“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 rlobles 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 bom 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 IT 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 impres — sion 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 business-like 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 — ”