In the World

In the World

This was the only time I remember seeing my stepfather smile quietly.

But the young mistress let her spoon fall on the table in her agitation, and cried to her husband:

"Are n't you ashamed to talk so disgustingly before me?"

Sometimes my stepfather came to me in the dark vestibule, where I slept under the stairs which led to the attic, and where, sitting on the stairs by the window, I used to read.

"Reading?" he would say, blowing out smoke. There came a hissing sound from his chest like the hissing of a fire-stick. "What is the book?"

I showed it to him.

"Ah," he said, glancing at the title, "I think I have read it. Will you smoke?"

We smoked, looking out of the window onto the dirty yard. He said:

"It is a great pity that you cannot study; it seems to me that you have ability."

"I am studying; I read."

"That is not enough; you need a school; a system." I felt inclined to say to him:

"You had the advantages of both school and system, my fine fellow, and what is the result?"

But he added, as if he had read my thoughts: "Given the proper disposition, a school is a good educator. Only very well educated people make any mark in life."

But once he counseled me:

"You would be far better away from here. I see no sense or advantage to you in staying."

"I like the work."

"Ah--what do you find to like?"

"I find it interesting to work with them."

"Perhaps you are right."

But one day he said:

"What trash they are in the main, our employers--trash!"

When I remembered how and when my mother had uttered that word, I involuntarily drew back from him. He asked, smiling:

"Don't you think so?"

"I don't know."

"Well, they are; I can see that."

"But I like the master, anyhow."

"Yes, you are right; he is a worthy man, but strange."

I should have liked to talk with him about books, but it was plain that he did not care for them, and one day he advised me:

"Don't be led away; everything is very much embellished in books, distorted one way or another. Most writers of books are people like our master, small people."

Such judgments seemed very daring to me, and quite corrupted me.

On the same occasion he asked me:

"Have you read any of Goncharov's works?"

'The Frigate Palada.'"

"That's a dull book. But really, Goncharov is the cleverest writer in Russia. I advise you to read his novel, 'Oblomov.' That is by far the truest and most daring book he wrote; in fact, it is the best book in Russian literature."

Of Dickens' works he said:

"They are rubbish, I assure you. But there is a most interesting thing running in the 'Nova Vremya,'-'The Temptation of St. Anthony.' You read it? Apparently you like all that pertains to the church, and 'The Temptation' ought to be a profitable subject for you."

He brought me a bundle of papers containing the serial, and I read Flaubert's learned work. It reminded me of the innumerable lives of holy men, scraps of history told by the valuers, but it made no very deep impression on me. I much preferred the "Memoirs of Upilio Faimali, Tamer of Wild Beasts," which was printed alongside of it.

When I acknowledged this fact to my stepfather, he remarked coolly:

"That means that you are still too young to read such things? However, don't forget about that book."

Sometimes he would sit with me for a long time without saying a word, just coughing and puffing out smoke continuously. His beautiful eyes burned painfully, and I looked at him furtively, and forgot that this man, who was dying so honestly and simply, without complaint, had once been so closely related to my mother, and had insulted her. I knew that he lived with some sort of seamstress, and thought of her with wonder and pity. How could she not shrink from embracing those lanky bones, from kissing that mouth which gave forth such an oppressive odor of putrescence? Just like "Good Business," my stepfather often uttered peculiarly characteristic sayings:

"I love hounds; they are stupid, but I love them. They are very beautiful. Beautiful women are often stupid, too."

I thought, not without pride:

"Ah, if he had only known Queen Margot!"

"People who live for a long time in the same house all have the same kind of face," was one of his sayings which I wrote down in my note-book.

I listened for these sayings of his, as if they had been treats. It was pleasant to hear unusual, literary words used in a house where every one spoke a colorless language, which had hardened into well-worn, undiversified forms. My stepfather never spoke to me of my mother; he never even uttered her name. This pleased me, and aroused in me a feeling of sympathetic consideration for him.

Once I asked him about God--I do not remember what brought up the subject. He looked at me, and said very calmly:

"I don't know. I don't believe in God."

I remembered Sitanov, and told my stepfather about him. Having listened attentively to me, he observed, still calmly:

"He was in doubt; and those who are in doubt must believe in something. As for me, I simply do not believe----"

"But is that possible?"

"Why not? You can see for yourself I don't believe."

I saw nothing, except that he was dying. I hardly pitied him; my first feeling was one of keen and genuine interest in the nearness of a dying person, in the mystery of death.

Here was a man sitting close to me, his knee touching mine, warm, sensate, calmly regarding people in the light of their relations to himself; speaking about everything like a person who possessed power to judge and to settle affairs; in whom lay something necessary to me, or something good, blended with something unnecessary to me. This being of incomprehensible complexity was the receptacle of continuous whirlwinds of thought. It was not as if I were merely brought in contact with him, but it seemed as if he were part of myself, that he lived somewhere within me. I thought about him continually, and the shadow of his soul lay across mine. And to-morrow he would disappear entirely, with all that was hidden in his head and his heart, with all that I seemed to read in his beautiful eyes. When he went, another of the living threads which bound me to life would be snapped. His memory would be left, but that would be something finite within me, forever limited, immutable. But that which is alive changes, progresses. But these were thoughts, and behind them lay those inexpressible words which give birth to and nourish them, which strike to the very roots of life, demanding an answer to the question, Why?

"I shall soon have to lie by, it seems to me," said my stepfather one rainy day. "This stupid weakness! I don't feel inclined to do anything."

The next day, at the time of evening tea, he brushed the crumbs of bread from the table and from his knees with peculiar care, and brushed something invisible from his person. The old mistress, looking at him from under her brows, whispered to her daughter-in-law:

"Look at the way he is plucking at himself, and brushing himself."

He did not come to work for two days, and then the old mistress put a large white envelope in my hand, saying:

"Here you are! A woman brought this yesterday about noon, and I forgot to give it to you. A pretty little woman she was, but what she wants with you I can't imagine, and that's the truth!"

On a slip of paper with a hospital stamp, inside the envelope, was written in large characters:

"When you have an hour to spare, come and see me. I am in the Martinovski Hospital. "E. M."

The next morning I was sitting in a hospital ward on my stepfather's bed. It was a long bed, and his feet, in gray, worn socks, stuck out through the rails. His beautiful eyes, dully wandering over the yellow walls, rested on my face and on the small hands of a young girl who sat on a bench at the head of the bed. Her hands rested on the pillow, and my stepfather rubbed his cheek against them, his mouth hanging open. She was a plump girl, wearing a shiny, dark frock. The tears flowed slowly over her oval face; her wet blue eyes never moved from my stepfather's face, with its sharp bones, large, sharp-pointed nose, and dark mouth.

"The priest ought to be here," she whispered, "but he forbids it--he does not understand." And taking her hands from the pillow, she pressed them to her breast as if praying.

In a minute my stepfather came to himself, looked at the ceiling and frowned, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he stretched his lank hand toward me.

"You? Thank you. Here I am, you see. I feel to stupid."

