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"It will have, for this year at least, to be kept without you." Seating himself on the sand, the old soldier lit his pipe and growled: "What cowards you all are! The bank was only fifteen sazheni from us, yet you ran as though possessed!" "With you yourself as leader," put in Mokei. The old soldier took no notice, but added: "What were you all afraid of?
"If you want horses get them from the Lord Mayor, and take his three daughters, who seem quite fit for harness. Then destroy the house of Judas Petunikoff and pave the street with its timbers. By the way, Mokei, I know out of what your wife baked to-day's kalaches; out of the frames of the third window and the two steps from the roof of Judas' house."
And, doffing his cap, a gesture which he never failed to execute when he had something particularly important to say, he added humbly and sonorously as he glanced at the grey firmament: "In the sight of the Lord our ways are the ways of thieves, and such as will never gain of Him salvation." "And that is true enough," responded Mokei Budirin after the fashion of a clarionet.
Yakov understood that to beat her incautiously might be injurious to his wife. He is silent, replying to his companions' jokes with confused smiles. "Then again, what is a wife?" philosophizes the baker, Mokei Anisimoff. "A wife . . . is a friend if we look at the matter in that way. She is like a chain, chained to you for life . . . and you are both just like galley slaves.
All of which inspired Mokei Budirin, a grey-headed muzhik of a cast of countenance canine in the prominence of his jaws and the recession of his forehead, and taciturn withal, though not otherwise remarkable, to give slow, nasal utterance to his favourite formula. "That is true enough," he said.
I will walk first, and next there must come well, which is the heaviest? you, soldier, and then Mokei, and then the Morduine, and then Boev, and then Mishuk, and then Sashok, and then Makarei, the lightest of all. And do you all take off your caps before starting, and say a prayer to the Mother of God. Ha! Here is Old Father Sun coming out to greet us."
Yes, before my mind's eye there arose men drowned and devoured by crayfish, men with crumbling skulls and swollen features, and glassy, bulging eyes and puffy hands and outstretched fingers and palms of which the skin had rotted off with the damp. The first to fall in was Mokei Budirin.
And the old soldier, in support of his mate, extended his pipe towards the river, and muttered with a grin: "You want to cross to the town, do you? Well, be off with you, and though the ice may give way beneath your feet and drown you, at least you'll be taken to the police station, and so get to your festival. For that's what you want, I suppose?" "True enough," Mokei re-echoed.
Similarly, after that, did Boev, the man next in order behind Mokei, contrive to wrest himself from the grasp of the ice, though, on immersion, he started bawling, "Mates, I shall drown! I am dead already! Help me, help me!" and became so cramped with terror as to be extricated only with great difficulty, while amid the general confusion the Morduine too nearly slipped into the water.
Yakov understood that to beat her incautiously might be injurious to his wife. He is silent, replying to his companions' jokes with confused smiles. "Then again, what is a wife?" philosophises the baker, Mokei Anisimoff. "A wife ... is a friend ... if we look at the matter in that way. She is like a chain, chained to you for life ... and you are both just like galley slaves.
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