PAGE 13
In A Mountain Defile
by
Then, as carefully he withdrew his pipe from his lips, and sighed, he added:
“Aye! If I could but feel sure that life in the next world will be like life here, I would pray to God: ‘For Christ’s sake take my soul at the earliest conceivable moment.'”
“What might suit YOU would not suit ME,” Vasili thoughtfully observed. “I would not always live such a life as this. I might do so for a time, but not in perpetuity.”
“Ah, but never have you worked hard,” grunted the ex-soldier.
In every way the evening resembled the previous one; there were to be observed the same luscious flooding of the defile with dove-coloured mist, the same flashing of the silver crags in the roseate twilight, the same rocking of the dense, warm forest’s soft, leafy tree-tops, the same softening of the rocks’ outlines in the gloom, the same gradual uplift of shadows, the same chanting of the “matchmaking” river, the same routine on the part of the big, sleek carpenters around the barraque–a routine as slow and ponderous in its course as the movements of a drove of wild boars.
More than once during the off hours of the day had we sought to make the carpenters’ acquaintance, to start a conversation with them, but always their answers had been given reluctantly, in monosyllables, and never had a discussion seemed likely to get under way without the whiteheaded foreman shouting to the particular member of the gang concerned: ” Hi, you, Pavlushka! Get back to work, there! ” Indeed, he, the foreman, had outdone all in his manifestations of dislike for our friendship, and as monotonously as though he had been minded to rival the rivulet as a songster, he had hummed his pious ditties, or else raised his snuffling voice to sing them with an ever-importunate measure of insistence, so that all day long those ditties had been coursing their way in a murky, melancholy-compelling flood. Indeed, as the foreman had stepped cautiously on thin legs from stone to stone during his ceaseless inspection of the work of his men, he had come to seem to have for his object the describing of an invisible, circular path, as a means of segregating us more securely than ever from the society of the carpenters.
Personally, however, I had no desire to converse with him, for his frozen eyes chilled and repelled me and from the moment when I had approached him, and seen him fold his hands behind him, and recoil a step as he inquired with suppressed sternness, “What do you want?” there had fallen away from me all further ambition to learn the nature of the songs which he sang.
The ex-soldier gazed at him resentfully, then said with an oath:
“The old wizard and pilferer! Take my word for it that a lump of piety like that has got a pretty store put away somewhere.”
Whereafter, as he lit his pipe and squinted in the direction of the carpenters, he added with stifled wrath:
“The airs that the ‘elect’ give themselves–the sons of bitches! “
“It is always so,” commented Vasili with a resentment equal to the last speaker’s. “Yes, no sooner, with us, does a man accumulate a little money than he sticks his nose in the air, and falls to thinking himself a real barin.”
“Why is it that you always say ‘With us,’ and ‘Among us,’ and so on?”
“Among us Russians, then, if you like it better.”
“I do like it better. For you are not a German, are you, nor a Tartar?”
“No. It is merely that I can see the faults in our Russian folk.”
Upon that (not for the first time) the pair plunged into a discussion which had come so to weary them that now they spoke only indifferently, without effort.
“The word ‘faults’ is, I consider, an insult,” began the ex- soldier as he puffed at his pipe. “Besides, you don’t speak consistently. Only this moment I observed a change in your terms.”