Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace

BOOK FOURTEEN: 1812 6. CHAPTER VI (continued)

"What a bwute you are!... Well?"

"I went for another one," Tikhon continued, "and I crept like this through the wood and lay down." (He suddenly lay down on his stomach with a supple movement to show how he had done it.) "One turned up and I grabbed him, like this." (He jumped up quickly and lightly.) "'Come along to the colonel,' I said. He starts yelling, and suddenly there were four of them. They rushed at me with their little swords. So I went for them with my ax, this way: 'What are you up to?' says I. 'Christ be with you!'" shouted Tikhon, waving his arms with an angry scowl and throwing out his chest.

"Yes, we saw from the hill how you took to your heels through the puddles!" said the esaul, screwing up his glittering eyes.

Petya badly wanted to laugh, but noticed that they all refrained from laughing. He turned his eyes rapidly from Tikhon's face to the esaul's and Denisov's, unable to make out what it all meant.

"Don't play the fool!" said Denisov, coughing angrily. "Why didn't you bwing the first one?"

Tikhon scratched his back with one hand and his head with the other, then suddenly his whole face expanded into a beaming, foolish grin, disclosing a gap where he had lost a tooth (that was why he was called Shcherbaty- the gap-toothed). Denisov smiled, and Petya burst into a peal of merry laughter in which Tikhon himself joined.

"Oh, but he was a regular good-for-nothing," said Tikhon. "The clothes on him- poor stuff! How could I bring him? And so rude, your honor! Why, he says: 'I'm a general's son myself, I won't go!' he says."

"You are a bwute!" said Denisov. "I wanted to question..."

"But I questioned him," said Tikhon. "He said he didn't know much. 'There are a lot of us,' he says, 'but all poor stuff- only soldiers in name,' he says. 'Shout loud at them,' he says, 'and you'll take them all,'" Tikhon concluded, looking cheerfully and resolutely into Denisov's eyes.