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Look there!" one soldier was saying to another, pointing to a Russian musketeer who had gone up to the picket line with an officer and was rapidly and excitedly talking to a French grenadier. "Hark to him jabbering! Fine, isn't it? It's all the Frenchy can do to keep up with him. There now, Sidorov!" "Wait a bit and listen. It's fine!" answered Sidorov, who was considered an adept at French.
"Ah, that's the way to talk French," said the picket soldiers. "Now, Sidorov, you have a try!" Sidorov, turning to the French, winked, and began to jabber meaningless sounds very fast: "Kari, mala, tafa, safi, muter, Kaska," he said, trying to give an expressive intonation to his voice. "Ho! ho! ho! Ha! ha! ha! ha!
Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at me in silence with great, terrified eyes. Out of his mouth poured a stream of blood. Yes, I remember it very well." This is the "red laugh" of Andreev, though until the appearance of his book it lacked the appropriate name.
Piotr Sidorov starts, crosses himself, and goes into a little room with a glass door, where the conscripts undress. A comrade of Piotr Sidorov's, who has just been passed for service, and come naked out of the revision office, is dressing hurriedly, his teeth chattering. Sidorov has already heard the news, and can see from his face too that he has been taken.
Round the table are sitting the revising officers, looking collected and indifferent. One is smoking a cigarette; another is looking through some papers. Directly Sidorov comes in, a guard goes up to him, places him under the measuring frame, raising him under his chin, and straightening his legs.
What do you want?" "A man's been crushed, please your honour!" "Where? Pass on! I ask you civilly! I ask you civilly, you blockheads!" "You may shove a peasant, but you daren't touch a gentleman! Hands off!" "Did you ever know such people? There's no doing anything with them by fair words, the devils! Sidorov, run for Akim Danilitch! Look sharp! It'll be the worse for you, gentlemen!
And so they have come, drinking, swearing, singing, fighting and scuffling with one another. They have spent the night in taverns. In the morning they have slept off their drunkenness and have gathered together at the Zemsky Court-house. Inside the office the work was going on rapidly. The door is opened and the guard calls Piotr Sidorov.
In the midst of this free artistic company, spoiled by fortune, though refined and modest, who recalled the existence of doctors only in times of illness, and to whom the name of Dymov sounded in no way different from Sidorov or Tarasov in the midst of this company Dymov seemed strange, not wanted, and small, though he was tall and broad-shouldered.
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