We struggled on, living from hand to mouth,[3] and all three of us felt a very natural and lawful dissatisfaction with our fate. Sometimes this took an acute form, giving us a hostile feeling to all around us, and drawing us into somewhat riotous exploits provided for in the "Statutes on Penalties inflicted by the Justices of the Peace"; but as a rule we were weighed down by a dull melancholy, anxiously preoccupied in the search of a meagre earning, and responded but feebly to all those impressions which we could not turn to material advantage. In our spare time—and there was always more of it than we required—we built castles in the air. Semka, the eldest and most matter-of-fact of us, was a thick-set, Penza-born peasant. He used to be a gardener, but, ruined by drink, as fate willed it, he struck at the town of K—— a year ago, on his way to the Nigny Fair, where he hoped somehow to "get on." His dreams, the embittered sceptic's, took a clear and definite form. He required but little.
"Damn my soul!"[3] he used to say, when we, lying on our empty stomachs on the ground, somewhere in the shade, beyond the town, tried to illumine our future, little by little, but insistently looking into its darkness.
[3] The Russian exclamation has no English equivalent.—TR.
"If I could just cut to Siberia. I'd make my way there, meet a good business-like man, apprentice myself to him directly. 'Take me, mate,' I'd say, 'to share your luck. Pals in prison, pals in hunger.' Then I'd polish off one or two little jobs with him. That would be something like. Ye-es."
"Why should you go to Siberia particularly?" I asked him once.
"Why? It's there the real smart ones are, man. Lots of 'em—easy to find. But here—here you can't for the life of you find a good one. As for trying alone, you'd only go hang for nothing. Not used to it. Skill it wants—experience."
Mishka could not express his dreams in words, but there was not the slightest doubt that he dreamed continually and persistently. You had but to look at his good-natured blue eyes, always gazing into space, at his gentle tipsy smile, constantly parting his thick moustache and beard, which always contained some extraneous matter, such as bird's feathers, bits of straw, a shaving or two, breadcrumbs, pieces of eggshell, etc.; you had but to glance at his simple open face to see in him the typical peasant-dreamer. I had my dreams too, but the direction of my thoughts is even now interesting to no one but myself.
We had all three met in a night shelter a fortnight or so before the incident I want to describe, deeming it interesting. In a day or two we were friends—that is, went everywhere together, told each other our aims and wishes, divided everything that fell to one equally amongst us, and, in fact, made a tacit defensive and offensive alliance against Life, which treated us in an extremely hostile manner.
During the day we tried with great energy to find something to saw or take to pieces, to pull down, to dig, to carry, and, if such an opportunity occurred, at first set to work with a will.
But, perhaps because each of us in his heart thought himself destined for the fulfilment of higher-business than, for instance, the digging of cesspools, or cleaning them, which is still worse, I may add, for the information of those not initiated into that art, after some two hours of the work our ardour somewhat abated. Then Semka would begin to doubt its necessity.