Bartek was a temporary inhabitant of this desert solitude. He was a very respectable man, but a kind of fatality hung over him; he was industrious and honest, yet he had never been able to find an occupation in which he could display his qualities and draw attention to himself. He had come here not long beforehand, attracted by the promises of some emigration agents. The promises had not been fulfilled, and Bartek, taking advantage in the meantime of this shelter, was only waiting for the frosts to abate a little before setting out on his return journey. He was a grave man—in fact, almost too serious. He did not care for idle talk, and rarely started a conversation; but when he did speak, it was always laconically and with decision, brooking no contradiction. As the representative of a class which for long ages had been fairly privileged, he was an ardent Conservative, and did not admit the desirability of social reform. "A dog is a dog, and a sheep is a sheep," was his maxim. He raised the authority of his moral leaders almost to a religious cult, and it was not always safe to express an opinion before him, which even remotely reflected on the authority he acknowledged.
"Who says so?" Bartek would ask threateningly on such occasions. And when he was not too much irritated, and able to control himself, he would shake his thick fist in the speaker's face, and solemnly announce:
In the other equally large room two more permanent inhabitants of this solitude were to be found: the locksmith, Porankiewicz, and the ex-landowner, once Pan Feliks Babiński.
If Horodelski was a man standing on the edge of a precipice, Porankiewicz had rolled to the very bottom long ago. When I went into the room, he was scraping together something near the little table which he called his bench. He was pale, thin, and very small, and appeared still smaller owing to his stoop; few quite old men would walk more bent.
"Do hold yourself straight just for once," I often used to say to him.
"Hah, hah, hah!" Porankiewicz would laugh good-naturedly; "only the ground, the ground, my dear sir, will straighten me. I have sat working from morning till night since I was ten years old, and even steel gets bent at last."
This man's life was a real Odyssey—only he, poor wretch! was no Odysseus. Ill-fortune had driven him through all parts of Siberia, and it was his lot to breathe his last in the worst of them.
Babiński was asleep when I went in, but our conversation woke him, and he got up. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had a strong physique, and his dark face with large projecting eyebrows and surrounded by a beard as black as coal, always had a stern expression. I never saw him moved to tears; when something touched him very deeply, he would only blink hard and stretch out his hand for the vodka. He was indefatigable and competent and knew how to work and had worked like an ox until two years previously, when he had begun to drink desperately. "He has either been 'overlooked' or he has a screw loose," Bartek used to say of him. So now he seemed to be lost irretrievably, although under favourable circumstances he might perhaps yet draw himself out of the abyss into which he had rolled; for he was a man of exceptionally strong character.
There are black cart-horses in Russia, called "bitiugs," which are bad-tempered, tall, and uncommonly strong. These animals walk with an even, measured step, and without the least effort. When you inquire what weight they are drawing, you will find that it is at least sixty poods, and they frequently draw a hundred.