Fiction; Short stories, Russian -- Translations into English
Gavrilo drank, and at last reached a condition when everything
seemed waving up and down in regular undulations before his eyes.
It was unpleasant and made him feel sick. His face wore
an expression of childish bewilderment and foolish enthusiasm.
Trying to say something, he smacked his lips absurdly and bellowed.
Chelkash, watching him intently, twisted his mustaches,
and as though recollecting something, still smiled to himself,
but morosely now and maliciously.
The eating-house roared with drunken clamor. The red-headed
sailor was asleep, with his elbows on the table.
"Come, let's go then!" said Chelkash, getting up.
Gavrilo tried to get up, but could not, and with a vigorous oath,
he laughed a meaningless, drunken laugh.
"Quite screwed!" said Chelkash, sitting down again opposite him.
Gavrilo still guffawed, staring with dull eyes at his new employer.
And the latter gazed at him intently, vigilantly and thoughtfully.
He saw before him a man whose life had fallen into his wolfish clutches.
He, Chelkash, felt that he had the power to do with it as he pleased.
He could rend it like a card, and he could help to set it on a firm
footing in its peasant framework. He reveled in feeling himself
master of another man, and thought that never would this peasant-lad
drink of such a cup as destiny had given him, Chelkash, to drink.
And he envied this young life and pitied it, sneered at it, and was
even troubled over it, picturing to himself how it might again fall
into such hands as his.
And all these feelings in the end melted in Chelkash into one--
a fatherly sense of proprietorship in him. He felt sorry for
the boy, and the boy was necessary to him. Then Chelkash took
Gavrilo under the arms, and giving him a slight shove behind
with his knee, got him out into the yard of the eating-house,
where he put him on the ground in the shade of a stack of wood,
then he sat down beside him and lighted his pipe.
Gavrilo shifted about a little, muttered, and dropped asleep.
CHAPTER II.
"Come, ready?" Chelkash asked in a low voice of Gavrilo,
who was busy doing something to the oars.
"In a minute! The rowlock here's unsteady, can I just knock
it in with the oar?"
"No--no! Not a sound! Push it down harder with your hand,
it'll go in of itself."
They were both quietly getting out a boat, which was tied to the stern
of one of a whole flotilla of oakladen barges, and big Turkish feluccas,
half unloaded, hall still full of palm-oil, sandal wood, and thick
trunks of cypress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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