“Tell your mother that I thank her very much, will you?”
“Yes, I will,” she promised, and she smiled lovingly and tenderly.
“Good-by till tomorrow, eh? Yes?”
I met her again twenty years later, married to an officer in the gendarmerie.
CHAPTER XI
ONCE more I became a washer-up on a steamboat, the Perm, a boat as white as a swan, spacious, and swift.
This time I was a “black” washer-up, or a “kitchen man.” I received seven rubles a month, and my duties were to help the cook.
The steward, stout and bloated, was as bald as a billiard-ball. He walked heavily up and down the deck all day long with his hands clasped behind his back, like a boar looking for a shady corner on a sultry day.
His wife flaunted herself in the buffet. She was a woman of about forty, handsome, but faded, and so thickly powdered that her colored dress was covered with the white, sticky dust that fell from her cheeks.
The kitchen was ruled over by an expensive cook, Ivan Ivanovich, whose surname was Medvyejenok. He was a small, stout man, with an aquiline nose and mocking eyes.
He was a coxcomb, wore starched collars, and shaved every day. His cheeks were dark blue, and his dark mustaches curled upward. He spent all his spare moments in the arrangement of these mustaches, pulling at them with fingers stained by his work at the stove, and looking at them in a small hand-glass.
The most interesting person on the boat was the stoker, Yaakov Shumov, a broad-chested, square man.
His snub-nosed face was as smooth as a spade; his coffee-colored eyes were hidden under thick eyebrows; his cheeks were covered with small, bristling hairs, like the moss which is found in marshes; and the same sort of hair, through which he could hardly pass his crooked fingers, formed a close-fitting cap for his head.
He was skilful in games of cards for money, and his greed was amazing. He was always hanging about the kitchen like a hungry dog, asking for pieces of meat and bones. In the evenings he used to take his tea with Medvyejenok and relate amazing stories about himself.
In his youth he had been assistant to the town shepherd of Riazin. Then a passing monk lured him into a monastery, where he served for four years.
“And I should have become a monk, a black star of God,” he said in his quick, comical way, “if a pilgrim had not come to our cloister from Penza. She was very entertaining, and she upset me. ‘Eh, you ‘re a fine strong fellow,’ says she, ‘and I am a respectable widow and lonely. You shall come to me,’ she says. ‘I have my own house, and I deal in eider-down and feathers.’
That suited me, and I went to her. I became her lover, and lived with her as comfortably as warm bread in a oven, for three years.”
“You lie hardily,” Medvyejenok interrupted him, anxiously examining a pimple on his nose.
“If lies could make money, you would be worth thousands.”
Yaakov hummed. The blue, bristling hairs moved on his impassive face, and his shaggy mustaches quivered. After he had heard the cook’s remark he con tinued as calmly and quickly as before:
“She was older than I, and she began to bore me. Then I must go and take up with her niece, and she found it out, and turned me out by the scruff of the neck.”
“And served you right, you did not deserve anything better,” said the cook as easily and smoothly as Yaakov himself.
The stoker went on, with a lump of sugar in his check:
“I was at a loose end till I came across an old Volodimerzian peddler. Together we wandered all over the world. We went to the Balkan Hills to Turkey itself, to Rumania, and to Greece, to different parts of Austria. We visited every nation. Wherever there were likely to be buyers, there we went, and sold our goods.”
“And stole others?” asked the cook, gravely.
“No! no!” the old man said to me.
“You must act honestly in a strange land, for they are so strict here, it is said, that they will cut off your head for a mere nothing.’
It is true that I did try to steal, but the result was not at all consoling. I managed to get a horse away from the yard of a certain merchant, but I had done no more than that when they caught me, knocked me about, and dragged me to the police station.
There were two of us. The other was a real horse-stealer, but I did it only for the fun of the thing.
But I had been working at the merchant’s house, putting in a new stove for his bath, and the merchant fell ill, and had bad dreams about me, which alarmed him, so that he begged the magistrate, ‘Let him go,’ — that was me, you know, — ‘let him go; for I have had dreams about him, and if you don’t let him off, you will never be well. It is plain that he is a wizard.’ That was me, if you please — a wizard!
However, the merchant was a person of influence, and they let me go.”
“I should not have let you go. I should have let you lie in water for three days to wash the foolery out of you,” said the cook.
Yaakov instantly seized upon his words.
“True, there is a lot of folly about me, and that is the fact — enough folly for a whole village.”
Thrusting his fingers into his tight collar, the cook angrily dragged it up, and complained in a tone of vexation:
“Fiddlesticks!
How a villain like you can live, gorge himself, drink, and stroll about the world, beats me.
I should like to know what use you are.”
Munching, the stoker, answered:
“I don’t know myself.
I live, and that is all I •can say about it.
One man lies down, and another walks about. A chinovnik leads a sedentary life, but every one must eat.”
The cook was more incensed than ever.
“You are such a swine that you are absolutely unbearable.
Really, pigs’ food — ”
“What are you in such a rage about?” asked Yaakov, surprised.
“All men are acorns from the same oak.
But don’t you abuse me. It won’t make me any better, you know.”
This man attracted me and held me at once. I gazed at him with unbounded astonishment, and listened to him with open mouth.
I had an idea that he possessed a deep knowledge of life.