Two Captains Read Online Free PDF Page B

till dark-he spent a whole day there once, I remember. St. George's Day it was. Or when he refused to meet Petrovna.
    But after two or three days he became interested in my dumbness.
    "Why don't you speak? Don't you want to?"
    I looked at him in silence.
    "I tell you, you must speak. You can hear, so you ought to be able to speak. It's a very rare case yours-I mean being dumb but not deaf. Maybe you're deaf and dumb?"
    I shook my head.
    "In that case we're going to make you speak."
    He took some instruments from his knapsack, complained about the light being poor, though it was a bright sunny day, and started fiddling about with my ear.
    "Ear vulgaris," he remarked with satisfaction. "An ordinary ear."
    He withdrew to a corner and whispered: "Sap."
    "Did you hear that?"
    I laughed.
    "You've got a good ear, like a dog's." He winked at Sanya who was staring at us open-mouthed. "You can hear splendidly. Why the dickens don't you speak then?"
    He took my tongue between his finger and thumb and pulled it out so far that I got frightened and made a croaky sound.
    "What a throat you have, my dear chap! A regular Chaliapin. Well, well!"
    He looked at me for a minute, then said gravely: "You'll have to learn, old chap. Can you talk to yourself at all? In your mind?"
    He tapped my forehead.
    "In your head-get me?"
    I mumbled an affirmative.
    "What about saying it aloud then? Say out loud whatever you can.' Now, then, say 'yes'."
    I could hardly say anything. Nevertheless I did bring out a "yes".
    "Fine! Try again."
    I said it again.
    "Now whistle."
    I whistled.
    "Now say 'oo'."
    I said "oo".
    "You're a lazybones, that's what the matter with you! Now, then, repeat after me..."
    He did not know that I spoke everything in my mind. I'm sure that's the reason why I have remembered my earliest years so distinctly. But my dumb mental speech fell far short of all those "ees", '"os" and "yoos", of all those unfamiliar movements of lips, tongue and throat in which the simplest words got stuck. I managed to repeat after him separate sounds, chiefly vowel sounds, but putting them together and uttering them smoothly, without
    "barking", the way he bade me, was some job.
    Three words I coped with at once: they were "ear", "mamma" and "stove".
    It was as if I had pronounced them before and merely had to recall them. As a matter of fact that's how it was. Mother told that I had begun to speak at the age of two and then had suddenly gone dumb after an illness.
    My teacher slept on the floor, slipping some shiny metallic object under his mattress and using his sheepskin coat as a blanket, but I kept tossing about, drinking water, sitting up in bed and gazing at the frostwork on the window. I was thinking of how I would go home and start talking to Mother and Aunt Dasha. I recollected the moment when I first realised that I couldn't speak: it was in the evening, and Mother thought I was asleep; pale, erect, with black plaits hanging down in front, she gazed at me for a long time. It was then that there first occurred to me the bitter thought that was to poison my early years: "I'm not as good as others, and she's ashamed of me."
    I kept repeating "ee", "o", "uoo" all night, too happy to go to sleep I did not doze off until dawn. Sanya woke me when the day was full.
    "I've been over to Grandma's, and you're still asleep," she rattled off. "Grandma's kitten has got lost. Where's Ivan Ivanovich?"
    His mattress lay on the floor and you could still see the depressions where his head, shoulders and legs had been. But Ivan Ivanovich himself was not there. He used to put his knapsack under his head, but that too was missing. He used to cover himself with his sheepskin coat, but that too was gone.
    "Ivan Ivanovich!"
    We ran up into the attic, but there was nobody there.
    "I swear to God he was asleep when I went to Grandma's. I remember looking at him and thinking: while he's asleep I'll run over to Grandma's.
    Oh, Sanya, look!"
    On the table lay a little black