"That's right! You're supposed to turn into the blind alley here.
They can't even organize a parade!
Scandalous!"
The children were riding in lorries belonging to the Stargorod communal services and the grain-mill-and-lift-construction administration.
The youngest ones stood at the sides of the lorry and the bigger ones in the middle.
The junior army waved paper flags and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
It was crowded, noisy, and hot.
Every minute there were bottlenecks, and every other minute they were cleared.
To pass the time during the bottlenecks the crowd tossed old men and activists in the air.
The old men wailed in squeaky voices, while the activists sailed up and down with serious faces in silence.
One merry column of people mistook Polesov for a supervisor as he was trying to squeeze through them and began tossing him.
Polesov thrashed about like Punchinello.
Then came an effigy of Neville Chamberlain, being beaten on his top-hat with a cardboard hammer by a worker possessing a model anatomical physique.
This was followed by a truck carrying three members of the Communist Youth in tails and white gloves.
They kept looking at the crowd with embarrassment.
"Basil!" shouted someone from the pavement, "you bourgeois !
Give back those braces!"
Girls were singing.
Alchen was marching along in a group of social-security workers with a large red bow on his chest. As he went he crooned in a nasal voice:
From the forests of Siberia To the British Sea,
There's no one superior To the Red Army. . . .
At a given command, gymnasts disjointedly shouted out something unintelligible.
Everything walked, rode and marched to the new tram depot from where at exactly one o'clock the first electric tram in Stargorod was due to move off.
No one knew exactly when the construction of the tramline had been begun.
Some time back in 1920, when voluntary Saturday work was introduced, railway workers and ropemakers had marched to Gusishe to the accompaniment of music and spent the whole day digging holes.
They dug a great number of large, deep holes.
A comrade in an engineer's cap had run about among the diggers, followed by a foreman carrying coloured poles.
Work had continued at the same spot the next Saturday.
Two holes dug in the wrong place had to be filled in again.
The comrade descended on the foreman and demanded an explanation.
Then fresh holes had been dug that were even bigger and deeper.
Next, the bricks were delivered and the real builders arrived.
They set about laying the foundations, but then everything quieted down.
The comrade in the engineer's cap still appeared now and then at the deserted building site and wandered round and round the brick-lined pit, muttering:
"Cost accounting!"
He tapped the foundations with a stick and then hurried home, covering his frozen ears with his hands.
The engineer's name was Treukhov.
The idea of the tram depot, the construction of which ceased abruptly at the foundation stage, was conceived by Treukhov in 1912, but the Tsarist town council had rejected the project.
Two years later Treukhov stormed the town council again, but the war prevented any headway.
Then the Revolution interfered, and now the New Economic Plan, cost accounting, and capital recovery were the obstacles.
The foundations were overgrown with flowers in the summer, and in the winter children turned them into a snow-slide.
Treukhov dreamed of great things.
He was sick and tired of working in the town-improvement department of the Stargorod communal services, tired of mending the kerbs, and tired of estimating the cost of hoardings.
But the great things did not pan out.
The tramline project, re-submitted for consideration, became bogged down at the higher instances of the provincial administration; it was approved by one and rejected by another, passed on to the capital, regardless of approval or rejection, became covered in dust, and no money was forthcoming.
"It's barbarous!" Treukhov shouted at his wife. "No money, indeed!
But they have enough money to pay for cab drivers and for carting merchandise to the station!
The Stargorod's cab-drivers would rob their own grandmothers!
It's a pillagers' monopoly, of course.
Just try carrying your own stuff to the station!