| IN AN UNFINISHED HOUSE in Varvarka, the lower part of which was a pot-house, there were sounds of drunken brawling and singing. Some ten factory hands were sitting on benches at tables in a little, dirty room. Tipsy, sweating, blear-eyed, with wide-gaping mouths, bloated with drink, they were singing some sort of a song. They were singing discordantly, with toil, with labour, not because they wanted to sing, but simply to betoken that they were drunk, and were enjoying themselves. One of them, a tall, flaxen-headed fellow, in a clean, blue long coat was standing over the rest. His face, with its straight, fine nose, would have been handsome, but for the thick, compressed, continually twitching lips and the lustreless, staring, and frowning eyes. He was standing over the singers, and, obviously with some notion in his head, was making solemn and angular passes over their heads with his bare, white arm, while he tried to spread his dirty fingers out unnaturally wide apart. The sleeve of his coat was incessantly slipping down, and the young fellow kept carefully tucking it up again with his left hand, as though there was something of special significance requiring that white, sinewy, waving arm to be bare. In the middle of the song, shouts and blows were heard in the passage and the porch. The tall fellow waved his arms. “Shut up!” he shouted peremptorily. “A fight, lads!” and still tucking up his sleeves, he went out to the porch. The factory hands followed him. They had brought the tavern- keeper some skins that morning from the factory, had had drink given them for this service, and had been drinking under the leadership of the tall young man. The blacksmiths working in a smithy hard by heard the sounds of revelry in the pothouse, and supposing the house had been forcibly broken into, wanted to break in too. A conflict was going on in the porch. The tavern-keeper was fighting with a blacksmith in the doorway, and at the moment when the factory hands emerged, the smith had reeled away from the tavern-keeper, and fallen on his face on the pavement. Another smith dashed in at the door, staggering with his chest against the tavern-keeper. The young man with the sleeve tucked up, as he went, dealt a blow in the face of the smith who had dashed in at the door, and shouted wildly: “Lads! they are beating our mates!” Meanwhile, the smith got up from the ground, and with blood spurting from his bruised face, cried in a wailing voice: “Help! They have killed me …! They have killed a man! Mates! …” “Oy, mercy on us, killed entirely, a man killed!” squealed a woman, coming out of the gates next door. A crowd of people gathered round the blood-stained smith. “Haven’t you ruined folks enough, stripping the shirts off their backs?” said a voice, addressing the tavern-keeper; “and so now you have murdered a man! Blackguard!” The tall young man standing on the steps turned his bleared eyes from the tavern-keeper to the smiths, as though considering with which to fight. “Cut-throat!” he cried suddenly at the tavern-keeper. “Lads, bind him!” “Indeed, and you try and bind a man like me!” bawled the tavern-keeper, tearing himself away from the men who threw themselves on him, and taking off his cap, he flung it on the ground. As though this act had some mysterious and menacing significance, the factory hands, who had surrounded the tavern-keeper, stood still in uncertainty. “I know the law, mate, very well, I do. I’ll go to the police. Are you thinking I won’t find them? Robbery’s not the order of the day for any one!” bawled the tavern-keeper, picking up his cap. “And go we will, so there!” … “And go we will … so there!” the tavern-keeper and the tall fellow repeated after one another, and both together moved forward along the street. The blood-bespattered smith walked on a level with them. The factory-hands and a mob of outsiders followed them with talk and shouting. At the corner of Maroseyka, opposite a great house with closed shutters, and the signboard of a bootmaker, stood a group of some twenty bootmakers, thin, exhausted-looking men, with dejected faces, in loose smocks, and torn coats. “He ought to pay folks properly!” a thin boot hand, with a scant beard and scowling brows, was saying. “He’s sucked the life-blood out of us, and then he’s quit of us. He’s been promising and promising us all the week. And now he’s driven us to the last point, and he’s made off.” Seeing the mob and the blood-bespattered smith, the man paused, and the bootmakers with inquisitive eagerness joined the moving crowd. “Where are the folks going?” “Going to the police, to be sure.” “Is it true we