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:
“Goon!”
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 success — fully, 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 ex — pectant 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.