“What should I go to Tomsk for?”
“Have you changed your mind, then?”
“If I had been going to strangers, it would have been different.”
“What do you mean?”
“But to go to my sister and my brother-in-law — ”
“What of it?”
“It is not particularly pleasant to begin again with one’s own people.”
“The beginning is the same anywhere.”
“All the same —”
They talked in such an amicably serious vein that the Tatar woman left off teasing them, and coming into the room, took her frock down from the wall in silence, and disappeared.
“She is young,” said Osip.
Ardalon glanced at him and without annoyance replied:
“Ephimushka is wrong-headed.
He knows nothing, except about women.
But the Tatar woman is joyous; she maddens us all.”
“Take care; you won’t be able to escape from her,” Osip warned him, and having eaten the walnut, took his leave.
On the way back I asked Osip:
“Why did you go to him?”
“Just to look at him.
He is a man I have known a long time.
I have seen ma-a-ny such cases. A man leads a decent life, and suddenly he behaves as if he had just escaped from prison.” He repeated what he had said before, “One should be on one’s guard against vodka.”
But after a minute he added:
“But life would be dull without it.”
“Without vodka?”
“Well, yes!
When you drink, it is just as if you were in another world.”
Ardalon never came back for good.
At the end of a few days he returned to work, but soon disappeared again, and in the spring I met him among the dock laborers; he was melting the ice round the barges in the harbor.
We greeted each other in friendly fashion and went to a tavern for tea, after which he boasted:
“You remember what a workman I was, eh?
I tell you straight, I was an expert at my own business!
I could have earned hundreds.”
“However, you did not.”
“No, I didn’t earn them,” he cried proudly. “I spit upon work!”
He swaggered. The people in the tavern listened to his impassioned words and were impressed.
“You remember what that sly thief Petrucha used to say about work?
For others stone houses; for himself a wooden coffin!
Well, that’s true of all work!”
I said:
“Petrucha is ill. He is afraid of death.”
But Ardalon cried:
“I am ill, too; my heart is out of order.”
On holidays I often wandered out of the town to “Millioni Street,” where the dockers lived, and saw how quickly Ardalon had settled down among those uncouth ruffians.
Only a year ago, happy and serious-minded, Ardalon had now become as noisy as any of them. He had acquired their curious, shambling walk, looked at people defiantly, as if he were inviting every one to fight with him, and was always boast — ing:
“You see how I am received; I am like a chieftain here!”
Never grudging the money he had earned, he liberally treated the dockers, and in fights he always took the part of the weakest. He often cried:
“That’s not fair, children!
You’ve got to fight fair!”
And so they called him “Fairplay,” which delighted him.
I ardently studied these people, closely packed in that old and dirty sack of a street.