are beaten?” “Why, what did you think? Look what folks are saying!” Questions and answers were audible. The tavern-keeper, taking advantage of the increased numbers of the rabble, dropped behind the mob, and went back to his tavern. The tall young fellow, not remarking the disappearance of his foe, the tavern-keeper, still moved his bare arm and talked incessantly, attracting the attention of all. The mob pressed about his figure principally, expecting to get from him some solution of the questions that were absorbing all of them. “Let them show the order, let him show the law, that’s what the government’s for! Isn’t it the truth I am saying, good Christian folk?” said the tall young man, faintly smiling. “Does he suppose there’s no government? Could we do without government? Wouldn’t there be plenty to rob us, eh?” “Why talk nonsense!” was murmured in the crowd. “Why, will they leave Moscow like this! They told you a lot of stuff in joke, and you believed them. Haven’t we troops enough? No fear, they won’t let him enter! That’s what the government’s for. Ay, listen what folks are prating of!” they said, pointing to the tall fellow. By the wall of the Kitay-Gorod there was another small group of people gathered about a man in a frieze coat, who held a paper in his hand. “A decree, a decree being read! A decree is being read,” was heard in the crowd, and the mob surged round the reader. The man in the frieze coat was reading the placard of the 31st of August. When the mob crowded round, he seemed disconcerted, but at the demand of the tall fellow who pressed close up to him, he began with a faint quiver in his voice reading the notice again from the beginning. “Early to-morrow I am going to his highness the prince,” he read (“his highness!” the tall young man repeated, with a triumphant smile and knitted brows), “to consult with him, to act and to aid the troops to exterminate the wretches; we, too, will destroy them root and branch …” the reader went on and paused (“D’ye see?” bawled the tall fellow with an air of victory. “He’ll unravel the whole evil for you …”) “and send our visitors packing to the devil; I shall come back to dinner, and we will set to work, we will be doing till we have done, and done away with the villains.” These last words were uttered by the reader in the midst of complete silence. The tall fellow’s head sank dejectedly. It was obvious that nobody had understood these last words. The words “I shall come back to dinner” in especial seemed to offend both reader and audience. The faculties of the crowd were strained to the highest pitch, and this was too easy and unnecessarily simple; it was just what any one of them might have said, and what for that reason could not be said in a decree coming from a higher authority. All stood in depressed silence. The tall fellow’s lips moved, and he staggered. “Ask him! … Isn’t that himself? … How’d it be to ask him! Or else … He’ll explain …” was suddenly heard in the back rows of the crowd, and the general attention turned to the chaise of the head of the police, which drove into the square, escorted by two mounted dragoons. The head of the police, who had driven out that morning by Count Rastoptchin’s command to set fire to the barques in the river, and had received for that commission a large sum of money, at that moment in his pocket, ordered his coachman to stop on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him. “What are those people?” he shouted to the people, who timidly approached the chaise in detached groups. “What is this crowd, I ask you?” repeated the head of police, receiving no reply. “Your honour,” said the man in the frieze coat, “it was their wish, your honour, not sparing their substance, in accord with his excellency the count’s proclamation, to serve, and not to make a riot at all, as his excellency said …” “The count has not gone, he is here, and will give orders about you,” said the head of police. “Go on!” he said to his coachman. The crowd stood still, pressing round those who had heard what was said by the official, and looking at the departing chaise. The head of the police meantime looked about him in alarm, and said something to his coachman; the horses trotted faster. “Cheated, mates! Lead us to himself!” bawled the voice of the tall fellow. “Don’t let him go, lads! Let him answer for it! Keep him!” roared voices, and the crowd dashed full speed after the chaise. The mob in noisy talk pursued the head of the police to Lubyanka. “Why, the gentry and the tradespeople are all gone, and we are left to perish. Are we dogs, pray?” was heard more frequently in the crowd. |