The effort tired him; he closed his eyes. I stroked his long cold fingers with the blue nails. The girl asked softly:

"Evgen Vassilvich, introduce us, please!"

"You must know each other," he said, indicating her with his eyes. "A dear creature--"

He stopped speaking, his mouth opened wider and wider, and he suddenly shrieked out hoarsely, like a raven. Throwing herself on the bed, clutching at the blanket, waving her bare arms about, the girl also screamed, burying her head in the tossed pillow.

My stepfather died quickly, and as soon as he was dead, he regained some of his good looks. I left the hospital with the girl on my arm. She staggered like a sick person, and cried. Her handkerchief was squeezed into a ball in her hand; she alternately applied it to her eyes, and rolling it tighter, gazed at it as if it were her last and most precious possession.

Suddenly she stood still, pressing close to me, and said:

"I shall not live till the winter. Oh Lord, Lord! What does it mean?"

Then holding out her hand, wet with tears, to me: "Good-by. He thought a lot of you. He will be buried to-morrow."

"Shall I see you home?"

She looked about her.

"What for? It is daytime, not night."

From the corner of a side street I looked after her. She walked slowly, like a person who has nothing to hurry for. It was August. The leaves were already beginning to fall from the trees. I had no time to follow my stepfather to the graveyard, and I never saw the girl again.

CHAPTER XVII

Every morning at six o'clock I set out to my work in the market-place. I met interesting people there. There was the carpenter, Osip, a grayhaired man who looked like Saint Nikolai, a clever workman, and witty; there was the humpbacked slater, Ephimushka, the pious bricklayer, Petr, a thoughtful man who also reminded me of a saint; the plasterer, Gregory Shishlin, a flaxen-bearded, blue-eyed, handsome man, beaming with quiet good-nature.

I had come to know these people during the second part of my life at the draughtsman's house. Every Sunday they used to appear in the kitchen, grave, important-looking, with pleasant speech, and with words which had a new flavor for me. All these solid-looking peasants had seemed to me then to be easy to read, good through and through, all pleasantly different from the spiteful, thieving, drunken inhabitants of the Kunavin and its environs.

The plasterer, Shishlin, pleased me most of all, and I actually asked if I might join his gang of workmen. But scratching his golden brow with a white finger, he gently refused to have me.

"It is too soon for you," he said. "Our work is not easy; wait another year."

Then throwing up his handsome head, he asked:

"You don't like the way you are living? Never mind, have patience; learn to live a life of your own, and then you will be able to bear it!"

I do not know all that I gained from this good advice, but I remember it gratefully.

These people used to come to my master's house every Sunday morning, sit on benches round th? kitchen-table, and talk of interesting things while they waited for my master. When he came, he greeted them loudly and gayly, shaking-their strong hands, and then sat down in the chief corner. They produced their accounts and bundles of notes, the workmen placed their tattered account-books on the table, and the reckoning up for the week began.

Joking and bantering, the master would try to prove them wrong in their reckoning, and they did the same to him. Sometimes there was a fierce dispute, but more often friendly laughter.

"Eh, you're a dear man; you were born a rogue!" the workmen would say to the master.

And he answered, laughing in some confusion:

"And what about you, wild fowl? There's as much roguery about you as about me!"

"How should we be anything else, friend?" agreed Ephimushka, but grave Petr said:

"You live by what you steal; what you earn you give to God and the emperor."

"Well, then I 'll willingly make a burnt offering of you," laughed the master.

They led him on good-naturedly:

"Set fire to us, you mean?"

"Burn us in a fiery furnace?"

Gregory Shishl in, pressing his luxuriant beard to his breast with his hands, said in a sing-song voice: "Brothers, let us do our business without cheating. If we will only live honestly, how happy and peaceful we shall be, eh? Shall we not, dear people?"

His blue eyes darkened, grew moist; at that moment he looked wonderfully handsome. His question seemed to have upset them all; they all turned away from him in confusion.

"A peasant does not cheat much," grumbled good-looking Osip with a sigh, as if he pitied the peasant.

The dark bricklayer, bending his round-shouldered back over the table, said thickly:

"Sin is like a sort of bog; the farther you go, the more swampy it gets!"

And the master said to them, as if he were making a speech:

"What about me? I go into it because something calls me. Though I don't want to."

After this philosophising they again tried to get the better of one another, but when they had finished their accounts, perspiring and tired from the effort, they went out to the tavern to drink tea, inviting the master to go with them.

On the market-place it was my duty to watch these people, to see that they did not steal nails, or bricks, or boards. Every one of them, in addition to my master's work, held contracts of his own, and would try to steal something for his own work under my very nose. They welcomed me kindly, and Shishlin said:

"Do you remember how you wanted to come into my gang? And look at you now; put over me as chief!"

"Well, well," said Osip banteringly, "keep watch over the river-banks, and may God help you!"

Petr observed in an unfriendly tone:

"They have put a young crane to watch old mice."

My duties were a cruel trial to me. I felt ashamed in the presence of these people. They all seemed to possess some special knowledge which was hidden from the rest of the world, and I had to watch them as if they had been thieves and tricksters. The first part of the time it was very hard for me, but Osip soon noticed this, and one day he said to me privately:

"Look here, young fellow, you won't do any good by sulking--understand?"

Of course I did not understand, but I felt that he realized the absurdity of my position, and I soon arrived at a frank understanding with him.

He took me aside in a corner and explained:

"If you want to know, the biggest thief among us is the bricklayer, Petrukha. He is a man with a large family, and he is greedy. You want to watch him well. Nothing is too small for him; everything comes in handy. A pound of nails, a dozen of bricks, a bag of mortar--he 'll take all. He is a good man, God-fearing, of severe ideas, and well educated, but he loves to steal! Ephimushka lives like a woman. He is peaceable, and is harmless as far as you are concerned. He is clever, too--humpbacks are never fools! And there's Gregory Shishlin. He has a fad--he will neither take from others nor give of his own. He works for nothing; any one can take him in, but he can deceive no one. He is not governed by his reason."

"He is good, then?"

Osip looked at me as if I were a long way from him, and uttered these memorable words:

"True enough, he is good. To be good is the easiest way for lazy people. To be good, my boy, does not need brains."

"And what about you?" I asked Osip.

He laughed and answered:

"I? I am like a young girl. When I am a grandmother I will tell you all about myself; till then you will have to wait. In the meanwhile you can set your brains to work to find out where the real 'I' is hidden. Find out; that is what you have to do!"

He had upset all my ideas of himself and his friends.

It was difficult for me to doubt the truth of his statement. I saw that Ephimushka, Petr, and Gregory regarded the handsome old man as more clever and more learned in worldly wisdom than themselves. They took counsel with him about everything, listened attentively to his advice, and showed him every sign of respect.

"Will you be so good as to give us your advice," they would ask him. But after one of these questions, when Osip had gone away, the bricklayer said softly to Grigori:

"Heretic!"

And Grigori burst out laughing and added:

"Clown!"

