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 today.”
“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 halt — ing 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 wasn’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 bab — blers; 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 sup — per 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: