was there a blade of grass or any kind of plant to be seen; it was all black. “Ah, what a destructive creature is man. How many different plant-lives he destroys to support his own existence!” thought I, involuntarily looking round for some living thing in this lifeless black ield. In front of me, to the right of the road, I saw a kind of little clump, and drawing nearer I found it was the same kind of thistle as that which I had vainly plucked and thrown away. This “Tartar” plant had three branches. One was broken, and stuck out like the stump of a mutilated arm. Each of the other two bore a lower, once red but now blackened. One stalk was broken and half of it hung down with a soiled lower at its tip. The other, though also soiled with black mud, still stood erect. Evidently a cartwheel had passed over the plant but it had risen again and that was why, though erect, it stood twisted to one side, as if a piece of its body had been torn from it, its bowels had been drawn out, an arm torn off, and one of its eyes plucked out; and yet it stood irm and did not surrender to man, who had destroyed all its brothers around it … “What vitality!” I thought. “Mankind has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won’t submit.” And I remembered a Caucasian episode of years ago, which I had partly seen myself, partly heard of from eye-witnesses, and in part imagined. The episode, as it has taken shape in my memory and imagination, was as follows. § This happened towards the end of 1851. On a cold November evening Hadji Murad rode into Makhmet, a hostile Chechen aoul (village), that was illed with the scented smoke of burning kizyák (straw and manure), and that lay some ifteen miles from Russian territory. The strained 9 chant of the muezzin had just ceased, and through the clear mountain air, impregnated with kizyák smoke, above the lowing of the cattle and the bleating of the sheep that were dispersing among the sáklyas (clay-plastered houses, which were crowded together like the cells of honeycomb), could be clearly heard the guttural voices of disputing men, and sounds of women’s and children’s voices rising from near the fountain below. This was Hadji Murad, Shamil’s naïb, famous for his exploits, who used never to ride out without his banner, and was always accompanied by some dozens of murids (followers), who caracoled (fancy horse-stepping) and showed off before him. Now, with one murid only, wrapped in a hood and búrka (long cape), from under which protruded a rile, he rode, a fugitive, trying to attract as little attention as possible, and peering with his quick black eyes into the faces of those he met on his way. When he entered the aoul, Hadji Murad did not ride up the road leading to the open square, but turned to the left into a narrow side street; and on reaching the second sáklya, which was cut into the hillside, he stopped and looked round. There was no one under the penthouse in front; but on the roof of the sáklya itself, behind the freshly-plastered clay chimney, lay a man covered with a sheepskin. Hadji Murad touched him with the handle of his leather-plaited whip, and clicked his tongue. An old man rose from under the sheepskin. He had on a greasy old beshmét (blouse) and a nightcap. His moist red eyelids had no lashes, and he blinked to get them unstuck. Hadji Murad, repeating the customary “Selaam aleikum!” uncovered his face. “Aleikum, selaam!” said the old man, recognising Hadji Murad and smiling with his toothless mouth; and rising up on his thin legs, he began thrusting his feet into the wooden-heeled slippers that stood by the chimney. Then he leisurely slipped his arms into the sleeves of his crumpled sheepskin, and going to the ladder that leaned against the roof, he descended backwards. While he dressed, and as he climbed down, he kept shaking his head on its thin, shrivelled sunburnt neck, and mumbling something with his toothless mouth. As soon as he reached the ground he hospitably seized Hadji Murad’s bridle and right stirrup; but the strong, active murid who accompanied Hadji Murad had 10 quickly dismounted and, motioning the old man aside, took his place. Hadji Murad also dismounted and, walking with a slight limp, entered under the penthouse. A boy of ifteen, coming quickly out of the door, met him and wonderingly ixed his sparkling eyes, black as ripe sloes, on the new arrivals. “Run to the mosque and call your father,” ordered the old man, as he hurried forward to open the thin, creaking door into the sáklya for Hadji Murad. As Hadji Murad entered the outer door, a slight spare middle-aged woman in a yellow smock, red beshmét, and wide blue trousers came through an inner door carrying cushions. “May your coming bring happiness!” said she, and, bending nearly double, began arranging the cushions along the front wall for the guest to sit on. “May your sons live!” answered Hadji Murad, taking off his búrka, his rile and his sword and handing them to the old man, who carefully hung the rile and sword on a nail beside the weapons of the master of the house, which were suspended between two large basins that glittered against the clean clayplastered and carefully whitewashed wall. Hadji Murad adjusted the pistol at his back, came up to the cushions and, wrapping his Circassian coat closer round him, sat down. The old man squatted on his bare heels beside him, closed his eyes, and lifted his hands, palms upwards. Hadji Murad did the same; then, after repeating a prayer, they both stroked their faces, passing their hands downwards till the palms joined at the end of their beards. “Ne habar?” (“Anything new?”) asked Hadji Murad, addressing the old man. “Habar yok” (“Nothing new”), replied the old man, looking with his lifeless red eyes not at Hadji Murad’s face but at his breast. “I live at the apiary and have only today come to see my son … He knows.” Hadji Murad, understanding that the old man did not wish to say what he knew and what Hadji Murad wanted to know, slightly nodded his head and asked no more questions. “There is no good news,” said the old man. “The only news is that the hares keep discussing how to drive away the eagles; and the eagles tear irst one and then another of them. The other day the Russian dogs burned the hay in the Mitchit aoul… 11 May their faces be torn!” added he, hoarsely and angrily. Hadji Murad’s murid entered the room, his strong legs striding softly over the earthen loor. Retaining only his dagger and pistol, he took off his burka, rile, and sword as Hadji Murad had done, and hung them up on the same nails as his leader’s weapons. “Who is he?” asked the old man, pointing to the newcomer. “My murid. Eldar is his name,” said Hadji Murad. “That is well,” said the old man, and motioned Eldar to a place on a piece of felt beside Hadji Murad. Eldar sat down, crossing his legs, and ixing his ine ram-like eyes on the old man, who, having now started talking, was telling how their brave fellows had caught two Russian soldiers the week before, and had killed one and sent the other to Shamil in Veden. Hadji Murad heard him absently, looking at the door and listening to the sounds outside. Under the penthouse steps were heard, the door creaked, and Sado, the master of the house, came in. He was a man of about forty, with a small beard, long nose, and eyes as black, though not as glittering, as those of his ifteen-year-old son who had run to call him home, and who now entered with his father and sat down by the door. The master of the house took off his wooden slippers at the door, and pushing his old and much-worn cap onto the back of his head (which had remained unshaved so long that it was beginning to be overgrown with black hair), at once squatted down in front of Hadji Murad. He too lifted his hands, palms upwards, as the old man had done, repeated a prayer, and then stroked his face downwards. Only after that did he begin to speak. He told how an order had come from Shamil to seize Hadji Murad, alive or dead; that Shamil’s envoys had left only the day before; that the people were afraid to disobey Shamil’s orders; and that therefore it was necessary to be careful. “In my house,” said Sado, “no one shall injure my kunák (adopted friend) while I live; but how will it be in the open ields?...We must think it over.” Hadji Murad listened with attention and nodded approvingly. When Sado had inished he said,— “Very well. Now we must send a man with a letter to the 12 Russians. My murid will go, but he will need a guide.” “I will send brother Bata,” said Sado. “Go and call Bata,” he added, turning to his son. The boy instantly bounded to his nimble feet as if he were on springs, and swinging his arms, rapidly left the sáklya. Some ten minutes later he returned with a sinewy, short-legged Chechen, burnt almost black by the sun, wearing a worn and tattered yellow Circassian coat with frayed sleeves, and crumpled black leggings. Hadji Murad greeted the newcomer, and at once, and again without wasting a single word, asked,— “Can you conduct my murid to the Russians?” “I can,” gaily replied Bata. “I can certainly do it. There is not another Chechen who would pass as I can. Another might agree to go, and might promise anything, but would do nothing; but I can do it!” “All right,” said Hadji Murad. “You will receive three for your trouble,” and he held up three ingers. Bata nodded to show that he understood, and added that it was not money he prized, but that he was ready to serve Hadji Murad for the honor alone. Everyone in the mountains knew Hadji Murad, and how he slew the Russian swine. “Very well.…A rope should be long, but a speech short,” said Hadji Murad. “Well, then, I’ll hold my tongue,” said Bata. “Where the river Argun bends by the cliff,” said Hadji Murad, “there are two stacks in a glade in the forest—you know?” “I know.” “There my four horsemen are waiting for me,” said Hadji Murad. “Aye,” answered Bata, nodding. “Ask for Khan Mahoma. He knows what to do and what to say. Can you lead him to the Russian Commander, Prince Vorontsov?” “I’ll take him there.” “Take him, and bring him back again. Can you?” “I can.” “Take him there, and return to the wood. I shall be there too.” 13 “I will do it all,” said Bata, rising, and putting his hands on his heart he went out. Hadji Murad turned to his host when Bata had gone. “A man must also be sent to Chekhi,” he began, and took hold of one of the cartridge pouches of his Circassian coat, but immediately let his hand drop and became silent on seeing two women enter the sáklya. One was Sado’s wife—the thin middle-aged woman who had arranged the cushions for Hadji Murad. The other was quite a young girl, wearing red trousers and a green beshmét; a necklace of silver coins covered the whole front of her dress, and at the end of the not long but thick plait of hard black hair that hung between her thin shoulder-blades a silver ruble was suspended. Her eyes, as sloe black as those of her father and brother, sparkled brightly in her young face, which tried to be stern. She did not look at the visitors, but evidently felt their presence. Sado’s wife brought in a low round table, on which stood tea, pancakes in butter, cheese, churek (thinly rolled bread), and honey. The girl carried a basin, a ewer, and a towel. Sado and Hadji Murad kept silent as long as the women, with their coin ornaments tinkling, moved softly about in their red soft-soled slippers, setting out before the visitors the things they had brought. Eldar sat motionless as a statue, his ram-like eyes ixed on his crossed legs, all the time the women were in the sáklya. Only after they had gone, and their soft footsteps could no longer be heard behind the door, did he give a sigh of relief. Hadji Murad having pulled out a bullet that plugged one of the bullet-pouches of his Circassian coat, and having taken out a rolled-up note that lay beneath it, held it out, saying,— “To be handed to my son.” “Where must the answer be sent?” “To you, and you must forward it to me.” “It shall be done,” said Sado, and placed the note in a cartridge-pocket of his own coat. Then he took up the metal ewer and moved the basin towards Hadji Murad. Hadji Murad turned up the sleeves of his beshmét on his white muscular arms, and held out his hands under the clear cold water which Sado poured from the ewer. Having wiped 14 them on a clean unbleached towel, Hadji Murad turned to the table. Eldar did the same. While the visitors ate, Sado sat opposite, and thanked them several times for their visit. The boy sat by the door, never taking his sparkling eyes off Hadji Murad’s face, and smiled as if in conirmation of his father’s words. Though he had eaten nothing for more than twenty-four hours, he ate only a little bread and cheese; then, drawing out a small knife from under his dagger, he spread some honey on a piece of bread. “Our honey is good,” said the old man, evidently pleased to see Hadji Murad eating his honey. “This year, above all other years, it is plentiful and good.” “I thank you,” said Hadji Murad, and turned from the table. Eldar would have liked to go on eating but he followed his leader’s example, and, having moved away from the table, handed Hadji Murad the ewer and basin. Sado knew that he was risking his life by receiving Hadji Murad in his house, as, after his quarrel with Shamil, the latter had issued a proclamation to all the inhabitants of Chechnya forbidding them to receive Hadji Murad on pain of death. He knew that the inhabitants of the aoul might at any moment become aware of Hadji Murad’s presence in his house, and might demand his surrender; but this not only did not frighten Sado, but even gave him pleasure. He considered it his duty to protect his guest though it should cost him his life, and he was proud and pleased with himself because he was doing his duty. “While you are in my house and my head is on my shoulders no one shall harm you,” he repeated to Hadji Murad. Hadji Murad looked into his glittering eyes, and understanding that this was true, said with some solemnity,— “May you receive joy and life!” Sado silently laid his hand on his heart as a sign of thanks for these kind words. Having closed the shutters of the sáklya and laid some sticks in the ireplace, Sado, in an exceptionally bright and animated mood, left the room and went into that part of his sáklya where his family all lived. The women had not yet gone to sleep, and were talking about the dangerous visitors who were spending the night in their guest-chamber. 15 Chapter II At the advanced fort Vozvizhensk, situated some ten miles from the aoul in which Hadji Murad was spending the night, three soldiers and a non-commissioned oficer left the fortiications and went beyond the Shahgirinsk Gate. The soldiers, dressed as Caucasian soldiers of those days, wore sheepskin coats and caps, and boots that reached above their knees, and they carried their cloaks tightly rolled up and fastened across their shoulders. Shouldering arms, they irst went some ive hundred paces along the road, and then turned off it and went some twenty paces to the right—the dead leaves rustling under their boots—till they reached the blackened trunk of a broken plane tree, just visible through the darkness. There they stopped. It was at this plane tree that an ambush party was usually placed. The bright stars, that seemed to be running along the treetops while the soldiers were walking through the forest, now stood still, shining brightly between the bare branches of the trees. “A good job it’s dry,” said the non-commissioned oficer Panov, bringing down his long gun and bayonet with a clang from his shoulder, and placing it against the plane tree. The three soldiers did the same. “Sure enough, I’ve lost it!” crossly muttered Panov. “Must have left it behind, or I’ve dropped it on the way.” “What are you looking for?” asked one of the soldiers in a bright, cheerful voice. “The bowl of my pipe. Where the devil has it got to?” “Have you the stem?” asked the cheerful voice. “Here’s the stem.” “Then why not stick it straight into the ground?” “Not worth bothering!” “We’ll manage that in a minute.” It was forbidden to smoke while in ambush, but this ambush hardly deserved the name. It was rather an outpost to pre16 vent the mountaineers from bringing up a cannon unobserved and iring at the fort as they used to. Panov did not consider it necessary to forego the pleasure of smoking, and therefore accepted the cheerful soldier’s offer. The latter took a knife from his pocket and dug with it a hole in the ground. Having smoothed this round, he adjusted the pipe-stem to it, then illed the hole with tobacco and pressed it down; and the pipe was ready. A sulphur match lared and for a moment lit up the broad-cheeked face of the soldier who lay on his stomach. The air whistled in the stem, and Panov smelled the pleasant odor of burning tobacco. “Fixed it up?” said he, rising to his feet. “Why, of course!” “What a smart chap you are, Avdeyev!...As wise as a judge! Now then, lad.” Avdeyev rolled over on his side to make room for Panov, letting smoke escape from his mouth. Panov lay down prone, and, after wiping the mouthpiece with his sleeve, began to inhale. When they had had their smoke the soldiers began to talk. “They say the commander has had his ingers in the cashbox again,” remarked one of them in a lazy voice. “He lost at cards, you see.” “He’ll pay it back again,” said Panov. “Of course he will! He’s a good oficer,” assented Avdeyev. “Good! good!” gloomily repeated the man who had started the conversation. “In my opinion the company ought to speak to him. ‘If you’ve taken the money, tell us how much and when you’ll repay it.’ ” “That will be as the company decides,” said Panov, tearing himself away from the pipe. “Of course. ‘The community is a strong man,’ ” assented Avdeyev, quoting a proverb. “There will be oats to buy and boots to get towards spring. The money will be wanted, and what if he’s pocketed it?” insisted the dissatisied one. “I tell you it will be as the company wishes,” repeated Panov. “It’s not the irst time: he takes, and gives back.” In the Caucasus in those days each company chose men to manage its own commissariat. They received 6 rubles 50 kopeks 17 (14 euros) a month per man from the treasury, and catered for the company. They planted cabbages, made hay, had their own carts, and prided themselves on their well-fed horses. The company’s money was kept in a chest, of which the commander had the key; and it often happened that he borrowed from the chest. This had just happened again, and that was what the soldiers were talking about. The morose soldier, Niketin, wished to demand an account from the commander, while Panov and Avdeyev considered it unnecessary. After Panov, Niketin had a smoke; and then, spreading his cloak on the ground, sat down on it, leaning against the trunk of the plane tree. The soldiers were silent. Only far above their heads the crowns of the trees rustled in the wind. Suddenly, above this incessant low rustling, rose the howling whining weeping and chuckling of jackals. “Hear those accursed creatures—how they caterwaul!” “They’re laughing at you because your mug’s all on one side,” remarked the high voice of the other soldier, a Little Russian. All was silent again: only the wind swayed the branches, now revealing and now hiding the stars. “I say, Panov,” suddenly asked the cheerful Avdeyev, “Do you ever feel dull?” “Dull, why?” replied Panov reluctantly. “Well, I do feel dull...so dull sometimes that I don’t know what I might not be ready to do to myself.” “There now!” was all Panov replied. “That time when I drank all the money, it was from dullness. It took hold of me...took hold of me till I thinks to myself, ‘I’ll just get blind drunk!’ ” “But sometimes drinking makes it still worse.” “Yes, that’s happened to me too. But what is one to do with oneself?” “But what makes you feel so dull?” “What, me? … Why, it’s the longing for home.” “Is yours a wealthy home, then?” “No; we weren’t wealthy, but things went properly—we lived well.” And Avdeyev began to relate what he had already many times told Panov. “You see, I went as a soldier of my own free will, instead of 18 my brother,” he said. “He has children. They were ive in family, and I had only just married. Mother began begging me to go. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe they will remember what I’ve done.’ So I went to our proprietor…he was a good master, and he said, ‘You’re a ine fellow, go!’ So I went instead of my brother.” “Well, that was right,” said Panov. “And yet, will you believe me, Panov, if I now feel so dull, it’s chiely because of that? ‘Why did you go instead of your brother?’ I say. ‘He’s now living like a king over there, while I have to suffer here’; and the more I think the worse I feel.… Seems it’s just a piece of ill-luck!” Avdeyev was silent. “Perhaps we’d better have another smoke,” said he after a pause. “Well then, ix it up!” But the soldiers were not to have their smoke. Hardly had Avdeyev risen to ix the pipe-stem in its place when above the rustling of the trees they heard footsteps along the road. Panov took his gun, and pushed Niketin with his foot. Niketin rose and picked up his cloak. The third soldier, Bondarenko, rose also, and said,— “And I have just dreamt such a dream, mates…” “Sh!” said Avdeyev, and the soldiers held their breath, listening. The footsteps of men not shod in hard boots were heard approaching. Clearer and clearer through the darkness was heard a rustling of the fallen leaves and dry twigs. Then came the peculiar guttural tones of Chechen voices. The soldiers now not only heard, but saw two shadows passing through a clear space between the trees. One shadow was taller than the other. When these shadows had come in line with the soldiers, Panov, gun in hand, stepped out onto the road, followed by his comrades. “Who goes there?” cried he. “Me, friendly Chechen,” said the shorter one. This was Bata. “Gun, yok!...sword, yok!” (none, none) said he, pointing to himself. “Prince, want!” The taller one stood silent beside his comrade. He, too, was unarmed. “He means he’s a scout, and wants the colonel,” explained Panov to his comrades. 19 “Prince Vorontsov...much want! Big business!” said Bata. “All right, all right! We’ll take you to him,” said Panov. “I say, you’d better take them,” said he to Avdeyev, “you and Bondarenko; and when you’ve given them up to the oficer on duty come back again. Mind,” he added, “be careful to make them keep in front of you!” “And what of this?” said Avdeyev, moving his gun and bayonet as though stabbing someone. “I’d just give a dig, and let the steam out of him!” “What’ll he be worth when you’ve stuck him?” remarked Bondarenko. “Now, march!” When the steps of the two soldiers conducting the scouts could no longer be heard, Panov and Niketin returned to their post. “What the devil brings them here at night?” said Niketin. “Seems it’s necessary,” said Panov. “But it’s getting chilly,” he added, and, unrolling his cloak, he put it on and sat down by the tree. About two hours later Avdeyev and Bondarenko returned. “Well, have you handed them over?” “Yes. They’re not yet asleep at the colonel’s—they were taken straight in to him. And do you know, mates, those shaven-headed lads are ine?” continued Avdeyev. “Yes, really? What a talk I had with them!” “Of course you’d talk,” remarked Niketin disapprovingly. “Really, they’re just like Russians. One of them is married. ‘Molly,’ says I, ‘bar?’ ‘Bar,’ he says. Bondarenko, didn’t I say ‘bar?’ ‘Many bar?’ ‘A couple,’ says he. A couple! Such a good talk we had! Such nice fellows!” “Nice, indeed!” said Niketin. “If you met him alone he’d soon let the guts out of you.” “It will be getting light before long.” said Panov. “Yes, the stars are beginning to go out,” said Avdeyev, sitting down and making himself comfortable. And the soldiers were again silent. 20 Chapter III The windows of the barracks and of the soldiers’ houses had long been dark in the fort; but there was still light in the windows of the best house there. In it lived Prince Simon Mikhailovich Vorontsov, commander of the Kuren Regiment, an imperial aide-de-camp and son of the commander-in-chief. Vorontsov lived with his wife, Mary Vaselevna, a famous Petersburg beauty, and lived in this little Caucasian fort more luxuriously than anyone had ever lived there before. To Vorontsov, and especially to his wife, it seemed that they were not only living a very modest life, but one full of privations; while to the inhabitants of the place their luxury was surprising and extraordinary. Now at midnight, in the spacious drawing-room with its carpeted loor, its rich curtains drawn across the windows, at a card table lit by four candles, sat the hosts and their visitors, playing cards. One of the players was Vorontsov himself: a long-faced, fair-haired colonel, wearing the initials and gold cords of an aide-de-camp. His partner—a graduate of Petersburg University, whom the Princess Vorontsov had lately sent out as tutor to her little son (born of her irst marriage)—was a shaggy young man of gloomy appearance. Against them played two oficers: one a broad and red-faced man, Poltoratsky, a company commander, who had exchanged out of the guards; and the other, the regimental adjutant, a man with a cold expression on his handsome face, who sat very straight on his chair. The princess, Mary Vaselevna, the large-built large-eyed and black-browed beauty, sat beside Poltoratsky (her crinoline touching his legs) and looked over his cards. In her words, her looks, and her smile, in her perfume and in every movement of her body, there was something that reduced Poltoratsky to obliviousness of everything except a consciousness of her nearness; and he made blunder after blunder, trying his partner’s temper more and more. 21 “No … that’s too bad! You’ve again wasted an ace,” said the regimental Adjutant, lushing all over, as Poltoratsky threw out an ace. Poltoratsky uncomprehendingly—as though he had just awoke—turned his kindly, wide-set black eyes towards the dissatisied Adjutant. “Do forgive him!” said Mary Vaselevna, smiling. “There, you see? Didn’t I tell you so?” she went on, turning to Poltoratsky. “But that’s not at all what you said,” replied Poltoratsky, smiling. “Wasn’t it?” she replied, also smiling; and this answering smile excited and delighted Poltoratsky to such a degree that he blushed crimson, and seizing the cards began to shufle. “It isn’t your turn to deal,” said the Adjutant sternly, and, with his white ringed hand, he himself began to deal as though he only wished to get rid of the cards as quickly as possible. The Prince’s valet entered the drawing-room, and announced that the oficer on duty wanted the Prince. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” said the Prince, speaking Russian with an English accent. “Will you take my place, Marie?” “Do you all agree?” asked the Princess, rising quickly and lightly to her full height, rustling with her silks, and smiling the radiant smile of a happy woman. “I always agree to everything,” replied the Adjutant, very pleased that the Princess—who could not play at all—was now going to play against him. Poltoratsky only spread out his hands and smiled. The rubber was nearly inished when the Prince returned to the drawing-room. He came back animated and very pleased. “Do you know what I propose?” “What is it?” “Let us have some champagne.” “I am always ready for that,” said Poltoratsky. “Why not? We shall be delighted!” said the Adjutant. “Vasely! Bring some!” said the Prince. “What did they want you for?” asked Mary Vaselevna. “It was the oficer on duty, and another man.” “Who? What about?” asked Mary Vaselevna quickly. “I mustn’t say,” said Vorontsov, shrugging his shoulders. 22 “You mustn’t say!” repeated Mary Vaselevna. “We’ll see about that.” When the champagne was brought, each of the visitors drank a glass; and, having inished the game and settled the scores, they began to take their leave. “Is it your company that’s ordered to the forest tomorrow?” the Prince asked Poltoratsky as they said goodbye. “Yes, mine...why?” “Oh, then we’ll meet tomorrow,” said the Prince, slightly smiling. “Very pleased,” replied Poltoratsky, not quite understanding what Vorontsov was saying to him, and preoccupied only by the thought that he would in a minute be pressing Mary Vaselevna’s hand. Mary Vaselevna, according to her wont, not only irmly pressed his hand, but shook it vigorously; and again reminding him of his mistake in playing diamonds, she gave him what appeared to Poltoratsky to be a delightful affectionate and meaning smile. Poltoratsky went home in an ecstatic condition only to be understood by people like himself who, having grown up and been educated in society, meet a woman belonging to their own circle after months of isolated military life, and, moreover, a woman like the Princess Vorontsov. When he reached the little house in which he and his comrade lived he pushed the door, but it was locked. He knocked, but still the door was not opened. He felt vexed, and began banging the door with his foot and his sword. Then he heard a sound of footsteps, and Vovelo—a domestic serf belonging to Poltoratsky—undid the cabin-hook which fastened the door. “What do you mean by locking yourself in, blockhead?” “But how is it possible, sir...?” “You’re tipsy again! I’ll show you how ‘it is possible!’ ” and Poltoratsky was about to strike Vovelo, but changed his mind. “Well, go to the devil! … Light a candle.” “In a minute.” Vovelo was really tipsy. He had been drinking at the Name-Day party of the ordnance-sergeant. On returning home he began comparing his life with that of the latter, Ivan Petrovich. Ivan Petrovich had a salary, was married, and hoped in a 23 year’s time to get his discharge. Vovelo had been taken “up” when a boy; that is, he had been taken into his owner’s household service; and now he was already over forty, was not married, and lived a campaigning life with his harum-scarum young master. He was a good master, who seldom struck him; but what kind of a life was it? “He promised to free me when we return from the Caucasus, but where am I to go with my freedom?… It’s a dog’s life!” thought Vovelo; and he felt so sleepy that, afraid lest someone should come in and steal something, he fastened the hook of the door and fell asleep. § Poltoratsky entered the bedroom, which he shared with his comrade Tekhonof. “Well, have you lost?” asked Tekhonof, waking up. “As it happens, I’ve not. I’ve won seventeen rubles, and we drank a bottle of Cliquot!” “And you’ve looked at Mary Vaselevna?” “Yes, and I’ve looked at Mary Vaselevna,” repeated Poltoratsky. “It will soon be time to get up,” said Tekhonof. “We are to start at six.” “Vovelo!” shouted Poltoratsky, “see that you wake me up properly tomorrow at ive!” “How’s one to wake you, if you ight?” “I tell you you’re to wake me! Do you hear?” “All right.” Vovelo went out, taking Poltoratsky’s boots and clothes with him. Poltoratsky got into bed, and smiling, smoked a cigarette and put out his candle. In the dark he saw before him the smiling face of Mary Vaselevna. § The Vorontsovs did not go to bed at once. When the visitors had left, Mary Vaselevna went up to her husband, and standing in front of him, said severely,— “Eh bien! Vous allez me dire ce que c’est.” (“Well, now! You’re going to tell me what it’s all about...”) 24 “Mais, ma chère...” (“But, my dear...”) “Pas de ‘ma chère’! C’était un émissaire, n’est-ce pas?” (“Don’t ‘my dear’ me! It was an emissary, wasn’t it?”) “Quand même, je ne puis pas vous le dire.” (“Well, supposing it was, still I must not tell you.”) “Vous ne pouvez pas? Alors, c’est moi qui vais vous le dire!” (“You must not? Well, then, it’s I who will tell you...”) “Vous?” (“You?”) “It was Hadji Murad, wasn’t it?” said Mary Vaselevna, who had for some days past heard of the negotiations, and thought that Hadji Murad himself had been to see her husband. Vorontsov could not altogether deny this, but disappointed her by saying that it was not Hadji Murad himself but only an emissary to announce that Hadji Murad would come to meet him next day, at the spot where a wood-cutting expedition had been arranged. In the monotonous life of the fortress, the young Vorontsovs—both husband and wife—were glad of this occurrence; and when, after speaking of the pleasure the news would give his father, they went to bed, it was already past two o’clock. 25 Chapter IV After the three sleepless nights he had passed lying from the murids Shamil sent to capture him, Hadji Murad fell asleep as soon as Sado, having bid him good-night, had gone out of the sáklya. He slept fully dressed, with his head on his hand, his elbow sinking deep into the red down-cushions his host had arranged for him. At a little distance, by the wall, slept Eldar. He lay on his back, his strong young limbs stretched out so that his high chest with the black cartridge-pouches sewn into the front of his white Circassian coat was higher than his freshly-shaven blue-gleaming head, which had rolled off the pillow and was thrown back. His upper lip, on which a little soft down was just appearing, pouted like a child’s, now contracting and now expanding, as though he were sipping something. He, like Hadji Murad, slept with pistol and dagger in his belt. The sticks in the grate burnt low, and a nightlight in the niche in the wall gleamed faintly. In the middle of the night the loor of the guest-chamber creaked, and Hadji Murad immediately rose, putting his hand to his pistol. Sado entered treading softly on the earthen loor. “What is it?” asked Hadji Murad, as if he had not been asleep at all. “We must think,” replied Sado, squatting down in front of him. “A woman from her roof saw you arrive, and told her husband; and now the whole aoul knows. A neighbor has just been to tell my wife that the Elders have assembled in the mosque, and want to detain you.” “I must be off!” said Hadji Murad. “The horses are saddled,” said Sado, quickly leaving the sáklya. “Eldar!” whispered Hadji Murad; and Eldar, hearing his name, and above all his master’s voice, leapt to his feet, setting straight his cap. Hadji Murad donned his weapons and then his búrka. 26 Eldar did the same, and they both went silently out of the sáklya into the penthouse. The black-eyed boy brought their horses. Hearing the clatter of hoofs on the hard beaten road, someone stuck his head out of the door of a neighboring sáklya, and, clattering with his wooden shoes, and a man ran up the hill towards the mosque. There was no moon, but the stars shone brightly in the black sky, so that the outlines of the sáklya roofs could be seen in the darkness, and rising above the other buildings, the mosque with its minarets in the upper part of the village. From the mosque came a hum of voices. Hadji Murad, quickly seizing his gun, placed his foot in the narrow stirrup, and, silently and easily throwing his body across, swung himself onto the high cushion of the saddle. “May God reward you!” he said, addressing his host, while his right foot felt instinctively for the stirrup, and with his whip he lightly touched the lad who held his horse, as a sign that he should let go. The boy stepped aside; and the horse, as if it knew what it had to do, started at a brisk pace down the lane towards the principal street. Eldar rode behind him. Sado in his sheepskin followed almost running, swinging his arms, and crossing now to one side and now to the other of the narrow side-street. At the place where the streets met, irst one moving shadow and then another appeared in the road. “Stop...who’s that? Stop!” shouted a voice, and several men blocked the path. Instead of stopping, Hadji Murad drew his pistol from his belt, and increasing his speed rode straight at those who blocked the way. They separated, and Hadji Murad without looking round started down the road at a swift canter. Eldar followed him at a sharp trot. Two shots cracked behind them, and two bullets whistled past without hitting either Hadji Murad or Eldar. Hadji Murad continued riding at the same pace, but having gone some three hundred yards, he stopped his slightly panting horse, and listened. In front of him, lower down, gurgled rapidly running water. Behind him, in the aoul, cocks crowed, answering one another. Above these sounds he heard behind him the approaching tramp of horses, and the voices of several men. Hadji Murad touched his horse and rode on at an even pace. Those behind him galloped and soon overtook him. They were some twenty 27 mounted men, inhabitants of the aoul, who had decided to detain Hadji Murad, or at least to make a show of detaining him in order to justify themselves in Shamil’s eyes. When they came near enough to be seen in the darkness, Hadji Murad stopped, let go his bridle, and with an accustomed movement of his left hand unbuttoned the cover of his rile, which he drew forth with his right. Eldar did the same. “What do you want?” cried Hadji Murad. “Do you wish to take me!...Take me, then!” and he raised his rile. The men from the aoul stopped, and Hadji Murad, rile in hand, rode down into the ravine. The mounted men followed him, but did not draw any nearer. When Hadji Murad had crossed to the other side of the ravine, the men shouted to him that he should hear what they had to say. In reply he ired his rile and put his horse to a gallop. When he reined it in, his pursuers were no longer within hearing, and the crowing of the cocks could also no longer be heard; only the murmur of the water in the forest sounded more distinctly, and now and then came the cry of an owl. The black wall of the forest appeared quite close. It was in the forest that his murids awaited him. On reaching it Hadji Murad paused, and drawing much air into his lungs, he whistled and then listened silently. The next minute he was answered by a similar whistle from the forest. Hadji Murad turned from the road and entered it. When he had gone about a hundred paces, he saw among the trunks of the trees a bonire, and the shadows of some men sitting round it, and, half lit-up by the irelight, a hobbled horse which was saddled. Four men were seated by the ire. One of them rose quickly, and coming up to Hadji Murad took hold of his bridle and stirrup. This was Hadji Murad’s sworn brother, who managed his household affairs for him. “Put out the ire,” said Hadji Murad, dismounting. The men began scattering the pile, and trampling on the burning branches. “Has Bata been here?” asked Hadji Murad, moving towards a búrka that was spread on the ground. “Yes, he went away long ago, with Khan Mahoma.” “Which way did they go?” “That way,” answered Khanei, pointing in the opposite direction to that from which Hadji Murad had come. 28 “All right,” said Hadji Murad, and, unslinging his rile, he began to load it. “We must take care—I have been pursued,” said Hadji Murad to a man who was putting out the ire. This was Gamzalo, a Chechen. Gamzalo approached the búrka, took up a rile that lay on it wrapped in its cover, and without a word went to that side of the glade from which Hadji Murad had come. Eldar, when he had dismounted, took Hadji Murad’s horse; and having reined up both horses’ heads high, tied them to two trees. Then he shouldered his rile, as Gamzalo had done, and went to the other side of the glade. The bonire was extinguished, the forest no longer looked so black as before, and in the sky the stars shone, though but faintly. Lifting his eyes to the stars, and seeing that the Pleiades had already risen half-way up the sky, Hadji Murad calculated that it must be long past midnight, and that his nightly prayer was long overdue. He asked Khanei for a ewer (they always carried one in their packs), and, putting on his búrka, went to the water. Having taken off his shoes and performed his ablutions, Hadji Murad stepped onto the búrka with bare feet, and then squatted down on his calves, and having irst placed his ingers in his ears and closed his eyes, he turned to the south and recited the usual prayer. When he had inished he returned to the place where the saddle bags lay, and, sitting down on the búrka, he leaned his elbows on his knees and bowed his head and fell into deep thought. Hadji Murad always had great faith in his own fortune. When planning anything he felt in advance irmly convinced of success, and fate smiled on him. It was so, with a few rare exceptions, during the whole course of his stormy military life; and so he hoped it would be now. He pictured to himself how—with the army Vorontsov would place at his disposal— he would march against Shamil and take him prisoner, and revenge himself on him; and how the Russian Tsar would reward him, and he would again rule over not only Avaria, but also over the whole of Chechnya, which would submit to him. With these thoughts he fell asleep before he was aware of it. 29 He dreamt how he and his brave followers rushed at Shamil, with songs and with the cry, “Hadji Murad is coming!” and how they seized him and his wives, and he heard the wives crying and sobbing. He woke up. The song, Lya-il-allysha, and the cry “Hadji Murad is coming!” and the weeping of Shamil’s wives, was the howling weeping and laughter of jackals that awoke him. Hadji Murad lifted his head, glanced at the sky which seen between the trunks of the trees was already getting light in the east, and inquired after Khan Mahoma of a murid who sat at some distance from him. On hearing that Khan Mahoma had not yet returned, Hadji Murad again bowed his head and fell asleep at once. He was awakened by the merry voice of Khan Mahoma, returning from his mission with Bata. Khan Mahoma at once sat down beside Hadji Murad, and told him how the soldiers had met them and had led them to the Prince himself; and how pleased the Prince was, and how he promised to meet them in the morning, where the Russians would be felling trees beyond the Mitchék, in the Shalen glade. Bata interrupted his fellowenvoy to add details of his own. Hadji Murad asked particularly for the words with which Vorontsov had answered his offer to go over to the Russians; and Khan Mahoma and Bata replied with one voice that the Prince promised to receive Hadji Murad as a guest, and to act so that it should be well for him. Then Hadji Murad questioned them about the road, and when Khan Mahoma assured him that he knew the way well, and would conduct him straight to the spot, Hadji Murad took out some money and gave Bata the promised three rubles; and he ordered his men to take out of the saddle-bags his gold-ornamented weapons and his turban, and to clean themselves up so as to look well when they arrived among the Russians. While they cleaned their weapons, harness and horses, the stars faded away; it became quite light, and an early morning breeze sprang up. 30 Chapter V Early in the morning, while it was still dark, two companies, carrying axes and commanded by Poltoratsky, marched six miles beyond the Shahgirinsk Gate, and having thrown out a line of sharpshooters, set to work to fell trees as soon as the day broke. Towards eight o’clock the mist which had mingled with the perfumed smoke of the hissing and crackling damp green branches on the bonires began to rise, and the lumberjacks— who till then had not seen ive paces off, but had only heard one another—began to see both the bonires and the road through the forest, blocked with falled trees. The sun now appeared like a bright spot in the fog, and now again was hidden. In the glade, some way from the road, Poltoratsky, and his subaltern Tekhonof, two oficers of the 3rd Company, and Baron Freze, an ex-oficer of the Guards who had been reduced to the ranks for ighting in a duel, a fellow-student of Poltoratsky at the Cadet College, were sitting on drums. Bits of paper that had contained food, cigarette stumps, and empty bottles lay scattered round the drums. The oficers had had some vodka, and were now eating, and drinking dark beer. A drummer was uncorking their third bottle. Poltoratsky, although he had not had enough sleep, was in that peculiar state of elation and kindly careless gaiety which he always felt when he found himself among his soldiers and with his comrades, where there was a possibility of danger. The oficers were carrying on an animated conversation, the subject of which was the latest news: the death of General Sleptsov. None of them saw in this death that most important moment of a life—its termination and return to the source whence it sprang—but they only saw in it the valor of a gallant oficer, who rushed at the mountaineers, sword in hand, and desperately hacked them. Though all of them—and especially those who had been in action—knew and could not help knowing that never in those days in the Caucasus, nor in fact anywhere, nor at any time, 31 did such hand-to-hand hacking as is always imagined and described take place (or if hacking with swords and bayonets ever does take place, it is only those who are running away that get hacked), that iction of hand-to-hand ighting endowed them with the calm pride and cheerfulness with which they sat on drums (some with a jaunty air, others, however, in a very modest pose), drank and joked without troubling about death, which might overtake them at any moment as it had overtaken Sleptsov. And, as if to conirm their expectations, in the midst of their talk, they heard to the left of the road the pleasant stirring sound of a rile-shot; and a bullet, merrily whistling somewhere in the misty air, lew past and crashed into a tree. “Hullo!” exclaimed Poltoratsky in a merry voice; “Why, that’s at our line.…There now, Kostya,” and he turned to Freze, “Now’s your chance. Go back to the company. I will lead the whole company to support the cordon, and we’ll arrange a battle that will be simply delightful … and then we’ll make a report.” Freze jumped to his feet and went at a quick pace towards the smoke-enveloped spot where he had left his company. Poltoratsky’s little Kabarda dapple-bay was brought to him, and he mounted and drew up his company, and led it in the direction from which the shots were ired. The outposts stood on the skirts of the forest, in front of the bare descending slope of a ravine. The wind was blowing in the direction of the forest, and not only was it possible to see the slope of the ravine, but the opposite side of it was also distinctly visible. When Poltoratsky rode up to the line, the sun came out from behind the mist; and on the other side of the ravine, by the outskirts of a young forest, at a distance of a quarter of a mile, a few horsemen became visible. These were the Chechens who had pursued Hadji Murad and wanted to see him meet the Russians. One of them ired at the line. Several soldiers ired back. The Chechens retreated, and the iring ceased. But when Poltoratsky and his company came up, he nevertheless gave orders to ire; and scarcely had the word been passed, when along the whole line of sharpshooters started the incessant, merry, stirring rattle of our riles, accompanied by pretty dissolving cloudlets of smoke. The soldiers, pleased to have some distraction, hastened to load, and ired shot after 32 shot. The Chechens evidently caught the feeling of excitement, and leaping forward one after another, ired a few shots at our men. One of these shots wounded a soldier. It was that same Avdeyev who had lain in ambush the night before. When his comrades approached him he was lying prone, holding his wounded stomach with both hands, and rocking himself with a rhythmic motion, moaned softly. He belonged to Poltoratsky’s company, and Poltoratsky, seeing a group of soldiers collected, rode up to them. “What is it, lad? Been hit?” said Poltoratsky. “Where?” Avdeyev did not answer. “I was just going to load, your honor, when I heard a click,” said a soldier who had been with Avdeyev, “and I look, and see he’s dropped his gun.” “Tut, tut, tut!” Poltoratsky clicked his tongue. “Does it hurt much, Avdeyev?” “It doesn’t hurt, but it stops me walking. A drop of vodka now, your honor!” Some vodka (or, rather, the spirits drunk by the soldiers in the Caucasus) was found, and Panov, severely frowning, brought Avdeyev a can-lid full. Avdeyev tried to drink it, but immediately handed back the lid. “My soul turns against it,” he said. “Drink it yourself.” Panov drank up the spirit. Avdeyev raised himself, but sank back at once. They spread out a cloak and laid him on it. “Your honor, the colonel is coming,” said the sergeant-major to Poltoratsky. “All right. Then will you see to him?” said Poltoratsky; and, lourishing his whip, he rode at a fast trot to meet Vorontsov. Vorontsov was riding his thoroughbred English chestnut gelding, and was accompanied by the adjutant, a Cossack, and a Chechen interpreter. “What’s happening here?” asked Vorontsov. “Why, a skirmishing party attacked our advanced line,” Poltoratsky answered. “Come, come; you’ve arranged the whole thing yourself!” “Oh no, Prince, not I,” said Poltoratsky with a smile; “they pushed forward of their own accord.” 33 “I hear a soldier has been wounded?” “Yes, it’s a great pity. He’s a good soldier.” “Seriously?” “Seriously, I believe … in the stomach.” “And do you know where I am going?” Vorontsov asked. “I don’t.” “Can’t you guess?” “No.” “Hadji Murad has surrendered, and we are now going to meet him.” “You don’t mean to say so!” “His envoy came to me yesterday,” said Vorontsov, with dificulty repressing a smile of joy. “He will be waiting for me at the Shalen glade in a few minutes. Place sharpshooters as far as the glade, and then come and join me.” “I understand,” said Poltoratsky, lifting his hand to his cap, and rode back to his company. He led the sharpshooters to the right himself, and ordered the sergeant-major to do the same on the left side. The wounded Avdeyev had meanwhile been taken back to the fort by some of the soldiers. On his way back to rejoin Vorontsov, Poltoratsky noticed behind him several horsemen who were overtaking him. In front, on a white-maned horse, rode a man of imposing appearance. He wore a turban, and carried weapons with gold ornaments. This man was Hadji Murad. He approached Poltoratsky and said something to him in Tartar. Raising his eyebrows, Poltoratsky made a gesture with his arms to show that he did not understand, and smiled. Hadji Murad gave him smile for smile, and that smile struck Poltoratsky by its childlike kindliness. Poltoratsky had never expected to see the terrible mountain chief look like that. He expected to see a morose, hard-featured man; and here was a vivacious person, whose smile was so kindly that Poltoratsky felt as if he were an old acquaintance. He had but one peculiarity: his eyes, set wide apart, gazed from under their black brows attentively, penetratingly and calmly into the eyes of others. Hadji Murad’s suite consisted of ive men. Among them was Khan Mahoma, who had been to see Prince Vorontsov that night. He was a rosy, round-faced fellow, with black lashless 34 eyes and a beaming expression, full of the joy of life. Then there was the Avar Khanei, a thick-set, hairy man, whose eyebrows were joined. He was in charge of all Hadji Murad’s property, and led a stud-bred horse which carried tightly packed saddlebags. Two men of the suite were particularly striking. The irst was a Lesghian from Daghestan—a youth, broad-shouldered, but with a waist as slim as a woman’s, a brown beard just appearing on his face, and beautiful ram-like eyes. This was Eldar. The other, Gamzalo, was a Chechen, blind in one eye, without eyebrows or eyelashes, with a short red beard, and a scar across his nose and face. Poltoratsky pointed out Vorontsov to Hadji Murad, as he had just appeared on the road. Hadji Murad rode to meet him, and, putting his right hand on his heart, said something in Tartar, and stopped. The Chechen interpreter translated. “He says, ‘I surrender myself to the will of the Russian Tsar. I wish to serve him,’ he says. ‘I wished to so do long ago, but Shamil would not let me.’ ” Having heard what the interpreter said, Vorontsov stretched out his hand in its wash-leather glove to Hadji Murad. Hadji Murad looked at it hestitatingly for a moment, and then pressed it irmly, again saying something, and looking irst at the interpreter and then at Vorontsov. “He says he did not wish to surrender to anyone but you, as you are the son of the Sirdar, and he respects you much.” Vorontsov nodded to express his thanks. Hadji Murad again said something, pointing to his suite. “He says that these men, his henchmen, will serve the Russians as well as he.” Vorontsov turned towards them, and nodded to them too. The merry, black-eyed, lashless Chechen, Khan Mahoma, also nodded, and said something which was probably amusing, for the hairy Avar drew his lips into a smile, showing his ivory-white teeth. But the red-haired Gamzalo’s one red eye just glanced at Vorontsov and then was again ixed on the ears of his horse. § 35 When Vorontsov and Hadji Murad with their retinues rode back to the fort, the soldiers, released from the lines, gathered in groups and made their own comments. “What a number of souls the damned fellow has destroyed! And now see what a fuss they will make of him!” “Naturally. He was Shamil’s right hand, and now—no fear!” “Still there’s no denying it! he’s a ine fellow—a regular dzhigít!” (horse warrior) “And the red one? The red one squints at you like a beast!” “Ugh! He must be a hound!” They had all specially noticed the red one. Where the treefelling was going on, the soldiers nearest to the road ran out to look. Their oficer shouted to them, but Vorontsov stopped him. “Let them have a look at their old friend.” “You know who that is?” asked Vorontsov, turning to the nearest soldier, and speaking the words slowly with his English accent. “No, your Excellency.” “Hadji Murad … Heard of him?” “How could we help it, your Excellency? We’ve beaten him many a time!” “Yes, and we’ve had it hot from him too.” “Yes, that’s right, your Excellency,” answered the soldier, pleased to be talking with his chief. Hadji Murad understood that they were speaking about him, and smiled brightly with his eyes. Vorontsov, in the most cheerful mood, returned to the fort. 36 Chapter VI Young Vorontsov was much pleased that it was he, and not anyone else, who had succeeded in winning over and receiving Hadji Murad—next to Shamil, Russia’s chief and most active enemy. There was just one unpleasant thing about it: General Meller-Zakomelsky was in command of the army in Vozdvezhensk, and the whole affair ought to have been carried out through him; and as Vorontsov had done everything himself without reporting it, there might be some unpleasantness; and this thought somewhat interfered with his satisfaction. On reaching his house he entrusted Hadji Murad’s henchmen to the regimental adjutant, and himself showed Hadji Murad into the house. Princess Mary Vaselevna, elegantly dressed and smiling, and her little son, a handsome curly-headed, six-year-old boy, met Hadji Murad in the drawing room. The latter placed his hands on his heart, and through the interpreter—who had entered with him—said with solemnity that he regarded himself as the Prince’s kunák, since the Prince had brought him into his own house; and that a kunák’s whole family was as sacred as the kunák himself. Hadji Murad’s appearance and manners pleased Mary Vaselevna, and the fact that he lushed when she held out her large white hand to him, inclined her still more in his favor. She invited him to sit down; and having asked him whether he drank coffee, had some served up. He, however, declined it when it came. He understood a little Russian, but could not speak it. When something was said which he could not understand he smiled, and his smile pleased Mary Vaselevna just as it had pleased Poltoratsky. The curly-headed, keen-eyed little boy (whom his mother called Bulka) standing beside her did not take his eyes off Hadji Murad, whom he had always heard spoken of as a great warrior. Leaving Hadji Murad with his wife, Vorontsov went to his ofice to do what was necessary about reporting the fact of 37 Hadji Murad’s having come over to the Russians. When he had written a report to the general in command of the left lank— General Kozlovsky—at Grozny, and a letter to his father, Vorontsov hurried home, afraid that his wife might be vexed with him for forcing on her this terrible stranger, who had to be treated in such a way that he should not take offense, and yet not too kindly. But his fears were needless. Hadji Murad was sitting in an armchair with little Bulka, Vorontsov’s stepson, on his knee; and with bent head was listening attentively to the interpreter, who was translating to him the words of the laughing Mary Vaselevna. Mary Vaselevna was telling him that if every time a kunák admired anything of his he made him a present of it, he would soon have to go about like Adam.… When the Prince entered, Hadji Murad rose at once, and surprising and offending Bulka by putting him off his knee, changed the playful expression of his face to a stern and serious one; and he only sat down again when Vorontsov had himself taken a seat. Continuing the conversation, he answered Mary Vaselevna by telling her that it was a law among his people that anything your kunák admired must be presented to him. “Your son, kunák!” he said in Russian, patting the curly head of the boy, who had again climbed on his knee. “He is delightful, your brigand!” said Mary Vaselevna, to her husband in French. “Bulka has been admiring his dagger, and he has given it to him.” Bulka showed the dagger to his father. “C’est un objet de prix!” (“It is a valuable piece.”) she added. “Il faudra trouver l’occasion de lui faire cadeau,” (“Then, we must ind an opportunity to make him a present.”) said Vorontsov. Hadji Murad, his eyes turned down, sat stroking the boy’s curly head and saying: “Dzhigít, dzhigít!” “A beautiful, beautiful dagger,” said Vorontsov, half drawing out the sharpened blade, which had a ridge down the centre. “I thank you!” “Ask him what I can do for him,” he said to the interpreter. The interpreter translated, and Hadji Muradat once replied that he wanted nothing, but that he begged to be taken to a 38 place where he could say his prayers. Vorontsov called his valet, and told him to do what Hadji Murad desired. As soon as Hadji Murad was alone in the room allotted to him his face altered. The pleased expression, now kindly and now stately, vanished, and a look of anxiety showed itself. Vorontsov had received him far better than Hadji Murad had expected. But the better the reception the less did Hadji Murad trust Vorontsov and his oficers. He feared everything: that he might be seized, chained, and sent to Siberia, or simply killed; and therefore he was on his guard. He asked Eldar, when the latter entered his room, where his murids had been put, and whether their arms had been taken from them, and where the horses were. Eldar reported that the horses were in the Prince’s stables; that the men had been placed in a barn; that they retained their arms, and that the interpreter was giving them food and tea. Hadji Murad shook his head in doubt; and after undressing he said his prayers, and told Eldar to bring him his silver dagger. He then dressed, and, having fastened his belt, sat down with his legs up on the divan to await what might befall him. At four in the afternoon the interpreter came to call him to dine with the Prince. At dinner he hardly ate anything, except some pilau, to which he helped himself from the very part of the dish from which Mary Vaselevna had helped herself. “He is afraid we shall poison him,” Mary Vaselevna remarked to her husband. “He has helped himself from the place where I took my helping.” Then, instantly turning to Hadji Murad, she asked him through the interpreter when he would pray again. Hadji Murad lifted ive ingers and pointed to the sun. “Then it will soon be time,” and Vorontsov drew out his watch and pressed a spring. The watch struck four and one quarter. This evidently surprised Hadji Murad, and he asked to hear it again, and to be allowed to look at the watch. “Voilà l’occasion! Donnez lui la montre,” (“Here is our opportunity! Give him the watch.”) said the Princess to her husband. Vorontsov at once offered the watch to Hadji Murad. The latter placed his hand on his breast and took the watch. 39 Several times he touched the spring, listened, and nodded his head approvingly. After dinner, Meller-Zakomelsky’s aide-de-camp was announced. The aide-de-camp informed the Prince that the General, having heard of Hadji Murad’s arrival, was highly displeased that this had not been reported to him, and required Hadji Murad to be brought to him without delay. Vorontsov replied that the General’s command should be obeyed; and through the interpreter he informed Hadji Murad of these orders and asked him to go to Meller with him. When Mary Vaselevna heard what the aide-de-camp had come about, she at once understood that unpleasantness might arise between her husband and the General, and decided, in spite of all her husband’s attempts to dissuade her, to go with him and Hadji Murad. “Vous feriez bien mieux de rester—c’est mon affaire, non pas la vôtre.…” (“You would do much better to remain at home … this is my business, and not yours.”) “Vous ne pouvez pas m’empêcher d’aller voir madame la générale!” (“You cannot prevent my going to see the general’s wife!”) “You could go some other time.” “But I wish to go now!” There was no help for it, so Vorontsov agreed; and they all three went. When they entered, Meller with somber politeness conducted Mary Vaselevna to his wife, and told his aide-de-camp to show Hadji Murad into the waiting-room, and not let him out till further orders. “Please...” he said to Vorontsov, opening the door of his study and letting the Prince enter before him. Having entered the study, he stopped in front of the Prince and said, without offering him a seat,— “I am in command here, and therefore all negotiations with the enemy must be carried on through me! Why did you not report to me the fact of Hadji Murad’s having come over?” “An emissary came to me and announced Hadji Murad’s wish to capitulate only to me,” replied Vorontsov, growing pale with excitement, expecting some rude expression from the 40 angry general, and at the same time becoming infected with his anger. “I ask you why I was not informed?” “I intended to do so, Baron, but...” “You are not to address me as ‘Baron,’ but as ‘Your Excellency’!” And here the Baron’s pent-up irritation suddenly broke out, and he uttered all that had long been boiling in his soul. “I have not served my sovereign twenty-seven years in order that men who began their service yesterday, relying on family connections, should give orders under my very nose about matters that do not concern them!” “Your Excellency, I request you will not say things that are incorrect!” interrupted Vorontsov. “I am saying what is correct, and I won’t allow...” said the General, still more irritably. But at that moment Mary Vaselevna entered, rustling with her skirts, and followed by a little modest-looking lady, MellerZakomelsky’s wife. “Come, come, Baron! Simon did not wish to displease you,” began Mary Vaselevna. “I am not speaking about that, Princess...” “Well, you know, let’s leave all that!... You know, ‘A bad peace is better than a good quarrel!’ … Oh dear, what am I saying?” and she laughed. The angry General capitulated to the enchanting laugh of the beauty. A smile hovered under his mustache. “I confess I was wrong,” said Vorontsov, “but—“ “Well, and I too got rather carried away,” said Meller, and held out his hand to the Prince. Peace was re-established, and it was decided to leave Hadji Murad for the present at Meller’s, and then to send him to the commander of the left lank. Hadji Murad sat in the next room, and though he did not understand what was said, he understood what it was necessary for him to understand—namely, that they were quarrelling about him, and that his desertion of Shamil was a matter of immense importance to the Russians, and that therefore not only would they not exile him or kill him, but that he would be able to demand much from them. He also understood that though Meller-Zakomelsky was the commanding oficer, he 41 had not as much inluence as his subordinate Vorontsov; and that Vorontsov was important and Meller-Zakomelsky unimportant; and therefore, when Meller-Zakomelsky sent for him and began to question him, Hadji Murad bore himself proudly and ceremoniously, saying that he had come from the mountains to serve the White Tsar, and would give account only to his Sirdar, meaning the commander-in-chief, Prince Vorontsov, in Tilis (Tbilisi). 