"Why do you say that? You cook, while those others kill and steal."
"I don't cook; I only prepare. The women cook," he said, bursting out laughing; but after thinking a moment he added: "The difference between one person and another lies in stupidity. One man is clever, another not so clever, and a third may be quite a fool. To become clever one must read the right books—black magic and what not. One must read all kinds of books and then one will find the right ones."
He was continually impressing upon me:
"Read! When you don't understand a book, read it again and again, as many as seven times; and if you do not understand it then, read it a dozen times."
To every one on the boat, not excluding the taciturn steward, Smouri spoke roughly. Sticking out his lower lip as if he were disgusted, and, stroking his mustache, he pelted them with words as if they were stones. To me he always showed kindness and interest, but there was something about his interest which rather frightened me. Sometimes I thought he was crazy, like grandmother's sister. At times he said to me:
"Leave off reading."
And he would lie for a long time with closed eyes, breathing stertorously, his great stomach shaking. His hairy fingers, folded corpse-like on his chest, moved, knitting invisible socks with invisible needles. Suddenly he would begin growling:
"Here are you! You have your intelligence. Go and live! Rut intelligence is given sparingly, and not to all alike. If all were on the same level intellectually—but they are not. One understands, another does not, and there are some people who do not even wish to understand!"
Stumbling over his words, he related stories of his life as a soldier, the drift of which I could never manage to catch. They seemed very uninteresting to me. Besides, he did not tell them from the beginning, but as he recollected them.
"The commander of the regiment called this soldier to him and asked: 'What did the lieutenant say to you?' So he told everything just as it had happened—a soldier is bound to tell the truth—but the lieutenant looked at him as if he had been a wall, and then turned away, hanging his head. Yes—"