“Every one must work out his own fate,” said the stoker, masticating.
I knew that to stoke the furnaces was heavier and hotter work than to stand at the stove, for I had tried several times at night to stoke with Yaakov, and it seemed strange to me that he did not enlighten the cook with regard to the heaviness of his labors.
Yes, this man certainly had a peculiar knowledge of his own.
They all scolded him, — the captain, the engineer, the first mate, all of those who must have known he was not lazy. I thought it very strange. Why did they not appraise him rightly?
The stokers behaved considerably better to him than the rest al — though they made fun of his incessant chatter and his love of cards.
I asked them: “What do you think of Yaakov? Is he a good man?”
“Yaakov?
He’s all right.
You can’t upset him whatever you do, even if you were to put hot coals in his chest.”
What with his heavy labor at the boilers, and his appetite of a horse, the stoker slept but little. Often, when the watches were changed, without changing his clothes, sweating and dirty, he stayed the whole night on deck, talking with the passengers, and playing cards.
In my eyes he was like a locked trunk in which something was hidden which I simply must have, and I obstinately sought the key by which I might open it.
“What you are driving at, little brother, I cannot, for the life of me, understand,” he would say, looking at me with his eyes almost hidden under his eyebrows.
“It is a fact that I have traveled about the world a lot. What about it?
Funny fellow!
You had far better listen to a story I have to tell you about what happened to me once ”
And he told me how there had lived, somewhere in one of the towns he had passed through, a young consumptive lawyer who had a German wife — a fine, healthy woman, without children.
And this German woman was in love with a dry-goods merchant. The merchant was married, and his wife was beautiful and had three children.
When he discovered that the German woman was in love with him, he planned to play a practical joke on her. He told ‘her to meet him in the garden at night, and invited two of his friends to come with him, hiding them in the garden among the bushes.
“Wonderful!
When the German woman came, he said, ‘Here she is, all there!’
And to her, he said, ‘I am no use to you, lady; I am married. But I have brought two of my friends to you. One of them is a widower, and the other a bachelor.’
The German woman — ach! she gave him such a slap on the face that he fell over the garden bench, and then she trampled his ugly mug and his thick head with her heel I I had brought her there, for I was dvornik at the lawyer’s house. I looked through a chink in the fence, and saw how the soup was boiling.
Then the friends sprang out upon her, and seized her by the hair, and I dashed over the fence, and beat them off. ‘You must not do this, Mr. Merchants!’ I said.
The lady had come trustfully, and he had imagined that she had evil intentions.
I took her away, and they threw a brick at me, and bruised my head.
She was overcome with grief, and almost beside herself. She said to me, as we crossed the yard:
‘I shall go back to my own people, the Germans, as soon as my husband dies!’
I said to her,
‘Of course you must go back to them.’
And when the lawyer died, she went away.
She was very kind, and so clever, tool And the lawyer was kind, too, — God rest his soul!”
Not being quite sure that I had understood the meaning of this story, I was silent.
I was conscious of something familiar, something which had happened before, something pitiless and blind about it. But what could I say?
“Do you think that is a good story?” asked Yaakov.
I said something, making some confused objections, but he explained calmly: “People who have more than is necessary are easily amused, but sometimes, when they want to play a trick on some one, it turns out not to be fun at all. It doesn’t come off as they expected.
Merchants are brainy people, of course.
Commerce demands no little cleverness, and the life of clever persons is very dull, you see, so they like to amuse themselves.”
Beyond the prow, all in a foam, the river rushed swiftly. The seething, running water was audible, the dark shore gliding slowly along with it.
On the deck lay snoring passengers. Among the benches, among the sleeping bodies, a tall faded woman in a black frock, with uncovered gray head, moved quietly, coming towards us. The stoker, nudging me, said softly: “Look — she is in trouble!”
And it seemed to me that other people’s griefs were amusing to him.
He told me many stories, and I listened greedily. I remember his stories perfectly, but I do not remember one of them that was happy.
He spoke more calmly than books. In books, I was often conscious of the feelings of the writer, — of his rage, his joy, his grief, his mockery; but the stoker never mocked, never judged. Nothing excited either his disgust or his pleasure to any extent. He spoke like an impartial witness at a trial, like a man who was a stranger alike to accuser, accused, and judge.
This equanimity aroused in me an ever-increasing sense of irritated sorrow, a feeling of angry dislike for Yaakov.
Life burned before his eyes like the flame of the stove beneath the boilers. He stood in front of the stove with a wooden mallet in his pock-marked, coffee-colored hands, and softly struck the edge of the regu — lator, diminishing or increasing the heat.
“Hasn’t all this done you harm?”
“Who would harm me?
I am strong. You see what blows I can give!”
“I am not speaking of blows, but has not your soul been injured?”
“The soul cannot be hurt. The soul does not receive injuries,” he said.
“Souls are not affected by any human agency, by anything external.”