"Shall we give him a tip?" they would ask, and after purposely fumbling in their purses for a long time, they would give him nothing at all.
I asked Phoma how he could go out as a waiter when he had meant to enter a monastery.
"I never meant to go into a monastery!" he replied, "and I shall not stay long as a waiter."
Four years later I met him in Tzaritzin, still a waiter in a tavern; and later still I read in a newspaper that Phoma Tuchkov had been arrested for an attempted burglary.
The history of the mason, Ardalon, moved me deeply. He was the eldest and best workman in Petr's gang. This black-bearded, light-hearted man of forty years also involuntarily evoked the query, "Why was he not the master instead of Petr?" He seldom drank vodka and hardly ever drank too much; he knew his work thoroughly, and worked as if he loved it; the bricks seemed to fly from his hands like red doves. In comparison with him, the sickly, lean Petr seemed an absolutely superfluous member of the gang. He used to speak thus of his work:
"I build stone houses for people, and a wooden coffin for myself."
But Ardalon laid his bricks with cheerful energy as he cried: "Work, my child, for the glory of God."
And he told us all that next spring he would go to Tomsk, where his brother-in-law had undertaken a large contract to build a church, and had invited him to go as overseer.
"I have made up my mind to go. Building churches is work that I love!" he said. And he suggested to me: "Come with me! It is very easy, brother, for an educated person to get on in Siberia. There, education is a trump card!"
I agreed to his proposition, and he cried triumphantly: