The man seemed childishly pleased at being called ‘captain,’ and replied, in very bad Russian: “Yes, that’s right.”
“We were wondering if you could take us along with you?”
“Well, I might, if you were to make it worth my while.”
To accept too instantly would have looked suspicious, so A.J. went on: “We are only poor people, so we cannot afford very much.”
“Where do you want to go to?”
“A little village called Varokslav—it is on the river, lower down.”
“I don’t think I know it at all.”
A.J. was not surprised, for it was an invented name.
“It t is only very small—we would tell you when you come to it.”
“But how can we settle a price if I don’t know how far it is?”
To which A.J. answered: “Where is it you are bound for, Captain?”
“Saratof. We are due there in three weeks.”
“Very well, I will give you twenty gold roubles to take us both to Saratof.”
“Thirty, comrade.”
They haggled in the usual way and finally came to terms at twenty-four. Then the bargeman, whose Russian became rapidly imperfect when he left the familiar ground of bargaining, conveyed to them with great difficulty the fact that accommodation on the barge was very poor, and that there was only one cabin, which he himself, his wife, and five children already occupied, and which the passengers would have to share. A.J. said that would be all right, and they did not mind. Then the bargeman confided to A.J. that his name was Akhiz, and A.J. returned the compliment. Having thus got over the introductions, Akhiz gave A.J. two very loud kisses as a token of their future relationship and invited both passengers to come on board immediately. It was beginning to snow again, for which A.J. was thankful, since their tracks would soon be covered. As they crossed the steep plank there came, very faintly over the white fields, the sound of a train puffing out of Tarzov station.
Akhiz was a Tartar from Astrakhan—a young, genial, magnificently strong and excessively dirty monster, six feet five in height and correspondingly large in face and mouth. His perfectly spaced teeth glittered like gems whenever he smiled, which was fairly often. His wife, small, fat, and of the same race, was less genial, but almost more dirty, and their five children, ranging from a baby to a six-year-old, were noisy, good-looking, and full of ringworm.
The position of Akhiz in the scheme of things was simple enough. He went up and down the Volga with his timber-barge. He had been doing so for exactly twenty-six years—since, in fact, the day he had been born on just a similar barge on that same Volga. He was not a man of acute intelligence; he could handle the rafts and work the small steam-engine and strike a bargain and play intricate games with dice, but that was almost all. Above everything else, he was incurious—as incurious about his two passengers as he was about the various excitements and convolutions that had interfered with the timber trade during recent years.
A.J. and Daly settled down effortlessly to the tranquil barge life; they had been travelling so long and so far and so cumbrously that the large, spacious existence in swollen mid-stream seemed the most perfect and enchanting rest. Even the stuffy cabin, swarming with children and fleas, did not trouble them, though there was no privacy in it, and Akhiz and his family conducted themselves at all times with completely unembarrassed freedom.. They rather liked Akhiz, however, and soon found it possible to behave before him with no greater restraints than before some large and good-humoured dog.
Every evening, at dusk, the barge drifted in to the bank and was moored for the night. Akhiz was aware of every current and backwater, and showed great skill in manoeuvring the rafts into place. It was typical of him that he knew practically nothing of the land beyond the banks; he did not know even the names of most of the villages that were passed. With an instinct for adapting himself to circumstances without understanding them, he managed somehow or other never to be short of food, even though the country near by was famine- stricken; fortunately, he and his family could eat almost anything—queer-looking roots and seeds that A.J. would have liked to know more about, if Akhiz had been intelligent enough to be questioned. A.J. and Daly still had ample food for themselves; at first they were afraid of what Akhiz might deduce from their luxurious provender, but they very soon realised that it was the way of Akhiz to notice as little as possible and never to make any kind of deduction at all. Once they went so far as to share with him a tin of corned beef; he was hugely delighted, but completely and almost disappointingly indifferent as to how they had come to possess such a rarity.
It was so restful and satisfying to be on the barge that during their first night aboard they hardly gave thought to the dangers that might still be ahead. Dawn, however, brought a more dispassionate outlook; it was obvious then to both of them that their escape would soon be discovered and that efforts would be made to recapture them. A.J.’s immediate fear was of Samara, which they must reach during the first day’s journey; it seemed to him that the authorities there were likely to be especially vigilant and would probably suspect some method of escape by river. During that first day, as the wooded bluffs passed slowly by on either side, he debated in his mind whether he should take Akhiz somewhat into his confidence. Daly favoured doing so, and A.J. accordingly broached the matter as delicately as he knew how. But delicacy was quite wasted on Akhiz; he had to be told outright that his two passengers were escaping from enemies who wanted to kill them, and that anywhere, especially at Samara and the big towns, he might be questioned by the authorities. They half expected Akhiz to be furious and threaten to turn them ashore, but instead he took it all in with a comprehension so mild and casual that they could only wonder at first if it were comprehension at all. “I don’t think he really understands what we’ve been getting at,” A.J. said, but there he certainly did Akhiz an injustice, for about an hour later the huge fellow, beaming all over his face, drew them to the far end of the barge and showed them a small and inconspicuous gap which he had arranged amongst the piled tree-trunks. “If anyone comes to ask for you, my wife will say nobody here,” he explained, in broken Russian. “You will go in there—see?—and I will put the logs back in their places—so. Plenty of room for you in behind there.” He grinned with immense geniality and bared his arms to show them his bulging muscles. “Nobody move those logs but me,” he declared proudly, and it was satisfactory to be able to believe it.