by Maxim Gorky
“What is it all about? Why do you speak through your teeth? It is impossible to understand you. What the devil has Gerbvase to do with me? Gervase! Umbra indeed!”
Terrible words, incomprehensible names were wearily remembered, and they tickled my tongue. I had an incessant desire to repeat them, thinking that perhaps by pronouncing them I might discover their meaning. And outside the port-hole the water unweariedly sang and splashed. It would have been pleasant to go to the stern, where the sailors and stokers were gathered together among the chests, where the passengers played cards, sang songs, and told interesting stories. It would have been pleasant to sit among them and listen to simple, intelligible conversation, to gaze on the banks of the Kama, at the fir-trees drawn out like brass wires, at the meadows, wherein small lakes remained from the floods, looking like pieces of broken glass as they reflected the sun.
Our steamer was traveling at some distance from the shore, yet the sound of invisible bells came to us, reminding us of the villages and people. The barks of the fishermen floated on the waves like crusts of bread. There, on the bank a little village appeared, here a crowd of small boys bathed in the river, men in red blouses could be seen passing along a narrow strip of sand. Seen from a distance, from the river, it was a very pleasing sight; everything looked like tiny toys of many colors.
I felt a desire to call out some kind, tender words to the shore and the barge. The latter interested me greatly; I could look at it for an hour at a time as it dipped its blunt nose in the turbid water. The boat dragged it along as if it were a pig: the tow-rope, slackening, lashed the water, then once more drew taut and pulled the barge along by the nose. I wanted very much to see the faces of those people who were kept like wild animals in an iron cage. At Perm, where they were landed, I made my way to the gangway, and past me came, in batches of ten, gray people, trampling dully, rattling their fetters, bowed down by their heavy knapsacks. There were all sorts, young and old, handsome and ugly, all exactly like ordinary people except that they were differently dressed and were disfiguringly close-shaven. No doubt these were robbers, but grandmother had told me much that was good about robbers. Smouri looked much more like a fierce robber than they as he glanced loweringly at the barge and said loudly:
“Save me, God, from such a fate!”
Once I asked him:
“Why do you say that? You cook, while those others kill and steal.”
“I don’t cook; I only prepare. The women cook,” he said, bursting out laughing; but after thinking a moment he added: “The difference between one person and another lies in stupidity. One man is clever, another not so clever, and a third may be quite a fool. To become clever one must read the right books—black magic and what not. One must read all kinds of books and then one will find the right ones.”
He was continually impressing upon me:
“Read! When you don’t understand a book, read it again and again, as many as seven times; and if you do not understand it then, read it a dozen times.”
To every one on the boat, not excluding the taciturn steward, Smouri spoke roughly. Sticking out his lower lip as if he were disgusted, and, stroking his mustache, he pelted them with words as if they were stones. To me he always showed kindness and interest, but there was something about his interest which rather frightened me. Sometimes I thought he was crazy, like grandmother’s sister. At times he said to me:
“Leave off reading.”
And he would lie for a long time with closed eyes, breathing stertorously, his great stomach shaking. His hairy fingers, folded corpse-like on his chest, moved, knitting invisible socks with invisible needles. Suddenly he would begin growling:
“Here are you! You have your intelligence. Go and live! Rut intelligence is given sparingly, and not to all alike. If all were on the same level intellectually—but they are not. One understands, another does not, and there are some people who do not even wish to understand!”
Stumbling over his words, he related stories of his life as a soldier, the drift of which I could never manage to catch. They seemed very uninteresting to me. Besides, he did not tell them from the beginning, but as he recollected them.
“The commander of the regiment called this soldier to him and asked: ‘What did the lieutenant say to you?’ So he told everything just as it had happened—a soldier is bound to tell the truth—but the lieutenant looked at him as if he had been a wall, and then turned away, hanging his head. Yes—”
He became indignant, puffed out clouds of smoke, and growled:
“How was I to know what I could say and what I ought not to say? Then the lieutenant was condemned to be shut up in a fortress, and his mother said—ah, my God! I am not learned in anything.”
It was hot. Everything seemed to be quivering and tinkling. The water splashed against the iron walls of the cabin, and the wheel of the boat rose and fell. The river flowed in a broad stream between the rows of lights. In the distance could be seen the line of the meadowed bank. The trees drooped. When one’s hearing had become accustomed to all the sounds, it seemed as if all was quiet, although the soldiers in the stern of the boat howled dismally, “Se-e-even! Se-e-ven!”
I had no desire to take part in anything. I wanted neither to listen nor to work, but only to sit somewhere in the shadows, where there was no greasy, hot smell of cooking; to sit and gaze, half asleep, at the quiet, sluggish life as it slipped away on the water.
“Read!” the cook commanded harshly.
Even the head steward was afraid of him, and that mild man of few words, the dining-room steward, who looked like a sandre, was evidently afraid of Smouri too.
“Ei! You swine!” he would cry to this man. “Come here! Thief! Asiatic!”