The plasterer warned me in a friendly way:

"You look out for yourself with the old man, Maximich. You must be careful, or he will twist you round his finger in an hour; he is a bitter old man. God save you from the harm he can do."

"What harm?"

"That I can't say!" answered the handsome workman, blinking.

I did not understand him in the least. I thought that the most honest and pious man of them all was the bricklayer, Petr; He spoke of everything briefly, suggestively; his thoughts rested mostly upon God, hell, and death.

"Ekh! my children, my brothers, how can you not be afraid? How can you not look forward, when the grave and the churchyard let no one pass them?"

He always had the stomachache, and there were some days when he could not eat anything at all. Even a morsel of bread brought on the pain to such an extent as to cause convulsions and a dreadful sickness.

Humpbacked Ephimushka also seemed a very good and honest, but always queer fellow. Sometimes he was happy and foolish, like a harmless lunatic. He was everlastingly falling in love with different women, about whom he always used the same words:

"I tell you straight, she is not a woman, but a flower in cream--ei, bo--o!"

When the lively women of Kunavin Street came to wash the floors in the shops, Ephimushka let himself down from the roof, and standing in a corner somewhere, mumbled, blinking his gray, bright eyes, stretching his mouth from ear to ear:

"Such a butterfly as the Lord has sent to me; such a joy has descended upon me! Well, what is she but a flower in cream, and grateful I ought to be for the chance which has brought me such a gift! Such beauty makes me full of life, afire!"

At first the women used to laugh at him, calling out to each other:

"Listen to the humpback running on! Oh Lord!" The slater caused no little laughter. His high cheek-boned face wore a sleepy expression, and he used to talk as if he were raving, his honeyed phrases flowing in an intoxicating stream which obviously went to the women's heads. At length one of the elder ones said to her friend in a tone of amazement:

"Just listen to how that man is going on! A clean young fellow he is!"

"He sings like a bird."

"Or like a beggar in the church porch," said an obstinate girl, refusing to give way.

But Ephimushka was not like a beggar at all. He stood firmly, like a squat tree-trunk; his voice rang out like a challenge; his words became more and more alluring; the women listened to him in silence. In fact, it seemed as if his whole being was flowing away in a tender, narcotic speech.

It ended in his saying to his mates in a tone of astonishment at supper-time, or after the Sabbath rest, shaking his heavy, angular head:

"Well, what a sweet little woman, a dear little thing! I have never before come across anything like her!"

When he spoke of his conquests Ephimushka was not boastful, nor jeered at the victim of his charms, as the others always did. He was only joyfully and gratefully touched, his gray eyes wide open with astonishment.

Osip, shaking his head, exclaimed:

"Oh, you incorrigible fellow! How old are you?" "Forty-four years, but that's nothing! I have grown five years younger to-day, as if I had bathed in the healing water of a river. I feel thoroughly fit, and my heart is at peace! Some women can produce that effect, eh?"

The bricklayer said coarsely:

"You are going on for fifty. You had better be careful, or you will find that your loose way of life will leave a bitter taste."

"You are shameless, Ephimushka!" sighed Grigori Shishlin.

And it seemed to me that the handsome fellow envied the success of the humpback.

Osip looked round on us all from under his level silver brows, and said jestingly:

"Every Mashka has her fancies. One will love cups and spoons, another buckles and ear-rings, but all Mashkas will be grandmothers in time."

Shishlin was married, but his wife was living in the country, so he also cast his eyes on the floor-scrubbers. They were all of them easy of approach. All of them "earned a bit" to add to their income, and they regarded this method of earning money in that poverty-stricken area as simply as they would have regarded any other kind of work. But the handsome workman never approached the women. He just gazed at them from afar with a peculiar expression, as if he were pitying some one--himself or them. But when they began to sport with him and tempt him, he laughed bashfully and went away.

"Well, you--"

"What's the matter with you, you fool?" asked Ephimushka, amazed. "Do you mean to say you are going to lose the chance?"

"I am a married man," Grigori reminded him.

"Well, do you think your wife will know anything about it?"

"My wife would always know if I lived unchastely. I can't deceive her, my brother."

"How can she know?"

"That I can't say, but she is bound to know, while she lives chaste herself; and if I lead a chaste life, and she were to sin, I should know it."

"But how?" cried Ephimushka, but Grigori repeated calmly:

"That I can't say."

The slater waved his hands agitatedly.

"There, if you please! Chaste, and does n't know! Oh, you blockhead!"

Shishlin's workmen, numbering seven, treated him as one of themselves and not as their master, and behind his back they nicknamed him "The Calf."

When he came to work and saw that they were lazy, he would take a trowel, or a spade, and artistically do the work himself, calling out coaxingly:

"Set to work, children, set to work!"

One day, carrying out the task which my master had angrily set me, I said to Grigori:

"What bad workmen you have."

He seemed surprised.

"Why?"--

"This work ought to have been finished yesterday, and they won't finish it even to-day."

"That is true;'they won't have time," he agreed, and after a silence he added cautiously:

"Of course, I see that by rights I ought to dismiss them, but you see they are all my own people from my own village. And then again the punishment of God is that every man should eat bread by the sweat of his brow, and the punishment is for all of us--for you and me, too. But you and I labor less than they do, and--well, it would be awkward to dismiss them."

He lived in a dream. He would walk along the deserted streets of the market-place, and suddenly halting on one of the bridges over the Obvodni Canal, would stand for a long time at the railings, looking into the water, at the sky, or into the distance beyond the Oka. If one overtook him and asked:

"What are you doing?"

"What?" he would reply, waking up and smiling confusedly. "I was just standing, looking about me a bit."

"God has arranged everything very well, brother," he would often say. "The sky, the earth, the flowing rivers, the steamboats running. You can get on a boat and go where you like--to Riazan, or to Ribinsk, to Perm, to Astrakhan. I went to Riazan once. It was n't bad--a little town--but very dull, duller than Nijni. Our Nijni is wonderful, gay! And Astrakhan is still duller. There are a lot of Kalmucks there, and I don't like them. I don't like any of those Mordovans, or Kalmucks, Persians, or Germans, or any of the other nations."

He spoke slowly; his words cautiously felt for sympathy in others, and always found it in the bricklayer, Petr.

"Those are not nations, but nomads," said Petr with angry conviction. "They came into the world before Christ and they 'll go out of it before He comes again."

Grigori became animated; he beamed.

"That's it, isn't it? But I love a pure race like the Russians, my brother, with a straight look. I don't like Jews, either, and I cannot understand how they are the people of God. It is wisely arranged, no doubt."

The slater added darkly:

"Wisely--but there is a lot that is superfluous!"

Osip listened to what they said, and then put in, mockingly and caustically:

"There is much that is superfluous, and your conversation belongs to that category. Ekh! you babblers; you want a thrashing, all of you!"

Osip kept himself to himself, and it was impossible to guess with whom he would agree, or with whom he would quarrel. Sometimes he seemed inclined to agree calmly with all men, and with all their ideas; but more often one saw that he was bored by all of them, regarding them as half-witted, and he said to Petr, Grigori, and Ephimushka:

"Ekh, you sow's whelps!"

They laughed, not very cheerfully or willingly, but still they laughed.

My master gave me five copecks a day for food. This was not enough, and I was rather hungry. Seeing this, the workmen invited me to breakfast and supper with them, and sometimes the contractors would invite me to a tavern to drink tea with them. I willingly accepted the invitations. I loved to sit among them and listen to their slow speeches, their strange stories. I gave them great pleasure by my readings out of church books.

"You've stuck to books till you are fed up with them. Your crop is stuffed with them," said Osip, regarding me attentively with his cornflower-blue eyes. It was difficult to catch their expression; his pupils always seemed to be floating, melting.

"Take it a drop at a time--it is better; and when you are grown up, you can be a monk and console the people by your teaching, and in that way you may become a millionaire."

"A missioner," corrected the bricklayer in a voice which for some reason sounded aggrieved.

"What?" asked Osip.

"A missioner is what you mean! You are not deaf, are you?"

"All right, then, a missioner, and dispute with heretics. And even those whom you reckon as heretics have the right to bread. One can live even with a heretic, if one exercises discretion."

Grigori laughed in an embarrassed manner, and Petr said in his beard:

"And wizards don't have a bad time of it, and other kinds of godless people."

But Osip returned quickly:

"A wizard is not a man of education; education is not usually a possession of the wizard."

And he told me:

"Now look at this; just listen. In our district there lived a peasant, Tushek was his name, an emaciated little man, and idle. He lived like a feather, blown about here and there by the wind, neither a worker nor a do-nothing. Well, one day he took to praying, because he had nothing else to do, and after wandering about for two years, he suddenly showed himself in a new character. His hair hung down over his shoulders; he wore a skull-cap, and a brown cassock of leather; he looked on all of us with a baneful eye, and said straight out: 'Repent, ye cursed!' And why not repent, especially if you happened to be a woman? And the business ran its course: Tushek overfed, Tushek drunk, Tushek having his way with the women to his heart's content--"

The bricklayer interrupted him angrily:

"What has that got to do with the matter, his overfeeding, or overdrinking?"

"What else has to do with it, then?"

"His words are all that matter."

"Oh, I took no notice of his words; I am abundantly gifted with words myself."

"We know all we want to know about Tushinkov, Dmitri Vassilich," said Petr indignantly, and Grigori said nothing, but let his head droop, and gazed into his glass.

"I don't dispute it," replied Osip peaceably. "I was just telling our Maximich of the different pathways to the morsel--"

"Some of the roads lead to prison!"

"Occasionally," agreed Osip. "But you will meet with priests on all kinds of paths; one must learn where to turn off."

He was always somewhat inclined to make fun of these pious people, the plasterer and the bricklayer; perhaps he did not like them, but he skilfully concealed the fact. His attitude towards people was always elusive.

He looked upon Ephimushka more indulgently, with more favor than upon the other. The slater did not enter into discussions about God, the truth, sects, the woes of humanity, as his friends did. Setting his chair sidewise to the table, so that its back should not be in the way of his hump, he would calmly drink glass after glass of tea. Then, suddenly alert, he would glance round the smoky room, listening to the incoherent babel of voices, and darting up, swiftly disappear. That meant that some one had come into the tavern to whom Ephimushka owed money,--he had a good dozen creditors,--so, as some of them used to beat him when they saw him, he just fled from sin.

"They get angry, the oddities!" he would say in a tone of surprise. "Can't they understand that if I had the money I would give it to them?"

"Oh, bitter poverty!" Osip sped after him.

Sometimes Ephimushka sat deep in thought, hearing and seeing nothing; his high cheek-boned face softened, his pleasant eyes looking pleasanter than usual.

"What are you thinking about?" they would ask him.

"I was thinking that if I were rich I would marry a real lady, a noblewoman--by God, I would! A colonel's daughter, for example, and, Lord! how I would love her! I should be on fire with love of her, because, my brothers, I once roofed the country house of a certain colonel--"

"And he had a widowed daughter; we 've heard all that before!" interrupted Petr in an unfriendly tone.

But Ephimushka, spreading his hands out on his knees, rocked to and fro, his hump looking as if it were chiselling the air, and continued:

"Sometimes she went into the garden, all in white; glorious she looked. I looked at her from the roof, and I did n't know what the sun had done to me. But what caused that white light? It was as if a white dove had flown from under her feet! She was just a cornflower in cream! With such a lady as that, one would like all one's life to be night."

"And how would you get anything to eat?" asked Petr gruffly. But this did not disturb Ephimushka.

"Lord!" he exclaimed. "Should we want much? Besides, she is rich."

Osip laughed.

"And when are you going in for all this dissipation, Ephimushka, you rogue?"

Ephimushka never talked on any other subject but women, and he was an unreliable workman. At one time he worked excellently and profitably, at another time he did not get on at all; his wooden hammer tapped the ridges lazily, leaving crevices. He always smelt of train-oil, but he had a smell of his own as well, a healthy, pleasant smell like that of a newly cut tree.

One could discuss everything that was interesting with the carpenter. His words always stirred one's feelings, but it was hard to tell when he was serious and when joking.

With Grigori it was better to talk about God; this was a subject which he loved, and on which he was an authority.

"Grisha," I asked, "do you know there are people who do not believe in God?"

He laughed quietly.

"What do you mean?"

"They say there is no God."

"Oh, that's what you mean! I know that."

And as if he were brushing away invisible flies, he went on:

"King David said in his time, you remember, 'The fool hath said in his heart "There is no God."' That's what he said about that kind of fool. We can't do without God!"

Osip said, as if agreeing with him:

"Take away God from Petrukha here, and he will show you!"

Shishlin's handsome face became stern. He touched his beard with fingers the nails of which were covered with dried lime, and said mysteriously:

"God dwells in every incarnate being; the conscience and all the inner life is God-given."

"And sin?"

"Sin comes from the flesh, from Satan! Sin is an external thing, like smallpox, and nothing more! He who thinks too much of sin, sins all the more. If you do not remember sin, you will not sin. Thoughts about sin are from Satan, the lord of the flesh, who suggests."

The bricklayer queried this.

"You are wrong there."

"I am not! God is sinless, and man is in His image and likeness. It is the image of God, the flesh, which sins, but His likeness cannot sin; it is a spirit."

He smiled triumphantly, but Petr growled:

"That is wrong."

"According to you, I suppose," Osip asked the bricklayer, "if you don't sin, you can't repent, and if you don't repent, you won't be saved?"

"That's a more hopeful way. Forget the devil and you cease to love God, the fathers said."

Shishlin was not intemperate, but two glasses would make him tipsy. His face would be flushed, his eyes childish, and his voice would be raised in song.

"How good everything is, brothers! Here we live, work a little, and have as much as we want to eat, God be praised! Ah, how good it is!"

He wept. The tears trickled down his beard and gleamed on the silken hairs like false pearls.