42 Chapter VII The wounded Avdeyev was taken to the hospital—a small wooden building roofed with boards, at the entrance of the fort—and was placed on one of the empty beds in the common ward. There were four patients in the ward: one, ill with typhus and in high fever, another, pale, with dark shadows under his eyes, who had ague and was just expecting another attack, and yawned continually; and two more who had been wounded in a raid three weeks before: one in the hand—he was up—and the other in the shoulder; the latter was sitting on a bed. All of them, except the typhus patient, surrounded and questioned the newcomer, and those who had brought him. “Sometimes they ire as if it were peas they were spilling over you, and nothing happens … and this time only about ive shots were ired,” related one of the bearers. “Each gets what fate sends!” “Oh!” groaned Avdeyev loudly, trying to master his pain when they began to place him on the bed; but he stopped groaning when he was on it, and only frowned and moved his feet continually. He held his hands over his wound and looked ixedly before him. The doctor came, and gave orders to turn the wounded man over, to see whether the bullet had passed out behind. “What’s this?” the doctor asked, pointing to the large white scars that crossed one another on the patient’s back and loins. “That was done long ago, your honor!” replied Avdeyev, with a groan. They were the scars left by the logging Avdeyev had received for the money he drank. Avdeyev was again turned over, and the doctor long probed in his stomach, and found the bullet, but failed to extract it. He put a dressing on the wound, and having stuck plaster over it went away. During the whole time the doctor was probing and bandaging the wound Avdeyev lay with clenched teeth and closed eyes, but when the doctor had gone he opened them and 43 looked around as though amazed. His eyes were turned to the other patients and to the surgeon’s orderly, but he seemed to see not them, but something else that surprised him. His friends, Panov and Serogin, came in; but Avdeyev continued to lie in the same position, looking before him with surprise. It was long before he recognized his comrades, though his eyes gazed straight at them. “I say, Peter, have you no message to send home?” said Panov. Avdeyev did not answer, though he was looking Panov in the face. “I say, haven’t you any orders to send home?” again repeated Panov, touching Avdeyev’s cold large-boned hand. Avdeyev seemed to come to. “Ah! … Panov!” “Yes, here … I’ve come! Have you nothing for home? Serogin would write a letter.” “Serogin…” said Avdeyev, moving his eyes with dificulty towards Serogin, “will you write? … Well then, write so: ‘Your son,’ say, ‘Peter, has given orders that you should live long. He envied his brother’ … I told you about that today … ‘and now he is himself glad. Don’t worry him … Let him live. God grant it him. I am glad!’ Write that.” Having said this he was long silent, with his eyes ixed on Panov. “And did you ind your pipe?” he suddenly asked. Panov did not reply. “Your pipe … your pipe! I mean, have you found it?” Avdeyev repeated. “It was in my bag.” “That’s right! … Well, and now give me a candle … I am going to die,” said Avdeyev. Just then Poltoratsky came in to inquire after his soldier. “How goes it, my lad! Badly?” said he. Avdeyev closed his eyes and shook his head negatively. His broad-cheeked face was pale and stern. He did not reply, but again said to Panov— “Bring a candle … I am going to die.” A wax taper was placed in his hand, but his ingers would not bend, so it was placed between them, and was held up for him. 44 Poltoratsky went away, and ive minutes later the orderly put his ear to Avdeyev’s heart and said that all was over. Avdeyev’s death was described in the following manner in the report sent to Tilis,— “23rd Nov.—Two companies of the Kuren regiment advanced from the fort on a tree-cutting expedition. At mid-day a considerable number of mountaineers suddenly attacked the woodcutters. The sharpshooters began to retreat, but the 2nd Company charged with the bayonet and overthrew the mountaineers. In this affair two privates were slightly wounded and one killed. The mountaineers lost about a hundred men killed and wounded.” 45 Chapter VIII On the day Peter Avdeyev died in the hospital at Vozdvizhensk, his old father, the wife of the brother in whose place he had enlisted, and that brother’s daughter—who was already approaching womanhood and almost of age to get married—were threshing oats on the hard-frozen threshing loor. The day before, there had been a heavy fall of snow followed towards morning by a severe frost. The old man woke when the cocks were crowing for the third time, and seeing the bright moonlight through the frozen window-panes, got down from the oven-loft, put on his boots, his sheepskin coat and cap, and went out to the threshing loor. Having worked there for a couple of hours, he returned to the hut and awoke his son and the women. When the younger woman and the girl came to the threshing-loor they found it ready swept, a wooden shovel sticking in the dry white snow, and beside it birch brooms with the twigs upwards, and two rows of oat-sheaves laid ears to ears in a long line the whole length of the clean threshing-loor. They chose their lails and started threshing, keeping time with their triple blows. The old man struck powerfully with his heavy lail, breaking the straw; the girl struck the ears from above with measured blows; and his daughter-in-law turned the oats over with her lail. The moon had set, dawn was breaking, and they were inishing the line of sheaves when Akim, the eldest son, in his sheepskin and cap, joined the threshers. “What are you lazing about for?” shouted his father to him, pausing in his work and leaning on his lail. “The horses had to be seen to.” “’Horses seen to!’” the father repeated, mimicking him. “The old woman will look after them … Take your lail! You’re getting too fat, you drunkard!” “Have you been standing me treat?” muttered the son. “What?” said the old man, frowning sternly and missing a stroke. 46 The son silently took a lail, and they began threshing with four lails. “Trak, tapatam...trak, tapatam...trak...” came down the old man’s heavy lail after the three others. “Why, you’ve got a nape like a goodly gentleman! … Look here, my trousers have hardly anything to hand on!” said the old man, omitting his stroke and only swinging his lail in the air, so as not to get out of time. They had inished the row, and the women began removing the straw with rakes. “Peter was a fool to go in your stead. They’d have knocked the nonsense out of you in the army; and he was worth ive of such as you at home!” “That’s enough, father,” said the daughter-in-law, as she threw aside the binders that had come off the sheaves. “Yes, feed the six of you, and get no work out of a single one! Peter used to work for two. He was not like ...” Along the trodden path from the house came the old man’s wife, the frozen snow creaking under the new bark shoes she wore over her tightly wound woolen leg-bands. The men were shovelling the unwinnowed grain into heaps, the woman and the girl sweeping up what remained. “The Elder has been here, and orders everybody to go and work for the master, carting bricks,” said the old woman. “I’ve got breakfast ready … Come along, won’t you?” “All right … Harness the roan and go,” said the old man to Akem, “and you’d better look out that you don’t get me into trouble, as you did the other day! … One can’t help regretting Peter!” “When he was at home you used to scold him,” retorted Akem. “Now he’s away you keep nagging at me.” “That shows you deserve it,” said his mother in the same angry tones. “You’ll never be Peter’s equal.” “Well, all right,” said the son. “ ‘All right,’ indeed! You’ve drunk the meal, and now you say ‘all right!’ ” “Let bygones be bygones!” said the daughter-in-law. The disagreements between father and son had begun long ago—almost from the time Peter went as a soldier. Even then the old man felt that he had parted with an eagle for a cuckoo. 47 It is true that according to right—as the old man understood it—a childless man had to go in place of a family man. Akem had four children, and Peter had none; but Peter was a worker like his father, skillful, observant, strong, enduring, and above all, industrious. He was always at work. If he happened to pass by where people were working he lent a helping hand, as his father would have done, and took a turn or two with the scythe, or loaded a cart, or felled a tree, or chopped some wood. The old man regretted his going away, but there was no help for it. Conscription in those days was like death. A soldier was a severed branch; and to think about him at home was to tear at one’s heart uselessly. Only occasionally, to prick his elder son, the father mentioned him, as he had done that day. But his mother often thought of her younger son, and she had long—for more than a year now—been asking her husband to send Peter a little money, to which the old man made no reply. The Kurenkovs were a well-to-do family, and the old man had some savings hidden away; but he would on no account have consented to touch what he had laid by. Now, however, his old woman, having heard him mention their younger son, made up her mind again to ask him to send him at least a ruble after selling the oats. This she did. As soon as the young people had gone to work for the proprietor, and the old folks were left alone together, she persuaded him to send Peter a ruble out of the oats-money. So when ninety-six bushels of the winnowed oats had been packed onto three sledges, lined with sacking carefully pinned together at the top with wooden skewers, she gave her old man a letter written at her dictation by the church clerk; and the old man promised when he got to town to enclose a ruble, and send it off to the right address. The old man, dressed in a new sheepskin with a homespun cloak over it, his legs wrapped round with warm white woollen leg-bands, took the letter, placed it in his wallet, said a prayer, got into the front sledge, and drove to town. His grandson drove in the last sledge. When he reached the town the old man asked the innkeeper to read the letter to him, and listened to it attentively and approvingly. In her letter Peter’s mother irst sent him her blessing, then greetings from everybody, and the news of his godfather’s 48 death; and at the end she added that Aksenya (Peter’s wife) had not wished to stay with them, but had gone into service, where they heard she was living well and honestly. Then came a reference to that present of a ruble; and inally, in her own words, what the old woman, with tears in her eyes and yielding to her sorrow, had dictated and the church clerk had taken down exactly, word for word:— “One thing more, my darling child, my sweet dove, my own Peterkin! I have wept my eyes out lamenting for you, you light of my eyes. To whom have you left me?...” At this point the old woman had sobbed and wept, and said: “That will do!” So the words stood in the letter; but it was not fated that Peter should receive the news of his wife’s having left home, nor the present of the ruble, nor his mother’s last words. The letter with the money in it came back with the announcement that Peter had been killed in the war, defending his Tsar, his Fatherland, and the Orthodox Faith. That is how the army clerk expressed it. The old woman, when this news reached her, wept for as long as she could spare time, and then set to work again. The very next Sunday she went to church, and had a requiem chanted, and Peter’s name entered among those for whose souls prayers were to be said; and she distributed bits of holy bread to all the good people, in memory of Peter the servant of God. Aksenya, the soldier’s widow, also lamented loudly when she heard of her beloved husband’s death, with whom she had lived but one short year. She regretted her husband, and her own ruined life; and in her lamentations mentioned Peter’s brown locks and his love, and the sadness of her life with her little orphaned Vanka, and bitterly reproached Peter for having had pity on his brother, but none on her—obliged to wander among strangers! But in the depth of her soul Aksenya was glad of her husband’s death. She was pregnant by the shopman in whose service she was living; and no one would now have a right to scold her, and the shopman could marry her as, when he was persuading her to yield, he had said he would. 49 Chapter IX Michael Semyenovich Vorontsov, as the son of the Russian ambassador, had been educated in England, and possessed a European education quite exceptional among the higher Russian oficials of his day. He was ambitious, gentle, and kind in his manner with inferiors, and a inished courtier with superiors. He did not understand life without power and submission. He had obtained all the highest ranks and decorations, and was looked upon as a clever commander, and even as the conqueror of Napoleon at Krasnoye. In 1852 he was over seventy, but was still quite fresh, moved briskly, and above all was in full possession of a facile, reined and agreeable intellect, which he used to maintain his power and to strengthen and spread his popularity. He possessed large means—his own and his wife’s (née Countess Branetsky)—and received an enormous salary as viceroy; and he spent a great part of his means on building a palace and laying out a garden on the south coast of the Crimea. On the evening of 4th December 1852 a courier’s troika drew up before his palace in Tilis. A tired oficer, black with dust, whom General Kozlovsky had sent with the news of Hadji Murad’s surrender to the Russians, stretched the stiffened muscles of his legs, as he moved past the sentinel, and entered the wide porch. It was six o’clock, and Vorontsov was just going in to dinner, when he was informed of the arrival of the courier. Vorontsov received him at once, and was therefore a few minutes late for dinner. When he entered the drawing-room, the thirty persons invited to dine, sitting with the Princess Elizabeth Ksaverevna Vorontsov, or standing in groups by the windows, turned their faces towards him. Vorontsov was dressed in his usual black military coat, with shoulder-straps but no epaulets, and wore the White Cross of the Order of St. George at his neck. His clean-shaven, foxlike face smiled pleasantly as, screwing up his eyes, he surveyed the assembly. Entering with quick, 50 soft steps he apologized to the ladies for being late, greeted the men, and approaching the Princess Manana Orbelyani—a tall, ine, handsome woman of Oriental type about forty-ive years of age—he offered her his arm to take her in to dinner. The Princess Elizabeth Ksaverevna Vorontsov herself gave her arm to a red-haired general with bristly mustaches, who was visiting Tilis. A Georgian Prince offered his arm to the Princess Vorontsov’s friend, the Countess Choiseuil; Dr. Andreyevsky, the aide-de-camp, and others, with ladies or without, followed these irst couples. Footmen in livery and knee-breeches drew back and replaced the guests’ chairs as they sat down, while the major-domo ceremoniously ladled out steaming soup from a silver tureen. Vorontsov took his place in the center of one side of the long table, and his wife sat opposite, with the General on her right. On the Prince’s right sat his lady, the beautiful Orbelyani; and on his left was a graceful, dark, red-cheeked Georgian woman, glittering with jewels and incessantly smiling. “Excellentes, chère amie!” (“Excellent, my dear!” ) replied Vorontsov to his wife’s inquiry about what news the courier had brought him. “Simon a eu de la chance!” (“Simon has had good fortune.”) And he began to tell aloud, so that everyone could hear, the striking news (for him alone not quite unexpected, because negotiations had long been going on) that the bravest and most famous of Shamil’s oficers, Hadji Murad, had come over to the Russians, and would in a day or two be brought to Tilis. Everybody—even the young aides-de-camp and oficials who sat at the far ends of the table, and who had been quietly laughing at something among themselves—became silent and listened. “And you, General, have you ever met this Hadji Murad?” asked the Princess of her neighbor, the carroty General with the bristly mustaches, when the Prince had inished speaking. “More than once, Princess.” And the General went on to tell how Hadji Murad, after the mountaineers had captured Gergebel in 1843, had fallen upon General Pahlen’s detachment and killed Colonel Zolotukhin almost before their very eyes. Vorontsov listened to the General and smiled amiably, 51 evidently pleased that the latter had joined in the conversation. But suddenly Vorontsov’s face assumed an absent-minded and depressed expression. The General, having started talking, had begun to tell of his second encounter with Hadji Murad. “Why, it was he, if your Excellency will please remember,” said the General, “who arranged the ambush that attacked the rescue party in the ‘Biscuit’ expedition.” “Where?” asked Vorontsov, screwing up his eyes. What the brave General spoke of as the “ rescue,’” was the affair in the unfortunate Dargo campaign in which a whole detachment, including Prince Vorontsov who commanded it, would certainly have perished had it not been rescued by the arrival of fresh troops. Everyone knew that the whole Dargo campaign under Vorontsov’s command—in which the Russians lost many killed and wounded and several cannon—had been a shameful affair; and therefore, if anyone mentioned it in Vorontsov’s presence they only did so in the aspect in which Vorontsov had reported it to the Tsar: as a brilliant achievement of the Russian army. But the word “rescue” plainly indicated that it was not a brilliant victory, but a blunder costing many lives. Everybody understood this, and some pretended not to notice the meaning of the General’s words, others nervously waited to see what would follow, while a few exchanged glances and smiled. Only the carroty General with the bristly mustaches noticed nothing, and, carried away by his narrative, quietly replied,— “At the rescue, your Excellency.” Having started on his favorite theme the General recounted circumstantially how Hadji Murad had so cleverly cut the detachment in two, that if the rescue party had not arrived (he seemed to be particularly fond of repeating the word “rescue”) not a man in the division would have escaped, because… The General did not inish his story, for Manana Orbelyani, having understood what was happening, interrupted him by asking if he had found comfortable quarters in Tilis. The General, surprised, glanced at everybody all round, and saw his aides-decamp from the end of the table looking ixedly and signiicantly at him, and suddenly he understood! Without replying to the Princess’s question, he frowned, became silent, and began 52 hurriedly eating, without chewing, the delicacy that lay on his plate, both the appearance and taste of which completely mystiied him. Everybody felt uncomfortable, but the discomfort of the situation was relieved by the Georgian Prince—a very stupid man, but an extraordinarily reined and artful latterer and courtier—who sat on the other side of the Princess Vorontsov. Without seeming to have noticed anything, he began to relate how Hadji Murad had carried off the widow of Akhmet Khan of Mekhtule. “He came into the village at night, seized what he wanted, and galloped off again with the whole party.” “Why did he want that particular woman?” asked the Princess. “Oh, he was her husband’s enemy, and pursued him, but could never once succeed in meeting him right up to the time of his death, so he revenged himself on the widow.” The Princess translated this into French to her old friend the Countess Choiseuil, who sat next to the Georgian Prince. “Quelle horreur!” (“How horrible!”) said the Countess, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “Oh, no!” said Vorontsov, smiling. “I have been told that he treated his captive with chivalrous respect and afterwards released her.” “Yes, for a ransom!” “Well, of course. But, all the same, he acted honorably.” These words of the Prince’s set the tone for the further conversation. The courtiers understood that the more importance was attributed to Hadji Murad the better pleased the Prince would be. “The man’s audacity is amazing. A remarkable man!” “Why, in 1849, he dashed into Temir Khan Shura, and plundered the shops in broad daylight.” An Armenian sitting at the end of the table, who had been in Temir Khan Shura at the time, related the particulars of that exploit of Hadji Murad’s. In fact, only Hadji Murad was talked about during the whole dinner. Everybody in succession praised his courage, his ability, and his magnanimity. Someone mentioned his having ordered 53 twenty-six prisoners to be slain; but that too was met by the usual rejoinder, “What’s to be done? À la guerre, comme à la guerre!” (“War is war.” ) “He is a great man.” “Had he been born in Europe he might have been another Napoleon,” said the stupid Georgian Prince with a gift of lattery. He knew that every mention of Napoleon was pleasant to Vorontsov, who wore the White Cross at his neck as a reward for having defeated him. “Well, not Napoleon, perhaps, but a gallant cavalry general, if you like,” said Vorontsov. “If not Napoleon, then Murad.” “And his name is Hadji Murad!” “Hadji Murad has surrendered, and now there’ll be an end to Shamil also,” someone remarked. “They feel that now”—this “now” meant under Vorontsov—“they can’t hold out,” remarked another. “Tout cela est grâce à vous!” (“And all that, thanks to you!”) said Manana Orbelyani. Prince Vorontsov tried to moderate the waves of lattery which began to low over him. Still, it was pleasant, and in the best of spirits he led his lady back into the drawing-room. After dinner, when coffee was being served in the drawingroom, the Prince was particularly amiable to everybody, and going up to the General with the red bristly mustaches, he tried to appear not to have noticed his blunder. Having made a round of the visitors, he sat down to the card table. He only played the old-fashioned game of ombre. The Prince’s partners were the Georgian Prince, an Armenian General (who had learned the game of ombre from Prince Vorontsov’s valet, and the fourth was Dr. Andreyevsky, a man remarkable for the great inluence he exercised. Placing beside him his gold snuff-box, with a portrait of Alexander I on the lid, the Prince tore open a pack of highlyglazed cards, and was going to spread them out when his Italian valet, Giovanni, brought him a letter on a silver tray. “Another courier, your Excellency.” Vorontsov laid down the cards, excused himself, opened the letter, and began to read. 54 The letter was from his son, who described Hadji Murad’s surrender, and his own encounter with Meller-Zakomelsky. The Princess came up and inquired what their son had written. “It’s all about the same matter.… Il a eu quelques désagréments avec le commandant de la place. Simon a eu tort (“He has had some unpleasantness with the commander of the place. Simon was in the wrong.” ).… But ‘All’s well that ends well,’ ” he added in English, handing the letter to his wife; and turning to his respectfully waiting partners, he asked them to draw cards. When the irst round had been dealt, Vorontsov did what he was in the habit of doing when in a particularly pleasant mood: with his white, wrinkled old hand he took out a pinch of French snuff, carried it up to his nose, and released it. 55 Chapter X When, next day, Hadji Murad appeared at the Prince’s palace, the waiting-room was already full of people. Yesterday’s General with the bristly mustaches was there in full uniform, with all his decorations, having come to take leave. There was the commander of a regiment who was in danger of being courtmartialled for misappropriating commisariat money; and there was a rich Armenian (patronised by Doctor Andreyevsky) who wanted to get from the Government a renewal of his monopoly for the sale of vodka. There, dressed in black, was the widow of an oficer who had been killed in action. She had come to ask for a pension, or for free education for her children. There was a ruined Georgian Prince in a magniicent Georgian costume, who was trying to obtain for himself some coniscated church property. There was an oficial with a large roll of paper containing a new plan for subjugating the Caucasus. There was also a Khan, who had come solely to be able to tell his people at home that he had called on the Prince. They all waited their turn, and were one by one shown into the Prince’s cabinet and out again by the aide-de-camp, a handsome, fair-haired youth. When Hadji Murad entered the waiting-room with his brisk though limping step all eyes were turned towards him, and he heard his name whispered from various parts of the room. He was dressed in a long white Circassian coat over a brown beshmét trimmed round the collar with ine silver lace. He wore black leggings and soft shoes of the same color, which were stretched over his instep as tight as gloves. On his head he wore a high cap, draped turban-fashion—that same turban for which, on the denunciation of Akhmet Khan, he had been arrested by General Klügenau, and which had been the cause of his going over to Shamil. Hadji Murad stepped briskly across the parquet loor of the waiting-room, his whole slender igure swaying slightly in 56 consequence of his lameness in one leg, which was shorter than the other. His eyes, set far apart, looked calmly before him and seemed to see no one. The handsome aide-de-camp, having greeted him, asked him to take a seat while he went to announce him to the Prince; but Hadji Murad declined to sit down, and, putting his hand on his dagger, stood with one foot advanced, looking contemptuously at all those present. The Prince’s interpreter, Prince Tarkhanov, approached Hadji Murad and spoke to him. Hadji Murad answered abruptly and unwillingly. A Kumyk Prince, who was there to lodge a complaint against a police oficial, came out of the Prince’s room, and then the aide-de-camp called Hadji Murad, led him to the door of the cabinet, and showed him in. Vorontsov received Hadji Murad standing beside his table. The old white face of the commander-in-chief did not wear yesterday’s smile, but was rather stern and solemn. On entering the large room, with its enormous table and great windows with green venetian blinds, Hadji Murad placed his small sunburnt hands on that part of his chest where the front of his white coat overlapped, and, having lowered his eyes, began without hurrying to speak in Tartar distinctly and respectfully, using the Kumyk dialect, which he spoke well. “I place myself under the powerful protection of the great Tsar and of yourself,” said he, “and promise to serve the White Tsar in faith and truth to the last drop of my blood, and I hope to be useful to you in the war with Shamil, who is my enemy and yours.” Having heard the interpreter out, Vorontsov glanced at Hadji Murad, and Hadji Murad glanced at Vorontsov. The eyes of the two men met, and expressed to each other much that could not have been put into words, and that was not at all what the interpreter said. Without words they told each other the whole truth. Vorontsov’s eyes said that he did not believe a single word Hadji Murad was saying, and that he knew he was and always would be an enemy to everything Russian, and had surrendered only because he was obliged to. Hadji Murad understood this, and yet continued to give assurances of his idelity. His eyes said, “That old man ought to be thinking of his death, and not of war; but though old he is 57 cunning, and I must be careful.” Vorontsov understood this also, but nevertheless he spoke to Hadji Murad in the way he considered necessary for the success of the war. “Tell him,” said Vorontsov, “that our sovereign is as merciful as he is mighty, and will probably at my request pardon him and take him into his service.… Have you told him?” he asked, looking at Hadji Murad.… “Until I receive my master’s gracious decision, tell him I take it on myself to receive him and to make his sojourn among us pleasant.” Hadji Murad again pressed his hands to the center of his chest, and began to say something with animation. “He says,” the interpreter translated, “that before, when he governed Avaria in 1839, he served the Russians faithfully, and would never have deserted them had his enemy, Akhmet Khan, wishing to ruin him, calumniated him to General Klügenau.” “I know, I know,” said Vorontsov (though, if he had ever known, he had long forgotten it). “I know,” said he, sitting down and motioning Hadji Murad to the divan that stood beside the wall. But Hadji Murad did not sit down. Shrugging his powerful shoulders as a sign that he could not make up his mind to sit in the presence of so important a man, he went on, addressing the interpreter,— “Akhmet Khan and Shamil are both my enemies. Tell the Prince that Akhmet Khan is dead, and I cannot revenge myself on him; but Shamil lives, and I will not die without taking vengeance on him,” said he, knitting his brows and tightly closing his mouth. “Yes, yes; but how does he want to revenge himself on Shamil?” said Vorontsov quietly to the interpreter. “And tell him he may sit down.” Hadji Murad again declined to sit down; and, in answer to the question, replied that his object in coming over to the Russians was to help them to destroy Shamil. “Very well, very well,” said Vorontsov; “but what exactly does he wish to do? … Sit down, sit down!” Hadji Murad sat down, and said that if only they would send him to the Lesghian line, and would give him an army, he would guarantee to raise the whole of Daghestan, and Shamil would then be unable to hold out. 58 “That would be excellent.…I’ll think it over,” said Vorontsov. The interpreter translated Vorontsov’s words to Hadji Murad. Hadji Murad pondered. “Tell the Sirdar one thing more,” Hadji Murad began again: “That my family are in the hands of my enemy, and that as long as they are in the mountains I am bound, and cannot serve him. Shamil would kill my wife and my mother and my children if I went openly against him. Let the Prince irst exchange my family for the prisoners he has, and then I will destroy Shamil or die!” “All right, all right,” said Vorontsov. “I will think it over.… Now let him go to the chief of the staff, and explain to him in detail his position, intentions, and wishes.” Thus ended the irst interview between Hadji Murad and Vorontsov. That evening, at the new theater, which was decorated in Oriental style, an Italian opera was performed. Vorontsov was in his box when the striking igure of the limping Hadji Murad wearing a turban appeared in the stalls. He came in with LorisMelikov, Vorontsov’s aide-de-camp, in whose charge he was placed, and took a seat in the front row. Having sat through the irst act with Oriental, Muslim dignity, expressing no pleasure, but only obvious indifference, he rose and, looking calmly round at the audience, exited, drawing everybody’s attention. The next day was Monday, and there was the usual evening party at the Vorontsovs’. In the large brightly-lit hall a band was playing, hidden among trees. Young and not very young women, in dresses displaying their bare necks, arms and breasts, turned round and round in the embrace of men in bright uniforms. At the buffet, footmen in red swallow-tail coats and wearing buckle shoes and knee-breeches, poured out champagne and served confections to the ladies. The “Sirdar’s” wife also, in spite of her age, went about half-dressed among the visitors, affably smiling, and through the interpreter said a few amiable words to Hadji Murad, who glanced at the visitors with the same indifference he had shown yesterday in the theater. After the hostess, other half-naked women came up to him, and all of them stood shamelessly before him and smilingly asked him the same question: How he liked what he saw? Vorontsov himself, wearing gold epaulets and gold shoulder59 knots, with his white cross and ribbon at his neck, came up and asked him the same question, evidently feeling sure, like all the others, that Hadji Murad could not help being pleased at what he saw. Hadji Murad replied to Vorontsov, as he had replied to them all, that among his people nothing of the kind was done, without expressing an opinion as to whether it was good or bad that it was so. Here at the ball Hadji Murad tried to speak to Vorontsov about buying out his family; but Vorontsov, pretending he had not heard him, walked away; and Loris-Melikov afterwards told Hadji Murad that this was not the place to talk about business. When it struck eleven Hadji Murad, having made sure of the time by the watch the Vorontsovs had given him, asked Loris-Melikov whether he might now leave. Loris-Melikov said he might, though it would be better to stay. In spite of this Hadji Murad did not stay, but drove in the open carriage placed at his disposal to the quarters that had been assigned to him. 60 Chapter XI In the ifth day of Hadji Murad’s stay in Tilis, Loris-Melikov, the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp, came to see him at the latter’s command. “My head and my hands are glad to serve the Sirdar,” said Hadji Murad with his usual diplomatic expression, bowing his head and putting his hands to his chest. “Command me!” said he, looking amiably into Loris-Melikov’s face. Loris-Melikov sat down in an armchair placed by the table, and Hadji Murad sank onto a low divan opposite, and resting his hands on his knees, bowed his head and listened attentively to what the other said to him. Loris-Melikov, who spoke Tartar luently, told him that though the Prince knew about his past life, he yet wanted to hear the whole story from himself. “Tell it me, and I will write it down and translate it into Russian, and the Prince will send it to the Emperor.” Hadji Murad remained silent for a while (he never interrupted anyone, but always waited to see whether his interviewer had not something more to say). Then he raised his head, shook back his cap, and smiled the peculiar childlike smile that had captivated Mary Vaselevna. “I can do that,” said he, evidently lattered by the thought that his story would be read by the Emperor. “You must tell me” (nobody is addressed as “you” in Tartar) “everything, deliberately, from the beginning,” said LorisMelikov, drawing a notebook from his pocket. “I can do that, only there is much—very much—to tell! Many events have happened!” said Hadji Murad. “If you cannot do it all in one day, you will inish it another time,” said Loris-Melikov. “Shall I begin at the beginning?” “Yes, at the very beginning … where you were born, and where you did live.” Hadji Murad’s head sank, and he sat in that position for a 61 long time. Then he took a stick that lay beside the divan, drew a little knife with an ivory gold-inlaid handle, sharp as a razor, from under his dagger, and started whittling the stick with it and speaking at the same time. “Write: Born in Tselmess, a small aoul, ‘the size of an ass’s head,’ as we in the mountains say,” he began. “Not far from it, about two cannon-shots, lies Khunzakh, where the Khans lived. Our family was closely connected with them. “My mother, when my eldest brother Osman was born, nursed the eldest Khan, Abu Nutsal Khan. Then she nursed the second son of the Khan, Umma Khan, and reared him; but Akhmet, my second brother, died; and when I was born and the Khansha bore Bulach Khan, my mother would not go as wet-nurse again. My father ordered her to, but she would not. She said: ‘I should again kill my own son; and I will not go.’ Then my father, who was passionate, struck her with a dagger, and would have killed her had they not rescued her from him. So she did not give me up, and later on she composed a song … but I need not tell that.” “Well, so my mother did not go as nurse,” he said, with a jerk of his head, “and the Khansha took another nurse, but still remained fond of my mother; and my mother used to take us children to the Khansha’s palace, and we played with her children, and she was fond of us. “There were three young Khans: Abu Nutsal Khan, my brother Osman’s foster-brother; Umma Khan, my own sworn brother; and Bulach Khan, the youngest—whom Shamil threw over the precipice. But that happened later. “I was about sixteen when murids began to visit the aouls. They beat the stones with wooden scimitars and cried ‘Mussulmans, Ghazavat!’ (holy war against inidels, Christians) The Chechens all went over to muridism, and the Avars began to go over, too. I was then living in the palace like a brother of the Khans. I could do as I liked, and I became rich. I had horses and weapons and money. I lived for pleasure and had no care, and went on like that till the time when Kazi-Mulla, the Imam, was killed and Hamzad succeeded him. Hamzad sent envoys to the Khans to say that if they did not join the Ghazavat he would destroy Khunzakh. “This needed consideration. The Khans feared the Russians, 62 but were also afraid to join in the Holy War. The old Khansha sent me with her second son, Umma Khan, to Tilis, to ask the Russian commander-in-chief for help against Hamzad. The commander-in-chief at Tilis was Baron Rosen. He did not receive either me or Umma Khan. He sent word that he would help us, but did nothing. Only his oficers came riding to us and played cards with Umma Khan. They made him drunk with wine, and took him to bad places; and he lost all he had to them at cards. His body was as strong as a bull’s, and he was as brave as a lion, but his soul was weak as water. He would have gambled away his last horses and weapons if I had not made him come away. “After visiting Tilis my ideas changed, and I advised the old Khansha and the Khans to join the Ghazavat.…” What made you change your mind?” asked Loris-Melikov. “Were you not pleased with the Russians?” Hadji Murad paused. “No, I was not pleased,” he answered decidedly, closing his eyes. “And there was also another reason why I wished to join the Ghazavat.” “What was that?” “Why, near Tselmess the Khan and I encountered three murids, two of whom escaped, but the third one I shot with my pistol. “He was still alive when I approached to take his weapons. He looked up at me, and said, ‘You have killed me...I am happy; but you are a Muslim, young and strong. Join theGhazavat! God wills it!’” “And did you join it?” “I did not, but it made me think,” said Hadji Murad, and he went on with his tale. “When Hamzad approached Kunzakh we sent our Elders to him to say that we would agree to join the Ghazavat if the Imam would send a learned man to explain it to us. Hamzad had our Elders’ mustaches shaved off, their nostrils pierced, and cakes hung to their noses; and in that condition he sent them back to us. “The Elders brought word that Hamzad was ready to send a Sheik to teach us the Ghazavat, but only if the Khansha sent him her youngest son as a hostage. She took him at his word, 63 and sent her youngest son, Bulach Khan. Hamzad received him well, and sent to invite the two elder brothers also. He sent word that he wished to serve the Khans as his father had served their father.… The Khansha was a weak, stupid and conceited woman, as all women are when they are not under control. She was afraid to send away both sons, and sent only Umma Khan. I went with him. We were met by murids about a mile before we arrived, and they sang and shot and caracoled around us; and when we drew near, Hamzad came out of his tent and went up to Umma Khan’s stirrup and received him as a Khan. He said,— “’I have not done any harm to your family, and do not wish to do any. Only do not kill me, and do not prevent my bringing the people over to the Ghazavat, and I will serve you with my whole army, as my father served your father! Let me live in your house, and I will help you with my advice, and you shall do as you like!’ “Umma Khan was slow of speech. He did not know how to reply, and remained silent. Then I said that if this was so, let Hamzad come to Khunzakh, and the Khansha and the Khans would receive him with honor. … But I was not allowed to inish—and here I irst encountered Shamil, who was beside the Imam. He said to me,— “ ‘You have not been asked. … It was the Khan!’ “I was silent, and Hamzad led Umma Khan into his tent. Afterwards Hamzad called me and ordered me to go to Khunzakh with his envoys. I went. The envoys began persuading the Khansha to send her eldest son also to Hamzad. I saw there was treachery, and told her not to send him; but a woman has as much sense in her head as an egg has hair. She ordered her son to go. Abu Nutsal Khan did not wish to. Then she said, ‘I see you are afraid!’ Like a bee, she knew where to sting him most painfully. Abu Nutsal Khan lushed, and did not speak to her any more, but ordered his horse to be saddled. I went with him. “Hamzad met us with even greater honor than he had shown Umma Khan. He himself rode out two rile-shot lengths down the hill to meet us. A large party of horsemen with their banners followed him, and they too sang, shot, and caracoled. “When we reached the camp, Hamzad led the Khan into 64 his tent, and I remained with the horses.… “I was some way down the hill when I heard shots ired in Hamzad’s tent. I ran there, and saw Umma Khan lying prone in a pool of blood, and Abu Nutsal was ighting the murids. One of his cheeks had been hacked off, and hung down. He supported it with one hand, and with the other stabbed with his dagger at all who came near him. I saw him strike down Hamzad’s brother, and aim a blow at another man; but then the murids ired at him and he fell.” Hadji Murad stopped, and his sunburnt face lushed a dark red, and his eyes became blood-shot. “I was seized with fear, and ran away.” “Really? … I thought you never were afraid,” said LorisMelikov. “Never after that.… Since then I have always remembered that shame, and when I recalled it I feared nothing!” 65 Chapter XII “But enough! It is time for me to pray,” said Hadji Murad, drawing from an inner breast-pocket of his Circassian coat Vorontsov’s repeater watch and carefully pressing the spring. The repeater struck twelve and a quarter. Hadji Murad listened with his head on one side, repressing a childlike smile. “Kunák Vorontsov’s present,” he said, smiling. “It is a good watch,” said Loris-Melikov. “Well then, go you and pray, and I will wait.” “Yakshé. Very well,” said Hadji Murad, and went to his bedroom. Left by himself, Loris-Melikov wrote down in his notebook the chief things Hadji Murad had related; and then lighting a cigarette, began to pace up and down the room. On reaching the door opposite the bedroom, he heard animated voices speaking rapidly in Tartar. He guessed that the speakers were Hadji Murad’s murids, and, opening the door, he went in to them. The room was impregnated with that special leathery acid smell peculiar to the mountaineers. On a búrka spread out on the loor sat the one-eyed red-haired Gamzalo, in a tattered greasy beshmét, plaiting a bridle. He was saying something excitedly, speaking in a hoarse voice; but when Loris-Melikov entered he immediately became silent, and continued his work without paying any attention to him. In front of Gamzalo stood the merry Khan Mahoma, showing his white teeth, his black lashless eyes glittering, saying something over and over again. The handsome Eldar, his sleeves turned up on his strong arms, was polishing the girths of a saddle suspended from a nail. Khanei, the principal worker and manager of the household, was not there; he was cooking their dinner in the kitchen. “What were you disputing about?” asked Loris-Melikov, after greeting them. “Why, he keeps on praising Shamil,” said Khan Mahoma, 66 giving his hand to Loris-Melikov. “He says Shamil is a great man, learned, holy, and a dzhigít.” “How is it that he has left him and still praises him?” “He has left him, and still praises him,” repeated Khan Mahoma, his teeth showing and his eyes glittering. “And does he really consider him a saint?” asked LorisMelikov. “If he were not a saint the people would not listen to him,” said Gamzalo rapidly. “Shamil is no saint, but Mansur was!” replied Khan Mahoma. “He was a real saint. When he was Imam the people were quite different. He used to ride through the aouls, and the people used to come out and kiss the hem of his coat and confess their sins and vow to do no evil. Then all the people—so the old men say—lived like saints: not drinking, nor smoking, nor neglecting their prayers, and forgave one another their sins, even when blood had been spilled. If anyone then found money or anything, he tied it to a stake and set it up by the roadside. In those days God gave the people success in everything—not as now.” “In the mountains they don’t smoke or drink now,” said Gamzalo. “Your Shamil is a lámorey,” said Khan Mahoma, winking at Loris-Melikov. (lámorey: contemptuous term for a mountaineer.) “Yes, lámorey means mountaineer,” replied Gamzalo. “It is in the mountains that the eagles dwell.” “Smart fellow! Well hit!” said Khan Mahoma with a grin, pleased at his adversary’s apt retort. Seeing the silver cigarette-case in Loris-Melikov’s hand, Khan Mahoma asked for a cigarette; and when Loris-Melikov remarked that they were forbidden to smoke, he winked with one eye and jerking his head in the direction of Hadji Murad’s bedroom replied that they could do it as long as they were not seen. He at once began smoking—not inhaling—and pouting his red lips awkwardly as he blew out the smoke. “That is wrong!” said Gamzalo severely, and left the room for a time. Khan Mahoma winked after him, and, while smoking, asked Loris-Melikov where he could best buy a silk beshmét and a white cap. 67 “Why, have you so much money?” “I have enough,” replied Khan Mahoma with a wink. “Ask him where he got the money,” said Eldar, turning his handsome smiling face towards Loris-Melikov. “Oh, I won it!” said Khan Mahoma quickly; and related how, walking in Tilis the day before, he had come upon a group of men—Russians and Armenians—playing at orlyánka (a kind of heads-and-tails). The stake was a large one: three gold pieces and much silver. Khan Mahoma at once saw what the game consisted in, and, jingling the coppers he had in his pocket, he went up to the players and said he would stake the whole amount. “How could you do it? Had you so much?” asked LorisMelikov. “I had only twelve kopeks,” said Khan Mahoma, grinning. “Well, but if you had lost?” “Why, look here!” said Khan Mahoma pointing to his pistol. “Would you have given that?” “Why give it? I should have run away, and if anyone had tried to stop me I should have killed him—that’s all!” “Well, and did you win?” “Aye, I won it all and went away!” Loris-Melikov quite understood what sort of men Khan Mahoma and Eldar were. Khan Mahoma was a merry fellow, careless and ready for any spree. He did not know what to do with his superluous vitality. He was always gay and reckless, and played with his own and other people’s lives. For the sake of that sport with life, he had now come over to the Russians, and for the same sport he might go back to Shamil tomorrow. Eldar was also quite easy to understand. He was a man entirely devoted to his murshéd; calm, strong, and irm. The red-haired Gamzalo was the only one Loris-Melikov did not understand. He saw that that man was not only loyal to Shamil, but felt an insuperable aversion, contempt, repugnance and hatred for all Russians; and Loris-Melikov could therefore not understand why he had come over to the Russians. It occurred to him that, as some of the higher oficials suspected, Hadji Murad’s surrender, and his tales of hatred against Shamil, 68 might be a fraud; and that perhaps he had surrendered only to spy out the Russians’ weak spots, that—after escaping back to the mountains—he might be able to direct his forces accordingly. Gamzalo’s whole person strengthened this suspicion. The others, and Hadji Murad himself, know how to hide their intentions; but this one betrays them by his open hatred, thought he. Loris-Melikov tried to speak to him. He asked whether he did not feel dull. “No, I don’t!” he growled hoarsely, without stopping his work, and he glanced at Loris-Melikov out of the corner of his one eye. He replied to all Loris-Melikov’s other questions in a similar manner. While Loris-Melikov was in the room, Hadji Murad’s fourth murid, the Avar Khanei, came in; a man with a hairy face and neck, and a vaulted chest as rough as though overgrown with moss. He was strong, and a hard worker; always engrossed in his duties, and, like Eldar, unquestioningly obedient to his master. When he entered the room to fetch some rice, Loris-Melikov stopped him and asked where he came from, and how long he had been with Hadji Murad. “Five years,” replied Khanei. “I come from the same aoul as he. My father killed his uncle, and they wished to kill me,” he said calmly, looking from beneath his joined eyebrows straight into Loris-Melikov’s face. “Then I asked them to adopt me as a brother.” “What do you mean by ‘adopt as a brother?’” “I did not shave my head nor cut my nails for two months, and then I came to them. They let me in to Patimat, his mother, and she gave me the breast and I became his brother.” Hadji Murad’s voice could be heard from the next room, and Eldar, immediately answering his call, promptly wiped his hands and went with large strides into the drawing-room. “He asks you to come,” said he, coming back. Loris-Melikov gave another cigarette to the merry Khan Mahoma, and went into the drawing-room. 69 Chapter XIII When Loris-Melikov entered the drawing-room, Hadji Murad received him with a bright face. “Well, shall I continue?” he asked, sitting down comfortably on the divan. “Yes, certainly,” said Loris-Melikov. “I have been in to have a talk with your henchmen.… One is a jolly fellow!” he added. “Yes, Khan Mahoma is a frivolous fellow,” said Hadji Murad. “I liked the young handsome one.” “Ah, that’s Eldar. He’s young, but irm—made of iron!” They were silent for a while. “So I am to go on?” “Yes, yes!” “I told you how the Khans were killed.… Well, having killed them, Hamzad rode into Khunzakh and took up his quarters in their palace. The Khansha was the only one of the family left alive. Hamzad sent for her. She reproached him, so he winked to his murid Aseldar, who struck her from behind and killed her.” “Why did he kill her” asked Loris-Melikov. “What could he do? … Where the forelegs have gone, the hind legs must follow! He killed off the whole family. Shamil killed the youngest son—threw him over a precipice.… “Then the whole of Avaria surrendered to Hamzad. But my brother and I would not surrender. We wanted his blood for the blood of the Khans. We pretended to yield, but our only thought was how to get his blood. We consulted our grandfather, and decided to await the time when he would come out of his palace, and then to kill him from an ambush. Someone overheard us and told Hamzad, who sent for grandfather, and said, ‘Mind, if it be true that your grandsons are planning evil against me, you and they shall hang from one rafter. I do God’s work, and cannot be hindered.… Go, and remember what I have said!’ 70 “Our grandfather came home and told us. “Then we decided not to wait, but to do the deed on the irst day of the feast in the mosque. Our comrades would not take part in it, but my brother and I remained irm. “We took two pistols each, put on our búrkas, and went to the mosque. Hamzad entered the mosque with thirty murids. They all had drawn swords in their hands. Aseldar, his favorite murid (the one who had cut off Khansha’s head) saw us, shouted to us to take off our búrkas, and came towards me. I had my dagger in my hand, and I killed him with it and rushed at Hamzad; but my brother Osman had already shot him. He was still alive, and rushed at my brother, dagger in hand, but I gave him a inishing blow on the head. There were thirty murids, and we were only two. They killed my brother Osman, but I kept them at bay, leaped through the window, and escaped. “When it was known that Hamzad had been killed, all the people rose. The murids led; and those of them who did not lee were killed.” Hadji Murad paused, and breathed heavily. “That was all very well,” he continued, “but afterwards everything was spoiled. “Shamil succeeded Hamzad. He sent envoys to me to say that I should join him in attacking the Russians, and that if I refused he would destroy Khunzakh and kill me. “I answered that I would not join him, and would not let him come to me.…” “Why did you not go with him?” asked Loris-Melikov. Hadji Murad frowned, and did not reply at once. “I could not. The blood of my brother Osman and of Abu Nutsal Khan was on his hands. I did not go to him. General Rosen sent me an oficer’s commission, and ordered me to govern Avaria. All this would have been well, but that Rosen appointed as Khan of Kazi-Kumukh, irst Mahomet-Murza, and afterwards Akhmet Khan, who hated me. He had been trying to get the Khansha’s daughter, Sultanetta, in marriage for his son, but she would not give her to him, and he believed me to be the cause of this.… Yes, Akhmet Khan hated me and sent his henchmen to kill me, but I escaped from them. Then he calumniated me to General Klügenau. He said that I told the Avars not to supply wood to the Russian soldiers; and he also said that I had 71 donned a turban—this one—“ and Hadji Murad touched his turban—“and that this meant that I had gone over to Shamil. The General did not believe him, and gave orders that I should not be touched. But when the General went to Tilis, Akhmet Khan did as he pleased. He sent a company of soldiers to seize me, put me in chains, and tied me to a cannon. “So they kept me six days,” he continued. “On the seventh day they untied me and started to take me to Temir-KhanShura. Forty soldiers with loaded guns had me in charge. My hands were tied, and I knew that they had orders to kill me if I tried to escape. “As we approached Mansooha the path became narrow, and on the right was an abyss about a hundred and twenty yards deep. I went to the right—to the very edge. A soldier wanted to stop me, but I jumped down and pulled him with me. He was killed outright but I, as you see, remained alive. “Ribs, head, arms, and leg—all were broken! I tried to crawl, but grew giddy and fell asleep. I awoke, wet with blood. A shepherd saw me, and called some people who carried me to anaoul. My ribs and head healed, and my leg too, only it has remained short,” and Hadji Murad stretched out his crooked leg. “It still serves me, however, and that is well,” said he. “The people heard the news, and began coming to me. I recovered, and went to Tselmess. The Avars again called on me to rule over them,” said Hadji Murad, with tranquil, conident pride, “And I agreed.” He quickly rose, and taking a portfolio out of a saddle-bag, drew out two discolored letters and handed one of them to Loris-Melikov. They were from General Klügenau. Loris-Melikov read the irst letter, which was as follows,— “Lieutenant Hadji Murad, you have served under me, and I was satisied with you, and considered you a good man. “Recently Akhmet Khan informed me that you are a traitor, that you have donned a turban, and has intercourse with Shamil, and that you have taught the people to disobey the Russian Government. I ordered you to be arrested and brought before me, but you led. I do not know whether this is for your good or not, as I do not know whether you are guilty or not. “Now hear me. If your conscience is pure, if you are not guilty in anything towards the great Tsar, come to me; fear no 72 one. I am your defender. The Khan can do nothing to you; he is himself under my command, so you have nothing to fear.” Klügenau added that he always kept his word and was just, and he again exhorted Hadji Murad to appear before him. When Loris-Melikov had read this letter, Hadji Murad, before handing him the second one, told him what he had written in reply to the irst. “I wrote that I wore a turban, not for Shamil’s sake, but for my soul’s salvation; that I neither wished nor could go over to Shamil, because he was the cause of my father’s, my brothers’, and my relations’ deaths; but that I could not join the Russians because I had been dishonored by them. (In Khunzakh, while I was bound, a scoundrel sh— on me; and I could not join your people until that man was killed.) But, above all, I feared that liar, Akhmet Khan. “Then the General sent me this letter,” said Hadji Murad, handing Loris-Melikov the other discolored paper. “You has answered my irst letter, and I thank you,” read Loris-Melikov. “You write that you are not afraid to return, but that the insult done you by a certain Giaour prevents it; but I assure you that the Russian law is just, and that you shall see him who dared to offend you punished before your eyes. I have already given orders to investigate the matter. “Hear me, Hadji Murad! I have a right to be displeased with you for not trusting me and my honor; but I forgive you, for I know how suspicious mountaineers are in general. If your conscience is pure, if you have put on a turban only for your soul’s salvation, then you are right, and may look me and the Russian Government boldly in the eyes. He who dishonored you shall, I assure you, be punished; and your property shall be restored to you, and you shall see and know what Russian law is. And besides, we Russians look at things differently, and you have not sunk in our eyes because some scoundrel has dishonored you. “I myself have consented to the Chimrints wearing turbans; and I regard their actions in the right light; and therefore I repeat that you have nothing to fear. Come to me with the man by whom I am sending you this letter. He is faithful to me, and is not the slave of your enemies but is the friend of a man who enjoys the special favor of the Government.” Further on Klügenau again tried to persuade Hadji Murad 73 to come over to him. “I did not believe him,” said Hadji Murad when Loris-Melikov had inished reading, “and did not go to Klügenau. The chief thing for me was to revenge myself on Akhmet Khan; and that I could not do through the Russians. Then Akhmet Khan surrounded Tselmess, and wanted to take me or kill me. I had too few men, and could not drive him off; and just then came an envoy with a letter from Shamil, promising to help me to defeat and kill Akhmet Khan, and making me ruler over the whole of Avaria. I considered the matter for a long time, and then went over to Shamil; and from that time have fought the Russians continually.” Here Hadji Murad related all his military exploits, of which there were very many, and some of which were already familiar to Loris-Melikov. All his campaigns and raids had been remarkable for the extraordinary rapidity of his movements and the boldness of his attacks, which were always crowned with success. “There never was any friendship between me and Shamil,” said Hadji Murad at the end of his story, “but he feared me and needed me. But it so happened that I was asked who should be Imam after Shamil, and I replied: ‘He will be Imam whose sword is sharpest!’ “This was told to Shamil, and he wanted to get rid of me. He sent me into Tabasarán. I went, and captured a thousand sheep and three hundred horses, but he said I had not done the right thing, and dismissed me from being Naïb, and ordered me to send him all the money. I sent him a thousand gold pieces. He sent his murids, and they took from me all my property. He demanded that I should go to him; but I knew he wanted to kill me, and I did not go. Then he sent to take me. I resisted, and went over to Vorontsov. Only I did not take my family. My mother, my wives, and my son are in his hands. Tell the Sirdar that as long as my family is in Shamil’s power, I can do nothing.” “I will tell him,” said Loris-Melikov. “Take pains, do try! … What is mine is yours, only help me with the Prince! I am tied up, and the end of the rope is in Shamil’s hands,” said Hadji Murad, concluding his story. 74 Chapter XIV On 20th December Vorontsov wrote as follows to Chernyshov, the Minister of War. The letter was in French,— “I did not write to you by the last post, dear Prince, as I wished irst to decide what we should do with Hadji Murad, and for the last two or three days I have not been feeling quite well. “In my last letter I informed you of Hadji Murad’s arrival here. He reached Tilis on the 8th, and next day I made his acquaintance; and during the following seven or eight days I have spoken to him and have considered what use we can make of him in the future, and especially what we are to do with him at present; for he is much concerned about the fate of his family, and with every appearance of perfect frankness says that while they are in Shamil’s hands he is paralyzed and cannot render us any service, nor show his gratitude for the friendly reception and forgiveness we have extended to him. “His uncertainty about those dear to him makes him feverish; and the persons I have appointed to live with him assure me that he does not sleep at night, hardly eats anything, prays continually, and asks only to be allowed to ride out accompanied by several Cossacks—the sole recreation and exercise possible for him, and made necessary to him by lifelong habit. Every day he comes to me to know whether I have any news of his family, and to ask me to have all the prisoners in our hands collected and offered to Shamil in exchange for them. He would also give a little money. There are people who would let him have some for the purpose. He keeps repeating to me: ‘Save my family, and then give me a chance to serve you’ (preferably, in his opinion, on the Lesghian line) ‘and if within a month I do not render you great service, punish me as you think it.’ I reply that to me all this appears very just; and that many persons among us would even not trust him so long as his family remains in the mountains and are not in our hands as hostages; and that I will 75 do everything possible to collect the prisoners on our frontier; that I have no power under our laws to give him money for the ransom of his family in addition to the sum he may himself be able to raise, but that I may perhaps ind some other means of helping him. After that I told him frankly that in my opinion Shamil would not in any case give up the family, and that Shamil might tell him so straight out and promise him a full pardon and his former posts, but threaten, if Hadji Murad did not return, to kill his mother, wives, and six children; and I asked him whether he could say frankly what he would do if he received such an announcement from Shamil. Hadji Murad lifted his eyes and arms to heaven, and said that everything is in God’s hands, but that he would never surrender to his foe; for he is certain Shamil would not forgive him, and he would therefore not have long to live. As to the destruction of his family, he did not think Shamil would act so rashly: irstly, to avoid making him a yet more desperate and dangerous foe; and secondly, because there were many people, and even very inluential people, in Daghestan, who would dissuade Shamil from such a course. Finally, he repeated several times that whatever God might decree for him in the future, he was at present interested in nothing but his family’s ransom; and he implored me, in God’s name, to help him, and to allow him to return to the neighborhood of the Chechnya, where he could, with the help and consent of our commanders, have some intercourse with his family, and regular news of their condition, and of the best means to liberate them. He said that many people, and even some Naïbs in that part of the enemy’s territory, were more or less attached to him; and that among the whole of the population already subjugated by Russia, or neutral, it would be easy with our help to establish relations very useful for the attainment of the aim which gives him no peace day or night, and the attainment of which would set him at ease and make it possible for him to act for our good and to win our conidence. “He asks to be sent back to Grozny with a convoy of twenty or thirty picked Cossacks, who would serve him as a protection against foes and us as a guarantee of his good faith. “You will understand, dear Prince, that I have been much perplexed by all this; for, do what I will, a great responsibility rests on me. It would be in the highest degree rash to trust him 76 entirely; yet in order to deprive him of all means of escape we should have to lock him up, and in my opinion that would be both unjust and impolitic. A measure of that kind, the news of which would soon spread over the whole of Daghestan, would do us great harm by keeping back those (and there are many such) who are now inclined more or less openly to oppose Shamil, and who are keenly watching to see how we treat the Imam’s bravest and most adventurous oficer, now that he has found himself obliged to place himself in our hands. If we treat Hadji Murad as a prisoner, all the good effect of the situation will be lost. Therefore I think that I could not act otherwise than as I have done, though at the same time I feel that I may be accused of having made a great mistake if Hadji Murad should take it into his head again to escape. In the service, and especially in a complicated situation such as this, it is dificult, not to say impossible, to follow any one straight path without risking mistakes, and without accepting responsibility; but once a path seems to be the right one, I must follow it, happen what may. “I beg of you, dear Prince, to submit this to his Majesty the Emperor for his consideration; and I shall be happy if it pleases our most august monarch to approve my action. “All that I have written above, I have also written to Generals Zavodvsky and Kozlovsky, to guide the latter when communicating direct with Hadji Murad, whom I have warned not to act or go anywhere without Kozlovsky’s consent. I also told him that it would be all the better for us if he rode out with our convoy, as otherwise Shamil might spread a rumor that we were keeping him prisoner; but at the same time I made him promise never to go to Vozdvezhensk, because my son, to whom he irst surrendered and whom he looks upon as his kunák (friend), is not the commander of that place, and some unpleasant misunderstanding might easily arise. In any case, Vozdvezhensk lies too near a thickly populated, hostile settlement; while for the intercourse with his friends which he desires, Grozny is in all respects suitable. “Besides the twenty chosen Cossacks who, at his own request, are to keep close to him, I am also sending Captain Loris-Melikov with him—a worthy excellent and highly intelligent oficer who speaks Tartar, and knows Hadji Murad well, and apparently enjoys his full conidence. During the ten days 77 Hadji Murad has spent here, he has, however, lived in the same house with Lieutenant-Colonel Prince Tarkhanov, who is in command of the Shoushen District, and is here on business connected with the service. He is a truly worthy man whom I trust entirely. He also has won Hadji Murad’s conidence, and through him alone—as he speaks Tartar perfectly—we have discussed the most delicate and secret matters. I have consulted Tarkhanov about Hadji Murad, and he fully agrees with me that it was necessary either to act as I have done, or to put Hadji Murad in prison and guard him in the strictest manner (for if we once treat him badly, he will not be easy to hold), or else to remove him from the country altogether. But these two last measures would not only destroy all the advantage accruing to us from Hadji Murad’s quarrel with Shamil, but would inevitably check any growth of the present insubordination and possible future revolt of the people against Shamil’s power. Prince Tarkhanov tells me he himself has no doubt of Hadji Murad’s truthfulness, and that Hadji Murad is convinced that Shamil will never forgive him, but would have him executed in spite of any promise of forgiveness. The only thing Tarkhanov has noticed in his intercourse with Hadji Murad that might cause any anxiety, is his attachment to his religion. Tarkhanov does not deny that Shamil might inluence Hadji Murad from that side. But as I have already said, he will never persuade Hadji Murad that he will not take his life sooner or later, should the latter return to him. “This, dear Prince, is all I have to tell you about this episode in our affairs here.” 78 Chapter XV The report was dispatched from Tilis on 24th December 1851, and on New Year’s Eve a courier, having overexerted a dozen horses and beaten a dozen drivers till the blood came, delivered it to Prince Chernyshov, who at that time was Minister of War; and on 1st January 1852 Chernyshov, among other papers, took Vorontsov’s report to the Emperor Nicholas. Chernyshov disliked Vorontsov because of the general respect in which the latter was held, and because of his immense wealth; and also because Vorontsov was a real aristocrat, while Chernyshov after all was a parvenu; but especially because the Emperor was particularly well disposed towards Vorontsov. Therefore at every opportunity Chernyshov tried to injure Vorontsov. When he had last presented a report about Caucasian affairs, he had succeeded in arousing Nicholas’s displeasure against Vorontsov because—through the carelessness of those in command—almost the whole of a small Caucasian detachment had been destroyed by the mountaineers. He now intended to present the steps taken by Vorontsov in relation to Hadji Murad in an unfavorable light. He wished to suggest to the Emperor that Vorontsov always protected and even indulged the natives, to the detriment of the Russians; and that he had acted unwisely in allowing Hadji Murad to remain in the Caucasus, for there was every reason to suspect that he had only come over to spy on our means of defense; and that it would therefore be better to transport him to Central Russia, and make use of him only after his family had been rescued from the mountaineers and it had become possible to convince ourselves of his loyalty. Chernyshov’s plan did not succeed, merely because on that New Year’s Day Nicholas was in particularly bad spirits, and out of perversity would not have accepted any suggestion whatever from anyone, and least of all from Chernyshov, whom he 79 only tolerated—regarding him as indispensable for the time being, but looking upon him as a blackguard; for Nicholas knew of his endeavors at the trial of the Decembrists to secure the conviction of Zachary Chernyshov and of his attempt to obtain Zachary’s property for himself. So, thanks to Nicholas’s ill temper, Hadji Murad remained in the Caucasus; and his circumstances were not changed as they might have been had Chernyshov presented his report at another time. § It was half-past nine o’clock when, through the mist of the cold morning (the thermometer showed 13 degrees Fahrenheit below zero) Chernyshov’s fat, bearded coachman, sitting on the box of a small sleigh (like the one Nicholas drove about in) with a sharp-angled, cushion-shaped azure velvet cap on his head, drew up at the entrance of the Winter Palace, and gave a friendly nod to his chum, Prince Dolgoruky’s coachman—who, having brought his master to the palace, had himself long been waiting outside, in his big coat with the thickly wadded skirts, sitting on the reins and rubbing his numbed hands together. Chernyshov had on a long, large-caped cloak, with a luffy collar of silver beaver, and a regulation three-cornered hat with cocks’ feathers. He threw back the bearskin apron of the sleigh, and carefully disengaged his chilled feet, on which he had no galoshes (he prided himself on never wearing any). Clanking his spurs with an air of bravado, he ascended the carpeted steps and passed through the hall door, which was respectfully opened for him by the porter, and entered the hall. Having thrown off his cloak, which an old Court lackey hurried forward to take, he went to a mirror and carefully removed the hat from his curled wig. Looking at himself in the mirror, he arranged the hair on his temples and the tuft above his forehead with an accustomed movement of his old hands, and adjusted his cross, the shoulder-knots of his uniform, and his large-initialled epaulets; and then went up the gently-ascending carpeted stairs, his not very reliable old legs feebly mounting the shallow steps. Passing the Court lackeys in gala livery, who stood obsequiously bowing, Chernyshov entered the waitingroom. A newly appointed aide-de-camp to the Emperor, in a 80 shining new uniform, with epaulets shoulder-knots and a stillfresh rosy face, a small black mustache, and the hair on his temples brushed towards his eyes (Nicholas’s fashion) met him respectfully Prince Vasely Dolgoruky, Assistant-Minister of War, with an expression of ennui on his dull face—which was ornamented with similar whiskers, mustaches, and temple tufts brushed forward like Nicholas’s—greeted him. “L’empereur?” said Chernyshov, addressing the aide-decamp and looking inquiringly towards the door leading to the meeting room. “Sa majesté vient de rentrer,”(“His majesty has just returned.”) replied the aide-de-camp, evidently enjoying the sound of his own voice, and, stepping so softly and steadily that had a tumbler of water been placed on his head none of it would have been spilled, he approached the noiselessly opening door and, his whole body evincing reverence for the spot he was about to visit, he disappeared. Dolgoruky, meanwhile, opened his portfolio to see that it contained the necessary papers, while Chernyshov, frowning, paced up and down to restore the circulation in his numbed feet, and thought over what he was about to report to the Emperor. He was near the door of the meeting room when it opened again, and the aide-de-camp, even more radiant and respectful than before, came out and with a gesture invited the minister and his assistant to enter. The Winter Palace had been rebuilt after the ire some considerable time before this; but Nicholas was still occupying rooms in the upper story. The cabinet ofice in which he received the reports of his ministers and other high oficials, was a very lofty apartment with four large windows. A big portrait of the Emperor Alexander I hung on the front wall. Between the windows stood two bureaus. By the walls stood several chairs. In the middle of the room was an enormous writing-table, with an armchair before it for Nicholas, and other chairs for those to whom he gave audience. Nicholas sat at the table in a black coat with shoulder-straps but no epaulets, his enormous body—of which the overgrown stomach was tightly laced in—was thrown back, and he gazed at the newcomers with ixed, lifeless eyes. His long, pale face, 81 with its enormous receding forehead between the tufts of hair which were brushed forward and skillfully joined to the wig that covered his bald patch, was specially cold and stony that day. His eyes, always dim, looked duller than usual; the compressed lips under his upturned mustaches, and his fat freshlyshaven cheeks—on which symmetrical sausage-shaped bits of whiskers had been left—supported by the high collar, and his chin which also pressed upon it, gave to his face a dissatisied and even irate expression. The cause of the bad mood he was in was fatigue. The fatigue was due to the fact that he had been to a masquerade the night before, and while walking about as was his wont, in his Horse Guards’ uniform with a bird on the helmet, among the public which crowded round and timidly made way for his enormous, self-assured igure, he again met the mask who at the previous masquerade, by her whiteness, her beautiful igure, and her tender voice had aroused his senile sensuality. She had then disappeared, after promising to meet him at the next masquerade. At yesterday’s masquerade she had come up to him, and he had not let her go again, but had led her to the box specially kept ready for that purpose, where he could be alone with her. Having arrived in silence at the door of the box, Nicholas looked round to ind the attendant, but he was not there. Nicholas frowned, and pushed the door open himself, letting the lady enter irst. “Il y a quelq’un!”(“There’s some one there!”) said the mask, stopping short. The box actually was occupied. On the small velvet-covered sofa sat, close together, an Uhlan oficer and a pretty, curlyhaired, fair young woman in a domino, who had removed her mask. On catching sight of the angry igure of Nicholas, drawn up to its full height, the fair-haired woman quickly covered her face with her mask; but the Uhlan oficer, rigid with fear, without rising from the sofa, gazed at Nicholas with ixed eyes. Used as he was to the terror he inspired in people, that terror always pleased Nicholas, and by way of contrast he sometimes liked to astound those who were plunged in terror by addressing kindly words to them. He did so on this occasion. “Well, friend!” said he to the oficer, rigid with fear, “you are younger than I, and might give up your place to me.” 82 The oficer jumped to his feet, and growing pale and then red and bending almost double, he followed his partner silently out of the box, and Nicholas remained alone with his lady. She proved to be a pretty, twenty-year old virgin, the daughter of a Swedish governess. She told Nicholas how, when quite a child, she had fallen in love with him from his portraits; how she adored him, and made up her mind to attract his attention at any cost. Now she had succeeded, and wanted nothing more—so she said. The girl was taken to the place where Nicholas usually had rendezvous with women, and there he spent more than an hour with her. When he returned to his room that night and lay on the hard narrow bed about which he prided himself, and covered himself with the cloak which he considered to be (and spoke of as being) as famous as Napoleon’s hat, it was long before he could fall asleep. He thought now of the frightened and elated expression on that girl’s fair face, and now of the full, powerful shoulders of his regular mistress, Neledova, and he compared the two. That proligacy in a married man was a bad thing did not once enter his head; and he would have been greatly surprised had anyone censured him for it. Yet, though convinced that he had acted properly, some kind of unpleasant after-taste remained behind, and to stile that feeling he began to dwell on a thought that always tranquillized him—the thought of his own greatness. Though he fell asleep very late, he rose before eight, and after attending to his toilet in the usual way—rubbing his big well-fed body all over with ice—and saying his prayers (repeating those he had been used to from childhood—the prayer to the Virgin, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, without attaching any kind of meaning to the words he uttered), he went out through the smaller portico of the palace onto the embankment, in his military cloak and cap. On the embankment he met a student in the uniform of the School of Jurisprudence, who was as enormous as himself. On recognizing the uniform of that School, which he disliked for its freedom of thought, Nicholas frowned; but the stature of the student, and the painstaking manner in which he drew himself up and saluted, ostentatiously sticking out his elbow, molliied Nicholas’s displeasure. 83 “Your name?” said he. “Polosatov, your Imperial Majesty.” “...ine fellow!” The student continued to stand with his hand lifted to his hat. Nicholas stopped. “Do you wish to enter the army?” “Not at all, your Imperial Majesty.” “Blockhead!” And Nicholas turned away and continued his walk, and began uttering aloud the irst words that came into his head. “Kopervine...Kopervine—“ he repeated several times (it was the name of yesterday’s girl). “Horrid … horrid—” He did not think of what he said, but stiled his feelings by listening to it. “Yes, what would Russia do without me?” said he, feeling his former dissatisfaction returning; “yes, what would—not Russia alone, but Europe be, without me?” and calling to mind the weakness and stupidity of his brother-in-law, the King of Prussia, he shook his head. As he was returning to the small portico, he saw the carriage of his sister-in-law, Helena Pavlovna, with a red-liveried footman, approaching the Saltykov entrance of the palace. Helena Pavlovna was to him the personiication of that futile class of people who discussed not merely science and poetry, but even the ways of governing men: imagining that they could govern themselves better than he, Nicholas, governed them! He knew that however much he crushed such people, they reappeared again and again; and he recalled her husband, his brother Michael Pavlovich, who had died not long before. A feeling of sadness and vexation came over him, and with a dark frown he again began whispering the irst words that came into his head. He only ceased doing this when he re-entered the palace. On reaching his apartments he smoothed his whiskers and the hair on his temples and the wig on his bald patch, and twisted his mustaches upwards in front of the mirror; and then went straight to the cabinet in which he received reports. He irst received Chernyshov, who at once saw by his face, 84 and especially by his eyes, that Nicholas was in a particularly bad humor that day; and knowing about the adventure of the night before, he understood the cause. Having coldly greeted him and invited him to sit down, Nicholas ixed on him a lifeless gaze. The irst matter Chernyshov reported upon was a case, which had just been discovered, of embezzlement by commissariat oficials; the next was the movement of troops on the Prussian frontier; then came a list of rewards to be given at the New Year to some people omitted from a former list; then Vorontsov’s report about Hadji Murad; and lastly some unpleasant business concerning an attempt by a student of the Academy of Medicine on the life of a professor. Nicholas heard the report of the embezzlement silently, with compressed lips, his large white hand—with one ring on the fourth inger—stroking some sheets of paper, and his eyes steadily ixed on Chernyshov’s forehead and on the tuft of hair above it. Nicholas was convinced that everybody stole. He knew he would have to punish the commissariat oficials now, and decided to send them all to serve in the ranks; but he also knew that this would not prevent those who succeeded them from acting in the same way. It was a characteristic of oficials to steal, and it was his duty to punish them for doing so; and tired as he was of that duty he conscientiously performed it. “It seems there is only one honest man in Russia!” said he. Chernyshov at once understood that this one honest man was Nicholas himself, and smiled approvingly. “It looks like it, your Imperial Majesty,” said he. “Leave it—I will give a decision,” said Nicholas, taking the document and putting it on the left side of the table. Then Chernyshov reported the rewards to be given, and about moving the army on the Prussian frontier. Nicholas looked over the list and struck out some names; and then briely and irmly gave orders to move two divisions to the Prussian frontier. Nicholas could not forgive the King of Prussia for granting a Constitution to his people after the events of 1848, and therefore, while expressing most friendly feelings to his brother-in-law in letters and conversation, he considered it necessary to keep an army near the frontier in case of need. He might want to use these troops to defend his brother-in85 law’s throne if the people of Prussia rebelled (Nicholas saw a readiness for rebellion everywhere) as he had used troops to suppress the rising in Hungary a few years previously. Another reason why troops were wanted, was to give more weight and inluence to the advice he gave to the King of Prussia. Yes—what would Russia be like now, if it were not for me? he again thought. “Well, what else is there?” said he. “A courier from the Caucasus,” said Chernyshov, and he reported what Vorontsov had written about Hadji Murad’s surrender. “Dear me!” said Nicholas. “Well, it’s a good beginning!” “Evidently the plan devised by Your Majesty begins to bear fruit,” said Chernyshov. This approval of his strategic talents was particularly pleasant to Nicholas, because, though he prided himself on those talents, at the bottom of his heart he knew that they did not really exist; and he now desired to hear more detailed praise of himself. “How do you mean?” he asked. “I understand it this way—that if Your Majesty’s plans had been adopted long ago, and we had moved forward steadily though slowly, cutting down forests and destroying the supplies of food, the Caucasus would have been subjugated long ago. I attribute Hadji Murad’s surrender entirely to his having come to the conclusion that they can hold out no longer.” “True,” said Nicholas. Although the plan of a gradual advance into the enemy’s territory by means of felling forests and destroying the food supplies was Ermolov’s and Velyamenov’s plan, and was quite contrary to Nicholas’s own plan of seizing Shamil’s place of residence and destroying that nest of robbers—which was the plan on which the Dargo expedition in 1845 (that cost so many lives) had been undertaken—Nicholas nevertheless also attributed to himself the plan of a slow advance and a systematic felling of forests and devastation of the country. It would seem that to believe the plan of a slow movement by felling forests and destroying food supplies was his own, necessitated the hiding of the the fact that he had insisted on quite contrary operations in 1845. But he did not hide it, and was proud 86 of the plan of the 1845 expedition, and also of the plan of a slow advance—though evidently the two were contrary to one another. Continual brazen lattery from everybody round him, in the teeth of obvious facts, had brought him to such a state that he no longer saw his own inconsistencies or measured his actions and words by reality, logic or even by simple common sense; but was quite convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust and mutually contradictory they might be, became reasonable, just and mutually accordant simply because he gave them. His decision in the case next reported to him—that of the student of the Academy of Medicine—was of that senseless kind. The case was as follows: A young man who had twice failed in his examinations was being examined a third time, and when the examiner again would not pass him, the young man, whose nerves were deranged, considering this to be an injustice, in a paroxysm of fury seized a pocket-knife from the table and, rushing at the professor, inlicted on him several triling wounds. “What’s his name?” asked Nicholas. “Bzhezovsky.” “A Pole?” “Of Polish descent, and a Roman Catholic,” said Chernyshov. Nicholas frowned. He had done much evil to the Poles. To justify that evil he had to be certain that all Poles were rascals, and he considered them to be such, and hated them accordingly in proportion to the evil he had done to them. “Wait a little,” he said, closing his eyes and bowing his head. Chernyshov, having more than once heard Nicholas say so, knew that when the Emperor had to take a decision, it was only necessary for him to concentrate his attention for a few moments, and the spirit moved him, and the best possible decision presented itself, as though an inner voice had told him what to do. He was now thinking how most fully to satisfy the feeling of hatred against the Poles which this incident had stirred up within him; and the inner voice suggested the following decision. He took the report and in his large handwriting wrote on its margin, with three orthographical mistakes: 87 “Diserves deth, but, thank God, we have no capitle punishment, and it is not for me to introduce it. Make him run the gauntlet of a thousand men twelve times.—Nicholas.” He signed, adding his unnaturally huge lourish. Nicholas knew that twelve thousand strokes with the regulation rods were not only certain death with torture, but were a superluous cruelty, for ive thousand strokes were suficient to kill the strongest man. But it pleased him to be ruthlessly cruel, and it also pleased him to think that we have abolished capital punishment in Russia. Having written his decision about the student, he pushed it across to Chernyshov. “There,” he said, “read it.” Chernyshov read it, and bowed his head as a sign of respectful amazement at the wisdom of the decision. “Yes, and let all the students be present on the drill ground at the punishment,” added Nicholas. It will do them good! I will abolish this revolutionary spirit, and will tear it up by the roots! he thought. “It shall be done,” replied Chernyshov; and after a short pause he straightened the tuft on his forehead and returned to the Caucasian report. “What do you command me to write in reply to Prince Vorontsov’s dispatch?” “To keep irmly to my system of destroying the dwellings and food supplies in Chechnya, and to harass them by raids.” answered Nicholas. “And what are your Majesty’s commands with reference to Hadji Murad?” asked Chernyshov. “Why, Vorontsov writes that he wants to make use of him in the Caucasus.” “Is it not dangerous?” said Chernyshov, avoiding Nicholas’s gaze. “Prince Vorontsov is, I’m afraid, too coniding.” “And you—what do you think?” asked Nicholas sharply, detecting Chernyshov’s intention of presenting Vorontsov’s decision in an unfavorable light. “Well, I should have thought it would be safer to deport him to Central Russia.” “You would have thought!” said Nicholas ironically. “But I don’t think so, and agree with Vorontsov. Write to him accordingly.” 88 “It shall be done,” said Chernyshov, rising and bowing himself out. Dolgoruky also bowed himself out, having during the whole audience only uttered a few words (in reply to a question from Nicholas) about the movement of the army. After Chernyshov, Nicholas received Bebikov, GeneralGovernor of the Western Provinces. Having expressed his approval of the measures taken by Bebikov against the mutinous peasants who did not wish to accept the Orthodox Faith, he ordered him to have all those who did not submit tried by court-martial. That was equivalent to sentencing them to run the gauntlet. He also ordered the editor of a newspaper to be sent to serve in the ranks of the army for publishing information about the transfer of several thousand State peasants to the Imperial estates. “I do this because I consider it necessary,” said Nicholas, “and I will not allow it to be discussed.” Bebikov saw the cruelty of the order concerning the Uniate peasants, and the injustice of transferring State peasants (the only free peasants in Russia in those days) to the Crown, which meant making them serfs of the Imperial family. But it was impossible to express dissent. Not to agree with Nicholas’s decisions would have meant the loss of that brilliant position which it had cost Bebikov forty years to attain, and which he now enjoyed; and he therefore submissively bowed his dark head (already touched with gray) to indicate his submission and his readiness to fulil the cruel, insensate and dishonest supreme will. Having dismissed Bebikov, Nicholas, with a sense of duty well fulilled, stretched himself, glanced at the clock, and went to get ready to go out. Having put on a uniform with epaulets, Orders and a ribbon, he went out into the reception hall, where more than a hundred people—men in uniforms and women in elegant low-necked dresses, all standing in the places assigned to them—awaited his arrival with agitation. He came out to them with a lifeless look in his eyes, his chest expanded, his stomach bulging out above and below its bandages; and feeling everybody’s gaze tremulously and obsequiously ixed upon him, he assumed an even more triumphant air. When his eyes met those of people he knew, remembering 89 who was who, he stopped and addressed a few words to them, sometimes in Russian and sometimes in French, and transixing them with his cold glassy eye, listened to what they said. Having received all the New Year congratulations, he passed on to church. God, through His servants the priests, greeted and praised Nicholas just as worldly people did; and, weary as he was of these greetings and praises, Nicholas duly accepted them. All this was as it should be, because the welfare and happiness of the whole world depended on him; and though the matter wearied him, he still did not refuse the universe his assistance. When at the end of the service the magniicently arrayed deacon, his long hair crimped and carefully combed, began the chant “Many Years,” which was heartily caught up by the splendid choir, Nicholas looked round and noticed Neledova, with her ine shoulders, standing by a window, and he decided the comparison with yesterday’s girl in her favor. After Mass he went to the Empress and spent a few minutes in the bosom of his family, joking with the children and with his wife. Then, passing through the Hermitage, he visited the Minister of the Court, Volkonsky, and, among other things, ordered him to pay out of a special fund a yearly pension to the mother of yesterday’s girl. From there he went for his customary drive. Dinner that day was served in the Pompeian Hall. Besides the younger sons of Nicholas and Michael, invited guests included Baron Lieven, Count Ryevsky, Dolgoruky, the Prussian Ambassador, and the King of Prussia’s aide-de-camp. While waiting for the appearance of the Emperor and Empress, an interesting conversation took place between Baron Lieven and the Prussian Ambassador concerning the disquieting news from Poland. “La Pologne et le Caucase, ce sont les deux cautères de la Russie,” (“Poland and the Caucasus are Russia’s two sores.”) said Lieven. “Il nous faut 100,000 hommes à peu près, dans chaqu’un de ces deux pays” (“We need about 100,000 men in each of those two countries.”). The Ambassador expressed a ictitious surprise that it should be so. “Vous dites, la Pologne—” (“You say that Poland—”) 90 began the Ambassador. “Oh, oui, c’était un coup de maître de Metternich, de nous en avoir laissé l’embarras…” (“Oh, yes, it was a masterstroke of Metternich’s to leave us the bother of it...”) At this point the Empress, with her trembling head and ixed smile, entered, followed by Nicholas. At dinner Nicholas spoke of Hadji Murad’s surrender, and said that the war in the Caucasus must now soon come to an end in consequence of the measures he was taking to limit the scope of the mountaineers, by felling their forests and by his system of erecting a series of small forts. The Ambassador, having exchanged a rapid glance with the aide-de-camp—to whom he had only that morning spoken about Nicholas’s unfortunate weakness for considering himself a great strategist—warmly praised this plan, which once more demonstrated Nicholas’s great strategic ability. After dinner Nicholas drove to the ballet, where hundreds of women marched round in tights and scant clothing. One of them especially attracted him, and he had the German ballet master sent for, and gave orders that a diamond ring should be presented to him. The next day, when Chernyshov came with his report, Nicholas again conirmed his order to Vorontsov—that now that Hadji Murad had surrendered, the Chechens should be more actively harassed than ever, and the cordon round them tightened. Chernyshov wrote in that sense to Vorontsov; and another courier, hurriedly driving more horses and bruising the faces of more drivers, galloped to Tilis. 