"Make a list of the things and take them all to the store-room."
And he would take them home with him from the store-room, telling me sometimes to cross them off the list.
I did not love "things"; I had no desire to possess them; even books were an embarrassment to me. I had none of my own, save the little volumes of Béranger and the songs of Heine. I should have liked to obtain Pushkin, but the book-dealer in the town was an evil old man, who asked a great deal too much for Pushkin's works. The furniture, carpets, and mirrors, which bulked so largely in my master's house, gave me no pleasure, irritated me by their melancholy clumsiness and smell of paint and lacquer. Most of all I disliked the mistress's room, which reminded me of a trunk packed with all kinds of useless, superfluous objects. And I was disgusted with my master for bringing home other people's things from the storehouse. Queen Margot's rooms had been cramped too, but they were beautiful in spite of it.
Life, on the whole, seemed to me to be a disconnected, absurd affair; there was too much of the obviously stupid about it. Here we were building shops which the floods inundated in the spring, soaking through the floors, making the outer doors hang crooked. When the waters subsided the joists had begun to rot. Annually the water had overflowed the market-place for the last ten years, spoiling the buildings and the bridges. These yearly floods did enormous damage, and yet they all knew that the waters would not be diverted of themselves.
Each spring the breaking of the ice cut up the barges, and dozens of small vessels. The people groaned and built new ones, which the ice again broke. It was like a ridiculous treadmill whereon one remains always in the same place. I asked Osip about it. He looked amazed, and then laughed.
"Oh, you heron! What a young heron he is! What is it to do with you at all? What is it to you, eh?"
But then he spoke more gravely, although he could not extinguish the light of merriment in his pale blue eyes, which had a clearness not belonging to old age.
"That's a very intelligent observation! Let us suppose that the affair does not concern you; all the same it may be worth something to you to understand it. Take this case, for example—"
And he related in a dry speech, interspersed lavishly with quaint sayings, unusual comparisons, and all kinds of drollery:
"Here is a case where people are to be pitied; they have only a little land, and in the springtime the Volga overflows its banks, carries away the earth, and lays it upon its own sand-banks. Then others complain that the bed of the Volga is choked up. The springtime streams and summer rains tear up the gulleys, and again earth is carried away to the river."