Throwing his cigar over the side of the boat, he spat after it in disgust, saying:
“Life is very dull, Pyeshkov, very dull.
There are no educated people — no one to talk to.
If one wants to show off one’s gifts, who is there to be impressed?
Not a soul!
All the people here are carpenters, stone-masons, peasants — ”
He looked straight ahead at the white mosque which rose picturesquely out of the water on a small hill, and continued as. if he were recollecting something he had forgotten:
“I began to drink beer and smoke cigars when I was working under a German.
The Germans, my brother, are a business-like race — such wild fowl!
Drinking beer is a pleasant occupation, but I have never got used to smoking cigars.
And when you ‘ve been smoking, your wife grumbles:
‘What is it that you smell of? It is like the smell at the harness-makers.’
Ah, brother, the longer we live, the more artful we grow.
Well, well, true to oneself — ”
Placing the oar against the side of the boat, he took up his gun and shot at a Chinaman on a roof. No harm came to the latter; the shot buried itself in the roof and the wall, raising a dusty smoke.
“That was a miss,” he admitted without regret, and he again loaded his gun.
“How do you get on with the girls? Are you keen on them?
No?
Why, I was in love when I was only thirteen.”
He told me, as if he were telling a dream, the story of his first love for the housemaid of the architect to whom he had been apprenticed.
Softly splashed the gray water, washing the corners of the buildings; beyond the cathedral dully gleamed a watery waste; black twigs rose here and there above it.
In the icon-painter’s workshop they often sang the Seminarski song:
“O blue sea, Stormy sea . . .”
That blue sea must have been deadly dull.
“I never slept at nights,” went on my master. “Sometimes I got out of bed and stood at her door, shivering like a dog. It was a cold house!
The master visited her at night. He might have discovered me, but I was not afraid, not 1 1”
He spoke thoughtfully, like a person looking at an old worn-out coat, and wondering if he could wear it once more.
“She noticed me, pitied me, unfastened her door, and called me:
‘Come in, you little fool.’ ”
I had heard many stories of this kind, and they bored me, although there was one pleasing feature about them — almost every one spoke of their “first love” without boasting, or obscenity, and often so gently and sadly that I understood that the story of their first love was the best in their lives.
Laughing and shaking his head, my master exclaimed wonderingly:
“But that’s the sort of thing you don’t tell your wife; no, no!
Well, there’s no harm in it, but you never tell.
That’s a story — ”
He was telling the story to himself, not to me.
If he had been silent, I should have spoken. In that quietness and desolation one had to talk, or sing, or play on the harmonica, or one would fall into a heavy, eternal sleep in the midst of that dead town, drowned in gray, cold water.
“In the first place, don’t marry too soon,” he counseled me. “Marriage, brother, is a matter of the most
IN IHE WORLD 401 stupendous importance. You can live where you like and how you like, according to your will.
You can live in Persia as a Mahommedan; in Moscow as a man about town. You can arrange your life as you choose. You can give everything a trial.
But a wife, brother, is like the weather — you can never rule her!
You can’t take a wife and throw her aside like an old boot.”
His face changed. He gazed into the gray water with knitted brows, rubbing his prominent nose with his fingers, and muttered:
“Yes, brother, look before you leap.
Let us suppose that you are beset on all sides, and still continue to stand firm; even then there is a special trap laid for each one of us.”
We were now amongst the vegetation in the lake of Meshtcherski, which was fed by the Volga.
“Row softly,” whispered my master, pointing his gun into the bushes.
After he had shot a few lean woodcocks, he suggested:
“Let us go to Kunavin Street.
I will spend the evening there, and you can go home and say that I am detained by the contractors.”
Setting him down at one of the streets on the outskirts of the town, which was also flooded, I returned to the market-place on the Stravelka, moored the boat, and sitting in it, gazed at the confluence of the two rivers, at the town, the steamboats, the sky, which was just like the gorgeous wing of some gigantic bird, all white feathery clouds.