91 Chapter XVI In obedience to this command of Nicholas, a raid was immediately made in Chechnya that same month, January 1852. The detachment ordered for the raid consisted of four infantry battalions, two companies of Cossacks, and eight guns. The column marched along the road, and on both sides of it in a continuous line, now mounting, now descending, marched sharpshooters in high boots, sheepskin coats and tall caps, with riles on their shoulders and cartridges in their belts. As usual when marching through a hostile country, silence was observed as far as possible. Only occasionally the guns jingled, jolting across a ditch, or an artillery horse, not understanding that silence was ordered, snorted or neighed, or an angry commander shouted in a hoarse subdued voice to his subordinates that the line was spreading out too much, or marching too near or too far from the column. Only once was the silence broken, when, from a bramble patch between the line and the column, a gazelle with a white breast and gray back jumped out, followed by a male of the same color with small backward-curving horns. Doubling up their forelegs at each big bound they took, the beautiful and timid creatures came so close to the column that some of the soldiers rushed after them, laughing and shouting, intending to bayonet them, but the gazelles turned back, slipped through the line of rilemen, and, pursued by a few horsemen and the company’s dogs, led like birds to the mountains. It was still winter, but towards noon, when the column (which had started early in the morning) had gone three miles, the sun had risen high enough and was powerful enough to make the men quite hot, and its rays were so bright that it was painful to look at the shining steel of the bayonets, or at the relections—like little suns—on the brass of the cannons. The clear rapid stream the detachment had just crossed lay behind, and in front were tilled ields and meadows in the 92 shallow valleys. Further in front were the dark mysterious forest-clad hills with crags rising beyond them, and further still, on the lofty horizon, were the ever-beautiful ever-changing snowy peaks that danced in the light like diamonds. In a black coat and tall cap, shouldering his sword, at the head of the 5th Company marched Butler, a tall handsome oficer who had recently been exchanged from the Guards. He was illed with a buoyant sense of the joy of living, and also of the danger of death, and with a wish for action, and the consciousness of being part of an immense whole directed by a single will. This was the second time he was going into action, and he thought how in a moment they would be ired at, and that he would not only not stoop when the shells lew overhead, nor heed the whistle of the bullets, but would even carry his head even more erect than before, and would look round at his comrades and at the the soldiers with smiling eyes, and would begin to talk in a perfectly calm voice about quite other matters. The detachment turned off the good road onto a little-used one that crossed a stubbly cornield, and it was drawing near the forest when—they could not see from where—with an ominous whistle, a shell lew past the baggage-wagons, and tore up the ground in the ield by the roadside. “It is beginning,” said Butler, with a bright smile to a comrade who was walking beside him. And so it was. After the shell, from the shelter of the forest a thick crowd of mounted Chechens appeared with banners. In the midst of the crowd could be seen a large green banner, and an old but very far-sighted sergeant-major informed the short-sighted Butler that Shamil himself must be there. The horsemen came down the hill and appeared to the right, at the highest part of the valley nearest the detachment, and began to descend. A little general in a thick black coat and tall cap rode up to Butler’s company on his pedigreed ambler, and ordered him to the right to encounter the descending horsemen. Butler quickly led his company in the direction indicated, but before he reached the valley he heard two cannon shots behind him. He looked around: two clouds of gray smoke were rising from two cannons and were beginning to spread along the valley. The mountaineers’ horsemen—who had evidently not expected to meet artillery—retreated. Butler’s company began iring at 93 them, and the whole ravine illed with the smoke of powder. Only higher up, above the ravine, could the mountaineers be seen hurriedly retreating, though still iring back at the Cossacks who pursued them. The company followed the mountaineers further, and on the slope of a second ravine came in view of an aoul village. Following the Cossacks, Butler with his company entered the aoul at a run. None of its inhabitants were there. The soldiers were ordered to burn the corn and the hay, as well as the sáklyas, and the whole aoul was soon illed with pungent smoke, amid which the soldiers rushed about, dragging out of the sáklyas what they could ind, and above all catching and shooting the fowls the mountaineers had not been able to take away with them. The oficers sat down at some distance beyond the smoke, and lunched and drank. The sergeant-major brought them some honeycombs on a board. There was no sign of any Chechens, and early in the afternoon the order was given to retreat. The companies formed into a column behind the aoul, and Butler happened to be in the rearguard. As soon as they began their departure, Chechens appeared, and, following the detachment, ired at it. When the detachment came out into an open space, the mountaineers pursued it no further. Not one of Butler’s company had been wounded, and he returned in a most happy and energetic mood. When, after fording the same stream it had crossed in the morning, the detachment spread over the cornields and the meadows, the singers of each company came forward, and songs illed the air. “Very diff’rent, very diff’rent, Jägers (rilemen) are, Jägers are!” sang Butler’s singers, and his horse stepped merrily to the music. Trezorka, the shaggy gray dog of the company, with his tail curled up, ran in front with an air of responsibility, like a commander. Butler felt buoyant calm and joyful. War presented itself to him as consisting only in his exposing himself to danger and to possible death, and thereby gaining rewards and the respect of his comrades here, as well as of his friends in Russia. Strange to say, his imagination never pictured the other aspect of war: the death and wounds of the soldiers oficers and mountaineers. To retain this poetic conception he even unconsciously 94 avoided looking at the dead and wounded. So that day, when we had three dead and twelve wounded, he passed by a corpse lying on its back, and only saw with one eye the strange position of the waxen hand and a dark red spot on the head, and did not stop to look. The hillsmen appeared to him only as mounted dzhigíts from whom one had to defend oneself. “You see, my dear sir,” said his major in an interval between two songs, “it’s not as with you in Petersburg—‘Eyes right! Eyes left!’ Here we have done our job; and now we go home, and Masha will set a pie and some nice cabbage soup before us. That’s life; don’t you think so?—Now then! ‘As the Dawn was Breaking!’ ” he called for his favorite song. There was no wind, the air was fresh and clear, and so transparent that the snow hills nearly a hundred miles away seemed quite near, and in the intervals between the songs the regular sound of the footsteps and the jingle of the guns was heard as a background on which each song began and ended. The song that was being sung in Butler’s company was composed by a cadet in honor of the regiment, and went to a dance tune. The chorus was. “Very diff’rent, very diff’rent, Jägers are, Jägers are!” Butler rode beside the oficer next in command above him, Major Petrov, with whom he lived; and he felt he could not be thankful enough to have exchanged from the Guards and come to the Caucasus. His chief reason for exchanging was that he had lost all he had at cards, and was afraid that if he remained there he would be unable to resist playing, though he had nothing more to lose. Now all this was over, his life was quite changed, and was such a pleasant and brave one! He forgot that he was ruined, and forgot his unpaid debts. The Caucasus, the war, the soldiers, the oficers, those tipsy brave good-natured fellows, and Major Petrov himself, all seemed so delightful that sometimes it appeared too good to be true that he was not in Petersburg—in a room illed with tobacco-smoke, turning down the corners of cards and gambling, hating the holder of the bank, and feeling a dull pain in his head—but was really here in this glorious region among these brave Caucasians. The Major and the daughter of a surgeon’s orderly, formerly known as Masha, but now generally called by the more respectful name of Mary Dmetrievna, lived together as man 95 and wife. Mary Dmetrievna was a handsome fair-haired very freckled childless woman of thirty. Whatever her past may have been, she was now the major’s faithful companion, and looked after him like a nurse—a very necessary matter, since the Major often drank himself into oblivion. When they reached the fort everything happened as the Major had foreseen. Mary Dmetrievna gave him, Butler, and two other oficers of the detachment who had been invited, a nourishing and tasty dinner, and the Major ate and drank till he was unable to speak, and then went off to his room to sleep. Butler, tired but contented, having drunk rather more Chikher wine than was good for him, went to his bedroom, and hardly had he time to undress before, placing his hand under his handsome curly head, he fell into a sound, dreamless, and unbroken sleep. 96 Chapter XVII The aoul which had been destroyed was that in which Hadji Murad had spent the night before he went over to the Russians. Sado, with his family, had left the aoul on the approach of the Russian detachment; and when he returned he found his sáklya in ruins—the roof fallen in, the door and the posts supporting the penthouse burned, and the interior ilthy. His son, the handsome, bright-eyed boy who had gazed with such ecstasy at Hadji Murad, was brought dead to the mosque on a horse covered with a búrka. He had been stabbed in the back with a bayonet. The digniied woman who had served Hadji Murad when he was at the house now stood over her son’s body, her smock torn in front, her withered old breasts exposed, her hair down; and she dug her nails into her face till it bled, and wailed incessantly. Sado, with pickaxe and spade, had gone with his relatives to dig a grave for his son. The old grandfather sat by the wall of the ruined sáklya, cutting a stick and gazing solidly in front of him. He had only just returned from the apiary. The two stacks of hay there had been burnt; the apricot and cherry trees he had planted and nurtured were broken and scorched; and, worse still, all the beehives and bees were burnt. The wailing of the women and of the little children who cried with their mothers, mingled with the lowing of the hungry cattle, for whom there was no food. The bigger children did not play, but followed their elders with frightened eyes. The fountain was polluted, evidently on purpose, so that the water could not be used. The mosque was polluted in the same way, and the Mullah and his assistants were cleaning it out. No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings; but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them—like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves—was as natural an instinct 97 as that of self-preservation. The inhabitants of the aoul were confronted by the choice of remaining there and restoring with frightful effort what had been produced with such labor and had been so lightly and senselessly destroyed, facing every moment the possibility of a repetition of what had happened, or—contrary to their religion and despite the repulsion and contempt they felt—to submit to the Russians. The old men prayed, and unanimously decided to send envoys to Shamil, asking him for help. Then they immediately set to work to restore what had been destroyed. 98 Chapter XVIII On the morning after the raid, not very early, Butler left the house by the back porch, meaning to take a stroll and a breath of fresh air before breakfast, which he usually did with Petrov. The sun had already risen above the hills, and it was painful to look at the brightly lit-up white walls of the houses on the right side of the street; but then, as always, it was cheerful and soothing to look to the left, at the dark receding ascending forest-clad hills, and at the dim line of snow peaks which as usual pretended to be clouds. Butler looked at these mountains, inhaled deep breaths and rejoiced that he was alive, and that it was just he himself that was alive, and that he lived in this beautiful place. He was also rather pleased that he had behaved so well in yesterday’s affair, both during the advance and especially during the retreat, when things were pretty hot; and he was also pleased to remember how on their return after the raid Masha (or Mary Dmetrievna), Petrov’s mistress, had treated them at dinner, and how she had been particularly nice and simple with everybody, but specially kind—as he thought—to him. Mary Dmetrievna, with her thick plait of hair, her broad shoulders, her high bosom, and the radiant smile on her kindly freckled face, involuntarily attracted Butler, who was a strong young bachelor; and it even seemed to him that she wanted him; but he considered that that would be wrong towards his good-natured simple-hearted comrade, and he maintained a simple respectful attitude towards her, and was pleased with himself for so doing. He was thinking of this when his meditations were disturbed by the tramp of many horses’ hoofs along the dusty road in front of him, as if several men were riding that way. He looked up, and saw at the end of the street a group of horsemen coming towards him at a walk. In front of a score of Cossacks rode two men: one in a white Circassian coat, with a tall 99 turban on his head; the other, an oficer in the Russian service, dark, with an aquiline nose, and much silver on his uniform and weapons. The man with the turban rode a ine chestnut horse with mane and tail of a lighter shade, a small head, and beautiful eyes. The oficer’s was a large, handsome Karabakh horse. Butler, a lover of horses, immediately recognized the great strength of the irst horse, and stopped to learn who these people were. The oficer addressed him. “This the house of commanding oficer?” he asked, his foreign accent and his words betraying his foreign origin. Butler replied that it was. “And who is that?” he added, coming nearer to the oficer and indicating the man with the turban. “That, Hadji Murad. He come here to stay with the commander,” said the oficer. Butler knew about Hadji Murad and about his having come over to the Russians; but he had not at all expected to see him here in this little fort. Hadji Murad gave him a friendly look. “Good day, kotkildy,” said Butler, repeating the Tartar greeting he had learned. “Saubul!” (“Be well!”) replied Hadji Murad, nodding. He rode up to Butler and held out his hand, from two ingers of which hung his whip. “Are you the chief?” he asked. “No, the chief is in here. I will go and call him,” said Butler, addressing the oficer; and he went up the steps and pushed the door. But the door of the visitors’ entrance—as Mary Dmetrievna called it—was locked; and as it still remained closed after he had knocked, Butler went round to the back door. He called his orderly, but received no reply; and inding neither of the two orderlies, he went into the kitchen, where Mary Dmetrievna—lushed, with a kerchief tied round her head, and her sleeves rolled up on her plump white arms—was rolling pastry, white as her hands, and cutting it into small pieces to make pies of. “Where have the orderlies gone to?” asked Butler. “Gone to drink,” replied Mary Dmetrievna. “What do you want?” 100 “To have the front door opened. You have a whole horde of mountaineers in front of your house. Hadji Murad has come!” “Invent something else!” said Mary Dmetrievna, smiling. “I am not joking, he is really waiting by the porch!” “Is it really true?” said she. “Why should I wish to deceive you? Go and see; he’s just at the porch!” “Dear me, here’s a go!” said Mary Dmetrievna pulling down her sleeves, and putting up her hand to feel whether the hairpins in her thick plait were all in order. “Then I will go and wake Ivan Matveitch.” “No, I’ll go myself. And you, Bondarenko, go and open the door,” said he to Petrov’s orderly, who had just appeared. “Well, so much the better!” said Mary Dmetrievna, and returned to her work. When he heard that Hadji Murad had come to his house, Ivan Matveitch Petrov, the Major, who had already heard that Hadji Murad was in Grozny, was not at all surprised; and sitting up in bed he made a cigarette, lit it, and began to dress, loudly clearing his throat, and grumbling at the authorities who had sent “that devil” to him. When he was ready, he told his orderly to bring him some medicine. The orderly knew that “medicine” meant vodka, and brought some. “There is nothing so bad as mixing,” muttered the Major, when he had drunk the vodka and taken a bite of rye bread. “Yesterday I drank a little Chikher, and now I have a headache.… Well, I’m ready,” said he, and went to the parlor, into which Butler had already shown Hadji Murad and the oficer who accompanied him. The oficer handed the Major orders from the commander of the Left Flank, to the effect that he should receive Hadji Murad, and should allow him to have intercourse with the mountaineers through spies, but was on no account to let him to leave the fort without a convoy of Cossacks. Having read the order, the Major looked intently at Hadji Murad, and again scrutinized the paper. After passing his eyes several times from one to the other in this manner, he at last ixed them on Hadji Murad and said: “Yakshé, Bek; yakshé!” (“Very well, sir, very well!”) Let 101 him stay here, and tell him I have orders not to let him out— and that what is commanded is sacred! Well, Butler, where do you think we’d better lodge him? Shall we put him in the ofice?” Butler had not time to answer before Mary Dmetrievna—who had come from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway—said to the Major,— “Why? Keep him here! We will give him the guest chamber and the storeroom. Then at any rate he will be within sight,” said she, glancing at Hadji Murad; but meeting his eyes she turned quickly away. “Well, you know, I think Marya Dmetrievna is right,” said Butler. “Now then, now then; get away! Women have no business here,” said the Major, frowning. During the whole of this discussion, Hadji Murad sat with his hand on the hilt of his dagger, and a faint smile of contempt on his lips. He said it was all the same to him where he lodged, and that he wanted nothing but what the Sirdar had permitted—namely, to have communication with the mountaineers; and that he therefore wished that they should be allowed to come to him. The Major said this should be done, and asked Butler to entertain the visitors till something could be got for them to eat, and their rooms could be prepared. Meanwhile he himself would go across to the ofice, to write what was necessary, and to give some orders. Hadji Murad’s relations with his new acquaintances were at once very clearly deined. From the irst he was repelled by, and felt contempt for, the Major, to whom he always behaved very haughtily. Mary Dmetrievna, who prepared and served up his food, pleased him particularly. He liked her simplicity, and especially the—to him—foreign type of beauty, and he was inluenced by the attraction she felt towards him and unconsciously conveyed. He tried not to look at her or speak to her; but his eyes involuntarily turned towards her and followed her movements. With Butler, from their irst acquaintance, he immediately made friends, and talked much and willingly with him about his life, telling him of his own, and communicating to him the news the spies brought him of his family’s condition; 102 and even consulting him about how he ought to act. The news he received through the spies was not good. During the irst four days of his stay in the fort they came to see him twice, and both times brought bad news. 103 Chapter XIX Hadji Murad’s family had been removed to Vedeno soon after his desertion to the Russians, and were there kept under guard, awaiting Shamil’s decision. The women: his old mother Patimat. and his two wives with their ive little children, were kept under guard in the sáklya of the oficer Ibrahim Raschid, while Hadji Murad’s son, Yusuf, a youth of eighteen, was put in prison: that is, into a pit more than seven feet deep, together with seven criminals, who like himself were awaiting a decision as to their fate. The decision was delayed, because Shamil was away on a campaign against the Russians. On 6 January 1852, he returned to Vedeno, after a battle in which, according to the Russians, he had been vanquished, and had led to Vedeno; but in which, according to him and all the murids, he had been victorious, and had repulsed the Russians. In this battle he himself ired his rile—a thing he seldom did— and, drawing his sword, would have charged straight at the Russians, had not the murids who accompanied him held him back. Two of them were killed on the spot, at Shamil’s side. It was noon when Shamil—surrounded by a party of murids who caracoled around him, iring their riles and pistols and continually singing Lya illyah il Allah!—rode up to his place of residence. All the inhabitants of the large aoul were in the street or on their roofs to meet their ruler; and as a sign of triumph they also ired off riles and pistols. Shamil rode a white arab steed, which pulled at its bit as it approached the house. The horse’s equipment was of the simplest, without gold or silver ornaments, a delicately worked red leather bridle with a stripe down the middle, metal cup-shaped stirrups, and a red saddlecloth showing a little from under the saddle. The Imam wore a brown cloth cloak, lined with black fur showing at the neck and sleeves, and was tightly girded round his thin long waist with a black strap which held a dagger. On his head he wore a 104 tall cap with lat crown and black tassel; round it was wound a white turban, one end of which hung down on his neck. He wore green slippers and black leggings, trimmed with plain braid. In fact, the Imam wore nothing bright—no gold or silver—and his tall erect powerful igure, clothed in garments without any ornaments, surrounded by murids with gold and silver on their clothes and weapons, produced on the people just the impression and inluence that he desired and knew how to produce. His pale face, framed by a closely-trimmed reddish beard, with his small eyes always screwed up, was as immovable as though hewn out of stone. As he rode through the aoul he felt the gaze of a thousand eyes turned eagerly on him, but his eyes looked at no one. Hadji Murad’s wives had come out into the penthouse with the rest of the inmates of the sáklya, to see the Imam’s entry. Only Patimat, Hadji Murad’s old mother did not go out, but remained sitting on the loor of the sáklya with her gray hair down, her long arms encircling her thin knees, blinking with her scorching black eyes as she watched the dying embers in the ireplace. She, like her son, had always hated Shamil; and now she hated him more than ever, and did not wish to see him. Neither did Hadji Murad’s son see Shamil’s triumphal entry. Sitting in the dark and fetid pit, he only heard the iring and singing, and endured tortures such as can only be felt by the young who are full of vitality and deprived of freedom. He only saw his unfortunate dirty and exhausted fellow prisoners—embittered, and for the most part illed with hatred of one another. He now passionately envied those who, enjoying fresh air and light and freedom, caracoled on iery steeds around their chief, shooting and heartily singing: Lya illyah il Allah! When he had crossed the aoul, Shamil rode into the large courtyard adjoining the inner court where his seraglio was. Two armed Lesghians met him at the open gates of this outer court, which was crowded with people. Some had come from distant parts about their own affairs, some had come with petitions; and some had been summoned by Shamil to be tried and sentenced. As Shamil rode in, all respectfully saluted the Imam with their hands on their breasts. Some knelt down and remained on their knees while he rode across the court from 105 the outer to the inner gates. Though he recognized among the people who waited in the court many whom he disliked, and many tedious petitioners who wanted his attention, Shamil passed them all with the same immovable stony expression on his face, and having entered the inner court, dismounted at the penthouse in front of his apartment, to the left of the gate. He was worn out, mentally rather than physically, with the strain of the campaign—for in spite of the public declaration that he had been victorious, he knew very well that his campaign had been unsuccessful; that many Chechen aouls had been burnt down and ruined, and that the unstable and ickle Chechens were wavering, and those nearest the border line were ready to go over to the Russians. All this oppressed him, and had to be dealt with; but at that moment Shamil did not wish to think at all. He only desired one thing: rest, and the delights of family life, and the caresses of his favorite wife, the eighteen-year-old, black-eyed, quickfooted Aminal, who at that very moment was close at hand behind the fence that divided the inner court and separated the men’s from the women’s quarters (Shamil felt sure she was there with his other wives, looking through a chink in the fence while he dismounted). But not only was it impossible for him to go to her, he could not even lie down on his feather cushions and rest from his fatigues, but had irst of all to perform the midday rites, for which he had just then not the least inclination, but which—as the religious leader of the people—he could not omit, and which moreover, were as necessary to him himself as his daily food. So he performed his ablutions and said his prayers, and summoned those who were waiting for him. The irst to enter was Jemal Eddin, his father-in-law and teacher, a tall gray-haired good-looking old man, with a beard white as snow and a rosy red face. He said a prayer, and began questioning Shamil about the incidents of the campaign, and telling him what had happened in the mountains during his absence. Among events of many kinds—murders connected with blood-feuds, cattle stealing, people accused of disobeying the Tarikát (smoking and drinking wine)—Jemal Eddin related how Hadji Murad had sent men to bring his family over to the Russians, but that this had been detected, and the family had 106 been brought to Vedeno, where they were kept under guard and awaited the Imam’s decision. In the next room, the guestchamber, the Elders were assembled to discuss all these affairs, and Jemal Eddin advised Shamil to inish with them and let them go that same day, as they had already been waiting three days for him. After eating his dinner—served to him in his room by Zeidat, a dark sharp-nosed disagreeable-looking woman, whom he did not love but who was his eldest wife—Shamil passed into the guest chamber. The six old men who made up his Council—white, gray, or red-bearded, with tall caps on their heads, some with turbans and some without, wearing new beshméts and Circassian coats girdled with straps to which hung their daggers—rose to greet him on his entrance. Shamil towered a head above them all. He, as well as all the others, lifted his hands, palms upwards, closed his eyes and recited a prayer, and then stroked his face downwards with both hands, uniting them at the end of his beard. Having done this, they all sat down, Shamil on a larger cushion than the others, and discussed the various cases before them. In the case of the criminals, the decisions were given according to the Shariát; two were sentenced to have a hand cut off for stealing; one man to be beheaded for murder; and three were pardoned. Then they came to the principal business—how to stop the Chechens from going over to the Russians. To counteract that tendency, Jemal Eddin drew up the following proclamation:— “I wish you eternal peace with God the Almighty! “I hear that the Russians latter you and invite you to surrender to them. Do not believe them, and do not surrender, but endure. If ye be not rewarded for it in this life, ye shall receive your reward in the life to come. Remember what happened before, when they took your arms from you! If God had not brought you to reason then, in 1840, ye would now be soldiers, and your wives would no longer wear trousers and would be dishonored. “Judge of the future by the past. It is better to die in enmity with the Russians than to live with the Unbelievers. Endure for a little while, and I will come with the Koran and the sword, 107 and will lead you against the enemy. But now I strictly command you not only to entertain no intention, but not even a thought of submitting to the Russians!” Shamil approved this proclamation, signed it, and had it sent out. After this business they considered Hadji Murad’s case. This was of the utmost importance to Shamil. Although he did not wish to admit it, he knew that if Hadji Murad, with his agility, boldness, and courage had been with him, what had now happened in Chechnya would not have occurred. It would therefore be well to make it up with Hadji Murad, and again have the beneit of his services; but as this was not possible, it would never do to allow him to help the Russians; and therefore he must be enticed back and killed. They might accomplish this either by sending a man to Tilis who would kill him there, or by inducing him to come back, and then killing him. The only means of doing the latter was by making use of his family, and especially his son, whom, as Shamil knew, Hadji Murad loved passionately. Therefore they must act through the son. When the councillors had talked all this over, Shamil closed his eyes and sat silent. The councillors knew that this meant that he was listening to the voice of the Prophet, who spoke to him and told him what to do. After ive minutes of solemn silence Shamil opened his eyes, and narrowing them more than usual, said,— “Bring Hadji Murad’s son to me.” “He is here,” replied Jemal Eddin; and in fact Yusuf, Hadji Murad’s son, thin, pale, tattered and evil-smelling, but still handsome in face and igure, with black eyes that burnt like his grandmother Patimat’s, was already standing by the gate of the outside court, waiting to be called in. Yusuf did not share his father’s feelings towards Shamil. He did not know all that had happened in the past, or if he knew it, not having lived through it, he still did not understand why his father was so obstinately hostile to Shamil. To him, who wanted only one thing—to continue living the easy loose life that as the Naïb’s son he had led in Khunzakh—it seemed quite unnecessary to be at enmity with Shamil. Out of deiance and a spirit of contradiction to his father, he particularly admired 108 Shamil, and shared the ecstatic adoration with which he was regarded in the mountains. With a peculiar feeling of tremulous veneration for the Imam, he now entered the guest-chamber. As he stopped by the door he met the steady gaze of Shamil’s halfclosed eyes. He paused for a moment, and then approached Shamil and kissed his large, long-ingered hand. “You are Hadji Murad’s son?” “I am, Imam.” “You know what he has done?” “I know, Imam, and deplore it.” “Can you write?” “I was preparing myself to be a Mullah—“ “Then write to your father that if he will return to me now, before the Feast of Bairam, I will forgive him, and everything shall be as it was before; but if not, and if he remains with the Russians—“ and Shamil frowned sternly, “I will give your grandmother, your mother, and the rest, to the different aouls, and you I will behead!” Not a muscle of Yusuf’s face stirred, and he bowed his head to show that he understood Shamil’s words. “Write that, and give it to my messenger.” Shamil ceased speaking, and looked at Yusuf for a long time in silence. “Write that I have had pity on you and will not kill you, but will put out your eyes as I do to all traitors! … Go!” While in Shamil’s presence Yusuf appeared calm; but when he had been led out of the guest-chamber he rushed at his attendant, snatched the man’s dagger from its sheath, and wished to stab himself; but he was seized by the arms, bound, and led back to the pit. That evening at dusk, after he had inished his evening prayers, Shamil put on a white fur-lined cloak and passed out to the other side of the fence where his wives lived, and went straight to Aminal’s room; but he did not ind her there. She was with the older wives. Then Shamil, trying to remain unseen, hid behind the door and stood waiting for her. But Aminal was angry with him because he had given some silk stuff to Zeidat, and not to her. She saw him come out and go into her room looking for her, and she purposely kept away. She stood a long time at the door of Zeidat’s room, laughing softly at Shamil’s 109 white igure that kept coming in and out of her room. Having waited for her in vain, Shamil returned to his own apartments when it was already time for the midnight prayers. 