My duties in the workshop were not complicated.
In the morning when they were all asleep, I had to prepare the samovar
for the men, and while they drank tea in the kitchen, Pavl and I swept
and dusted the workshop, set out red, yellow, or white paints, and then
I went to the shop. In the evening I had to grind up colors and "watch"
the work. At first I watched with great interest, but I soon realized
that all the men who were engaged on this handicraft which was divided
up into so many processes, disliked it, and suffered from a torturing
boredom.
The evenings were free. I used to tell them stories about life on the
steamer and different stories out of books, and without noticing how
it came about, I soon held a peculiar position in the workshop as
story-teller and reader.
I soon found out that all these people knew less than I did; almost all
of them had been stuck in the narrow cage of workshop life since their
childhood, and were still in it. Of all the occupants of the workshop,
only Jikharev had been in Moscow, of which he spoke suggestively and
frowningly:
"Moscow does not believe in tears; there they know which side their
bread is buttered."
None of the rest had been farther than Shuya, or Vladimir. When mention
was made of Kazan, they asked me:
"Are there many Russians there? Are there any churches?"
For them, Perm was in Siberia, and they would not believe that Siberia
was beyond the Urals.
"Sandres come from the Urals; and sturgeon--where are they found? Where
do they get them? From the Caspian Sea? That means that the Urals are
on the sea!"
Sometimes I thought that they were laughing at me when they declared
that England was on the other side of the Atlantic, and that Bonaparte
belonged by birth to a noble family of Kalonga. When I told them
stories of what I had seen, they hardly believed me, but they all loved
terrible tales intermixed with history. Even the men of mature years
evidently preferred imagination to the truth. I could see very well
that the more improbable the events, the more fantastic the story, the
more attentively they listened to me. On the whole, reality did not
interest them, and they all gazed dreamily into the future, not wishing
to see the poverty and hideousness of the present.
This astonished me so much the more, inasmuch as I had felt keenly
enough the contradiction existing between life and books. Here before
me were living people, and in books there were none like them--no
Smouri, stoker Yaakov, fugitive Aleksander Vassiliev, Jikharev, or
washerwoman Natalia.
In Davidov's trunk a torn copy of Golitzinski's stories was
found--"Ivan Vuijigin," "The Bulgar," "A Volume of Baron Brambeuss." I
read all these aloud to them, and they were delighted. Larionovich said:
"Reading prevents quarrels and noise; it is a good thing!"
I began to look about diligently for books, found them, and read almost
every evening. Those were pleasant evenings. It was as quiet as night
in the workshop; the glass balls hung over the tables like white cold
stars, their rays lighting up shaggy and bald heads. I saw round me
at the table, calm, thoughtful faces; now and again an exclamation
of praise of the author, or hero was heard. They were attentive and
benign, quite unlike themselves. I liked them very much at those times,
and they also behaved well to me. I felt that I was in my right place.
"When we have books it is like spring with us; when the winter frames
are taken out and for the first time we can open the windows as we
like," said Sitanov one day.
It was hard to find books. We could not afford to subscribe to a
library, but I managed to get them somehow, asking for them wherever I
went, as a charity. One day the second officer of the fire brigade gave
me the first volume of "Lermontov," and it was from this that I felt
the power of poetry, and its mighty influence over people. I remember
even now how, at the first lines of "The Demon," Sitanov looked first
at the book and then at my face, laid down his brush on the table, and,
embracing his knee with his long arms, rocked to and fro, smiling.
"Not so much noise, brothers," said Larionovich, and also laying aside
his work, he went to Sitanov's table where I was reading. The poem
stirred me painfully and sweetly; my voice was broken; I could hardly
read the lines. Tears poured from my eyes. But what moved me still
more was the dull, cautious movement of the workmen. In the workshop
everything seemed to be diverted from its usual course--drawn to me as
if I had been a magnet. When I had finished the first part, almost all
of them were standing round the table, closely pressing against one
another, embracing one another, frowning and laughing.
"Go on reading," said Jikharev, bending my head over the book.
When I had finished reading, he took the book, looked at the title, put
it under his arm, and said:
"We must read this again! We will read it to-morrow! I will hide the
book away."
He went away, locked "Lermontov" in his drawer, and returned to his
work. It was quiet in the workshop; the men stole back to their tables.
Sitanov went to the window, pressed his forehead against the glass, and
stood there as if frozen. Jikharev, again laying down his brush, said
in a stern voice:
"Well, such is life; slaves of God--yes--ah!"
He shrugged his shoulders, hid his face, and went on:
"I can draw the devil himself; black and rough, with wings of red
flame, with red lead, but the face, hands, and feet--these should be
bluish-white, like snow on a moonlight night."
Until close upon supper-time he revolved about on his stool,
restless and unlike himself, drumming with his fingers and talking
unintelligibly of the devil, of women and Eve, of paradise, and of the
sins of holy men.
"That is all true!" he declared. "If the saints sinned with sinful
women, then of course the devil may sin with a pure soul."
They listened to him in silence; probably, like me, they had no
desire to speak. They worked unwillingly, looking all the time at
their watches, and as soon as it struck ten, they put away their work
altogether.
Sitanov and Jikharev went out to the yard, and I went with them. There,
gazing at the stars, Sitanov said:
"Like a wandering caravan
Thrown into space, it shone."
"You did not make that up yourself!"
"I can never remember words," said Jikharev, shivering in the bitter
cold. "I can't remember anything; but he, I see--It is an amazing
thing--a man who actually pities the devil! He has made you sorry for
him, hasn't he?"
"He has," agreed Sitanov.
"There, that is a real man!" exclaimed Jikharev reminiscently. In the
vestibule he warned me: "You, Maxim, don't speak to any one in the shop
about that book, for of course it is a forbidden one."
I rejoiced; this must be one of the books of which the priest had
spoken to me in the confessional.
We supped languidly, without the usual noise and talk, as if something
important had occurred and we could not keep from thinking about it,
and after supper, when we were going to bed, Jikharev said to me, as he
drew forth the book:
"Come, read it once more!"
Several men rose from their beds, came to the table, and sat themselves
round it, undressed as they were, with their legs crossed.
And again when I had finished reading, Jikharev said, strumming his
fingers on the table:
"That is a living picture of him! Ach, devil, devil--that's how he is,
brothers, eh?"
Sitanov leaned over my shoulder, read something, and laughed, as he
said:
"I shall copy that into my own note-book." Jikharev stood up and
carried the book to his own table, but he turned back and said in an
offended, shaky voice:
"We live like blind puppies--to what end we do not know. We are not
necessary either to God or the devil! How are we slaves of the Lord?
The Jehovah of slaves and the Lord Himself speaks with them! With
Moses, too! He even gave Moses a name; it means 'This is mine'--a man
of God. And we--what are we?"
He shut up the book and began to dress himself, asking Sitanov:
"Are you coming to the tavern?"
"I shall go to my own tavern," answered Sitanov softly.
When they had gone out, I lay down on the floor by the door, beside
Pavl Odintzov. He tossed about for a long time, snored, and suddenly
began to weep quietly.
"What is the matter with you?"
"I am sick with pity for all of them," he said. "This is the fourth
year of my life with them, and I know all about them."
I also was sorry for these people. We did not go to sleep for a long
time, but talked about them in whispers, finding goodness, good traits
in each one of them, and also something which increased our childish
pity.
I was very friendly with Pavl Odintzov. They made a good workman of him
in the end, but it did not last long; before the end of three years he
had begun to drink wildly, later on I met him in rags on the Khitrov
market-place in Moscow, and not long ago I heard that he had died of
typhoid. It is painful to remember how many good people in my life I
have seen senselessly ruined. People of all nations wear themselves
out, and to ruin themselves comes natural but nowhere do they wear
themselves out so terribly quickly, so senselessly, as in our own
Russia.
