"They dig a ditch ... And what for? For slops. Why can't they just pour them out on the ground? 'Won't do. They'll smell,' they say. Get along with you! Slops smell! What stuff people do talk, just from having nothing to do. Now throw a salt cucumber[4] out. Why should it smell if it's a little one? It'll lie there a day or two, and there you are—it's gone, rotted away. If you throw a dead man out into the sun, now, he'll smell a bit, to be sure, for it's a big carcass."
[4] A very common food in Russia.—TR.
Such reasoning and conclusions on Semka's part considerably damped our ardour for work. And this was rather advantageous for us if the job was by the day, but if it was by the piece it invariably happened that we took our wages and spent them on food before the work was finished. Then we used to go to our employer to ask for a "pribavka";[5] he generally told us to clear out, and threatened, with the help of the police, to make us finish the job already paid for. We argued that we could not work hungry, and more or less hotly insisted on the "pribavka," which in the majority of cases we got. Of course it was not exactly honourable, but really it was extremely advantageous, and it is not our fault if life is so clumsily arranged that the honourable and the advantageous nearly always clash. The wages disputes with our employers Semka always took upon himself, and really he conducted them with an artist's skill, detailing the proofs of his rights in the tones of a man worn out with work and exhausted by the burden of it.
[5] Lit., "an addition," i.e. additional wage.—TR.
Meanwhile Mishka looked on in silence, and blinked his blue eyes, smiling from time to time with his good-natured, kindly smile, as if he were trying to say something but could not summon up courage. He generally spoke very little, and only when half-seas-over was he capable of delivering something like an oration.
"Bratsi!"[6] he would then cry, smiling, and his lips twitched curiously, his throat grey husky, and he would cough for some time after the beginning of the speech, pressing his hand to his throat.
[6] Diminutive of "brothers."—TR.
"W-e-ll?" would be Semka's impatient and ungracious encouragement.
"Bratsi! We live like dogs, we do. And worse even. And what for? Nobody knows. But I suppose by the will of God. Everything is done by His will—eh, bratsi? Well, then—So there ... it shows we deserve to live like dogs, for we are bad men. We're bad men, eh? Well, then—Now I say, serve'em right, the dogs. Isn't it true what I say? So it shows it's for our sins. And we must put up with it, eh? Isn't it true?"
"Fool!" briefly and indifferently answered Semka to the anxious questioning of his comrade. And the other would penitently shrink up into himself, smile timidly, and fall silent, blinking his eyes, which he could scarcely keep open from drunken sleepiness.