His laudation of our life and those tears were unpleasant to me. My grandmother had sung the praises of life more convincingly, more sympathetically, and not so crudely.

All these discussions kept me in a continual tension, and aroused a dull emotion in me. I had already read many books about peasants, and I saw how utterly unlike the peasants in the books were to those in real life. In books they were all unhappy. Good or evil characters, they were all poorer in words and ideas than peasants in real life. In books they spoke less of God, of sects, of churches, and more of government, land, and law. They spoke less about women, too, but quite as coarsely, though more kindly. For the peasants in real life, women were a pastime, but a dangerous one. One had to be artful with women; otherwise they would gain the upper hand and spoil one's whole life. The _muzhik_ in books may be good or bad, but he is altogether one or the other. The real _muzhik_ is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but he is wonderfully interesting. If the peasant in real life does not blurt out all his thoughts to you, you have a feeling that he is keeping something back which he means to keep for himself alone, and that very unsaid, hidden thing is the most important thing about him.

Of all the peasants I had read of in books, the one I liked the best was Petr in "The Carpenter's Gang." I wanted to read the story to my comrades, and I brought the book to the Yarmaka. I often spent the night in one or another of the workshops; sometimes it was because I was so tired that I lacked the strength to get home.

When I told them that I had a book about carpenters, my statement aroused a lively interest, especially in Osip. He took the book out of my hands, and turned over the leaves distrustfully, shaking his head.

"And it is really written about us! Oh, you rascal! Who wrote it? Some gentleman? I thought as much! Gentlemen, and _chinovniks_ especially, are experts at anything. Where God does not even guess, a _chinovnik_ has it all settled in his mind. That's what they live for."

"You speak very irreverently of God, Osip," observed Petr.

"That's all right! My words are less to God than a snowflake or a drop of rain are to me. Don't you worry; you and I don't touch God."

He suddenly began to play restlessly, throwing off sharp little sayings like sparks from a flint, cutting off with them, as with scissors, whatever was displeasing to him. Several times in the course of the day he asked me:

"Are we going to read, Maximich? That's right! A good idea!"

When the hour for rest arrived we had supper with him in his workshop, and after supper appeared Petr with his assistant Ardalon, and Shishlin with the lad Phoma. In the shed where the gang slept there was a lamp burning, and I began to read. They listened without speaking, but they moved about, and very soon Ardalon said crossly:

"I've had enough of this!"

And he went out. The first to fall asleep was Grigori, with his mouth open surprisingly; then the carpenters fell asleep; but Petr, Osip, and Phoma drew nearer to me and listened attentively. When I finished reading Osip put out the lamp at once. By the stars it was nearly midnight.

Petr asked in the darkness:

"What was that written for? Against whom?"

"Now for sleep!" said Osip, taking off his boots.

Petr persisted in his question:

"I asked, against whom was that written?"

"I suppose they know!" replied Osip, arranging himself for sleep on a scaffolding.

"If it is written against stepmothers, it is a waste of time. It won't make stepmothers any better," said the bricklayer firmly. "And if it is meant for Petr, it is also futile; his sin in his answer. For murder you go to Siberia, and that's all there is about it! Books are no good for such sins; no use, eh?"

Osip did not reply, and the bricklayer added;

"They can do nothing themselves and so they discuss other people's work. Like women at a meeting. Good-by, it is bedtime."

He stood for a minute in the dark blue square of the open door, and asked:

"Are you asleep, Osip? What do you think about it?"

"Eh?" responded the carpenter sleepily.

"All right; go to sleep."

Shishlin had fallen on his side where he had been sitting. Phoma lay on some trampled straw beside me. The whole neighborhood was asleep. In the distance rose the shriek of the railway engines, the heavy rumbling of iron wheels, the clang of buffers. In the shed rose the sound of snoring in different keys. I felt uncomfortable. I had expected some sort of discussion, and there had been nothing of the kind. But suddenly Osip spoke softly and evenly:

"My child, don't you believe anything of that. You are young; you have a long while to live; treasure up your thoughts. Your own sense is worth twice some one else's. Are you asleep, Phoma?"

"No," replied Phoma with alacrity.

"That's right! You have both received some education, so you go on reading. But don't believe all you read. They can print anything, you know. That is their business!"

He lowered his feet from the scaffolding, and resting his hands on the edge of the plank, bent over us, and continued:

"How ought you to regard books? Denunciation of certain people, that's what a book is! Look, they say, and see what sort of a man this is--a carpenter, or any one else--and here is a gentleman, a different kind of man! A book is not written without an object, and generally around some one."

Phoma said thickly:

"Petr was right to kill that contractor!"

"That was wrong. It can never be right to kill a man. I know that you do not love Grigori, but put that thought away from you. We are none of us rich people. To-day I am master, to-morrow a workman again."

"I did not mean you, Uncle Osip."

"It is all the same."

"You are just--"

"Wait; I am telling you why these books are written," Osip interrupted Phoma's angry words. "It is a very cunning idea! Here we have a gentleman without a _muzhik;_ here a _muzhik_ without a gentleman! Look now! Both the gentleman and the _muzhik_ are badly off. The gentleman grows weak, crazy, and the _muzhik_ becomes boastful, drunken, sickly, and offensive. That's what happens! But in his lord's castle it was better, they say. The lord hid himself behind the _muzhik_ and the _muzhik_ behind the master, and so they went round and round, well-fed, and peaceful. I don't deny that it was more peaceful living with the nobles. It was no advantage to the lord if his _muzhik_ was poor, but it was to his good if he was rich and intelligent. He was then a weapon in his hand. I know all about it; you see I lived in a nobleman's domain for nearly forty years. There's a lot of my experience written on my hide."

I remembered that the carter, Petr, who committed suicide, used to talk in the same way about the nobility, and it was very unpleasant to my mind that the ideas of Osip should run on the same lines as those of that evil old man.

Osip touched my leg with his hand, and went on:

"One must understand books and all sorts of writings. No one does anything without a reason, and books are not written for nothing, but to muddle people's heads. Every one is created with intelligence, without which no one can wield an ax, or sew a shoe." He spoke for a long time, and lay down. Again he jumped up, throwing gently his well turned, quaint phrases into the darkness and quietness.

"They say that the nobles are quite a different race from the peasants, but it is not true. We are just like the nobles, only we happen to have been born low down in the scale. Of course a noble learns from books, while I learn by my own noddle, and a gentleman has a delicate skin; that is all the difference. No--o, lads, it is time there was a new way of living; all these writings ought to be thrown aside! Let every one ask himself 'What am I?' A man! 'And what is he?' Also a man! What then? Does God need his superfluous wealth? No-o, we are equal in the sight of God when it comes to gifts."

At last, in the morning, when the dawn had put out the light of the stars, Osip said to me:

"You see how I could write? I have talked about things that I have never thought about. But you mustn't place too much faith in what I say. I was talking more because I was sleepless than with any serious intention. You lie down and think of something to amuse you. Once there was a raven which flew from the fields to the hills, from boundary to boundary, and lived beyond her time; the Lord punished her. The raven is dead and dried up. What is the meaning of that? There is no meaning in it, none. Now go to sleep; it will soon be time to get up."

