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Lastly he said: "This is the sixth murder which I have seen one thing and another commit." "One thing and another commit?" I queried. The reply came only after a pause; when the little muzhik asked: "What did you say? I did not quite catch it." I explained that human beings, not inanimate entities, murdered human beings.
We muzhiks are used to this," said the Muzhik, making all the preparations for the journey. He gathered swan's-down and made a couch for his two Officials, then he crossed himself and rowed off from shore. How frightened the Officials were on the way, how seasick they were during the storms, how they scolded the coarse Muzhik for his idleness, can neither be told nor described.
A wise muzhik passed by muttering: "We know everything, but are not saying anything just yet. When you don't know anything they leave you alone. Only you can't cover up your mouth with a handkerchief." Several soldiers walked past together. They bawled their indecorous songs. Their faces were grey-red in colour. They stank of sweat, putrescence, bad tobacco, and vodka.
Lower even, and more noticeably, more pretentiously, than the rest does a certain "needy" native of Tula named Konev salute each Cossack. A hardbitten muzhik as sunburnt as a stick of ergot, he has a black beard distributed irregularly over a lean face, a fawning smile, and eyes deep-sunken in their sockets.
I presume they were obliged to have him banished again, by administrative order from the Minister of the Interior, the only remedy when one of this class of exiles has served out his term, before they could sleep tranquilly. When seen in his village home, it is impossible not to admire the hard-working, intelligent, patient, gentle, and sympathetic muzhik, in spite of all his faults.
With the increase of competition among the manufacturers, the uprooting of the muzhik from the soil must go on more and more rapidly, because employers must insist more and more on having thoroughly trained operatives ready to work steadily all the year round. This state of things had a curious effect on the course of the revolutionary movement.
You don't yet understand the Russian muzhik!" In this last remark I was obliged to concur, but since that time I have come to know the muzhik better, and an incident of the kind would now no longer surprise me.
"And I am one of those men do you remember? who sit on a scaffolding hung by ropes from the roofs and paint the outside walls. I am one of those who crawl about on the roofs like flies. That is what I am," replied the Muzhik. The Muzhik now pondered long and heavily on how to give great pleasure to his Officials, who had been so gracious to him, the lazy-bones, and had not scorned his work.
In the ordinary intercourse of peasants among themselves, or with people in whom they have confidence, I do not believe that the habit of lying is abnormally developed. It is only when the muzhik comes in contact with authorities that he shows himself an expert fabricator of falsehoods. In this there is nothing that need surprise us.
The muzhik is a very matter-of-fact practical person, totally incapable of understanding what Americans call "hifalutin" tendencies in speech and conduct, and as he listened to the preaching of the new Gospel doubts and questionings spontaneously rose in his mind: "What do those young people, who betray their gentlefolk origin by their delicate white hands, their foreign phrases, their ignorance of the common things of everyday peasant life, really want?
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