Then he was a round-headed boy two years older than myself; he was
lively, intelligent, and upright; he was talented, for he could draw
birds, cats, and dogs excellently, and was amazingly clever in his
caricatures of the workmen, always depicting them as feathered. Sitanov
was shown as a sad-looking woodcock standing on one leg, Jikharev as a
cock with a torn comb and no feathers on his head; sickly Davidov was
an injured lapwing. But best of all was his drawing of the old chaser,
Golovev, representing him as a bat with large whiskers, ironical nose,
and four feet with six nails on each. From the round, dark face, white,
round eyes gazed forth, the pupils of which looked like the grain of a
lentil. They were placed crossways, thus giving to the face a lifelike
and hideous expression.
The workmen were not offended when Pavl showed them the caricatures,
but the one of Golovev made an unpleasant impression on them all, and
the artist was sternly advised:
"You had better tear it up, for if the old man sees it, he will half
kill you!"
The dirty, putrid, everlastingly drunk old man was tiresomely pious,
and inextinguishably malicious. He vilified the whole workshop to the
shopman whom the mistress was about to marry to her niece, and who
for that reason felt himself to be master of the whole house and the
workpeople. The workmen hated him, but they were afraid of him, and
for the same reason were afraid of Golovev, too.
Pavl worried the chaser furiously and in all manner of ways, just as if
he had set before himself the aim of never allowing Golovev to have a
moment's peace. I helped him in this with enthusiasm, and the workshop
amused itself with our pranks, which were almost always pitilessly
coarse. But we were warned:
"You will get into trouble, children! Kouzka-Juchek will half kill you!"
Kouzka-Juchek was the nickname of the shopman, which was given to him
on the quiet by the workshop.
The warning did not alarm us. We painted the face of the chaser when
he was asleep. One day when he was in a drunken slumber we gilded his
nose, and it was three days before he was able to get the gold out
of the holes in his spongy nose. But every time that we succeeded in
infuriating the old man, I remembered the steamboat, and the little
Viatski soldier, and I was conscious of a disturbance in my soul. In
spite of his age, Golovev was so strong that he often beat us, falling
upon us unexpectedly; he would beat us and then complain of us to the
mistress.
She, who was also drunk every day, and for that reason always kind
and cheerful, tried to frighten us, striking her swollen hands on the
table, and crying: "So you have been saucy again, you wild beast?
He is an old man, and you ought to respect him! Who was it that put
photographic solution in his glass, instead of wine?"
"We did."
The mistress was amazed.
"Good Lord, they actually admit it! Ah, accursed ones, you ought to
respect old men!"
She drove us away, and in the evening she complained to the shopman,
who spoke to me angrily:
"How can you read books, even the Holy Scriptures, and still be so
saucy, eh? Take care, my brother!"
The mistress was solitary and touchingly sad. Sometimes when she had
been drinking sweet liqueurs, she would sit at the window and sing:
"No one is sorry for me,
And pity have I from none;
What my grief is no one knows;
To whom shall I tell my sorrow."
And sobbingly she drawled in the quavering voice of age:
"U--00--00--"
One day I saw her going down the stairs with a jug of warm milk in
her hands, but suddenly her legs gave way under her. She sat down,
and descended the stairs, sadly bumping from step to step, and never
letting the jug out of her hand. The milk splashed over her dress, and
she, with her hands outstretched, cried angrily to the jug:
"What is the matter with you, satyr? Where are you going?"
Not stout, but soft to flabbiness, she looked like an old cat which
had grown beyond catching mice, and, languid from overfeeding, could do
no more than purr, dwelling sweetly on the memories of past triumphs
and pleasures.
"Here," said Sitanov, frowning thoughtfully, "was a large business, a
fine workshop, and clever men labored at this trade; but now that is
all done with, all gone to ruin, all directed by the paws of Kuzikin!
It is a case of working and working, and all for strangers! When one
thinks of this, a sort of spring seems to break in one's head. One
wants to do nothing,--a fig for any kind of work!--just to lie on the
roof, lie there for the whole summer and look up into the sky."
Pavl Odintzov also appropriated these thoughts of Sitanov, and smoking
a cigarette which had been given him by his elders, philosophized about
God, drunkenness, and women. He enlarged on the fact that all work
disappears; certain people do it and others destroy it, neither valuing
it nor understanding it.