CHAPTER XVIII

As Yaakov, the stoker, had done in his time, so now Osip grew and grew in my eyes, until he hid all other people from me. There was some resemblance to the stoker in him, but at the same time he reminded me of grandfather, the valuer, Petr Vassiliev, Smouri, and the cook. When I think of all the people who are firmly fixed in my memory, he has left behind a deeper impression than any of them, an impression which has eaten into it, as oxide eats into a brass bell. What was remarkable about him was that he had two sets of ideas. In the daytime, at his work among people, his lively, simple ideas were businesslike and easier to understand than those to which he gave vent when he was off duty, in the evenings, when he went with me into the town to see his cronies, the dealers, or at night when he could not sleep. He had special night thoughts, many-sided like the flame of a lamp. They burned brightly, but where were their real faces? On which side was this or that idea, nearer and dearer to Osip?

He seemed to me to be much cleverer than any one else I had met, and I hovered about him, as I used to do with the stoker, trying to find out about the man, to understand him. But he glided away from me; it was impossible to grasp him. Where was the real man hidden? How far could I believe in him?

I remember how he said to me:

"You must find out for yourself where I am hidden. Look for me!"

My self-love was piqued, but more than that, it had become a matter of life and death to me to understand the old man.

With all his elusiveness he was substantial. He looked as if he could go on living for a hundred years longer and still remain the same, so unchangeably did he preserve his _ego_ amid the instability of the people around him. The valuer had made upon me an equal impression of steadfastness, but it was not so pleasing to me. Osip's steadfastness was of a different kind; although I cannot explain how, it was more pleasing.

The instability of human creatures is too often brought to one's notice; their acrobatic leaps from one position to another upset me. I had long ago grown weary of being surprised by these inexplicable somersaults, and they had by degrees extinguished my lively interest in humanity, disturbed my love for it.

One day at the beginning of July, a rackety hackney cab came dashing up to the place where we were working. On the box-seat a drunken driver sat, hiccuping gloomily. He was bearded, hatless, and had a bruised lip. Grigori Shishlin rolled about in the carriage, drunk, while a fat, red-cheeked girl held his arm. She wore a straw hat trimmed with a red ribbon and glass cherries; she had a sunshade in her hand, and goloshes on her bare feet. Waving her sunshade, swaying, she giggled and screamed:

"What the devil! The market-place is not open; there is no market-place, and he brings me to the market-place. Little mother--"

Grigori, dishevelled and limp, crept out of the cab, sat on the ground and declared to us, the spectators of the scene, with tears:

"I am down on my knees; I have sinned greatly! I thought of sin, and I have sinned. Ephimushka says 'Grisha! Grisha! He speaks truly, but you--forgive me; I can treat you all. He says truly, 'We live once only, and no more.'"

The girl burst out laughing, stamped her feet, and lost her goloshes, and the driver called out gruffly:

"Let us get on farther! The horse won't stand still!"

The horse, an old, worn-out jade, was covered with foam, and stood as still as if it were buried. The whole scene was irresistibly comical.

Grigori's workmen rolled about with laughter as they looked at their master, his grand lady, and the bemused coachman.

The only one who did not laugh was Phoma, who stood at the door of one of the shops beside me and muttered:

"The devil take the swine. And he has a wife at home--a bee-eautiful woman!"

The driver kept on urging them to start. The girl got out of the cab, lifted Grigori up, set him on his feet, and cried with a wave of her sunshade:

"Go on!"

Laughing good-naturedly at their master, and envying him, the men returned to their work at the call of Phoma. It was plain that it was repugnant to him to see Grigori made ridiculous.

"He calls himself master," he muttered. "I have not quite a month's work left to do here. After that I shall go back to the country. I can't stand this."

I felt vexed for Grigori; that girl with the cherries looked so annoyingly absurd beside him.

I often wondered why Grigori Shishlin was the master and Phoma Tuchkov the workman. A strong, fair fellow, with curly hair, an aquiline nose, and gray, clever eyes in his round face, Phoma was not like a peasant. If he had been well-dressed, he might have been the son of a merchant of good family. He was gloomy, taciturn, businesslike. Being well educated, he kept the accounts of the contractor, drew up the estimates, and could set his comrades to work successfully, but he worked unwillingly himself.

"You won't make work last forever," he said calmly. He despised books.

"They can print what they like, but I shall go on thinking as I like," he said. "Books are all nonsense."

But he listened attentively to every one, and if something interested him, he would ask all the details about it, perseveringly, always thinking of it in his own way, measuring it by his own measure.

Once I told Phoma that he ought to be a contractor. He replied indolently:

"If it were a question of turning over thousands, yes. But to worry myself for the sake of making a few copecks, it is not worth while. No, I am just looking about; then I shall go into a monastery in Oranko. I am good-looking, powerful in muscle; I may take the fancy of some merchant's widow! Such things do happen. There was a Sergatzki boy who made his fortune in two years, and married a girl from these parts, from the town. He had to take an icon to her house, and she saw him."

This was an obsession with him; he knew many tales of how taking service in a monastery had led people to an easy life. I did not care for these stories, nor did I like the trend of Phoma's mind, but I felt sure that he would go to a monastery.

When the market was opened, Phoma, to every one's surprise, went as waiter to a tavern. I do not say that his mates were surprised, but they all began to treat him mockingly. On holidays they would all go together to drink tea, saying to one another:

"Let us go and see our Phoma."

And when they arrived at the tavern they would call out:

"Hi, waiter! Curly mop, come here!"

He would come to them and ask, with his head held high:

"What can I get for you?"

"Don't you recognize acquaintances now?"

"I never recognize any one."

He felt that his mates despised him and were making fun of him, and he looked at them with dully expectant eyes. His face might have been made of wood, but it seemed to say:

"Well, make haste; laugh and be done with it."

"Shall we give him a tip?" they would ask, and after purposely fumbling in their purses for a long time, they would give him nothing at all.

I asked Phoma how he could go out as a waiter when he had meant to enter a monastery.

"I never meant to go into a monastery!" he replied, "and I shall not stay long as a waiter."

Four years later I met him in Tzaritzin, still a waiter in a tavern; and later still I read in a newspaper that Phoma Tuchkov had been arrested for an attempted burglary.

The history of the mason, Ardalon, moved me deeply. He was the eldest and best workman in Petr's gang. This black-bearded, light-hearted man of forty years also involuntarily evoked the query, "Why was he not the master instead of Petr?" He seldom drank vodka and hardly ever drank too much; he knew his work thoroughly, and worked as if he loved it; the bricks seemed to fly from his hands like red doves. In comparison with him, the sickly, lean Petr seemed an absolutely superfluous member of the gang. He used to speak thus of his work:

"I build stone houses for people, and a wooden coffin for myself."

