Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [77]
“How happy I am!” she murmured, closing her eyes. “How happy I am!”
1889
Gusev
I
IT was already dark, and would soon be night.
Gusev, a discharged soldier, sat up in his hammock and said softly: “Pavel Ivanich, are you listening to me? At Suchan there was a soldier who said a big fish came smack against his ship and tore a hole in the bottom.”
He was addressing a rather nondescript individual known to everyone in sick bay as Pavel Ivanich, but there was no answer: the man seemed not to have heard.
Once more there was silence. The wind wandered over the rigging, the propeller throbbed, waves dashed against the ship, hammocks creaked, but the ear had long since grown accustomed to these sounds, and everything seemed to sleep, caught up in a trance of silence. It was boring. The three sick men—two soldiers and a sailor—had spent the day playing cards; now they slept and uttered all kinds of nonsense in their dreams.
Apparently the ship was beginning to roll. The hammock slowly rose and fell under Gusev, as though it were sighing: this happened once, twice, three times.… Something crashed down on the floor with a ringing sound: probably a jug had fallen.
“The wind must have slipped its chains,” Gusev said, straining his ears.
This time Pavel Ivanich cleared his throat and said irritably: “First you say a fish has smacked into the side of a ship, then you say the wind has slipped its chains.… Is the wind, then, an animal that it breaks loose from its chains?”
“That’s what the Christians say.”
“Then the Christians are know-nothings just like you. They say whatever they want to say. You should have a head on your shoulders and try to reason things out. You don’t have any brains!”
Pavel Ivanich suffered from seasickness. When the sea was rough he was usually bad-tempered, and the merest trifle would reduce him to a state of complete exasperation. In Gusev’s opinion there was nothing at all to be angry about. What was strange or astonishing in the story about the fish or the wind slipping its chains? Suppose the fish were as big as a mountain, suppose its backbone was as strong as a sturgeon’s, and then suppose that far away, at the very end of the world, there were great walls of stone and that the furious winds were chained to these walls. If the winds had not broken loose from their chains, how do you account for the fact that they fling themselves across the sea like maniacs, and struggle to escape like dogs? If they were not chained up, what became of them when the seas were calm?
For a long time Gusev pondered those massive rusty chains and the fish as big as mountains, and then he wearied of these things and instead he summoned up the memory of his village, that village to which he was returning after five years’ service in the Far East. He thought of an immense pool crusted with snow; on one side stood the potteries, which were the color of brick, with the high chimney and clouds of black smoke, and on the other side lay the village. Driving a sleigh, his brother Alexey emerged from the fifth courtyard from the end, his little son Vanka and his daughter Akulka sitting behind him, both of them wearing big felt boots. Alexey had been drinking, Vanka was laughing, and Akulka was bundled up so that it was impossible to see her face.
“Unless he’s careful, the children will be frozen stiff!” Gusev thought. “Oh Lord, put some sense in their heads so that they will honor their father and mother, and not be any wiser than their father and mother.…”
“They need new soles