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 balls 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 pass that the wife begot a child – a child was born – it was necessary to christen it, but, being poor, they could not entertain the godparents and the guests, so nobody came to christen the child. They tried this and they tried that – yet nobody came. And they began to pray to the Lord, ‘Oh Lord! Oh Lord!’”
Foma knew this awful story about God’s godchild. He had heard it more than once and was already picturing to himself this godchild riding on a white horse to his godfather and godmother; 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-cock. 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 compassion of a satisfied man for a hungry one. Perhaps it was this very compassion 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
