When, after the fair, he looked into one of the shops which he was to rebuild, and saw a forgotten samovar, a piece of crockery, a carpet, or a pair of scissors which had been forgotten, even sometimes a case, or some merchandise, my master would say, smiling:
“Make a list of the things and take them all to the store-room.”
And he would take them home with him from the store-room, telling me sometimes to cross them off the list.
I did not love “things”; I had no desire to possess them; even books were an embarrassment to me.
I had none of my own, save the little volumes of Beranger and the songs of Heine. I should have liked to obtain Pushkin, but the book-dealer in the town was an evil old man, who asked a great deal too much for Pushkin’s works.
The furniture, carpets, and mirrors, which bulked so largely in my master’s house, gave me no pleasure, irritated me by their melancholy clumsiness and smell of paint and lacquer. Most of all I disliked the mistress’s room, which reminded me of a trunk packed with all kinds of useless, superfluous objects. And I was disgusted with my master for bringing home other people’s things from the store-house.
Queen Margot’s rooms had been cramped too, but they were beautiful in spite of it.
Life, on the whole, seemed to me to be a disconnected, absurd affair; there was too much of the ob — viously stupid about it.
Here we were building shops which the floods inundated in the spring, soaking through the floors, making the outer doors hang crooked. When the waters subsided the joists had begun to rot.
Annually the water had overflowed the market-place for the last ten years, spoiling the buildings and the bridges. These yearly floods did enor — mous damage, and yet they all knew that the waters would not be diverted of themselves.
Each spring the breaking of the ice cut up the barges, and dozens of small vessels. The people groaned and built new ones, which the ice again broke.
It was like a ridiculous treadmill whereon one remains always in the same place.
I asked Osip about it. He looked amazed, and then laughed.
“Oh, you heron! What a young heron he is!
What is it to do with you at all?
What is it to you,
But then he spoke more gravely, although he could not extinguish the light of merriment in his pale blue eyes, which had a clearness not belonging to old age.
“That’s a very intelligent observation!
Let us suppose that the affair does not concern you; all the same it may be worth something to you to understand it.
Take this case, for example — ”
And he related in a dry speech, interspersed lavishly with quaint sayings, unusual comparisons, and all kinds of drollery:
“Here is a case where people are to be pitied; they have only a little land, and in the springtime the Volga overflows its banks, carries away the earth, and lays it upon its own sand-banks. Then others complain that the bed of the Volga is choked up.
The spring-time streams and summer rains tear up the gulleys, and again earth is carried away to the river.”
He spoke without either pity or malice, but as if he enjoyed his knowledge of the miseries of life, and although his words were in agreement with my own ideas, yet it was unpleasant to listen to them.
“Take another instance; fires.”
I don’t think I can remember a summer when the forests beyond the Volga did not catch fire. Every July the sky was clouded by a muddy yellow smoke; the leaden sun, all its brightness gone, looked down on the earth like a bad eye.
“As for forests, who cares about them?” said Osip. “They all belong to the nobles, or the crown; the peasants don’t own them.
And if towns catch fire, that is not a very serious business either. Rich people live in towns; they are not to be pitied.
But take the villages. How many villages are burned down every summer?
Not less than a hundred, I should think; that’s a serious loss!”
He laughed softly.
“Some people have property and don’t know how to manage it, and between ourselves, a man has to work not so much on his own behalf, or on the land, as against fire and water.”
“Why do you laugh?”
“Why not?
You won’t put a fire out with your tears, nor will they make the floods more mighty.”
I knew that this handsome old man was more clever than any one I had met; but what were his real sympathies and antipathies?
I was thinking about this all the time he was adding his little dry sayings to my store.
“Look round you, and see how little people preserve their own, or other people’s strength.
How your master squanders yours!
And how much does water cost in a village?
Reflect a little; it is better than any cleverness which comes from learning.
If a peasant’s hut is burned, another one can be put up in its place, but when a worthy peasant loses his sight, you can’t set that right!
Look at Ardalon, for example, or Grisha; see how a man can break out!
A foolish fellow, the first, but Grisha is a man of understanding.
He smokes like a hayrick.
Women attacked him, as worms attack a murdered man in a wood.”
I asked him without anger, merely out of curiosity:
“Why did you go and tell the master about my ideas?’
He answered calmly, even kindly:
“So that he might know what harmful ideas you have. It was necessary, in order that he may teach you better ones. Who should teach you, if not he?