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“I?”

“You!”

“Her? Why, that’s nothing to me—pooh!”

“We shall see!”

“You will see! Ha! ha!”

“She’ll—”

“Give me a month!”

“What a braggart you are, soldier!”

“A fortnight! I’ll prove it! Who is it? Tanya! Pooh!”

“Well, get out. You’re in my way!”

“A fortnight—and it’s done! Ah, you—”

“Get out, I say!”

Our baker, all at once, flew into a rage and brandished his shovel. The soldier staggered away from him in amazement, looked at us, paused, and softly, malignantly said, “Oh, all right, then!” and went away.

During the dispute we had all sat silent, absorbed in it. But when the soldier had gone, eager, loud talk and noise arose among us.

Someone shouted to the baker: “It’s a bad job that you’ve started, Pavel!”

“Do your work!” answered the baker savagely.

We felt that the soldier had been touched to the quick, and that danger threatened Tanya. We felt this, and at the same time we were all possessed by a burning curiosity, most agreeable to us. What would happen? Would Tanya hold out against the soldier? And almost all cried confidently: “Tanya? She’ll hold out! You won’t catch her with your bare arms!”

We longed terribly to test the strength of our idol; we were forcibly trying to persuade each other that our divinity was a strong divinity and would come victorious out of this ordeal. We began at last to fancy that we had not worked enough on the soldier, that he would forget the dispute, and that we ought to pique his vanity further. From that day we began to live a different life, a life of nervous tension, such as we had never known
before. We spent whole days in arguing together; we all grew, as it were, sharper; and got to talk more and better. It seemed to us that we were playing some sort of game with the devil, and the stake on our side was Tanya. And when we learned from the bakers that the soldier had begun “running after our Tanya,” we felt a sort of delighted terror, and life was so interesting that we did not even notice that our employer had taken advantage of our preoccupation to increase our work by three hundred pounds of dough a day. We seemed, indeed, not even tired by our work. Tanya’s name was on our lips all day long. And every day we looked for her with a certain peculiar impatience. Sometimes we pictured to ourselves that she would come to us, and it would not be the same Tanya as of old, but somehow different. We said nothing to her, however, of the dispute regarding her. We asked her no questions, and behaved as well and affectionately to her as ever. But even in this a new element crept in, alien to our old feeling for Tanya—and that new element was keen curiosity, keen and cold as a steel knife.

“Mates! Today the time’s up!” our baker said to us one morning, as he set to work.

We were well aware of it without his reminder; but still we became alert.

“Have a good look at her. She’ll be here directly,” suggested the baker.

One of us cried out in a troubled voice, “Why! as though one could see anything! You need more than eyes. ”

And again an eager, noisy discussion sprang up among us. Today we were at last to discover how pure and spotless was the vessel into which we had poured all that was best in us. This morning, for the first time, it became clear to us that we really were playing for high stakes; that we might, indeed, through the exaction of this proof of purity, lose our divinity altogether. All this time we had been hearing that Tanya was stubbornly and persistently pursued by the soldier, but not one of us had thought of asking her what she thought of him. And she came every morning to fetch her pretzels and was the same toward us as ever.