ion. But we even abused one
another very seldom. Of what can a man be guilty when he is half
dead, when he is like a statue, when all his feelings are crushed
under the weight of toil? But silence is terrible and painful only
to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to
those who never had anything to say--to them silence is simple and
easy. . . . Sometimes we sang, and our song began thus: During work
some one would suddenly heave a sigh, like that of a tired horse, and
would softly start one of those drawling songs, whose touchingly
caressing tune always gives ease to the troubled soul of the singer.
One of us sang, and at first we listened in silence to his lonely
song, which was drowned and deafened underneath the heavy ceiling of
the cellar, like the small fire of a wood-pile in the steppe on a
damp autumn night, when the gray sky is hanging over the earth like a
leaden roof. Then another joined the singer, and now, two voices
soar softly and mournfully over the suffocating heat of our narrow
ditch. And suddenly a few more voices take up the song--and the song
bubbles up like a wave, growing stronger, louder, as though moving
asunder the damp, heavy walls of our stony prison.

All the twenty-six sing; loud voices, singing in unison, fill the
workshop; the song has no room there; it strikes against the stones
of the walls, it moans and weeps and reanimates the heart by a soft
tickling pain, irritating old wounds and rousing sorrow.

The singers breathe deeply and heavily; some one unexpectedly leaves
off his song and listens for a long time to the singing of his
companions, and again his voice joins the general wave. Another
mournfully exclaims, Eh! sings, his eyes closed, and it may be that
the wide, heavy wave of sound appears to him like a road leading
somewhere far away, like a wide road, lighted by the brilliant sun,
and he sees himself walking there. . . .

The flame is constantly trembling in the oven, the baker's shovel is
scraping against the brick, the water in the kettle is purring, and
the reflection of the fire is trembling on the wall, laughing in
silence. . . . And we sing away, with some one else's words, our
dull sorrow, the heavy grief of living men, robbed of sunshine, the
grief of slaves. Thus we lived, twenty-six of us, in the cellar of a
big stony house, and it was hard for us to live as though all the
three stories of the house had been built upon our should