At such times his sharp, pleasant face frowned, aged. He would sit on
his bed on the floor, embracing his knees, and look long at the blue
square of the window, at the roof of the shed which lay under a fall of
snow, and at the stars in the winter sky.
The workmen snored, or talked in their sleep; one of them raved,
choking with words; in the loft, Davidov coughed away what was left of
his life. In the corner, body to body, wrapped in an iron-bound sleep
of intoxication, lay those "slaves of God"--Kapendiukhin, Sorokhin,
Pershin; from the walls icons without faces, hands, or feet looked
forth. There was a close smell of bad eggs, and dirt, which had turned
sour in the crevices of the floor.
"How I pity them all!" whispered Pavl. "Lord!"
This pity for myself and others disturbed me more and more. To us both,
as I have said before, all the workmen seemed to be good people, but
their lives were bad, unworthy of them, unbearably dull. At the time of
the winter snowstorms, when everything on the earth--the houses, the
trees--was shaken, howled, and wept, and in Lent, when the melancholy
bells rang out, the dullness of it all flowed over the workshop like
a wave, as oppressive as lead, weighing people down, killing all that
was alive in them, driving them to the tavern, to women, who served the
same purpose as vodka in helping them to forget.
On such evenings books were of no use, so Pavl and I tried to amuse
the others in our own way: smearing our faces with soot and paint,
dressing ourselves up and playing different comedies composed by
ourselves, heroically fighting against the boredom till we made them
laugh. Remembering the "Account of how the soldier saved Peter the
Great," I turned this book into a conversational form, and climbing on
to Davidov's pallet-bed, we acted thereon cheerfully, cutting off the
head of an imaginary Swede. Our audience burst out laughing.
They were especially delighted with the legend of the Chinese devil,
Sing-U-Tongia. Pashka represented the unhappy devil who had planned
to do a good deed, and I acted all the other characters--the people
of the field, subjects, the good soul, and even the stones on which
the Chinese devil rested in great pain after each of his unsuccessful
attempts to perform a good action.
Our audience laughed loudly, and I was amazed when I saw how easily
they could be made to laugh. This facility provoked me unpleasantly.
"Ach, clowns," they cried. "Ach, you devils!"
But the further I went, the more I was troubled with the thought that
sorrow appealed more than joy to the hearts of these people. Gaiety has
no place in their lives, and as such has no value, but they evoke it
from under their burdens, as a contrast to the dreamy Russian sadness.
The inward strength of a gaiety which lives not of itself not because
it wishes to live, but because it is aroused by the call of sad days,
is suspect. And too often Russian gaiety changes suddenly into cruel
tragedy. A man will be dancing as if he were breaking the shackles
which bound him. Suddenly a ferocious wild beast is let loose in him,
and with the unreasoning anguish of a wild beast he will throw himself
upon all who come in his way, tear them in pieces, bite them, destroy
them.
This intense joy aroused by exterior forces irritated me, and
stirred to self-oblivion, I began to compose and act suddenly
created fantasies--for I wanted so much to arouse a real, free, and
unrestrained joy in these people. I succeeded in some measure. They
praised me, they were amazed at me, but the sadness which I had almost
succeeded in shaking off, stole back again, gradually growing denser
and stronger, harassing them.
Gray Larionovich said kindly:
"Well, you are an amusing fellow, God bless you!"
"He is a boon to us," Jikharev seconded him.
"You know, Maxim, you ought to go into a circus, or a theater; you
would make a good clown."
Out of the whole workshop only two went to the theaters, on Christmas
or carnival weeks, Kapendiukhin and Sitanov, and the older workmen
seriously counseled them to wash themselves from this sin in the
baptismal waters of the Jordan. Sitanov particularly would often urge
me:
"Throw up everything and be an actor!"
And much moved, he would tell me the "sad" story of the life of the
actor, Yakolev.
"There, that will show you what may happen!"
He loved to tell stories about Marie Stuart, whom he called "the
rogue," and his peculiar delight was the "Spanish nobleman."
"Don Cæsar de Bazan was a real nobleman. Maximich! Wonderful!"
