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And to the men themselves he shouted:

“Hi, boobies! Each of you now stands docked for some mandrels and bolts.”

“Why?” was the old soldier’s grim inquiry.

“Because you DO so stand,” carelessly retorted the other.

With snarls thereafter, the men eyed me covertly, until I began to feel that very likely I should not do as I had threatened, and even that so to do might not be expedient.

“But look here,” said I to Ossip. “I am going to give the contractor notice, and let all of you go to the devil. For if I were to remain with you much longer I too should become a thief.”

Ossip stroked his beard awhile, and pondered. Then he seated himself beside me, and said in an undertone:

“That is true.”

“Well?”

“But things are always so. The truth is that it’s time you departed. What sort of a watchman, of a checker, are you? In jobs of this kind what a man needs to know is the meaning of property. He needs to have in him the spirit of a dog, so that he shall look after his master’s stuff as he would look after the skin which his mother has put on to his own body. But you, you young puppy, haven’t the slightest notion of what property means. In fact, were anyone to go and tell Vasili Sergeitch about the way in which you keep letting us off, he’d give it you in the neck. Yes, you’re no good to him at all, but just an expense: whereas when a man serves a master he ought, do you understand, to be PROFITABLE to that master.”

He rolled and handed me a cigarette.

“Smoke this,” said he, “and perhaps it’ll make your brain work easier. If only you had been of a less awkward, uncomfortable nature, I should have said to you, ‘Go and join the priests; but, as things are, you aren’t the right sort for that–you’re too stiff and unbending, and would never make headway even with an abbot. No, you’re not the sort to play cards with. A monk is like a jackdaw–he chatters without knowing what he is chattering about, and pays no heed to the root of things, so busy is he with stuffing himself full with the grain. I say this to you with absolute earnestness, for I perceive you to be strange to our ways–a cuckoo that has blundered into the wrong nest.”

And, doffing his cap, a gesture which he never failed to execute when he had something particularly important to say, he added humbly and sonorously as he glanced at the grey firmament:

“In the sight of the Lord our ways are the ways of thieves, and such as will never gain of Him salvation.”

“And that is true enough,” responded Mokei Budirin after the fashion of a clarionet.

From that time forth, Ossip of the curly, silvered head, bright eyes, and shadowy soul became an object of agreeable interest for me. Indeed, there grew up between us a species of friendship, even though I could see that a civil bearing towards me in public was a thing that it hurt him to maintain. At all events, in the presence of others he avoided my glance, and his eyes, clear, unsullied, and fight blue in tint, wavered unsteadily, and his lips twitched and assumed an artificially unpleasant expression, while he uttered some such speech as:

“Hi, you Makarei, see that you keep your eyes open, and cam your pay, or that pig of a soldier will be making away with more nails!”

But at other times, when we were alone together, he would speak to me kindly and instructively, while his eyes would dance and gleam with a faint, grave, knowing smile, and dart blue rays direct into mine, while for my part, as I listened to his words, I took every one of them to be absolutely true and balanced, despite their strange delivery.

“A man’s duty consists in being good,” I remarked on one occasion.