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!
Tfoor
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 Ostaf cried out before his death,
“Father, dost thou hear?’
“Ruined utterly!” exclaimed Smouri. “Utterly!
Is that the end? EM/ What an accursed business!
He was a man, that Tarass. 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.