There was something of the "Spanish nobleman" about himself.
One day in the market-place, in front of the fire-station, three
firemen were amusing themselves by beating a peasant. A crowd of
people, numbering about forty persons, looked on and cheered the
soldiers. Sitanov threw himself into the brawl. With swinging blows of
his long arms he struck the firemen, lifted the peasant, and carried
him into the crowd, crying:
"Take him away!"
But he remained behind himself, one against three. The yard of the
fire-station was only about ten steps away; they might easily have
called others to their aid and Sitanov would have been killed. But by
good luck the firemen were frightened and ran away into the yard.
"Dogs!" he cried after them.
On Sunday the young people used to attend boxing-matches held in the
Tyessni yard behind the Petropavlovski churchyard, where sledge-drivers
and peasants from the adjacent villages assembled to fight with the
workmen. The wagoners put up against the town an eminent boxer, a
Mordovan giant with a small head, and large eyes always full of tears.
Wiping away the tears with the dirty sleeve of his short _caftan_,
he stood before his backers with his legs planted widely apart, and
challenged good-naturedly:
"Come on, then; what is the matter with you? Are you cold?"
Kapendiukhin was set up against him on our side, and the Mordovan
always beat him. But the bleeding, panting Cossack said:
"I 'll lick that Mordovan if I die for it!"
In the end, that became the one aim of his life. He even went to the
length of giving up vodka, rubbed his body with snow before he went to
sleep, ate a lot of meat, and to develop his muscles, crossed himself
many times every evening with two pound weights. But this did not
avail him at all. Then he sewed a piece of lead inside his gloves, and
boasted to Sitanov:
"Now we will finish the Mordovan!"
Sitanov sternly warned him:
"You had better throw it away, or I will give you away before the
fight."
Kapendiukhin did not believe him, but when the time for the fight
arrived, Sitanov said abruptly to the Mordovan:
"Step aside, Vassili Ivanich; I have something to say to Kapendiukhin
first!"
The Cossack turned purple and roared:
"I have nothing to do with you; go away!"
"Yes, you have!" said Sitanov, and approaching him, he looked into the
Cossack's face with a compelling glance.
Kapendiukhin stamped on the ground, tore the gloves from his hands,
thrust them in his breast, and went quickly away from the scene of his
fight.
Both our side and the other were unpleasantly surprised, and a certain
important personage said angrily to Sitanov:
"That is quite against the rules, brother,--to bring private affairs to
be settled in the world of the prize ring!"
They fell upon Sitanov from all sides, and abused him. He kept silence
for a long time, but at length he said to the important personage:
"Am I to stand by and see murder done?"
The important personage at once guessed the truth, and actually taking
off his cap said:
"Then our gratitude is due to you!"
"Only don't go and spread it abroad, uncle!"
"Why should I? Kapendiukhin is hardly ever the victor, and ill-success
embitters a man. We understand! But in future we will have his gloves
examined before the contest."
"That is your affair!"
When the important personage had gone away, our side began to abuse
Kapendiukhin:
"You have made a nice mess of it. He would have killed his man, our
Cossack would, and now we have to stay on the losing side!"
They abused him at length, captiously, to their hearts' content.
Sitanov sighed and said:
"Oh, you guttersnipes!"
And to the surprise of everyone he challenged the Mordovan to a single
contest. The latter squared up and flourishing his fists said jokingly:
"We will kill each other."
A good number of persons, taking hands, formed a wide, spacious circle.
The boxers, looking at each other keenly, changed over, the right hand
held out, the left on their breasts. The experienced people noticed at
once that Sitanov's arms were longer than those of the Mordovan. It was
very quiet; the snow crunched under the feet of the boxers. Some one,
unable to restrain his impatience, muttered complainingly and eagerly:
"They ought to have begun by now."
Sitanov flourished his right hand, the Mordovan raised his left
for defense, and received a straight blow under the right arm from
Sitanov's left hand. He gasped, retired, and exclaimed in a tone of
satisfaction:
"He is young, but he is no fool!"