But Ardalon laid his bricks with cheerful energy as he cried: "Work, my child, for the glory of God."

And he told us all that next spring he would go to Tomsk, where his brother-in-law had undertaken a large contract to build a church, and had invited him to go as overseer.

"I have made up my mind to go. Building churches is work that I love!" he said. And he suggested to me: "Come with me! It is very easy, brother, for an educated person to get on in Siberia. There, education is a trump card!"

I agreed to his proposition, and he cried triumphantly:

"There! That is business and not a joke."

Toward Petr and Grigori he behaved with good-natured derision, like a grown-up person towards children, and he said to Osip:

"Braggarts! Each shows the other his cleverness, as if they were playing at cards. One says: 'My cards are all such and such a color,' and the other says, 'And mine are trumps!'"

Osip observed hesitatingly:

"How could it be otherwise? Boasting is only human; all the girls walk about with their chests stuck out."

"All, yes, all. It is God, God all the time. But they hoard up money themselves!" said Ardalon impatiently.

"Well, Grisha does n't."

"I am speaking for myself. I would go with this God into the forest, the desert. I am weary of being here. In the spring I shall go to Siberia."

The workmen, envious of Ardalon, said:

"If we had such a chance in the shape of a brother-in-law, we should not be afraid of Siberia either."

And suddenly Ardalon disappeared. He went away from the workshop on Sunday, and for three days no one knew where he was.

This made anxious conjectures.

"Perhaps he has been murdered."

"Or maybe he is drowned."

But Ephimushka came, and declared in an embarrassed manner:

"He has gone on the drink."

"Why do you tell such lies?" cried Petr incredulously.

"He has gone on the drink; he is drinking madly. He is just like a corn kiln which burns from the very center. Perhaps his much-loved wife is dead."

"He is a widower! Where is he?"

Petr angrily set out to save Ardalon, but the latter fought him.

Then Osip, pressing his lips together firmly, thrust his hands in his pockets and said:

"Shall I go have a look at him, and see what it is all about? He is a good fellow."

I attached myself to him.

"Here's a man," said Osip on the way, "who lives for years quite decently, when suddenly he loses control of himself, and is all over the place. Look, Maximich, and learn."

We went to one of the cheap "houses of pleasure" of Kunavin Village, and we were welcomed by a predatory old woman. Osip whispered to her, and she ushered us into a small empty room, dark and dirty, like a stable. On a small bed slept, in an abandoned attitude, a large, stout woman. The old woman thrust her fist in her side and said:

"Wake up, frog, wake up!"

The woman jumped up in terror, rubbing her face with her hands, and asked:

"Good Lord! who is it? What is it?"

"Detectives are here," said Osip harshly. With a groan the woman disappeared, and he spat after her and explained to me:

"They are more afraid of detectives than of the devil."

Taking a small glass from the wall, the old woman raised a piece of the wall-paper.

"Look! Is he the one you want?"

Osip looked through a chink in the partition. "That is he! Get the woman away."

I also looked through the chink into just such a narrow stable as the one we were in. On the sill of the window, which was closely shuttered, burned a tin lamp, near which stood a squinting, naked, Tatar woman, sewing a chemise. Behind her, on two pillows on the bed, was raised the bloated face of Ardalon, his black, tangled beard projecting.

The Tatar woman shivered, put on her chemise, and came past the bed, suddenly appearing in our room.

Osip looked at her and again spat.

"Ugh! Shameless hussy!"

"And you are an old fool!" she replied, laughing, Osip laughed too, and shook a threatening finger at her.

We went into the Tatar's stable. The old man sat on the bed at Ardalon's feet and tried for a long time unsuccessfully to awaken him. He muttered:

"All right, wait a bit. We will go--"

At length he awoke, gazed wildly at Osip and at me, and closing his bloodshot eyes, murmured:

"Well, well!"

"What is the matter with you?" asked Osip gently, without reproaches, but rather sadly.

"I was driven to it," explained Ardalon hoarsely, and coughing.

"How?"

"Ah, there were reasons."

"You were not contented, perhaps?"

"What is the good--"

Ardalon took an open bottle of vodka from the table, and began to drink from it. He then asked Osip:

"Would you like some? There ought to be something to eat here as well."

The old man poured some of the spirit into his mouth, swallowed it, frowned, and began to chew a small piece of bread carefully, but muddled Ardalon said drowsily:

"So I have thrown in my lot with the Tatar woman. She is a pure Tatar, as Ephimushka says, young, an orphan from Kasimov; she was getting ready for the fair."

From the other side of the wall some one said in broken Russian:

"Tatars are the best, like young hens. Send him away; he is not your father."

"That's she," muttered Ardalon, gazing stupidly at the wall.

"I have seen her," said Osip.

Ardalon turned to me:

"That is the sort of man I am, brother."

I expected Osip to reproach Ardalon, to give him a lecture which would make him repent bitterly. But nothing of the kind happened; they sat side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and uttered calm, brief words. It was melancholy to see them in that dark, dirty stable. The woman called ludicrous words through the chink in the wall, but they did not listen to them. Osip took a walnut off the table, cracked it against his boot, and began to remove the shell neatly, as he asked:

"All your money gone?"

"There is some with Petrucha."

"I say! Aren't you going away? If you were to go to Tomsk, now--"

"What should I go to Tomsk for?"

"Have you changed your mind, then?"

"If I had been going to strangers, it would have been different."

"What do you mean?"

"But to go to my sister and my brother-in-law--"

"What of it?"

"It is not particularly pleasant to begin again with one's own people."

"The beginning is the same anywhere."

"All the same--"

They talked in such an amicably serious vein that the Tatar woman left off teasing them, and coming into the room, took her frock down from the wall in silence, and disappeared.

"She is young," said Osip.

Ardalon glanced at him and without annoyance replied:

"Ephimushka is wrong-headed. He knows nothing, except about women. But the Tatar woman is joyous; she maddens us all."

"Take care; you won't be able to escape from her," Osip warned him, and having eaten the walnut, took his leave.

On the way back I asked Osip:

"Why did you go to him?"

"Just to look at him. He is a man I have known a long time. I have seen ma-a-ny such cases. A man leads a decent life, and suddenly he behaves as if he had just escaped from prison." He repeated what he had said before, "One should be on one's guard against vodka."

But after a minute he added:

"But life would be dull without it."

"Without vodka?"

"Well, yes! When you drink, it is just as if you were in another world."

Ardalon never came back for good. At the end of a few days he returned to work, but soon disappeared again, and in the spring I met him among the dock laborers; he was melting the ice round the barges in the harbor. We greeted each other in friendly fashion and went to a tavern for tea, after which he boasted:

"You remember what a workman I was, eh? I tell you straight, I was an expert at my own business! I could have earned hundreds."

"However, you did not."

"No, I didn't earn them," he cried proudly. "I spit upon work!"

He swaggered. The people in the tavern listened to his impassioned words and were impressed.

"You remember what that sly thief Petrucha used to say about work? For others stone houses; for himself a wooden coffin! Well, that's true of all work!"

