Through Russia. Maksim Gorky

your tongue on the wag. So issue your commands, young cockerel."

      Then he shouted to the workmen:

      "Now, then! No shirking! Is the job going to be finished tonight, or is it not?"

      As a matter of fact, he himself was the worst shirker in the artel [Workman's union]. True, he was also a first-rate hand at his trade, and a man who could work quickly and well and with skill and concentration; but, unfortunately, he hated putting himself out, and preferred to spend his time spinning arresting yarns. For instance, on the present occasion he chose the moment when work was proceeding with a swing, when everyone was busily and silently and wholeheartedly labouring with the object of running the job through to the end, to begin in his musical voice:

      "Look here, lads. Once upon a time—"

      And though for the first two or three minutes the men appeared not to hear him, and continued their planing and chopping as before, the moment came when the soft tenor accents caught and held the men's attention, as they trickled and burbled forth. Then, screwing up his bright eyes with a humorous air, and twisting his curly beard between his fingers, Ossip gave a complacent click of his tongue, and continued measuredly, and with deliberation:

      "So he seized hold of the tench, and thrust it back into the cave. And as he turned to proceed through the forest he thought to himself: 'Now I must keep my eyes about me.' And suddenly, from somewhere (no one could have said where), a woman's voice shrieked: 'Elesi-a-ah! Elesia-ah!'"

      Here a tall, lanky Morduine named Leuka, with, as surname, Narodetz, a young fellow whose small eyes wore always an expression of astonishment, laid aside his axe, and stood gaping.

      "And from the cave a deep bass voice replied: 'Elesi-a-ah!' while at the same moment the tench sprang from the cave, and, champing its jaws, wriggled and wriggled back to the slough."

      Here an old soldier named Saniavin, a morose man, a tippler, and a sufferer from asthma and an inexplicable grudge against life in general, croaked out:

      "How could your tench have wriggled across dry land if it was a fish?"

      "Can, for that matter, a fish speak?" was Ossip's good-humoured retort.

      All of which inspired Mokei Budirin, a grey-headed muzhik of a cast of countenance canine in the prominence of his jaws and the recession of his forehead, and taciturn withal, though not otherwise remarkable, to give slow, nasal utterance to his favourite formula.

      "That is true enough," he said.

      For never could anything be spoken of that was grim or marvellous or lewd or malicious, but Budirin at once re-echoed softly, but in a tone of unshakable conviction: "That is true enough."

      Thereafter he would tap me on the breast with his hard and ponderous fist.

      Presently work again underwent an interruption through the fact that Yakov Boev, a man who possessed both a stammer and a squint, became similarly filled with a desire to tell us something about a fish. Yet from the moment that he began his narrative everyone declined to believe it, and laughed at his broken verbiage as, frequently invoking the Deity, and cursing, and brandishing his awl, and viciously swallowing spittle, he shouted amid general ridicule:

      "Once-once upon a time there lived a man. Yes, other folk before YOU have believed my tale. Indeed, it is no more than the truth that I'm going to tell you. Very well! Cackle away, and be damned!"

      Here everyone without exception dropped his work to shout with merriment and clap his hands: with the result that, doffing his cap, and thereby disclosing a silvered, symmetrically shaped head with one bald spot amid its one dark portion, Ossip was forced to shout severely:

      "Hi, you Budirin! You've had your say, and given us some fun, and there must be no more of it."

      "But I had only just begun what I want to say," the old soldier grumbled, spitting upon the palms of his hands.

      Next, Ossip turned to myself.

      "Inspector," he began …

      It is my opinion that in thus hindering the men from work through his tale-telling, Ossip had some definite end in view. I could not say precisely what that end was, but it must have been the object either of cloaking his own laziness or of giving the men a rest. On the other hand, whenever the contractor was present he, Ossip, bore himself with humble obsequiousness, and continued to assume a guise of simplicity which none the less did not prevent him, on the advent of each Saturday, from inducing his employer to bestow a pourboire upon the artel.

      And though this same Ossip was an artelui, and a director of the artel, his senior co-members bore him no affection, but, rather, looked upon him as a wag or trifler, and treated him as of no importance. And, similarly, the younger members of the artel liked well enough to listen to his tales, but declined to take him seriously, and, in some cases, regarded him with ill-concealed, or openly expressed, distrust.

      Once the Morduine, a man of education with whom, on occasions, I held discussions on intimate subjects, replied to a question of mine on the subject of Ossip:

      "I scarcely know. Goodness alone knows! No, I do not know anything about him."

      To which, after a pause, he added:

      "Once a fellow named Mikhailo, a clever fellow who is now dead, insulted Ossip by saying to him: 'Do you call yourself a man? Why, regarded as a workman, you're as lifeless as a doornail, while, seeing that you weren't born to be a master, you'll all your life continue chattering in corners, like a plummet swinging at the end of a string!' Yes, and that was true enough."

      Lastly, after another pause the Morduine concluded:

      "No matter. He is not such a bad sort."

      My own position among these men was a position of some awkwardness, for, a young fellow of only fifteen, I had been appointed by the contractor, a distant relative of mine, to the task of superintending the expenditure of material. That is to say, I had to see to it that the carpenters did not make away with nails, or dispose of planks in return for drink. Yet all the time my presence was practically useless, seeing that the men stole nails as though I were not even in existence and strove to show me that among them I was a person too many, a sheer incubus, and seized every opportunity of giving me covert jogs with a beam, and similarly affronting me.

      This, of course, made my relations with them highly difficult, embarrassing, and irksome; and though moments occurred when I longed to say something that might ingratiate me, and endeavoured to effect an advance in that direction, the words always failed me at the necessary juncture, and I found myself lying crushed as before under a burdensome sense of the superfluity of my existence.

      Again, if ever I tried to make an entry as to some material which had been used, Ossip would approach me, and, for instance, say:

      "Is it jotted down, eh? Then let me look at it."

      And, eyeing the notebook with a frown, he would add vaguely:

      "What a nice hand you write!" (He himself could write only in printing fashion, in the large scriptory characters of the Ecclesiastical Rubric, not in those of the ordinary kind.)

      "For example, that scoop there—what does IT say?"

      "It is the word 'Good.'"

      "'Good'? But what a slip-knot of a thing! And what are those words THERE, on THAT line?"

      "They say, 'Planks, 1 vershok by 9 arshini, 5.'"

      "No, six was the number used."

      "No, five."

      "Five? Why, the soldier broke one, didn't he?"

      "Yes, but never mind—at least it wasn't a plank that was wanted."

      "Oh! Well, I may tell you that he took the two pieces to the tavern to get drink with."

      Then, glancing into my face with his cornflower-blue eyes and quiet, quizzical smile, he would say without the least confusion as he twisted the ringlets of