Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART EIGHT CHAPTER 3
All of this together made a disagreeable impression on Katavasov, and when the
volunteers got out at a station for a drink, Katavasov would have liked to compare
his unfavorable impression in conversation with someone. There was an old man
in the carriage, wearing a military overcoat, who had been listening all the while to
Katavasov’s conversation with the volunteers. When they were left alone, Katavasov
addressed him.
“What different positions they come from, all those fellows who are going off
there,” Katavasov said vaguely, not wishing to express his own opinion, and at the
same time anxious to find out the old man’s views.
The old man was an officer who had served on two campaigns. He knew what
makes a soldier, and judging by the appearance and the talk of those persons, by the
swagger with which they had recourse to the bottle on the journey, he considered
them poor soldiers. Moreover, he lived in a district town, and he was longing to
tell how one soldier had volunteered from his town, a drunkard and a thief whom
no one would employ as a laborer. But knowing by experience that in the present
condition of the public temper it was dangerous to express an opinion opposed to the
general one, and especially to criticize the volunteers unfavorably, he too watched
Katavasov without committing himself.
“Well, men are wanted there,” he said, laughing with his eyes. And they fell to
talking of the last war news, and each concealed from the other his perplexity as to
the engagement expected next day, since the Turks had been beaten, according to
the latest news, at all points. And so they parted, neither giving expression to his
opinion.
Katavasov went back to his own carriage, and with reluctant hypocrisy reported
to Sergey Ivanovitch his observations of the volunteers, from which it would appear
that they were capital fellows.
At a big station at a town the volunteers were again greeted with shouts and
singing, again men and women with collecting boxes appeared, and provincial
ladies brought bouquets to the volunteers and followed them into the refreshment
room; but all this was on a much smaller and feebler scale than in Moscow.
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