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Lastly. after another pause the Morduine concluded:

“No matter. He is not such a bad sort.”

My own position among these men was a position of some awkwardness, for, a young fellow of only fifteen, I had been appointed by the contractor, a distant relative of mine, to the task of superintending the expenditure of material. That is to say, I had to see to it that the carpenters did not make away with nails, or dispose of planks in return for drink. Yet all the time my presence was practically useless, seeing that the men stole nails as though I were not even in existence and strove to show me that among them I was a person too many, a sheer incubus, and seized every opportunity of giving me covert jogs with a beam, and similarly affronting me.

This, of course, made my relations with them highly difficult, embarrassing, and irksome; and though moments occurred when I longed to say something that might ingratiate me, and endeavoured to effect an advance in that direction, the words always failed me at the necessary juncture, and I found myself lying crushed as before under a burdensome sense of the superfluity of my existence.

Again, if ever I tried to make an entry as to some material which had been used, Ossip would approach me, and, for instance, say:

“Is it jotted down, eh? Then let me look at it.”

And, eyeing the notebook with a frown, he would add vaguely:

“What a nice hand you write!” (He himself could write only in printing fashion, in the large scriptory characters of the Ecclesiastical Rubric, not in those of the ordinary kind.)

“For example, that scoop there–what does IT say?”

“It is the word ‘Good.'”

“‘Good’? But what a slip-knot of a thing! And what are those words THERE, on THAT line?”

“They say, ‘Planks, 1 vershok by 9 arshini, 5.'”

“No, six was the number used.”

“No, five.”

“Five? Why, the soldier broke one, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but never mind–at least it wasn’t a plank that was wanted.”

“Oh! Well, I may tell you that he took the two pieces to the tavern to get drink with.”

Then, glancing into my face with his cornflower-blue eyes and quiet, quizzical smile, he would say without the least confusion as he twisted the ringlets of his beard:

“Put down ‘6.’ And see here, young cockerel. The weather has turned wet and cold, and the work is hard, and sometimes folk need to have their spirits cheered and raised with a drop of liquor. So don’t you be too hard upon us, for God won’t think the more of you for being strict.”

And as he thus talked to me in his slow and kindly, but semi-affected, fashion–bespattering me, as it were, with wordy sawdust–I would suddenly grow blind of an eye and silently show him the corrected figure.

“That’s it–that’s right. And how fine the figure looks now, as it squats there like a merchant’s buxom, comely dame!”

Then he would be seen triumphantly telling his mates of his success; then, I would find myself feeling acutely conscious of the fact that everyone was despising me for my complacence Yes, grown sick beyond endurance with a yearning for some thing which it could not descry, my fifteen-year-old heart would dissolve in a flood of mortified tears, and there would pass through my brain the despondent, aching thought:

“Oh, what a sad, uncomfortable world is this! How should Ossip have known so well that I should not re-correct the 6 into a 5, or that I should not tell the contractor that the men have bartered a plank for liquor?”

Again, there befell an occasion when the men stole two pounds’ weight of five vershok mandrels and bolts.

“Look here,” I said to Ossip warningly. “I am going to report this.”

“All right,” he agreed with a twitch of his grey eyebrows. “Though what such a trifle can matter I fail to see. Yes, go and report every mother’s son of them.”