The sailors and stokers were very respectful to him, and expectant of favors. He gave them the meat from which soup had been made, and inquired after their homes and their families. The oily and smoke-dried White Russian stokers were counted the lowest people on the boat. They were all called by one name, Yaks, and they were teased, “Like a Yak, I amble along the shore.”
When Smouri heard this, he bristled up, his face became suffused with blood, and he roared at the stokers:
“Why do you allow them to laugh at you, you mugs? Throw some sauce in their faces.”
Once the boatswain, a handsome, but ill-natured, man, said to him:
“They are the same as Little Russians; they hold the same faith.”
The cook seized him by the collar and belt, lifted him up in the air, and said, shaking him:
“Shall I knock you to smithereens?”
They quarreled often, these two. Sometimes it even came to a fight, but Smouri was never beaten. He was possessed of superhuman strength, and besides this, the captain’s wife, with a masculine face and smooth hair like a boy’s, was on his side.
He drank a terrible amount of vodka, but never became drunk. He began to drink the first thing in the morning, consuming a whole bottle in four gulps, and after that he sipped beer till close on evening. His face gradually grew brown, his eyes widened.
Sometimes in the evening he sat for hours in the hatchway, looking large and white, without breaking his silence, and his eyes were fixed gloomily on the distant horizon. At those times they were all more afraid of him than ever, but I was sorry for him. Jaakov Ivanich would come out from the kitchen, perspiring and glowing with the heat. Scratching his bald skull and waving his arm, he would take cover or say from a distance:
“The fish has gone off.”
“Well, there is the salted cabbage.”
“But if they ask for fish-soup or boiled fish?”
“It is ready. They can begin gobbling.”
Sometimes I plucked up courage to go to him. He looked at me heavily.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Good.”.
On one of th
ese occasions, however, I asked him:
“Why is every one afraid of you? For you are good.”
Contrary to my expectations, he did not get angry.
“I am only good to you.”
But he added distinctly, simply, and thoughtfully:
“Yes, it is true that I am good to every one, only I do not show it. It does not do to show that to people, or they will be all over you. They will crawl over those who are kind as if they were mounds in a morass, and trample on them. Go and get me some beer.”
Having drunk the bottle, he sucked his mustache and said:
“If you were older, my bird, I could teach you a lot. I have something to say to a man. I am no fool. But you must read books. In them you will find all you need. They are not rubbish—books. Would you like some beer?”
“I don’t care for it.”
“Good boy! And you do well not to drink it. Drunkenness is a misfortune. Vodka is the devil’s own business. If I were rich, I would spur you on to study. An uninstructed man is an ox, fit for nothing but the yoke or to serve as meat. All he can do is to wave his tail.”
The captain’s wife gave him a volume of Gogol. I read “The Terrible Vengeance” and was delighted with it, but Smouri cried angrily:
“Rubbish! A fairy-tale! I know. There are other books.”
He took the book away from me, obtained another one from the captain’s wife, and ordered me harshly:
“Read Tarass’—what do you call it? Find it! She says it is good; good for whom? It may be good for her, but not for me, eh? She cuts her hair short. It is a pity her ears were not cut off too.”
When Tarass called upon Ostap to fight, the cook laughed loudly.
“That’s the way! Of course! You have learning, but I have strength. What do they say about it? Camels!”
He listened with great attention, but often grumbled:
“Rubbish! You couldn’t cut a man in half from his shoulders to his haunches; it can’t be done. And you can’t thrust a pike upward; it would break it. I have been a soldier myself.”
Andrei’s treachery aroused his disgust.
‘There’s a mean creature, eh? Like women! Tfoo!
But when Tarass killed his son, the cook let his feet slip from the hammock, bent himself double, and wept. The tears trickled down his cheeks, splashed upon the deck as he breathed stertorously and muttered:
“Oh, my God! my God!”
And suddenly he shouted to me:
“Go on reading, you bone of the devil!”
Again he wept, with even more violence and bitterness, when I read how Ostap cried, out before his death, “Father, dost thou hear?”
“Ruined utterly!” exclaimed Smouri. “Utterly! Is that the end? Ekh! What an accursed business! He was a man, that Tar ass. What do you think? Yes, he was a man.”
He took the book out of my hands and looked at it with attention, letting his tears fall on its binding.
“It is a fine book, a regular treat.”
After this we read “Ivanhoe.” Smouri was very pleased with Richard Plantagenet.
“That was a real king,” he said impressively.
To me the book had appeared dry. In fact, our tastes did not agree at all. I had a great liking for “The Story of Thomas Jones,” an old translation of “The History of Tom Jones, Foundling,” but Smouri grumbled:
“Rubbish! What do I care about your Thomas? Of what use is he to me? There must be some other books.”
One day I told him that I knew that there were other books, forbidden books. One could read them only at night, in underground rooms. He opened his eyes wide.
“Wha-a-t’s that? Why do you tell me these lies?”
“I am not telling lies. The priest asked me about them when I went to confession, and, for that matter, I myself have seen people reading them and crying over them.”
The cook looked sternly in my face and asked:
“Who was crying?”
“The lady who was listening, and the other actually ran away because she was frightened.”
