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 stem 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 these 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.