110 Chapter XX Hadji Murad had been a week in the Major’s house at the fort. Although Mary Dmetrievna quarrelled with the shaggy Khanei (Hadji Murad had only brought two of his murids, Khanei and Eldar, with him) and had turned him out of her kitchen—for which he nearly killed her—she evidently felt a particular respect and sympathy for Hadji Murad. She now no longer served him his dinner, having handed that duty over to Eldar, but she seized every opportunity of seeing him and rendering him service. She always took the liveliest interest in the negotiations about his family, knew how many wives and children he had, and their ages; and each time a spy came to see him, she inquired as best she could into the results of the negotiations. Butler during that week had become quite friendly with Hadji Murad. Sometimes the latter came to Butler’s room; sometimes Butler went to Hadji Murad’s. Sometimes they conversed by the help of the interpreter; and sometimes they got on as best they could with signs and especially with smiles. Hadji Murad had evidently taken a fancy to Butler. This could be gathered from Eldar’s relations with the latter. When Butler entered Hadji Murad’s room, Eldar met him with a pleased smile, showing his glittering teeth, and hurried to put down a cushion for him to sit on, and to relieve him of his sword if he was wearing one. Butler also got to know and became friendly with the shaggy Khanei, Hadji Murad’s sworn brother. Khanei knew many mountain songs, and sang them well. To please Butler, Hadji Murad often made Khanei sing, choosing the songs which he considered best. Khanei had a high tenor voice, and sang with extraordinary clearness and expression. One of the songs Hadji Murad specially liked, impressed Butler by its solemnly mournful tone, and he asked the interpreter to translate it. The subject of the song was the very blood-feud that had existed between Khanei and Hadji Murad. It ran as follows: 111 “The earth will dry on my grave, Mother, my Mother! And you will forget me, And over me rank grass wave, Father, my Father! Nor will you regret me! When tears cease your dark eyes to lave, Sister, dear Sister! No more will grief fret you! “But you my Brother the Elder, will never forget, With vengeance denied me! And you, my Brother the Younger, will ever regret, Till you lie beside me! “Hotly you came, O death-bearing ball that I spurned, For you were my Slave! And you, black earth, that battle-steed trampled and churned Will cover my grave! “Cold are You, O Death, yet I was your Lord and your Master! My body sinks fast to earth; my Soul to Heaven lies faster.” Hadji Murad always listened to this song with closed eyes, and when it ended on a long gradually dying note he always remarked in Russian,— “Good song! Wise song!” After Hadji Murad’s arrival and his intimacy with him and his murids, the poetry of the energetic life of the mountains took a still stronger hold on Butler. He procured for himself a beshmét, a Circassian coat and leggings, and imagined himself a mountaineer living the life those people lived. On the day of Hadji Murad’s departure, the Major invited several oficers to see him off. They were sitting, some at the table where Mary Dmetrievna was pouring out tea, some at another table on which stood vodka Chikher and light refreshments, when Hadji Murad, dressed for the journey, came limping with soft rapid footsteps into the room. They all rose and shook hands with him. The Major offered him a seat on the divan, but Hadji Murad thanked him and sat down on a chair by the window. The silence that followed his entrance did not at all abash 112 him. He looked attentively at all the faces and ixed an indifferent gaze on the tea-table with the samovar and refreshments. Petrovsky, a lively oficer who now met Hadji Murad for the irst time, asked him through the interpreter whether he liked Tilis. “Alya!” he replied. “He says ‘Yes,’” translated the interpreter. “What did he like there?” Hadji Murad said something in reply. “He liked the theater best of all.” “And how did he like the ball at the house of the Commander-in-chief?” Hadji Murad frowned. “Every nation has its own customs! Our women do not dress in such a way,” said he, glancing at Mary Dmetrievna. “Well, didn’t he like it?” “We have a proverb,” said Hadji Murad to the interpreter, “’The dog gave meat to the ass, and the ass gave hay to the dog, and both went hungry,’” and he smiled. “ It’s own customs seem good to each nation.” The conversation went no further. Some of the oficers took tea; some, other refreshments. Hadji Murad accepted the tumbler of tea offered him, and put it down before him. “Won’t you have cream and a bun?” asked Mary Dmetrievna, offering them to him. Hadji Murad bowed his head. “Well, I suppose it is good-bye!” said Butler, touching his knee. “When shall we meet again!” “Good-bye, good-bye!” said Hadji Murad with a smile, in Russian. “Kunák bulug.—Strong kunák to you! Time—ayda— go!” and he jerked his head in the direction in which he had to go. Eldar appeared in the doorway carrying some large white thing across his shoulder and a sword in his hand. Hadji Murad beckoned him to himself, and Eldar came with his big strides and handed him a white búrka and the sword. Hadji Murad rose, took the búrka, threw it over his arm, and, saying something to the interpreter, handed it to Mary Dmetrievna. The interpreter said, “He says you have praised the búrka, so accept it.” 113 “Oh, why?” said Mary Dmetrievna, blushing. “It is necessary. Like Adam,” said Hadji Murad. “Well, thank you,” said Mary Dmetrievna, taking the búrka. “God grant that you rescue your son,” added she. “Ulan yakshé,” said she. “Tell him that I wish him success in releasing his son.” Hadji Murad glanced at Mary Dmetrievna, and nodded his head approvingly. Then he took the sword from Eldar and handed it to the Major. The Major took it, and said to the interpreter,— “Tell him to take my chestnut gelding. I have nothing else to give him.” Hadji Murad waved his hand in front of his face to show that he did not want anything and would not accept it. Then, pointing irst to the mountains and then to his heart, he went out. Everyone followed him as far as the door. The oficers who remained inside the room drew the sword from its scabbard, examined its blade, and decided that it was a real Gurda. Butler accompanied Hadji Murad to the porch, and then something very unexpected occurred which might have ended fatally for Hadji Murad, had it not been for his quick observation, determination, and agility. The inhabitants of the Kumukh aoul, Tash-Kichu, which was friendly to the Russians, greatly respected Hadji Murad, and had often come to the fort merely to look at the famous Naïb. They had sent messengers to him three days previously to ask him to visit their mosque on the Friday. But the Kumukh princes who lived in Tash-Kichu hated Hadji Murad because there was a blood feud between them; and on hearing of this invitation they announced to the people that they would not allow him to enter the mosque. The people became excited, and a ight occurred between them and the princes’ supporters. The Russian authorities paciied the mountaineers and sent word to Hadji Murad not to go to the mosque. Hadji Murad did not go, and everyone supposed that the matter was settled. But at the very moment of his departure, when he came out into the porch before which the horses stood waiting, Arslan Khan—one of the Kumukh princes and an acquaintance of 114 Butler’s and of the Major’s—rode up to the house. When he saw Hadji Murad he snatched a pistol from his belt and aimed at him; but before he could ire, Hadji Murad— in spite of his lameness—rushed down from the porch like a cat towards Arslan Khan, who ired and missed. Seizing Arslan Khan’s horse by the bridle with one hand, Hadji Murad drew his dagger with the other and shouted something to him in Tartar. Butler and Eldar both ran at once towards the enemies, and caught them by the arms. The Major, who had heard the shot, also came out. “What do you mean by it, Arslan—starting such a horrid business on my premises?” said he, when he heard what had happened. “It’s not right, friend! ‘To the foe in the ield, you need not yield!’—but to start this kind of slaughter in my place—!” Arslan Khan, a little man with black mustaches, got off his horse, pale and trembling, looked angrily at Hadji Murad, and went into the house with the Major. Hadji Murad, breathing heavily and smiling, returned to the horses. “Why did he want to kill him?” Butler asked the interpreter. “He says it is a law of theirs,” the interpreter translated Hadji Murad’s reply. “Arslan must avenge a relation’s blood, and so he tried to kill him.” “And supposing he overtakes him on the road?” asked Butler. Hadji Murad smiled. “Well, if he kills me it will prove that such is Allah’s will.… Good-bye,” he said again in Russian, taking his horse by the withers. Glancing round at everybody who had come out to see him off, his eyes rested kindly on Mary Dmetrievna. “Good-bye, my lass,” said he to her. “I thank you.” “God help you—God help you to rescue your family!” repeated Mary Dmetrievna. He did not understand her words, but felt her sympathy for him, and nodded to her. “Mind, don’t forget your kunák,” said Butler. “Tell him I am his true friend and will never forget him,” answered Hadji Murad to the interpreter; and in spite of his 115 short leg he swung himself lightly and quickly, barely touching the stirrup, into the high saddle, automatically feeling for his dagger and adjusting his sword. Then, with that peculiarly proud look with which only a Caucasian hillman sits his horse—as though he were one with it—he rode away from the Major’s house. Khanei and Eldar also mounted, and having taken a friendly leave of their hosts and of the oficers, they rode off at a trot, following their murshéd. As usual after anyone’s departure, those who remained behind began to discuss them. “Plucky fellow! Didn’t he rush at Arslan Khan like a wolf! His face quite changed!” “But he’ll be up to tricks—he’s a terrible rogue, I should say,” remarked Petrovsky. “God grant there were more Russian rogues of such a kind!” suddenly put in Mary Dmetrievna with vexation. “He has lived a week with us, and we have seen nothing but good from him. He is courteous, wise and just,” she added. “How did you ind that out?” “Well, I did ind it out!” “She’s quite smitten,” said the Major, who had just entered the room; “and that’s a fact!” “Well, and if I am smitten? What’s that to you? But why run him down if he’s a good man? Though he’s a Tartar, he’s still a good man!” “Quite true, Mary Dmetrievna,” said Butler; “and you’re quite right to take his part!” 116 Chapter XXI Life in our advanced forts in the Chechen lines went on as usual. Since the events last narrated there had been two alarms when the companies were called out, and militiamen galloped about; but both times the mountaineers who had caused the excitement got away; and once at Vozdvezhensk they killed a Cossack, and succeeded in carrying off eight Cossack horses that were being watered. There had been no further raids since the one in which the aoul was destroyed; but an expedition on a large scale was expected in consequence of the appointment of a new Commander of the Left Flank, Prince Baryatinsky. He was an old friend of the Viceroy’s, and had been in command of the Kabarda Regiment. On his arrival at Grozny as commander of the whole Left Flank, he at once mustered a detachment to continue to carry out the Tsar’s commands as communicated by Chernyshov to Vorontsov. The detachment mustered at Vozdvezhensk left the fort, and took up a position towards Kuren. The troops were encamped there, and were felling the forest. Young Vorontsov lived in a splendid cloth tent, and his wife, Mary Vaselevna, often came to the camp and stayed the night. Baryatinsky’s relations with Mary Vaselevna were no secret to anyone, and the oficers who were not in the aristocratic set, and the soldiers, abused her in coarse terms—for her presence in camp caused them to be told off to lie in ambush at night. The mountaineers were in the habit of bringing guns within range and iring shells at the camp. The shells generally missed their aim, and therefore at ordinary times no special measures were taken to prevent such iring; but now, men were placed in ambush to hinder the mountaineers from injuring or frightening Mary Vaselevna with their cannons. To have to be always lying in ambush at night to save a lady from being frightened, offended and annoyed them; and therefore the soldiers, as well as the oficers not admitted to the higher society, called Mary Vaselevna bad names. Butler, having obtained leave of absence from his fort, came 117 to the camp to visit some old messmates from the cadet corps and fellow-oficers of the Kuren regiment, who were serving as adjutants and orderly-oficers. When he irst arrived he had a very good time. He put up in Poltoratsky’s tent, and there met many acquaintances who gave him a hearty welcome. He also called on Vorontsov whom he knew slightly, having once served in the same regiment with him. Vorontsov received him very kindly, introduced him to Prince Baryatinsky, and invited him to the farewell dinner he was giving in honor of General Kozlovsky, who, until Baryatinsky’s arrival, had been in command of the Left Flank. The dinner was magniicent. Special tents were erected in a line, and along the whole length of them a table was spread, as for a dinner-party, with dinner services and bottles. Everything recalled life in the guards in Petersburg. Dinner was served at two o’clock. In the middle on one side sat Kozlovsky; on the other, Baryatinsky. At Kozlovsky’s right and left hand sat the Vorontsovs, husband and wife. All along the table on both sides sat the oficers of the Kabarda and Kuren regiments. Butler sat next to Poltoratsky, and they both chatted merrily and drank with the oficers around them. When the roast was served and the orderlies had gone round and illed the champagne glasses, Poltoratsky, with real anxiety, said to Butler,— “Our Kozlovsky will disgrace himself!” “Why?” “Why, he’ll have to make a speech, and what good is he at that? … It’s not as easy as capturing entrenchments under ire! And with a lady beside him, too, and these aristocrats!” “Really, it’s painful to look at him,” said the oficers to one another. And now the solemn moment had arrived. Baryatinsky rose and lifting his glass addressed a short speech to Kozlovsky. When he had inished, Kozlovsky—who always had a trick of using the word “how” superluously—rose and stammeringly began,— “In compliance with the august will of his Majesty, I am leaving you—parting from you, gentlemen,” said he. “But consider me as always remaining among you. The truth of the proverb, how ‘One man in the ield is no warrior,’ is well known to you, gentlemen.… Therefore, how every reward I have received...how all the beneits showered on me by the 118 great generosity of our sovereign the Emperor...how all my position—how my good name...how everything decidedly… how…” (here his voice trembled) “... how I am indebted to you for it, to you alone, my friends!” The wrinkled face puckered up still more, he gave a sob, and tears came into his eyes. “How from my heart I offer you my sincerest, heartfelt gratitude!” Kozlovsky could not go on, but turned round and began to embrace the oficers. The Princess hid her face in her handkerchief. The Prince blinked, with his mouth drawn awry. Many of the oficers’ eyes grew moist, and Butler, who had hardly known Kozlovsky, could also not restrain his tears. He liked all this very much. Then followed other toasts. Baryatinsky’s, Vorontsov’s, the oficers’, and the soldiers’ healths were drunk, and the visitors left the table intoxicated with wine and with the military elation to which they were always so prone. The weather was wonderful, sunny and calm, and the air fresh and bracing. On all sides bonires crackled and songs resounded. It might have been thought that everybody was celebrating some joyful event. Butler went to Poltoratsky’s in the happiest, most emotional mood. Several oficers had gathered there, and a card-table was set. An Adjutant started a bank with a hundred rubles. Two or three times Butler left the tent with his hand gripping the purse in his trousers-pocket; but at last he could resist the temptation no longer, and despite the promise he had given to his brother and to himself not to play, he began to bet. Before an hour was past, very red, perspiring, and soiled with chalk, he sat with both elbows on the table and wrote on it—under cards bent for “corners” and “transports—the igures of his stakes. He had already lost so much that he was afraid to count up what was scored against him. But he knew without counting that all the pay he could draw in advance, added to the value of his horse, would not sufice to pay what the Adjutant, a stranger to him, had written down against him. He would still have gone on playing, but the Adjutant sternly laid down the cards he held in his large clean hands, and added up the chalked igures of the score of Butler’s losses. Butler, confused, began to make excuses for being unable to pay the whole of his debt at once; and said he would send it from home. When he said this he noticed that everybody pitied him and that they all—even Poltoratsky— 119 avoided meeting his eye. That was his last evening there. He need only have refrained from playing, and gone to the Vorontsovs who had invited him, and all would have been well, thought he; but now it was not only not well, but terrible. Having taken leave of his comrades and acquaintances he rode home and went to bed, and slept for eighteen hours as people usually sleep after losing heavily. From the fact that he asked her to lend him ifty kopeks to tip the Cossack who had escorted him, and from his sorrowful looks and short answers, Mary Dmetrievna guessed that he had lost at cards, and she reproached the Major for having given him leave of absence. When he woke up at noon next day and remembered the situation he was in, he longed again to plunge into the oblivion from which he had just emerged; but it was impossible. Steps had to be taken to repay the four hundred and seventy rubles he owed to the stranger. The irst step he took was to write to his brother, confessing his sin and imploring him, for the last time, to lend him ive hundred rubles on the security of the mill that they still owned in common. Then he wrote to a stingy relative, asking her to lend him ive hundred rubles at whatever rate of interest she liked. Finally he went to the Major, knowing that he—or rather Mary Dmetrievna—had some money, and asked him to lend him ive hundred rubles. “I’d let you have them at once,” said the Major, “but Masha won’t! These women are so close-isted—who the devil can understand them? … And yet you must get out of it somehow, devil take him! … Hasn’t that brute the canteen-keeper got something?” But it was no use trying to borrow from the canteen-keeper; so Butler’s salvation could only come from his brother or from his stingy relative. 120 Chapter XXII Not having attained his aim in Chechnya, Hadji Murad returned to Tilis and went every day to Vorontsov’s; and whenever he could obtain audience he implored the Viceroy to gather together the mountaineer prisoners and exchange them for his family. He said that unless that were done his hands were tied and he could not serve the Russians and destroy Shamil, as he desired to do. Vorontsov vaguely promised to do what he could, but put it off, saying that he would decide when General Argutensky reached Tilis and he could talk the matter over with him. Then Hadji Murad asked Vorontsov to allow him to go to live for a while in Nukha, a small town in Transcaucasia, where he thought he could better carry on negotiations about his family with Shamil and with the people who were attached to himself. Moreover, Nukha being a Muslim town, had a mosque where he could more conveniently perform the rites of prayer demanded by the Muslim law. Vorontsov wrote to Petersburg about it, but meanwhile gave Hadji Murad permission to go to Nukha. For Vorontsov and the authorities in Petersburg, as well as for most Russians acquainted with Hadji Murad’s history, the whole episode presented itself as a lucky turn in the Caucasian war, or simply as an interesting event. For Hadji Murad, on the other hand, it was (especially laterally) a terrible crisis in his life. He had escaped from the mountains partly to save himself, partly out of hatred of Shamil; and dificult as this light had been, he had attained his object and for a time was glad of his success, and really devised a plan to attack Shamil; but the rescue of his family—which he had thought would be easy to arrange—had proved more dificult than he expected. Shamil had seized the family and kept them prisoners, threatening to hand the women over to the different aouls, and to blind or kill the son. Now Hadji Murad had gone to Nukha 121 intending to try, by the aid of his adherents in Daghestan to rescue his family from Shamil by force or by cunning. The last spy who had come to see him in Nukha informed him that the Avars devoted to him were preparing to capture his family and to come over to the Russians with it; but that there were not enough of them, and they could not risk making the attempt in Vedeno where the family was at present imprisoned, but could only do it if the family were moved from Vedeno to some other place; in which case they promised to rescue them on the way. Hadji Murad sent word to his friends that he would give three thousand rubles for the liberation of his family. At Nukha a small house of ive rooms was assigned to Hadji Murad near the mosque and the Khan’s palace. The oficers in charge of him, his interpreter, and his henchmen, stayed in the same house. Hadji Murad’s life was spent in the expectation and reception of messengers from the mountains, and in rides he was allowed to take in the neighborhood. On 24th April, returning from one of these rides, Hadji Murad learned that during his absence an oficial had arrived from Tilis, sent by Vorontsov. In spite of his longing to know what message the oficial had brought him, Hadji Murad, before going into the room where the oficer in charge and the oficial were waiting, went to his bedroom and repeated his noon-day prayer. When he had inished he came out into the room which served him as drawing and reception room. The oficial who had come from Tilis, Councillor Kirellov, informed Hadji Murad of Vorontsov’s wish that he should come to Tilis on the 12th, to meet General Argutensky. “Yakshé!” said Hadji Murad angrily. The councillor did not please him. “Have you brought money?” “I have,” answered Kirellov. “For two weeks now,” said Hadji Murad, holding up irst both hands and then four ingers. “Give here!” “We’ll give it you at once,” said the oficial, getting his purse out of his travelling-bag. “What does he want with the money?” he went on in Russian, thinking Hadji Murad would not understand. But Hadji Murad understood, and glanced angrily at Kirellov. While getting out the money the councillor, wishing to begin a conversation with Hadji Murad in order to have something to tell Prince Vorontsov, asked through the 122 interpreter whether Hadji Murad was not feeling dull there. Hadji Murad glanced contemptuously out of the corner of his eye at the fat unarmed little man dressed as a civilian, and did not reply. The interpreter repeated the question. “Tell him that I cannot talk with him! Let him give me the money!” and having said this, Hadji Murad sat down at the table ready to count the money. When Kirellov had got out the money and arranged it in seven piles of ten gold pieces each (Hadji Murad received ive gold pieces daily) and pushed them towards Hadji Murad, the latter poured the gold into the sleeve of his Circassian coat, rose, and quite unexpectedly smacked Councillor Kirellov on his bald pate, and turned to go. The councillor jumped up and ordered the interpreter to tell Hadji Murad that he must not dare to behave like that to him, who held a rank equal to that of colonel! The oficer in charge conirmed this, but Hadji Murad only nodded to signify that he knew, and left the room. “What is one to do with him?” said the oficer in charge. “He’ll stick his dagger into you, that’s all! One cannot talk with those devils! I see that he is getting exasperated.” As soon as it began to grow dusk, two spies with hoods covering their faces up to their eyes, came to him from the hills. The oficer in charge led them to Hadji Murad’s room. One of them was a leshy swarthy Tavlinian; the other, a thin old man. The news they brought was not cheering for Hadji Murad. His friends who had undertaken to rescue his family, now deinitely refused to do so, being afraid of Shamil—who threatened to punish with most terrible tortures anyone who helped Hadji Murad. Having heard the messengers he sat with his elbows on his crossed legs, and bowing his turbaned head, remained silent a long time. He was thinking, and thinking resolutely. He knew that he was now considering the matter for the last time, and that it was necessary to come to a decision. At last he raised his head, gave each of the messengers a gold piece, and said: “Go!” “What answer will there be?” “The answer will be as God pleases.… Go!” The messengers rose and went away, and Hadji Murad continued to sit on the carpet, leaning his elbows on his knees. 123 He sat thus a long time, and pondered. What am I to do? To take Shamil at his word and return to him? he thought. He is a fox and will deceive me. Even if he did not deceive me, it would still be impossible to submit to that red liar. It is impossible … because now that I have been with the Russians he will not trust me, thought Hadji Murad; and he remembered a Tavlinian fable about a falcon who had been caught and lived among men, and afterwards returned to his own kind in the hills. He returned, but wearing jesses with bells; and the other falcons would not receive him. “Fly back to where they hung those silver bells on you!” said they. “We have no bells and no jesses.” The falcon did not want to leave his home, and remained; but the other falcons did not wish to let him stay there, and pecked him to death. And they would peck me to death in the same way, thought Hadji Murad. Shall I remain here and conquer Caucasia for the Russian Tsar, and earn renown, titles, riches? That could be done, thought he, recalling his interviews with Vorontsov, and the lattering things the Prince had said. But I must decide at once, or Shamil will destroy my family. That night Hadji Murad remained awake, thinking. 