I said:

"Petrucha is ill. He is afraid of death."

But Ardalon cried:

"I am ill, too; my heart is out of order."

On holidays I often wandered out of the town to "Millioni Street," where the dockers lived, and saw how quickly Ardalon had settled down among those uncouth ruffians. Only a year ago, happy and serious-minded, Ardalon had now become as noisy as any of them. He had acquired their curious, shambling walk, looked at people defiantly, as if he were inviting every one to fight with him, and was always boasting:

"You see how I am received; I am like a chieftain here!"

Never grudging the money he had earned, he liberally treated the dockers, and in fights he always took the part of the weakest. He often cried:

"That's not fair, children! You've got to fight fair!"

And so they called him "Fairplay," which delighted him.

I ardently studied these people, closely packed in that old and dirty sack of a street. All of them were people who had cut themselves off from ordinary life, but they seemed to have created a life of their own, independent of any master, and gay. Careless, audacious, they reminded me of grandfather's stories about the bargemen who so easily transformed themselves into brigands or hermits. When there was no work, they were not squeamish about committing small thefts from the barges and steamers, but that did not trouble me, for I saw that life was sewn with theft, like an old coat with gray threads. At the same time I saw that these people never worked with enthusiasm, unsparing of their energies, as happened in cases of urgency, such as fires, or the breaking of the ice. And, as a rule, they lived more of a holiday life than any other people.

But Osip, having noticed my friendship with Ardalon, warned me in a fatherly way:

"Look here, my boy; why this close friendship with the folk of Millioni Street? Take care you don't do yourself harm by it."

I told him as well as I could how I liked these people who lived so gaily, without working.

"Birds of the air they are!" he interrupted me, laughing. "That's what they are--idle, useless people; and work is a calamity to them!"

"What is work, after all? As they say, the labors of the righteous don't procure them stone houses to live in!"

I said this glibly enough. I had heard the proverb so often, and felt the truth of it.

But Osip was very angry with me, and cried:

"Who says so? Fools, idlers! And you are a youngster; you ought not to listen to such things! Oh, you--! That is the nonsense which is uttered by the envious, the unsuccessful. Wait till your feathers are grown; then you can fly! And I shall tell your master about this friendship of yours."

And he did tell. The master spoke to me about the matter.

"You leave the Millioni folk alone, Pyeshkov! They are thieves and prostitutes, and from there the path leads to the prison and the hospital. Let them alone!"

I began to conceal my visits to Millioni Street, but I soon had to give them up. One day I was sitting with Ardalon and his comrade, Robenok, on the roof of a shed in the yard of one of the lodging-houses. Robenok was relating to us amusingly how he had made his way on foot from Rostov, on the Don, to Moscow. He had been a soldier-sapper, a Geogrivsky horseman, and he was lame. In the war with Turkey he had been wounded in the knee. Of low stature, he had a terrible strength in his arms, a strength which was of no profit to him, for his lameness prevented him from working. He had had an illness which had caused the hair to fall from his head and face; his head was like that of a new-born infant.

With his brown eyes sparkling he said:

"Well, at Serpoukhov I saw a priest sitting in a sledge. 'Father,' I said, 'give something to a Turkish hero.'"

Ardalon shook his head and said:

"That's a lie!"

"Why should I lie?" asked Robenok, not in the least offended, and my friend growled in lazy reproof:

"You are incorrigible! You have the chance of becoming a watchman--they always put lame men to that job--and you stroll about aimlessly, and tell lies."

"Well, I only do it to make people laugh. I lie just for the sake of amusement."

"You ought to laugh at yourself."

In the yard, which was dark and dirty although the weather was dry and sunny, a woman appeared and cried, waving some sort of a rag about her head:

"Who will buy a petticoat? Hi, friends!"

Women crept out from the hidden places of the house and gathered closely round the seller. I recognized her at once; it was the laundress, Natalia. I jumped down from the roof, but she, having given the petticoat to the first bidder, had already quietly left the yard.

"How do you do?" I greeted her joyfully as I caught her at the gate.

"What next, I wonder?" she exclaimed, glancing at me askance, and then she suddenly stood still, crying angrily: "God save us! What are you doing here?"

Her terrified exclamation touched and confused me. I realized that she was afraid for me; terror and amazement were shown so plainly in her intelligent face. I soon explained to her that I was not living in that street, but only went there sometimes to see what there was to see.

"See?" she cried angrily and derisively. "What sort of a place is this that you should want to see it? It's the women you 're after."

Her face was wrinkled, dark shadows lay under her eyes, and her lips drooped feebly.

Standing at the door of a tavern she said:

"Come in; I am going to have some tea! You are well-dressed, not like they dress here, yet I cannot believe what you say."

But in the tavern she seemed to believe me, and as she poured out tea, she began to tell me how she had only awakened from sleep an hour ago, and had not had anything to eat or drink yet.

"And when I went to bed last night I was as drunk as drunk. I can't even remember where I had the drink, or with whom."

I felt sorry for her, awkward in her presence, and I wanted to ask her where her daughter was. After she had drunk some vodka and hot tea, she began to talk in a familiar, lively way, coarsely, like all the women of that street, but when I asked about her daughter she was sobered at once, and cried:

"What do you want to know for? No, my boy, you won't get hold of her; don't think it!"

She drank more, and then she said:

"I have nothing to do with my daughter. What am I? A laundress! What sort of a mother for her? She is well brought up, educated. That she is, my brother! She left me to live with a rich friend, as a teacher, like--"

After a silence she said:

"That's how it is! The laundress does n't please you, but the street-walker does?"

That she was a street-walker I had seen at once, of course. There was no other kind of woman in that street. But when she told me so herself, my eyes filled with tears of shame and pity for her. I felt as if she had burned me by making that admission,--she, who not long ago had been so brave, independent, and clever.

"Ekh! you!" she said, looking at me and sighing. "Go away from this place, I beg you! I urge you, don't come here, or you will be lost!"

Then she began to speak softly and brokenly, as if she were talking to herself, bending over the table and drawing figures on the tray with her fingers.

"But what are my entreaties and my advice to you? When my own daughter would not listen to me I cried to her: 'You can't throw aside your own mother. What are you thinking of?' And she--she said, 'I shall strangle myself!' And she went away to Kazan; she wants to learn to be a midwife. Good--good! But what about me? You see what I am now? What have I to cling to? And so I went on the streets."

She fell Into a silence, and thought for a long time, soundlessly moving her lips. It was plain that she had forgotten me. The corners of her lips drooped; her mouth was curved like a sickle, and it was a torturing sight to see how her lips quivered, and how the wavering furrows on her face spoke without words. Her face was like that of an aggrieved child. Strands of hair had fallen from under her headkerchief, and lay on her cheek, or coiled behind her small ear. Her tears dropped into her cup of cold tea, and seeing this, she pushed the cup away and shut her eyes tightly, squeezing out two more tears. Then she wiped her face with her handkerchief. I could not bear to stay with her any longer. I rose quietly.