“You were asleep. You were dreaming,” said Smouri, slowly covering his eyes, and after a silence he muttered: “But of course there must be something hidden from me somewhere. I am not so old as all that, and with my character—well, however that may be—”
He spoke to me eloquently for a whole hour.
Imperceptibly I acquired the habit of reading, and took up a book with pleasure. What I read therein was pleasantly different from life, which was becoming harder and harder for me.
Smouri also recreated himself by reading, and often took me from my work.
“Pyeshkov, come and read.”
“I have a lot of washing up to do.”
“Let Maxim wash up.”
He coarsely ordered the senior kitchen-helper to do my work, and this man would break the glasses out of spite, while the chief steward told me quietly:
“I shall have you put off the boat.”
One day Maxim on purpose placed several glasses in a bowl of dirty water and tea-leaves. I emptied the water overboard, and the glasses went flying with it.
“It is my fault,” said Smouri to the head steward. “Put it down to my account.”
The dining-room attendants began to look at me with lowering brows, and they used to say:
“Ei! you bookworm! What are you paid for?”
And they used to try and make as much work as they could for me, soiling plates needlessly. I was sure that this would end badly for me, and I was not mistaken.
One evening, in a little shelter on the boat, there sat a red-faced woman with a girl in a yellow coat and a new pink blouse. Both had been drinking. The woman smiled, bowed to every one, and said on the note O, like a church clerk:
“Forgive me, my friends; I have had a little too much to drink. I have been tried and acquitted, and I have been drinking for joy.”
The girl laughed, too, gazing at the other passengers with glazed eyes. Pushing the woman away, she said:
“But you, you plaguy creature—we know you.”
They had berths in the second-class cabin, opposite the cabin in which Jaakov Ivanich and Sergei slept.
The woman soon disappeared somewhere or other, and Sergei took her place near the girl, greedily stretching his frog-like mouth.
That night, when I had finished my work and had laid myself down to sleep on the table, Sergei came to me, and seizing me by the arm, said:
“Come along! We are going to marry you.”
He was drunk. I tried to tear my arm away from him, but he struck me.
“Come along!”
Maxim came running in, also drunk, and the two dragged me along the deck to their cabin, past the sleeping passengers. But by the door of the cabin stood Smouri, and in the doorway, holding on to the jamb, Jaakov Ivanich. The girl stuck her elbow in his back, and cried in a drunken voice:
“Make way!”
Smouri got me out of the hands of Sergei and Maxim, seized them by the hair, and, knocking their heads together, moved away. They both fell down.
“Asiatic!” he said to Jaakov, slamming the door on him. Then he roared as he pushed me along:
“Get out of this!”
I ran to the stern. The night was cloudy, the river black. In the wake of the boat seethed two gray lines of water leading to the invisible shore; between these two lines the barge dragged on its way. Now on the right, now on the left appeared red patches of light, without illuminating anything. They disappeared, hidden by the sudden winding of the shore. After this it became still darker and more gruesome.
The cook came and sat beside me, sighed deeply, and pulled at his cigarette.
“So they were taking you to that creature? Ekh! Dirty beasts! I heard them trying.”
“Did you take her
away from them?”
“Her?” He abused the girl coarsely, and continued in a sad tone:
“It is all nastiness here. This boat is worse than a village. Have you ever lived in a village?”
“No.”
“In a village there is nothing but misery, especially in the winter.”
Throwing his cigarette overboard, he was silent. Then he spoke again.
“You have fallen among a herd of swine, and I am sorry for you, my little one. I am sorry for all of them, too. Another time I do not know what I should have done. Gone on my knees and prayed. What are you doing, sons of ——? What are you doing, blind creatures? Camels!”
The steamer gave a long-drawn-out hoot, the tow-rope splashed in the water, the lights of lanterns jumped up and down, showing where the harbor was. Out of the darkness more lights appeared.
“Pyani Bor [a certain pine forest]. Drunk,” growled the cook. “And there is a river called Pyanaia, and there was a captain called Pyenkov, and a writer called Zapivokhin, and yet another captain called Nepei-pivo.[1] I am going on shore.”
The coarse-grained women and girls of Kamska dragged logs of wood from the shore in long trucks. Bending under their load-straps, with pliable tread, they arrived in pairs at the stoker’s hold, and, emptying their sooty loads into the black hole, cried ringingly:
“Logs!”
[1] Pyanaia means “drunk,” and the other names mentioned come from the same root. Nepei-pivo means, “Do not drink beer.”
When they brought the wood the sailors would take hold of them by the breasts or the legs. The women squealed, spat at the men, turned back, and defended themselves against pinches and blows with their trucks. I saw this a hundred times, on every voyage and at every land-stage where they took in wood, and it was always the same thing.
I felt as if I were old, as if I had lived on that boat for many years, and knew what would happen in a week’s time, in the autumn, in a year.
It was daylight now. On a sandy promontory above the harbor stood out a forest of fir-trees. On the hills and through the forests women went laughing and singing. They looked like soldiers as they pushed their long trucks.