They began to leap upon one another, striking each other's breasts
with blows from their mighty fists. In a few minutes not only our own
people, but strangers began to cry excitedly:
"Get your blows in quicker, image-painter! Fix him up, embosser."
The Mordovan was a little stronger than Sitanov, but as he was
considerably the heavier, he could not deal such swift blows, and
received two or three to every one he gave. But his seasoned body
apparently did not suffer much, and he was laughing and exclaiming all
the time, when, suddenly, with a heavy upward blow he put Sitanov's
right arm out of joint from the shoulder.
"Part them; it is a draw!" cried several voices, and, breaking the
circle, the crowd gathered round the pugilists.
"He is not very strong but he is skilful, the image-painter," said the
Mordovan good-naturedly. "He will make a good boxer, and that I say
before the whole world!"
The elder persons began a general wrestling match, and I took Sitanov
to the Feldsher bone-setter. His deed had raised him still higher in my
esteem, had increased my sympathy with him, and his importance in my
eyes.
He was, in the main, very upright and honorable, and he felt that he
had only done his duty, but the graceless Kapendiukhin made fun of him
lightly.
"Ekh, Genya, you live for show! You have polished up your soul like
a samovar before a holiday, "and you go about boasting, 'look how
brightly it shines!' But your soul is really brass, and a very dull
affair, too."
Sitanov remained calmly silent, either working hard or copying
Lermontov's verses into his note-book. He spent all his spare time in
this copying, and when I suggested to him:
"Why, when you have plenty of money, don't you buy the book?" he
answered:
"No, it is better in my own handwriting."
Having written a page in his pretty, small handwriting, he would read
softly while he was waiting for the ink to dry:
"Without regret, as a being apart,
You will look down upon this earth,
Where there is neither real happiness
Nor lasting beauty."
And he said, half-closing his eyes:
"That is true. Ekh! and well he knows the truth, too!"
The behavior of Sitanov to Kapendiukhin always amazed me. When he had
been drinking, the Cossack always tried to pick a quarrel with his
comrade, and Sitanov would go on for a long time bearing it, and saying
persuasively:
"That will do, let me alone!"
And then he would start to beat the drunken man so cruelly that the
workmen, who regarded internal dissensions amongst themselves merely as
a spectacle, interfered between the friends, and separated them.
"If we did n't stop Evgen in time, he would beat any one to death, and
he would never forgive himself," they said.
When he was sober Kapendiukhin ceaselessly jeered at Sitanov, making
fun of his passion for poetry and his unhappy romance, obscenely, but
unsuccessfully trying to arouse jealousy. Sitanov listened to the
Cossack's taunts in silence, without taking offense, and he sometimes
even laughed with Kapendiukhin at himself.
They slept side by side, and at night they would hold long, whispered
conversations about something. These conversations gave me no peace,
for I was anxious to know what these two people who were so unlike each
other found to talk about in such a friendly manner. But when I went
near them, the Cossack yelled:
"What do you want?"
But Sitanov did not seem to see me.
However, one day they called me, and the Cossack asked:
"Maximich, if you were rich, what would you do?"
"I would buy books."
"And what else?"
"I don't know."
"Ekh!" said Kapendiukhin, turning away from me in disgust, but Sitanov
said calmly:
"You see; no one knows that, whether they be old or young. I tell you
that riches in themselves are worth nothing, unless they are applied to
some special purpose."
I asked them, "What are you talking about?"
"We don't feel inclined to sleep, and so we are talking," answered the
Cossack.
Later, listening to them, I found that they were discussing by
night those things which other people discussed by day--God, truth,
happiness, the stupidity and cunning of women, the greediness of the
rich, and the fact that life is complicated and incomprehensible.
I always listened to their conversations eagerly; they excited me. I
was pleased to think that almost every one had arrived at the same
conclusion; namely, that life is evil, and that we ought to have a
better form of existence! But at the same time I saw that the desire
to live under better conditions would have no effect, would change
nothing in the lives of the work-people, in their relations one with
another. All these talks, throwing a light upon my life as it lay
before me, revealed at the same time, beyond it, a sort of melancholy
emptiness; and in this emptiness, like specks of dust in a pond ruffled
by the wind, floated people, absurdly and exasperatingly, among them
those very people who had said that such a crowd was devoid 'of sense.
