The Man Who Was Afraid Part 11

"I was only jesting. Try to be, not artificial, but genuine. And have some common sense, no matter how little, but your own. Have you many lessons to do?"

"Many!" sighed the boy, and to his sigh, like an echo, his aunt answered with a heavy sigh.

"Well, study. Don't be worse than others at school. Although, I'll tell you, even if there were twenty-five cla.s.ses in your school, they could never teach you there anything save reading, writing and arithmetic. You may also learn some naughty things, but G.o.d protect you! I shall give you a terrible spanking if you do. If you smoke tobacco I'll cut your lips off."

"Remember G.o.d, Fomushka," said the aunt. "See that you don't forget our Lord."

"That's true! Honour G.o.d and your father. But I wish to tell you that school books are but a trivial matter. You need these as a carpenter needs an adze and a pointer. They are tools, but the tools cannot teach you how to make use of them. Understand? Let us see: Suppose an adze were handed to a carpenter for him to square a beam with it. It's not enough to have hands and an adze; it is also necessary for him to know how to strike the wood so as not to hit his foot instead. To you the knowledge of reading and writing is given, and you must regulate your life with it. Thus it follows that books alone are but a trifle in this matter; it is necessary to be able to take advantage of them. And it is this ability that is more cunning than any books, and yet nothing about it is written in the books. This, Foma, you must learn from Life itself.

A book is a dead thing, you may take it as you please, you may tear it, break it--it will not cry out. While should you but make a single wrong step in life, or wrongly occupy a place in it, Life will start to bawl at you in a thousand voices; it will deal you a blow, felling you to the ground."

Foma, his elbows leaning on the table, attentively listened to his father, and under the sound of his powerful voice he pictured to himself now the carpenter squaring a beam, now himself, his hands outstretched, carefully and stealthily approaching some colossal and living thing, and desiring to grasp that terrible something.

"A man must preserve himself for his work and must be thoroughly acquainted with the road to it. A man, dear, is like the pilot on a ship. In youth, as at high tide, go straight! A way is open to you everywhere. But you must know when it is time to steer. The waters recede--here you see a sandbank, there, a rock; it is necessary to know all this and to slip off in time, in order to reach the harbour safe and sound."

"I will reach it!" said the boy, looking at his father proudly and with confidence.

"Eh? You speak courageously!" Ignat burst into laughter. And the aunt also began to laugh kindly.

Since his trip with his father on the Volga, Foma became more lively and talkative at home, with his father, with his aunt and with Mayakin. But on the street, in a new place, or in the presence of strangers, he was always gloomy, always looking about him with suspicion, as though he felt something hostile to him everywhere, something hidden from him spying on him.

At nights he sometimes awoke of a sudden and listened for a long time to the silence about him, fixedly staring into the dark with wide-open eyes. And then his father's stories were transformed before him into images and pictures. Without being aware of it, he mixed up those stories with his aunt's fairy-tales, thus creating for himself a chaos of adventures wherein the bright colours of fantasy were whimsically intertwined with the stern shades of reality. This resulted in something colossal, incomprehensible; the boy closed his eyes and drove it all away from him and tried to check the play of his imagination, which frightened him. In vain he attempted to fall asleep, and the chamber became more and more crowded with dark images. Then he quietly roused his aunt.

"Auntie! Auntie!"

"What? Christ be with you."

"I'll come to you," whispered Foma.

"Why? Sleep, darling, sleep."

"I am afraid," confessed the boy.

"You better say to yourself, 'And the Lord will rise again,' then you won't be afraid."

Foma lies with his eyes open and says the prayer. The silence of the night pictures itself before him in the form of an endless expanse of perfectly calm, dark water, which has overflowed everything and congealed; there is not a ripple on it, not a shadow of a motion, and neither is there anything within it, although it is bottomlessly deep.

It is very terrible for one to look down from the dark at this dead water. But now the sound of the night watchman's mallet is heard, and the boy sees that the surface of the water is beginning to tremble, and, covering the surface with ripples, light little b.a.l.l.s are dancing upon it. The sound of the bell on the steeple, with one mighty swing, brings all the water in agitation and it is slightly trembling from that sound; a big spot of light is also trembling, spreading light upon the water, radiating from its centre into the dark distance, there growing paler and dying out. Again there is weary and deathlike repose in this dark desert.

"Auntie," whispers Foma, beseechingly.

"Dearest?"

"I am coming to you."

"Come, then, come, my darling."

Going over into auntie's bed, he presses close to her, begging:

"Tell me something."

