Ah, accursed ones, you ought to respect old men!”
She drove us away, and in the evening she complained to the shopman, who spoke to me angrily:
“How can you read books, even the Holy Scriptures, and still be so saucy, eh?
Take care, my brother!”
The misjtress was solitary and touchingly sad. Sometimes when she had been drinking sweet liqueurs, she would sit at the window and sing:
“No one is sorry for me,
And pity have I from none;
What my grief is no one knows;
To whom shall I tell my sorrow.”
And sobbingly she drawled in the quavering voice of age:
“U— oo — oc.”
One day I saw her going down the stairs with a jug of warm milk in her hands, but suddenly her legs gave way under her. She sat down, and descended the stairs, sadly bumping from step to step, and never letting the jug out of her hand.
The milk splashed over her dress, and she, with her hands outstretched, cried angrily to the jug:
“What is the matter with you, satyr?
Where are you going?”
Not stout, but soft to flabbiness, she looked like an old cat which had grown beyond catching mice, and, languid from overfeeding, could do no more than purr, dwelling sweetly on the memories of past triumphs and pleasures.
“Here,” said Sitanov, frowning thoughtfully, “was a large — business, a fine workshop, and clever men labored at this trade; but now that is all done with, all gone to ruin, all directed by the paws of Kuzikin I .
It is a case of working and working, and all for strangers!
When one thinks of this, a sort of spring seems to break in one’s head. One wants to do nothing, — a fig for any kind of work I— just to lie on the roof, lie there for the whole summer and look up into the sky.”
Pavl Odintzov also appropriated these thoughts of Sitanov, and smoking a cigarette which had been given him by his elders, philosophized about God, drunkenness, and women. He enlarged on the fact that all work disappears; certain people do it and others destroy it, neither valuing it nor understanding it.
At such times his sharp, pleasant face frowned, aged. He would sit on his bed on the floor, embracing his knees, and look long at the blue square of the window, at the roof of the shed which lay under a fall of snow, and at the stars in the winter sky.
The workmen snored, or talked in their sleep; one of them raved, choking with words; in the loft, Davidov coughed away what was left of his life.
In the corner, body to body, wrapped in an iron-bound sleep of intoxication, lay those “slaves of God” — Kapendiukhin, Sorokhin, Pcrshin; from the walls icons with — out faces, hands, or feet looked forth.
There was a close smell of bad eggs, and dirt, which had turned sour in the crevices of the floor.
“How I pity them all!” whispered Pavl. “Lord!”
This pity for myself and others disturbed me more and more.
To us both, as I have said before, all the workmen seemed to be good people, but their lives were bad, unworthy of them, unbearably dull.
At the time of the winter snowstorms, when everything on the earth — the houses, the trees — was shaken, howled, and wept, and in Lent, when the melancholy bells rang out, the dullness of it all flowed over the workshop like a wave, as oppressive as lead, weighing people down, killing all that was alive in them, driving them to the tavern, to women, who served the same purpose as vodka in helping them to forget.
On such evenings books were of no use, so Pavl and I tried to amuse the others in our own way: smearing our faces with soot and paint, dressing ourselves up and playing different comedies composed by ourselves, heroically fighting against the boredom till we made them laugh.
Remembering the
“Account of how the soldier saved Peter the Great,” I turned this book into a conversational form, and climbing on to Davidov’s pallet-bed, we acted thereon cheerfully, cutting off the head of an imaginary Swede. Our audience burst out laughing.
They were especially delighted with the legend of the Chinese devil, Sing-U-Tongia. Pashka represented the unhappy devil who had planned to do a good deed, and I acted all the other characters — the people of the field, subjects, the good soul, and even the stones on which the Chinese devil rested in great pain after each of his unsuccessful attempts to perform a good action.
Our audience laughed loudly, and I was amazed when I saw how easily they could be made to laugh. This facility provoked me unpleasantly.
“Ach, clowns,” they cried. “Ach, you devils!”
But the further I went, the more I was troubled with the thought that sorrow appealed more than joy to the hearts of these people.
Gaiety has no place in their lives, and as such has no value, but they evoke it from under their burdens, as a contrast to the dreamy Russian sadness.
The inward strength of a gaiety which lives not of itself not because it wishes to live, but because it is aroused by the call of sad days, is suspect.
And too often Russian gaiety changes suddenly into cruel tragedy.
A man will be dancing as if he were breaking the shackles which bound him. Suddenly a ferocious wild beast is let loose in him, and with the unreasoning anguish of a wild beast he will throw himself upon all who come in his way, tear them in pieces, bite them, destroy them.
This intense joy aroused by exterior forces irritated me, and stirred to self-oblivion, I began to compose and act suddenly created fantasies — for I wanted so much to arouse a real, free, and unrestrained joy in these people.
I succeeded in some measure. They praised me, they were amazed at me, but the sadness which I had almost succeeded in shaking off, stole back again, gradually growing denser and stronger, harassing them.
Gray Larionovich said kindly:
“Well, you are an amusing fellow, God bless you!”
“He is a boon to us,” Jikharev seconded him. “You know, Maxim, you ought to go into a circus, or a theater; you would make a good clown.”
Out of the whole workshop only two went to the theaters, on Christmas or carnival weeks, Kapendiukhin and Sitanov, and the older workmen seriously counseled them to wash themselves from this sin in the baptismal waters of the Jordan.
Sitanov particularly would often urge me:
“Throw up everything and be an actor!”
And much moved, he would tell me the “sad” story of the life of the actor, Yakolev.
“There, that will show you what may happen!”
He loved to tell stories about Marie Stuart, whom he called “the rogue,” and his peculiar delight was the “Spanish nobleman.”