Always ready to give their opinion, they were always passing judgment
on others, repeating, bragging, and starting bitter quarrels about mere
trifles. They were always seriously offending one another. They tried
to guess what would happen to them after death; while on the threshold
of the workshop where the washstand stood, the floor-boards had rotted
away. From that damp, fetid hole rose the cold, damp smell of sour
earth, and it was this that made one's feet freeze. Pavl and I stopped
up this hole with straw and cloths. We often said that the boards
should be renewed, but the hole grew larger and larger, and in bad
weather fumes rose from it as from a pipe. Every one caught cold, and
coughed. The tin ventilator in the fortochka squeaked, and when some
one had oiled it, though they had all been grumbling at it, Jikharev
said:
"It is dull, now that the fortochka has stopped squeaking."
To come straight from the bath and lie down on a dirty, dusty bed, in
the midst of dirt and bad smells, did not revolt any one of them. There
were many insignificant trifles which made our lives unbearable, which
might easily have been remedied, but no one took the trouble to do
anything.
They often said:
"No one has any mercy upon human creatures,--neither God nor we
ourselves."
But when Pavl and I washed dying Davidov, who was eaten up with dirt
and insects, a laugh was raised against us. They took off their shirts
and invited us to search them, called us blockheads, and jeered at us
as if we had done something shameful and very ludicrous.
From Christmas till the beginning of Lent drew near, Davidov lay in the
loft, coughing protractedly, spitting blood, which, if it did not fall
into the wash-hand basin, splashed on the floor. At night he woke the
others with his delirious shrieks.
Almost every day they said:
"We must take him to the hospital!"
But it turned out that Davidov's passport had expired. Then he seemed
better, and they said:
"It is of no consequence after all; he will soon be dead!"
And he would say to himself:
"I shall soon be gone!"
He was a quiet humorist and also tried to relieve the dullness of the
workshop by jokes, hanging down his dark bony face, and saying in a
wheezy voice:
"Listen, people, to the voice of one who ascended to the loft.
"In the loft I live,
Early do I wake;
Asleep or awake
Cockroaches devour me."
"He is not downhearted!" exclaimed his audience.
Sometimes Pavl and I went to him, and he joked with difficulty.
"With what shall I regale you, my dear guests? A fresh little
spider--would you like that?"
He died slowly, and he grew very weary of it. He said with unfeigned
vexation:
"It seems that I can't die, somehow; it is really a calamity!"
His fearlessness in the face of death frightened Pavl very much. He
awoke me in the night and whispered:
"Maximich, he seems to be dying. Suppose he dies in the night, when we
are lying beneath him--Oh, Lord! I am frightened of dead people."
Or he would say:
"Why was he born? Not twenty-two years have passed over his head and he
is dying."
Once, on a moonlight night he awoke, and gazing with wide-open,
terrified eyes said:
"Listen!"
Davidov was croaking in the loft, saying quickly and clearly:
"Give it to me--give--"
Then he began to hiccup.
"He is dying, by God he is; you see!" said Pavl agitatedly.
I had been carrying snow from the yard into the fields all day, and I
was very sleepy, but Pavl begged me:
"Don't go to sleep, please; for Christ's sake don't go to sleep!"
And suddenly getting on to his knees, he cried frenziedly:
"Get up! Davidov is dead!"
Some of them awoke; several figures rose from the beds; angry voices
were raised, asking questions.
Kapendiukhin climbed up into the loft and said in a tone of amazement:
"It is a fact; he is dead, although he is still warm." It was quiet
now. Jikharev crossed himself, and wrapping himself round in his
blanket, said:
"Well, he is in the Kingdom of Heaven now!" Some one suggested:
"Let us carry him into the vestibule."
Kapendiukhin climbed down from the loft and glanced through the window.
"Let him lie where he is till the morning; he never hurt any one while
he was alive."
Pavl, hiding his head under the pillow, sobbed.
But Sitanov did not even wake!