"At night?" protests auntie, sleepily.

"Please."

He does not have to ask her long. Yawning, her eyes closed, the old woman begins slowly in a voice grown heavy with sleep:

"Well, my dear sir, in a certain kingdom, in a certain empire, there lived a man and his wife, and they were very poor. They were so unfortunate that they had nothing to eat. They would go around begging, somebody would give them a crust of stale bread and that would keep them for awhile. And it came to pa.s.s that the wife begot a child--a child was born--it was necessary to christen it, but, being poor, they could not entertain the G.o.dparents and the guests, so n.o.body came to christen the child. They tried this and they tried that--yet n.o.body came. And they began to pray to the Lord, 'Oh Lord! Oh Lord!'"

Foma knew this awful story about G.o.d's G.o.dchild. He had heard it more than once and was already picturing to himself this G.o.dchild riding on a white horse to his G.o.dfather and G.o.dmother; he was riding in the darkness, over the desert, and he saw there all the unbearable miseries to which sinners are condemned. And he heard their faint moans and requests:

"Oh! Man! Ask the Lord yet how long are we to suffer here!"

Then it appeared to Foma that it was he who was riding at night on the white horse, and that the moans and the implorings were addressed to him. His heart contracts with some incomprehensible desire; sorrow compressed his breast and tears gathered in his eyes, which he had firmly closed and now feared to open.

He is tossing about in his bed restlessly.

"Sleep, my child. Christ be with you!" says the old woman, interrupting her tale of men suffering for their sins.

But in the morning after such a night Foma rose sound and cheerful, washed himself hastily, drank his tea in haste and ran off to school, provided with sweet cakes, which were awaited by the always hungry little Yozhov, who greedily subsisted on his rich friend's generosity.

"Got anything to eat?" he accosted Foma, turning up his sharp-pointed nose. "Let me have it, for I left the house without eating anything. I slept too long, devil take it! I studied up to two o'clock last night.

Have you solved your problems?"

"No, I haven't."

"Eh, you lazy bones! Well, I'll dash them off for you directly!"

Driving his small, thin teeth into the cakes, he purred something like a kitten, stamped his left foot, beating time, and at the same time solved the problem, rattling off short phrases to Foma:

"See? Eight bucketfuls leaked out in one hour. And how many hours did it leak--six? Eh, what good things they eat in your house! Consequently, we must multiply six by eight. Do you like cake with green onions? Oh, how I like it! So that in six hours forty-eight bucketfuls leaked out of the first gauge-c.o.c.k. And altogether the tub contained ninety. Do you understand the rest?"

Foma liked Yozhov better than Smolin, but he was more friendly with Smolin. He wondered at the ability and the sprightliness of the little fellow. He saw that Yozhov was more clever and better than himself; he envied him, and felt offended on that account, and at the same time he pitied him with the condescending compa.s.sion of a satisfied man for a hungry one. Perhaps it was this very compa.s.sion that prevented him from preferring this bright boy to the boring red-headed Smolin. Yozhov, fond of having a laugh at the expense of his well-fed friends, told them quite often: "Eh, you are little trunks full of cakes!"

Foma was angry with him for his sneers, and one day, touched to the quick, said wickedly and with contempt:

"And you are a beggar--a pauper!"

Yozhov's yellow face became overcast, and he replied slowly:

"Very well, so be it! I shall never prompt you again--and you'll be like a log of wood!"

And they did not speak to each other for about three days, very much to the regret of the teacher, who during these days had to give the lowest markings to the son of the esteemed Ignat Matveyich.

Yozhov knew everything: he related at school how the procurator's chambermaid gave birth to a child, and that for this the procurator's wife poured hot coffee over her husband; he could tell where and when it was best to catch perch; he knew how to make traps and cages for birds; he could give a detailed account of how the soldier had hanged himself in the garret of the armoury, and knew from which of the pupils' parents the teacher had received a present that day and precisely what sort of a present it was.

The sphere of Smolin's knowledge and interests was confined to the merchant's mode of life, and, above all, the red-headed boy was fond of judging whether this man was richer than that, valuing and pricing their houses, their vessels and their horses. All this he knew to perfection, and spoke of it with enthusiasm.

Like Foma, he regarded Yozhov with the same condescending pity, but more as a friend and equal. Whenever Gordyeeff quarrelled with Yozhov, Smolin hastened to reconcile them, and he said to Foma one day, on their way home:

"Why do you always quarrel with Yozhov?"