but it must have been the object either of
cloaking his own laziness or of giving the men a rest. On the other
hand, whenever the contractor was present he, Ossip, bore himself with
humble obsequiousness, and continued to assume a guise of simplicity
which none the less did not prevent him, on the advent of each
Saturday, from inducing his employer to bestow a pourboire upon the
artel.

And though this same Ossip was an artelui, and a director of the artel,
his senior co-members bore him no affection, but, rather, looked upon
him as a wag or trifler, and treated him as of no importance. And,
similarly, the younger members of the artel liked well enough to listen
to his tales, but declined to take him seriously, and, in some cases,
regarded him with ill-concealed, or openly expressed, distrust.

Once the Morduine, a man of education with whom, on occasions, I held
discussions on intimate subjects, replied to a question of mine on the
subject of Ossip:

"I scarcely know. Goodness alone knows! No, I do not know anything
about him."

To which, after a pause, he added:

"Once a fellow named Mikhailo, a clever fellow who is now dead,
insulted Ossip by saying to him: 'Do you call yourself a man? Why,
regarded as a workman, you're as lifeless as a doornail, while, seeing
that you weren't born to be a master, you'll all your life continue
chattering in corners, like a plummet swinging at the end of a string!'
Yes, and that was true enough."

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 wor