124 Chapter XXIII By midnight his decision had been formed. He had decided that he must ly to the mountains, and with the Avars still devoted to him must break into Vedeno, and either die or rescue his family. Whether after rescuing them he would return to the Russians or escape to Khunzakh and ight Shamil, he had not made up his mind. All he knew was that irst of all he must escape from the Russians into the mountains; and he at once began to carry out his plan. He drew his black wadded beshmét from under his pillow and went into his henchmen’s room. They lived on the other side of the hall. As soon as he entered the hall, the outer door of which stood open, he was at once enveloped by the dewy freshness of the moonlit night and his ears were illed by the whistling and trilling of several nightingales in the garden by the house. Having crossed the hall, Hadji Murad opened the door of his henchmen’s room. There was no light in the room, but the moon in its irst quarter shone in at the window. A table and two chairs were standing on one side of the room; and four of Hadji Murad’s henchmen were lying on carpets or on búrkas on the loor. Khanei slept outside with the horses. Gamzalo heard the door creak, rose, turned round, and saw Hadji Murad. On recognizing him, he lay down again. But Eldar, who lay beside him, jumped up and began putting on his beshmét, expecting his master’s orders. Khan Mahoma and Bata slept on. Hadji Murad put down the beshmét he had brought on the table, and it hit the table with a dull sound. This was caused by the gold sewn up in it. “Sew these in too,” said Hadji Murad, handing Eldar the gold pieces he had that day received. Eldar took them, and at once went into the moonlight, drew a small knife from under his dagger, and started unstitching the lining of the beshmét. Gamzalo raised himself and sat up with his legs crossed. “And you, Gamzalo, tell the fellows to examine the riles 125 and pistols and to get the ammunition ready. Tomorrow we shall go far,” said Hadji Murad. “We have bullets and powder; everything shall be ready,” replied Gamzalo, and roared out something incomprehensible. He understood why Hadji Murad had ordered the riles to be loaded. From the irst he had desired only one thing—to slay and stab as many Russians as possible and to escape to the hills; and this desire had increased day by day. Now at last he saw that Hadji Murad also wanted this, and he was satisied. When Hadji Murad went away, Gamzalo roused his comrades, and all four spent the rest of the night examining their riles pistols lints and accoutrements; replacing what was damaged, sprinkling fresh powder onto the pans, and stoppering packets illed with powder measured for each charge with bullets wrapped in oiled rags, sharpening their swords and daggers and greasing the blades with tallow. Before daybreak Hadji Murad again came out into the hall to get water for his ablutions. The songs of the nightingales that had burst into ecstasy at dawn sounded even louder and more incessant than they had done before, while from his henchmen’s room, where the daggers were being sharpened, came the regular squeaking and rasping of iron against stone. Hadji Murad got himself some water from a tub, and was already at his own door when, above the sound of the grinding, he heard from his murids’ room the high tones of Khanei’s voice singing a familiar song. Hadji Murad stopped to listen. The song told of how a dzhigít, Hamzad, with his brave followers captured a herd of white horses from the Russians, and how a Russian Prince followed him beyond the Terek and surrounded him with an army as large as a forest; and then the song went on to tell how Hamzad killed the horses, and, with his men entrenched behind this gory bulwark, fought the Russians as long as they had bullets in their riles, daggers in their belts, and blood in their veins. But before he died Hamzad saw some birds lying in the sky and cried to them,— “Fly on, you winged ones, ly to our homes! Tell you our mothers, tell ye our sisters, Tell the white maidens, ighting we died For Ghazavat! Tell them our bodies Never shall lie and rest in a tomb! 126 Wolves shall devour and tear them to pieces, Ravens and vultures will pluck out our eyes.” With that the song ended, and at the last words, sung to a mournful air, the merry Bata’s vigorous voice joined in with a loud shout of “Lya-il lyakha-il’ Allakh!” inishing with shrill shriek. Then all was quiet again, except for the tchuk, tchuk, tchuk, tchuk and whistling of the nightingales from the garden, and from behind the door the even grinding, and now and then the whiz of iron sliding quickly along the whetstone. Hadji Murad was so full of thought that he did not notice how he tilted his jug till the water began to pour out. He shook his head at himself, and re-entered his room. After performing his morning ablutions he examined his weapons and sat down on his bed. There was nothing more for him to do. To be allowed to ride out, he would have to get permission from the oficer in charge; but it was not yet daylight, and the oficer was still asleep. Khanei’s song reminded him of another song, the one his mother had composed just after he was born: the song addressed to his father, that Hadji Murad had mentioned to Loris-Melikov. “Your sword of Damascus steel tore my white bosom; But close on it laid I my own little boy; In my hot-streaming blood him I laved; and the wound Without herbs or speciics was soon fully healed. As I, facing death, remained fearless, so he, My boy, my dzhigít, from all fear shall be free!” He remembered how his mother put him to sleep beside her under a cloak, on the roof of their sáklya, and how he asked her to let him see the place on her side where the wound had left a scar. Hadji Murad seemed to see his mother before him—not wrinkled, gray-haired, with gaps between her teeth, as he had lately left her, but young handsome and so strong that she carried him in a basket on her back across the mountains to her father’s when he was a heavy ive-year-old boy. He also recalled his grandfather, wrinkled and gray-bearded, and how the old man hammered silver with his sinewy hands, and made him say his prayers. He thought of the fountain at the foot of the hill, where, 127 holding to her wide trousers, he went with his mother to fetch water. He remembered the lean dog that used to lick his face, and he recalled with special vividness the peculiar smell of sour milk and smoke in the shed where his mother took him with her when she went to milk the cows or scald the milk. He remembered how she shaved his head for the irst time, and how surprised he was to see his round blue-gleaming head relected in the brightly-polished brass basin that hung against the wall. And the recollection of himself as a little child reminded him of his beloved son, Yusuf, whose head he himself had shaved for the irst time; and now this Yusuf was a handsome young dzhigít. He pictured him as he was when last he saw him. It was on the day that Hadji Murad left Tselmess. His son brought him his horse and asked to be allowed to accompany him. Yusuf was ready dressed and armed, and led his own horse by the bridle. His rosy handsome young face and the whole of his tall slender igure (he was taller than his father) breathed of daring, youth, and the joy of life. The breadth of his shoulders, though he was so young, the very slim youthful hips, the long slender waist, and the strength of his long arms, the power lexibility and agility of all his movements had always rejoiced Hadji Murad, who admired his son. “You had better stay. You will be alone at home now. Take care of your mother and your grandmother,” said Hadji Murad. And he remembered the spirited and proud look and the lush of pleasure with which Yusuf had replied that as long as he lived no one should injure his mother or grandmother. All the same Yusuf had mounted and accompanied his father as far as the stream. There he turned back, and since then Hadji Murad had not seen his wife, his mother, or his son. And it was this son whose eyes Shamil threatened to put out! Of what would be done to his wife, Hadji Murad did not wish to think. These thoughts so excited him that he could not sit still any longer. He jumped up and went limping quickly to the door, opened it, and called Eldar. The sun had not yet risen, but it was already quite light. The nightingales were still singing. “Go, and tell the oficer that I want to go out riding; and saddle the horses,” said he. 128 Chapter XXIV Butler’s only consolation all this time was the poetry of warfare, to which he gave himself up not only during his hours of service, but also in private life. Dressed in his Circassian costume he rode and swaggered about, and twice went into ambush with Bogdanovitch, though neither time did they discover or kill anyone. This closeness to and friendship with Bogdanovitch, famed for his courage, seemed pleasant and warlike to Butler. He had paid his debt, having borrowed the money of a Jew at an enormous rate of interest—that is to say, he had only postponed his dificulties without solving them. He tried not to think of his position, and to ind oblivion not only in the poetry of warfare, but also in wine. He drank more and more every day, and day by day grew morally weaker. He was now no longer the chaste Joseph he had been towards Mary Dmetrievna, but on the contrary began courting her grossly, but to his surprise, met with a strong and decided repulse which put him to shame. At the end of April there arrived at the fort a detachment with which Baryatinsky intended to effect an advance right through Chechnya, which had till then been considered impassable. In that detachment were two companies of the Kabarda regiment, and according to the Caucasian custom these were treated as guests by the Kuren companies. The soldiers were lodged in the barracks, and were treated not only to supper, consisting of buckwheat porridge and beef, but also to vodka. The oficers shared the quarters of the Kuren oficers, and as usual those in residence gave the newcomers a dinner, at which the regimental singers performed, and which ended up with a drinking bout. Major Petrov, very drunk and no longer red but ashy pale, sat astride a chair, and drawing his sword, hacked at imaginary foes, alternately swearing and laughing, now embracing someone and now dancing to the tune of his favorite song. 129 “Shamil, he began to riot In the days gone by; Try, ry, ra-ta-ty, In the years gone by!” Butler was there, too. He tried to see the poetry of warfare in this also; but in the depth of his soul he was sorry for the Major. To stop him however was quite impossible; and Butler, feeling that the fumes were mounting to his own head, quietly left the room and went home. The moon lit up the white houses and the stones on the road. It was so light that every pebble, every straw, every little heap of dust was visible. As he approached the house, Butler met Mary Dmetrievna with a shawl over her head and neck. After the rebuff she had given him, Butler had avoided her, feeling rather ashamed; but now, in the moonlight and after the wine he had drunk, he was pleased to meet her, and wished again to make up to her. “Where are you off to?” he asked. “Why, to see after my old man,” she answered pleasantly. Her rejection of Butler’s advances was quite sincere and decided, but she did not like his avoiding her as he had done lately. “Why bother about him? He’ll soon come back.” “But will he?” “If he doesn’t, they’ll bring him.” “Just so.… That’s not right, you know! … But you think I’d better not go?” “No, don’t. We’d better go home.” Mary Dmetrievna turned back and walked beside him. The moon shone so brightly that around the shadows of their heads a halo seemed to move along the road. Butler was looking at this halo and making up his mind to tell her that he liked her as much as ever, but he did not know how to begin. She waited to hear what he would say. So they walked on in silence almost to the house, when some horsemen appeared from round the corner. They were an oficer with an escort. “Who’s that coming now?” said Mary Dmetrievna, stepping aside. The moon was behind the rider, so that she did not recognize him until he had almost come up to Butler and herself. It was Peter Nikolaevich Kamenev, an oficer who had 130 formerly served with the Major, and whom Mary Dmetrievna therefore knew. “Is that you, Peter Nikolaevich?” said she, addressing him. “It’s me,” said Kamenev. “Ah, Butler, how d’you do? … Not asleep yet? Having a walk with Mary Dmetrievna! You’d better look out, or the Major will give it you.… Where is he?” “Why, there.… Listen!” replied Mary Dmetrievna, pointing in the direction whence came the sounds of a tulumbas and of songs. “They’re on a spree.” “How’s that? Are your people having a spree on their own?” “No; some oficers have come from Hasav-Yurt, and they are being entertained.” “Ah, that’s good! I shall be in time.… I just want the Major for a moment.” “On business?” asked Butler. “Yes, just a little business matter.” “Good or bad?” “It all depends… Good for us, but bad for some people,” and Kamenev laughed. By this time they had reached the Major’s house. “Chikhirev,” shouted Kamenev to one of his Cossacks, “come here!” A Don Cossack rode up from among the others. He was dressed in the ordinary Don Cossack uniform, with high boots and a mantle, and carried saddle-bags behind. “Well, take the thing out,” said Kamenev, dismounting. The Cossack also dismounted, and took a sack out of his saddle-bag. Kamenev took the sack from him, and put his hand in. “Well, shall I show you a novelty? You won’t be frightened, Mary Dmetrievna?” “Why should I be frightened?” she replied. “Here it is!” said Kamenev, taking out a man’s head, and holding it up in the light of the moon. “Do you recognize it?” It was a shaven head with salient brows, black short-cut beard and mustaches, one eye open and the other half-closed. The shaven skull was cleft, but not right through, and there was congealed blood in the nose. The neck was wrapped in a blood131 stained towel. Notwithstanding the many wounds on the head, the blue lips still bore a kindly childlike expression. Mary Dmetrievna looked at it, and without a word turned away and went quickly into the house. Butler could not tear his eyes from the terrible head. It was the head of that very Hadji Murad with whom he had so recently spent his evenings in such friendly intercourse. “How’s that? Who has killed him?” he asked. “Wanted to give us the slip, but was caught,” said Kamenev, and he gave the head back to the Cossack, and went into the house with Butler. “He died like a hero,” he added. “But however did it all happen?” “Just wait a bit. When the Major comes I’ll tell you all about it. That’s what I am sent for. I take it around to all the forts and aouls and show it.” The Major was sent for, and he came back accompanied by two other oficers as drunk as himself, and began embracing Kamenev. “And I have brought you Hadji Murad’s head,” said Kamenev. “No? … Killed?” “Yes; wanted to escape.” “I always said he would bamboozle them! … And where is it? The head, I mean.… Let’s see it.” The Cossack was called, and brought in the bag with the head. It was taken out, and the Major looked at it long with drunken eyes. “All the same, he was a ine fellow,” said he. “Let me kiss him!” “Yes, it’s true. It was a valiant head,” said one of the oficers. When they had all looked at it, it was returned to the Cossack, who put it in his bag, trying to let it bump against the loor as gently as possible. “I say, Kamenev, what speech do you make when you show the head?” asked an oficer. “No! … Let me kiss him. He gave me a sword!” shouted the Major. Butler went out into the porch. 132 Mary Dmetrievna was sitting on the second step. She looked round at Butler, and at once turned angrily away again. “What’s the matter, Mary Dmetrievna?” asked he. “You’re all cutthroats! … I hate it! You’re cutthroats, really,” and she got up. “It might happen to anyone,” remarked Butler, not knowing what to say. “That’s war.” “War? War, indeed! … Cutthroats and nothing else. A dead body should be given back to the earth, and they’re grinning at it there! … Cutthroats, really,” she repeated, as she descended the steps and entered the house by the back door. Butler returned to the room, and asked Kamenev to tell them in detail how the thing had occurred. And Kamenev told them. This is what had happened. 133 Chapter XXV Hadji Murad was allowed to go out riding in the neighborhood of the town, but never without a convoy of Cossacks. There was only half a troop of them altogether in Nukha, ten of whom were employed by the oficers, so that if ten were sent out with Hadji Murad (according to the orders received) the same men would have had to go every other day. Therefore, after ten had been sent out the irst day, it was decided to send only ive in future, and Hadji Murad was asked not to take all his henchmen with him. But on 25th April he rode out with all ive. When he mounted, the commander, noticing that all ive henchmen were going with him, told him that he was forbidden to take them all; but Hadji Murad pretended not to hear, touched his horse, and the commander did not insist. With the Cossacks rode a non-commissioned oficer, Nazarov, who had received the Cross of St. George for bravery. He was a young healthy brown-haired lad, as fresh as a rose. He was the eldest of a poor family belonging to the sect of Old Believers, had grown up without a father, and had maintained his old mother, three sisters, and two brothers. “Mind, Nazarov, keep close to him!” shouted the commander. “All right, your honor!” answered Nazarov, and rising in his stirrups and adjusting the rile that hung at his back, he started his ine large roan gelding at a trot. Four Cossacks followed him: Therapontov, tall and thin, a regular thief and plunderer (he it was who had sold gunpowder to Gamzalo); Ignatov, a sturdy peasant who boasted of his strength, was no longer young, and had nearly completed his service; Meshkin, a weakly lad at whom everybody laughed; and the young fairhaired Petrakov, his mother’s only son, always amiable and jolly. The morning had been misty, but it cleared up later on, and the opening foliage, the young virgin grass, the sprouting corn and the ripples of the rapid river just visible to the left of the 134 road, all glittered in the sunshine. Hadji Murad rode slowly along, followed by the Cossacks and by his henchmen. They rode out along the road beyond the fort at a walk. They met women carrying baskets on their heads, soldiers driving carts, and creaking wagons drawn by buffaloes. When he had gone about a mile and a half, Hadji Murad touched up his white Kabarda horse, which started at an amble that obliged the henchmen and Cossacks to ride at a quick trot to keep up with him. “Ah, he’s got a ine horse under him,” said Therapontov. “If only he were still an enemy I’d soon bring him down.” “Yes, mate. Three hundred rubles were offered for that horse in Tilis.” “But I can get ahead of him on mine,” said Nazarov. “You get ahead? A likely thing!” Hadji Murad kept increasing his pace. “Hey, kunák, you mustn’t do that. Steady!” cried Nazarov, starting to overtake Hadji Murad. Hadji Murad looked around, said nothing, and continued to ride at the same pace. “Mind, they’re up to something, the devils!” said Ignatov. “See how they are tearing along.” So they rode for the best part of a mile in the direction of the mountains. “I tell you it won’t do!” shouted Nazarov. Hadji Murad did not answer, and did not look round, but only increased his pace to a gallop. “Humbug! You won’t get away!” shouted Nazarov, stung to the quick. He gave his big roan gelding a cut with his whip, and rising in his stirrups and bending forward, lew full speed in pursuit of Hadji Murad. The sky was so bright, the air so clear, and life played so joyously in Nazarov’s soul as, becoming one with his ine strong horse, he lew along the smooth road behind Hadji Murad, that the possibility of anything sad or dreadful happening never occurred to him. He rejoiced that with every step he was gaining on Hadji Murad. Hadji Murad judged by the approaching tramp of the big horse behind him that he would soon be overtaken, and seizing his pistol with his right hand, with his left he began slightly to 135 rein in his Kabarda horse, which was excited by hearing the tramp of hoofs behind it. “You mustn’t, I tell you!” shouted Nazarov, almost level with Hadji Murad, and stretching out his hand to seize the latter’s bridle. But before he reached it a shot was ired—“What are you doing?” screamed Nazarov, catching hold of his breast. “At them, lads!” he exclaimed, and he reeled and fell forward on his saddle-bow. But the mountaineers were beforehand in taking to their weapons, and ired their pistols at the Cossacks and hewed at them with their swords. Nazarov hung on the neck of his horse, which careened around his comrades. The horse under Ignatov fell, crushing his leg, and two of the mountaineers, without dismounting, drew their swords and hacked at his head and arms. Petrakov was about to rush to his comrade’s rescue, when two shots—one in his back and the other in his side—stung him, and he fell from his horse like a sack. Meshkin turned round and galloped off towards the fortress. Khanei and Bata rushed after him, but he was already too far away and they could not catch him. When they saw that they could not overtake him, they returned to the others. Petrakov lay on his back, his stomach ripped open, his young face turned to the sky, and while dying he gasped for breath like a ish. Gamzalo having inished off Ignatov with his sword, gave a cut to Nazarov too, and threw him from his horse. Bata took their cartridge-pouches from the slain. Khanei wished to take Nazarov’s horse, but Hadji Murad called out to him to leave it, and dashed forward along the road. His murids galloped after him, driving away Nazarov’s horse that tried to follow them. They were already among rice ields more than six miles from Nukha when a shot was ired from the tower of that place to give the alarm. § “Oh, good Lord! Oh, dear me! Dear me! What have they done?” cried the commander of the fort, seizing his head with his hands, when he heard of Hadji Murad’s escape. “They’ve 136 done for me! They’ve let him escape, the villains!” cried he, listening to Meshkin’s account. An alarm was raised everywhere, and not only the Cossacks of the place were sent after the fugitives, but also all the militia that could be mustered from the pro-Russian aouls. A thousand rubles reward was offered for the capture of Hadji Murad alive or dead, and two hours after he and his followers had escaped from the Cossacks more than two hundred mounted men were galloping after the oficer in charge to ind and capture the runaways. After riding some miles along the highroad Hadji Murad checked his panting horse, which, wet with perspiration, had turned from white to gray. To the right of the road could be seen the sáklyas and minarets of the aoul Benerdzhek, on the left lay some ields, and beyond them the river. Although the way to the mountains lay to the right, Hadji Murad turned to the left, in the opposite direction, assuming that his pursuers would be sure to go to the right; while he, abandoning the road, would cross the Alazan and would come out onto the highroad on the other side, where no one would expect him, and would ride along it to the forest, and then, after recrossing the river, would make his way to the mountains. Having come to this conclusion, he turned to the left. But it proved impossible to reach the river. The rice-ield which had to be crossed had just been looded, as is always done in spring, and had become a bog in which the horses’ legs sank above their pasterns. Hadji Murad and his henchmen turned, now to the left, now to the right, hoping to ind drier ground; but the ield they happened to be in had been equally looded all over, and was now saturated with water. The horses drew their feet out of the sticky mud into which they sank, with a pop like that of a cork drawn from a bottle, and stopped, panting, after every few steps. They struggled in this way so long that it began to grow dusk, and they had still not reached the river. To their left lay a patch of higher ground overgrown with shrubs, and Hadji Murad decided to ride in among these clumps and remain there till night to rest their exhausted horses and let them graze. The men themselves ate some bread and cheese they had brought with them. At last night came on and the moon that had been 137 shining at irst, hid behind the hill, and it became dark. There were a great many nightingales in that neighborhood, and there were two of them in these shrubs. As long as Hadji Murad and his men were making a noise among the bushes the nightingales had been silent, but when the people became still, the birds again began to call to one another and to sing. Hadji Murad, awake to all the sounds of night, listened to them involuntarily, and their trills reminded him of the song about Hamzad which he had heard the night before when he went to get water. He might now at any moment ind himself in the position in which Hamzad had been. He fancied that it would be so, and suddenly his soul became serious. He spread out his búrka and performed his ablutions, and scarcely had he inished before a sound was heard approaching their shelter. It was the sound of many horses’ feet plashing through the bog. The keen-sighted Bata ran out to one edge of the clump, and peering through the darkness saw black shadows, which were men on foot and on horseback. Khanei discerned a similar crowd on the other side. It was Karganov, the military commander of the district, with his militia. “Well, then, we shall ight like Hamzad,” thought Hadji Murad. When the alarm was given, Karganov, with a troop of militiamen and Cossacks, had rushed off in pursuit of Hadji Murad; but he had been unable to ind any trace of him. He had already lost hope, and was returning home, when towards evening he met an old man and asked him if he had seen any horsemen about. The old man replied that he had. He had seen six horsemen loundering in the rice-ield, and then had seen them enter the clump where he himself was getting wood. Karganov turned back, taking the old man with him; and seeing the hobbled horses, he made sure that Hadji Murad was there. In the night he surrounded the clump, and waited till morning to take Hadji Murad alive or dead. Having understood that he was surrounded, and having discovered an old ditch among the shrubs, Hadji Murad decided to entrench himself in it, and to resist as long as strength and ammunition lasted. He told this to his comrades, and ordered them to throw up a bank in front of the ditch; and his henchmen at once set to work to cut down branches, dig up the 138 earth with their daggers, and to make an entrenchment. Hadji Murad himself worked with them. As soon as it began to grow light the commander of the militia troop rode up to a clump and shouted,— “Hey! Hadji Murad, surrender! We are many, and you are few!” In reply came the report of a rile, a cloudlet of smoke rose from the ditch, and a bullet hit the militiaman’s horse, which staggered under him and began to fall. The riles of the militiamen, who stood at the outskirt of the clump of shrubs, began cracking in their turn, and their bullets whistled and hummed, cutting off leaves and twigs and striking the embankment, but not the men entrenched behind it. Only Gamzalo’s horse, that had strayed from the others, was hit in the head by a bullet. It did not fall, but breaking its hobbles and rushing among the bushes it ran to the other horses, pressing close to them, and watering the young grass with its blood. Hadji Murad and his men ired only when any of the militiamen came forward, and rarely missed their aim. Three militiamen were wounded, and the others, far from making up their minds to rush the entrenchment, retreated further and further back, only iring from a distance and at random. So it continued for more than an hour. The sun had risen to about half the height of the trees, and Hadji Murad was already thinking of leaping on his horse and trying to make his way to the river, when the shouts were heard of many men who had just arrived. These were Hadji Aga of Mekhtule with his followers. There were about two hundred of them. Hadji Aga had once been Hadji Murad’s kunák and had lived with him in the mountains, but he had afterwards gone over to the Russians. With him was Akhmet Khan, the son of Hadji Murad’s old enemy. Like Karganov, Hadji Aga began by calling to Hadji Murad to surrender, and Hadji Murad answered as before with a shot. “Swords out, lads!” cried Hadji Aga, drawing his own; and a hundred voices were raised of men who rushed shrieking in among the shrubs. The militiamen ran in among the shrubs, but from behind the entrenchment came the crack of one shot after another. 139 Some three men fell, and the attackers stopped at the outskirts to the clump and also began iring. As they ired they gradually approached the entrenchment, running across from behind one shrub to another. Some succeeded in getting across; others fell under the bullets of Hadji Murad or of his men. Hadji Murad ired without missing; Gamzalo too, rarely wasted a shot, and shrieked with joy every time he saw that his bullet had hit its aim. Khan Mahoma sat at the edge of the ditch singing “Il lyakha il Allakh!” and ired leisurely, but often missed. Eldar’s whole body trembled with impatience to rush dagger in hand at the enemy, and he ired often and at random, constantly looking round at Hadji Murad and stretching out beyond the entrenchment. The shaggy Khanei, with his sleeves rolled up, did the duty of a servant even here. He loaded the guns which Hadji Murad and Khan Mahoma passed to him, carefully driving home with a ramrod the bullets wrapped in greasy rags, and pouring dry powder out of the powder-lask onto the pans. Bata did not remain in the ditch as the others did, but kept running to the horses, driving them away to a safer place, and, shrieking incessantly, ired without using a prop for his gun. He was the irst to be wounded. A bullet entered his neck, and he sat down spitting blood and swearing. Then Hadji Murad was wounded, the bullet piercing his shoulder. He tore some cotton wool from the lining of his beshmét, plugged the wound with it, and went on iring. “Let us lay at them with our swords!” said Eldar for the third time, and he looked out from behind the bank of earth, ready to rush at the enemy; but at that instant a bullet struck him, and he reeled and fell backwards onto Hadji Murad’s leg. Hadji Murad glanced at him. His beautiful ram’s eyes gazed intently and seriously at Hadji Murad. His mouth, the upper lip pouting like a child’s, twitched without opening. Hadji Murad drew his leg away from under him and continued iring. Khanei bent over the dead Eldar and began taking the unused ammunition out of the cartridge-cases of his coat. Khan Mahoma meanwhile continued to sing, loading leisurely and iring. The enemy ran from shrub to shrub, hallooing and shrieking, and drawing ever nearer and nearer. Another bullet hit Hadji Murad in the left side. He lay down in the ditch, and again pulled some cotton wool out of 140 his beshmét and plugged the wound. This wound in the side was fatal, and he felt that he was dying. Memories and pictures succeeded one another with extraordinary rapidity in his imagination. Now he saw the powerful Abu Nutsal Khan as, dagger in hand and holding up his severed cheek, he rushed at his foe; then he saw the weak, bloodless old Vorontsov, with his cunning white face, and heard his soft voice; and then he saw his son Yusuf, his wife Soiat, and then the pale, red-bearded face of his enemy Shamil with half-closed eyes. All these images passed through his mind without evoking any feeling within him: neither pity nor anger nor any kind of desire; everything seemed so insigniicant in comparison with what was beginning, or had already begun, within him. Yet his strong body continued the thing that he had commenced. Gathering together his last strength, he rose from behind the bank, ired his pistol at a man who was just running towards him, and hit him. The man fell. Then Hadji Murad got quite out of the ditch, and, limping heavily, went dagger in hand straight at the foe. Some shots cracked, and he reeled and fell. Several militiamen with triumphant shrieks rushed towards the fallen body. But the body that seemed to be dead, suddenly moved. First the uncovered bleeding shaven head rose; then, with hands holding to the trunk of the tree, the body rose. He seemed so terrible that those who were running towards him stopped short. But suddenly a shudder passed through him; he staggered away from the tree and fell on his face, stretched out at full length, like a thistle that had been mown down, and he moved no more. He did not move, but still he felt. When Hadji Aga, who was the irst to reach him, struck him on the head with a large dagger, it seemed to Hadji Murad that someone was striking him with a hammer, and he could not understand who was doing it, or why. That was his last consciousness of any connection with his body. He felt nothing more, and his enemies kicked and hacked at what had no longer anything in common with him. Hadji Aga placed his foot on the back of the corpse, and with two blows cut off the head, and carefully—not to soil his shoes with blood—rolled it away with his foot. Crimson blood 141 spurted from the arteries of the neck, and black blood lowed from the head, soaking the grass. Karganov and Hadji Aga and Akhmet Khan and all the militiamen gathered together—like sportsmen round a slaughtered animal—near the bodies of Hadji Murad and his men (Khanei, Khan Mahoma, and Gamzalo were bound), and amid the powder-smoke which hung over the bushes, they triumphed in their victory. The nightingales, that had hushed their songs while the iring lasted, now started their trills once more: irst one quite close, then others in the distance. § It was of this death that I was reminded by the crushed thistle in the midst of the plowed ield. 142 Glossary aoul : Tartar or Chechen village bar : have beshmét : a Tartar undergarment with sleeves. búrka : a long, round felt cape. caracole : to show off horses with fancy side-stepping, mincing, or dancing Decembrists : Military conspirators who tried to secure a Constitution for Russia in 1825, on the accession of Nicholas I. dzhigít : brave or hero. Among the Chechens, the word is inseparably connected with the idea of skillful horsemanship. Ghazavát : Holy War Gurda : A highly-prized quality of blade, said to be able to slice through a pillow or a human hair. Helena Pavlovna : Widow of Nicholas’s brother Michael: a clever, well-educated woman, interested in science, art, and public affairs. Hermitage : Later to become a celebrated public museum and picture gallery in St. Petersburg, adjoining the Winter Palace. Hungarian uprising : Russian troops putting down Hungarian uprising Khansha : Khan’s wife. kizyák : fuel made of straw and manure. kunák : friend, adopted brother. As now a member of the family, an offense to one is an offense to the whole family. Loris-Melikov : Count Michael Tarielovitch Loris-Melikov. Afterwards he became Minister of the Interior, and framed the Liberal ukase (proclamation) which was signed by Alexander II, the day that he was assassinated. naïb : local oficial ombre : a fast-paced card game, predecessor to Euchre 143 Prussian constitution of 1848 : King Frederick William IV, cousin of Tsar Nicholas, gave in to popular pressure to allow parliamentary elections, a constitution, and freedom of the press. P ฀ sáklya : a Caucasian house, clay plastered and often built of earth. Shariát : the written law, Sharia law; the Koran singers: Each army regiment had its own choir of singers. ฀ Tarikát : the Path; Sunnah, the practices of Muhammad himself as a preacher Tulumbas : a sort of kettledrum. Uniate : The Uniates acknowledge the Pope of Rome, though in other respects they are in accord with the Orthodox RussoGreek Church. ฀ yok : no, not. ฀ ฀ ฀ 144 Poe:฀First฀Detective฀ ฀฀฀฀Leaves฀of฀Grass฀ ฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀฀฀Uncle฀Tom’s฀Cabin฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀Rossetti’s฀Dante Leyendas฀de฀Mexico ฀฀฀Ghazals฀of฀Ghalib ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀฀฀฀Gandhi/Gita Shakespeare฀7฀Plays ฀฀฀฀฀฀฀Areopagitica ฀ ฀ ฀ ฀฀฀฀Aurora฀Leigh฀฀฀฀฀Blake,฀Everlasting฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ ฀฀฀ 145 ฀ 146