“Mates!” he would exclaim them, smiling, and his lips would twitch strangely, his throat would trouble him, and for some time after starting his speech, he would cough, pressing his hand to his throat.

“We-ell?” Syomka would encourage him impatiently.

“Mates, we live like dogs.…And really much worse. And why? Nobody knows. But, it must be, by the will of the Lord God. Everything happens in accordance with His will, eh, mates? Well, then…It proves that we deserve a dog’s life because we are bad eggs. We are bad eggs, eh? Well, then…So now I say, it serves us right, dogs that we are. Am I right? So it turns out, we’ve got our deserts. And so now we must bear our lot, eh? Am I right?”

“Fool!” Syomka replied with indifference to his friend’s anxious and searching questions.

Mishka would shrink guiltily, smile timidly, and say no more, blinking his eyes that were sticky with drunkenness.

One day a piece of luck came our way.

We were shoving our way through the market place in search of work, when we came upon a wizened little old woman with a stern, wrinkled face. Her head shook, and large silver-rimmed spectacles hopped on her nose, which was like an owl’s beak; she kept adjusting them constantly, flashing sharp glances from her coldly glittering eyes.

“You’re free? Looking for work?” she asked us, as all three of us fixed her with a look of longing.

“Very well,” she said, having received from Syomka a respectful answer in the affirmative. “I have to have an old bath-house torn down and a well cleaned. How much do you want for the work?”

“We must first see how big your bath-house is, ma’am,” Syomka said politely and reasonably. “Then again, the well. There are all kinds of wells. Some of them are very deep.”

We were invited to examine the premises, and an hour later, armed with axes and wooden levers, we were lustily heaving at the rafters of the bath-house, having undertaken to tear it down and clean the well for the sum of five rubles. The bath-house was situated in the corner of an old neglected garden. Not far from it, among cherry-trees, stood a summer-house, and from the roof of the bath-house we could see the old woman sitting there on a bench, absorbed in a large book which lay open on her knees. Now and then she cast a sharp, attentive glance in our direction, the book shifted on her lap, and its massive clasps, evidently of silver, glittered in the sun.

No work goes as smoothly as that of destruction.…

We were busily moving about in clouds of dry, biting dust, sneezing, coughing, blowing our noses, and rubbing our eyes; the bath-house, as aged as its owner, was crashing and falling to pieces.

“Come on, mates, all together!” Syomka ordered us, and the beams crashed to the ground, row after row.

“What’s that book she’s got, such a thick one?” asked Mishka, reflectively, leaning on his lever and wiping the sweat from his face with the palm of his hand. Suddenly taking on the look of a mulatto, he spat on his hands, swung the lever, in order to drive it into a crack between two beams, drove it in, and added in the same reflective tone:

“If it’s the Gospels, it seems too thick.…”

“What’s that to you?” inquired Syomka.