Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov (Illustrated) (194 page)

III

The ship was not rocking and Pavel Ivanitch was more cheerful. He was no longer ill-humoured. His face had a boastful, defiant, mocking expression. He looked as though he wanted to say: “Yes, in a minute I will tell you something that will make you split your sides with laughing.” The little round window was open and a soft breeze was blowing on Pavel Ivanitch. There was a sound of voices, of the plash of oars in the water. . . . Just under the little window someone began droning in a high, unpleasant voice: no doubt it was a Chinaman singing.

“Here we are in the harbour,” said Pavel Ivanitch, smiling ironically. “Only another month and we shall be in Russia. Well, worthy gentlemen and warriors! I shall arrive at Odessa and from there go straight to Harkov. In Harkov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him and say, ‘Come, old man, put aside your horrid subjects, ladies’ amours and the beauties of nature, and show up human depravity.’ “

For a minute he pondered, then said:

“Gusev, do you know how I took them in?”

“Took in whom, Pavel Ivanitch?”

“Why, these fellows. . . . You know that on this steamer there is only a first-class and a third-class, and they only allow peasants -- that is the rift-raft -- to go in the third. If you have got on a reefer jacket and have the faintest resemblance to a gentleman or a bourgeois you must go first-class, if you please. You must fork out five hundred roubles if you die for it. Why, I ask, have you made such a rule? Do you want to raise the prestige of educated Russians thereby? Not a bit of it. We don’t let you go third-class simply because a decent person can’t go third-class; it is very horrible and disgusting. Yes, indeed. I am very grateful for such solicitude for decent people’s welfare. But in any case, whether it is nasty there or nice, five hundred roubles I haven’t got. I haven’t pilfered government money. I haven’t exploited the natives, I haven’t trafficked in contraband, I have flogged no one to death, so judge whether I have the right to travel first-class and even less to reckon myself of the educated class? But you won’t catch them with logic. . . . One has to resort to deception. I put on a workman’s coat and high boots, I assumed a drunken, servile mug and went to the agents: ‘Give us a little ticket, your honour,’ said I. . . .”

“Why, what class do you belong to?” asked a sailor.

“Clerical. My father was an honest priest, he always told the great ones of the world the truth to their faces; and he had a great deal to put up with in consequence.”

Pavel Ivanitch was exhausted with talking and gasped for breath, but still went on:

“Yes, I always tell people the truth to their faces. I am not afraid of anyone or anything. There is a vast difference between me and all of you in that respect. You are in darkness, you are blind, crushed; you see nothing and what you do see you don’t understand. . . . You are told the wind breaks loose from its chain, that you are beasts, Petchenyegs, and you believe it; they punch you in the neck, you kiss their hands; some animal in a sable-lined coat robs you and then tips you fifteen kopecks and you: ‘Let me kiss your hand, sir.’ You are pariahs, pitiful people. . . . I am a different sort. My eyes are open, I see it all as clearly as a hawk or an eagle when it floats over the earth, and I understand it all. I am a living protest. I see irresponsible tyranny -- I protest. I see cant and hypocrisy -- I protest. I see swine triumphant -- I protest. And I cannot be suppressed, no Spanish Inquisition can make me hold my tongue. No. . . . Cut out my tongue and I would protest in dumb show; shut me up in a cellar -- I will shout from it to be heard half a mile away, or I will starve myself to death that they may have another weight on their black consciences. Kill me and I will haunt them with my ghost. All my acquaintances say to me: ‘You are a most insufferable person, Pavel Ivanitch.’ I am proud of such a reputation. I have served three years in the far East, and I shall be remembered there for a hundred years: I had rows with everyone. My friends write to me from Russia, ‘Don’t come back,’ but here I am going back to spite them . . . yes. . . . That is life as I understand it. That is what one can call life.”

Gusev was looking at the little window and was not listening. A boat was swaying on the transparent, soft, turquoise water all bathed in hot, dazzling sunshine. In it there were naked Chinamen holding up cages with canaries and calling out:

“It sings, it sings!”

Another boat knocked against the first; the steam cutter darted by. And then there came another boat with a fat Chinaman sitting in it, eating rice with little sticks.

Languidly the water heaved, languidly the white seagulls floated over it.

“I should like to give that fat fellow one in the neck,” thought Gusev, gazing at the stout Chinaman, with a yawn.

He dozed off, and it seemed to him that all nature was dozing, too. Time flew swiftly by; imperceptibly the day passed, imperceptibly the darkness came on. . . . The steamer was no longer standing still, but moving on further.

IV

Two days passed, Pavel Ivanitch lay down instead of sitting up; his eyes were closed, his nose seemed to have grown sharper.

“Pavel Ivanitch,” Gusev called to him. “Hey, Pavel Ivanitch.”

Pavel Ivanitch opened his eyes and moved his lips.

“Are you feeling bad?”

“No . . . it’s nothing . . .” answered Pavel Ivanitch, gasping. “Nothing; on the contrary -- I am rather better. . . . You see I can lie down. I am a little easier. . . .”

“Well, thank God for that, Pavel Ivanitch.”

“When I compare myself with you I am sorry for you . . . poor fellow. My lungs are all right, it is only a stomach cough. . . . I can stand hell, let alone the Red Sea. Besides I take a critical attitude to my illness and to the medicines they give me for it. While you . . . you are in darkness. . . . It’s hard for you, very, very hard!”

