Gregor Lukitch sneered. “Oh, you ancients!” he pronounced. “To listen to you one would think you had never been serfs, slaves, wretched creatures crushed by oppressors, victims of a tyrannical system that rested like a curse upon you, and still bears its bitter fruits. Good Barines say you? Ach! You make me sick.”
This lofty flight of words was rather lost upon the audience, but a few vague murmurs of approbation were heard to proceed from the corner where the younger men had congregated to smoke vile cigarettes—like kerosene-lamps, cigarettes are modern “luxuries” among the Russian peoples. Indeed, to indulge in “paper pipes”—as they are called—is looked upon as a sign of independence and enlightenment. Unfortunately those obtainable there by the masses are beyond all description offensive, and even the speaker’s nostrils, accustomed as they were to the terrible savor of public gatherings, began to quiver queerly.
“Gott verdamm!” he swore in a most un-Russian way, but happily quite under his breath. “Why do you little fathers persist in rotting the atmosphere with your beastly cigarettes? Here, have some decentish cigars. At any rate, they’ll not poison us!” Which was not strictly true, since the packet of “Perfectos” he pulled from a capacious pocket were, to say the best one could for them, rolled from nicotine-soaked cabbage-leaf, and dangerous-looking at that. The mujik is not particular, however, and cigars are to him the absolute complement of wealth and luxury; so with immense gratitude were the “delicacies” accepted and retained, excepting by the staròstá and the elder, who knew better than to be tempted.
“If I were you,” the irrepressible Gregor now went on, “I would speedily put myself in a position to live on the fat of the land, eat my fill, drink something better than government vòdka, and enjoy life while I’ve got it to enjoy.”
“What’s the matter with government vòdka?” asked a tall, upstanding chap, blond and blue and pink as the staròstá was, but with less of that worthy person’s dullness. “It’s strong and cheap, isn’t it? Much cheaper than when we had to buy it from the Jew innkeepers.”
Gregor brought his shoulders to a level with the top of his small, flat, lobeless ears.
“You make me sweat!” he said, with ineffable contempt. “You’d be satisfied with anything, as long as you can burn your foolish throats with strong alcohol. Why, I tell you”—and here he beat one dirty fist into a grimier palm, the better to emphasize his point—“the government is getting millions out of you, jackasses that you are; and what do you get in return? Why, stuff not fit to wash horses’ feet with. Cheap! No! A thousand times no, not at the price your guts pay for it. Then, also, it stupefies your brains that, by G––, don’t need it! And that’s just what the government wants—to make you more imbecile than you already are. When you had to sell your harvests before they were out of the ground, in order to buy enough to get drunk as often as you could, sometimes you stopped to think. Now, with your nasty little cheap bottlefuls of ‘destroyer’ that you stow in all your pockets, and guzzle from morning till night, it’s much worse. You’re never sober. Oh, you can look at me! I don’t care. I’m speaking the truth. And who have you to thank for all this? Why, your ‘good Barines,’ of course, your high lords who make the laws and keep you idiots under their thumbs. Government monopoly! Yah! Perhaps you were thinking that was all arranged for your benefit. But you are sheep, nothing else but sheep, grazing where you chance to be put, whether the grass is long or short, dry or juicy, never once dreaming of seeking new pastures to fill your bellies full.”
He paused, expelled a generous cloud of smoke from his well-trained lungs, and glanced triumphantly about him. The listeners were becoming interested, as was testified by varied and guttural grunts. The staròstá alone did not seem to relish the joke.
“You might talk more politely of my vòdka, you there!” he commented, raising his ponderous bulk from the bench near the stove. “I don’t get it for nothing, if I do sell it cheap! The government doesn’t make me a present of it, does it?”
The man opened his displeasing mouth wide, and laughed from the tonsils forward, his small, red-rimmed eyes disappearing almost completely in his bilious, moon-shaped face.