Then he fell among a shoal of pilot fish. When they saw the dark body they were astounded and rooted to the spot, and they suddenly turned tail and fled. In less than a minute they came hurrying back to him, quick as a shot, and they began zigzagging round him in the water.
Then still another dark body appeared. This was a shark. It swam below Gusev with dignity and reserve, seeming not to notice him; and when he, descending, fell against the back of the shark, then the shark turned belly upwards, basking in the warm transparent water and lazily opening its jaws with their two rows of teeth. The pilot fish were in ecstasy; they stopped to see what would happen next. After playing around with the body for a while, the shark calmly laid its jaws on it, tapped it with its teeth, and ripped open the sailcloth along the whole length of the body from head to foot; one of the fire bars fell out, frightened the pilot fish, struck the shark in the ribs, and sank rapidly to the bottom.
Meanwhile in the heavens clouds came and massed themselves against the sunset, and one cloud resembled a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors.… There came a great beam of green light transpiercing the clouds and stretching to the center of the sky, and a little while later a violetcolored beam lay beside it, and then there was a golden beam, and then a rose-colored beam. The heavens turned lilac, very soft. Gazing up at the enchanted heavens, magnificent in their splendor, the sea fumed darkly at first, but soon assumed the sweet, joyous, passionate colors for which there are scarcely any names in the tongue of man.
T
IN the village of Raibuzh, just opposite the church, there is a two-story house with stone foundations and an iron roof. The owner of the house, Philip Ivanov Kamin, and his family live in the lower story. Kamin’s nickname is Dyudya. On the upper floor, where it is very hot in summer and very cold in winter, there are lodgings for officials, merchants, and country gentlemen passing through the town. Dyudya rents out some parcels of land, runs a tavern along the main road, trades in tar, honey, cattle, and magpies, and has amassed some eight thousand rubles, which he keeps in the town bank.
Fedor, his elder son, is a foreman mechanic in a factory, and as the peasants say, he has climbed so high that no one can follow after him. Fedor’s wife, Sophia, is a plain sickly woman who lives at home with her father-in-law, weeps continually, and every Sunday drives over to the hospital for treatment. The second son, Alyoshka, is a hunchback and lives at home with his father. He has only lately married Varvara, a girl from a poor family, young, pretty, healthy, fond of dressing up. When officials and merchants stay at the house, they always demand that Varvara bring in the samovar and make up their beds.
One evening in June when the sun was setting and the air smelled of hay and warm manure and steaming milk, a plain cart came driving into Dyudya’s courtyard with three people sitting in it. One was a man of about thirty who wore a canvas suit, and sitting beside him was a boy of seven or eight in a long black coat with big bone buttons, and there was a young fellow in a red shirt sitting on the driver’s seat.
This young fellow unhitched the horses and walked them up and down the street, while the man washed himself, said a prayer with his face turned toward the church, and spreading out a fur cloak on the ground, sat down and had supper with the boy. He ate slowly, steadily, and Dyudya, who had known many travelers in his day, observed from his manners that he was a serious man with a head for business who knew his own worth.
Dyudya was sitting on the steps in his waistcoat, without a cap, waiting for a word from the stranger. He liked to listen in the evenings to travelers telling all kinds of stories as a preparation for sleep, and this had been his custom for some time. His old wife, Afanasyevna, and his daughter-in-law Sophia were milking in the cowshed, while Varvara, the other daughter-in-law, sat upstairs by an open window, eating sunflower seeds.
“I reckon that little fellow must be your son,” Dyudya asked the stranger.
“Well, no. Adopted. An orphan. I took him up for the salvation of my soul.”
They got to talking. The stranger seemed to be a talkative man with a gift for speech, and Dyudya learned that he belonged to the lower middle class, came from the town, owned his own house, and went by the name of Matvey Savvich. He was on his way to inspect some gardens he was renting from some German colonists. The name of the boy was Kuzka. The evening was hot and close, and no one wanted to sleep. When it grew dark and the pale stars were twinkling in the sky, Matvey Savvich began to tell the story of how he had taken up with Kuzka. Afanasyevna and Sophia stood a little way off, listening. Kuzka was away by the gate.
“It’s a complicated story, grandfather—extraordinarily so,” Matvey began. “If I told you everything that happened, it would take all night. Ten years ago in our street, in a little house next to mine, where there’s now a candle factory and a creamery, there used to live an old widow, Marfa Semyonovna Kapluntsev, with her two sons. One was a conductor on the railroad, and the other, Vasya, was a boy of my own age, and he lived at home with his mother. The widow’s husband had kept horses, five pairs of them, and he used to send his drivers all over town. The widow continued the business, and she was just as good at managing the drivers as her husband, and so there were days when they made a clear five-ruble profit. The young fellow, too, was making a bit of money. He bred prize pigeons and sold them to the fanciers. I remember him standing on the roof, throwing up a broom and whistling, and the pigeons were high in the sky, but not high enough for him—he wanted them to go higher. Greenfinches and starlings, too, he caught, and he knew how to make good cages.… All pretty trifling maybe, but a man can make ten rubles a month from trifles like that. Well, time went on, the old woman lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. Consequently the house had no woman to look after it, and that’s about as good as being blind in both eyes! So the old lady bestirred herself and made up her mind to get Vasya married. They called in a matchmaker at once, and then the old women got to talking and our Vasya went off to look at the girls. He picked on Mashenka, the widow Samokhvalikha’s daughter. They didn’t waste any time: they decided to get married on the spot, and in a week all arrangements were made. She was quite young, just seventeen, very thin, knee-high to a grasshopper, with a pale pretty-looking face, and all the qualities of a young lady, and the dowry was good, too, amounting to five hundred rubles, a cow, and a bed.… But the old lady knew what was in store, and on the third day after the wedding she departed unto the heavenly Jerusalem where there is neither sickness nor sighing. The young ones had masses said for her soul, and they began to live. Things went splendidly for six months, and then suddenly another misfortune occurred. It never rains but it pours. Vasya was summoned to draw lots as a conscript. Poor fellow, they made a soldier out of him, and they gave him no exemptions. They shaved his head and packed him off to the kingdom of Poland. It was God’s will, there was nothing to be done about it. When he said good-by to his wife in the courtyard he was all right until he looked up at the pigeons in the hayloft for the last time, and then he cried as if his heart would break. It was pitiful to see him. At first Mashenka got her mother to stay with her so that she wouldn’t be bored by being alone; the mother stayed until the birth of the baby, who is this very Kuzka, and then went off to stay with another married daughter in Oboyan, and Mashenka was alone with her child. There were the five drivers—drunken and mischievous peasants, all of them—and then there were the horses and carts, and fences would get broken or the soot would catch fire in the chimney—things a woman couldn’t cope with—and being as how we were neighbors she would come to me for every least thing. So I would go over and put things right and give her advice. Naturally I’d go indoors and have a cup of tea and we’d fall to talking. I was a young fellow then, quite clever, and I was fond of talking on all manner of subjects, and she was refined and well- mannered. She dressed neatly—in summer she went about with a sunshade. I remember how I would start on