The ship was not rolling, it was calm, but as hot and stifling as a bath-house; it was not only hard to speak but even hard to listen. Gusev hugged his knees, laid his head on them and thought of his home. Good heavens, what a relief it was to think of snow and cold in that stifling heat! You drive in a sledge, all at once the horses take fright at something and bolt. . . . Regardless of the road, the ditches, the ravines, they dash like mad things, right through the village, over the pond by the pottery works, out across the open fields. “Hold on,” the pottery hands and the peasants shout, meeting them. “Hold on.” But why? Let the keen, cold wind beat in one’s face and bite one’s hands; let the lumps of snow, kicked up by the horses’ hoofs, fall on one’s cap, on one’s back, down one’s collar, on one’s chest; let the runners ring on the snow, and the traces and the sledge be smashed, deuce take them one and all! And how delightful when the sledge upsets and you go flying full tilt into a drift, face downwards in the snow, and then you get up white all over with icicles on your moustaches; no cap, no gloves, your belt undone. . . . People laugh, the dogs bark. . . .

Pavel Ivanitch half opened one eye, looked at Gusev with it, and asked softly:

“Gusev, did your commanding officer steal?”

“Who can tell, Pavel Ivanitch! We can’t say, it didn’t reach us.”

And after that a long time passed in silence. Gusev brooded, muttered something in delirium, and kept drinking water; it was hard for him to talk and hard to listen, and he was afraid of being talked to. An hour passed, a second, a third; evening came on, then night, but he did not notice it. He still sat dreaming of the frost.

There was a sound as though someone came into the hospital, and voices were audible, but a few minutes passed and all was still again.

“The Kingdom of Heaven and eternal peace,” said the soldier with his arm in a sling. “He was an uncomfortable man.”

“What?” asked Gusev. “Who?”

“He is dead, they have just carried him up.”

“Oh, well,” muttered Gusev, yawning, “the Kingdom of Heaven be his.”

“What do you think?” the soldier with his arm in a sling asked Gusev. “Will he be in the Kingdom of Heaven or not?”

“Who is it you are talking about?”

“Pavel Ivanitch.”

“He will be . . . he suffered so long. And there is another thing, he belonged to the clergy, and the priests always have a lot of relations. Their prayers will save him.”

The soldier with the sling sat down on a hammock near Gusev and said in an undertone:

“And you, Gusev, are not long for this world. You will never get to Russia.”

“Did the doctor or his assistant say so?” asked Gusev.

“It isn’t that they said so, but one can see it. . . . One can see directly when a man’s going to die. You don’t eat, you don’t drink; it’s dreadful to see how thin you’ve got. It’s consumption, in fact. I say it, not to upset you, but because maybe you would like to have the sacrament and extreme unction. And if you have any money you had better give it to the senior officer.”

“I haven’t written home . . .” Gusev sighed. “I shall die and they won’t know.”

“They’ll hear of it,” the sick sailor brought out in a bass voice. “When you die they will put it down in the
Gazette,
at Odessa they will send in a report to the commanding officer there and he will send it to the parish or somewhere. .

Gusev began to be uneasy after such a conversation and to feel a vague yearning. He drank water -- it was not that; he dragged himself to the window and breathed the hot, moist air -- it was not that; he tried to think of home, of the frost -- it was not that. . . . At last it seemed to him one minute longer in the ward and he would certainly expire.

“It’s stifling, mates . . .” he said. “I’ll go on deck. Help me up, for Christ’s sake.”

“All right,” assented the soldier with the sling. “I’ll carry you, you can’t walk, hold on to my neck.”

Gusev put his arm round the soldier’s neck, the latter put his unhurt arm round him and carried him up. On the deck sailors and time-expired soldiers were lying asleep side by side; there were so many of them it was difficult to pass.

“Stand down,” the soldier with the sling said softly. “Follow me quietly, hold on to my shirt. . . .”

It was dark. There was no light on deck, nor on the masts, nor anywhere on the sea around. At the furthest end of the ship the man on watch was standing perfectly still like a statue, and it looked as though he were asleep. It seemed as though the steamer were abandoned to itself and were going at its own will.

“Now they will throw Pavel Ivanitch into the sea,” said the soldier with the sling. “In a sack and then into the water.”

“Yes, that’s the rule.”

“But it’s better to lie at home in the earth. Anyway, your mother comes to the grave and weeps.”

“Of course.”

There was a smell of hay and of dung. There were oxen standing with drooping heads by the ship’s rail. One, two, three; eight of them! And there was a little horse. Gusev put out his hand to stroke it, but it shook its head, showed its teeth, and tried to bite his sleeve.

“Damned brute . . .” said Gusev angrily.

The two of them, he and the soldier, threaded their way to the head of the ship, then stood at the rail and looked up and down. Overhead deep sky, bright stars, peace and stillness, exactly as at home in the village, below darkness and disorder. The tall waves were resounding, no one could tell why. Whichever wave you looked at each one was trying to rise higher than all the rest and to chase and crush the next one; after it a third as fierce and hideous flew noisily, with a glint of light on its white crest.

The sea has no sense and no pity. If the steamer had been smaller and not made of thick iron, the waves would have crushed it to pieces without the slightest compunction, and would have devoured all the people in it with no distinction of saints or sinners. The steamer had the same cruel and meaningless expression. This monster with its huge beak was dashing onwards, cutting millions of waves in its path; it had no fear of the darkness nor the wind, nor of space, nor of solitude, caring for nothing, and if the ocean had its people, this monster would have crushed them, too, without distinction of saints or sinners.