War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [575]
“Enough!” he cried imperiously. “There’s a fight, boys!” And, ceaselessly pushing up his sleeve, he went out to the porch.
The factory workers followed him. The factory workers drinking in the pot-house that morning, under the leadership of the tall fellow, had brought the landlord some leather from the factory, and for that he had given them vodka. The blacksmiths from the neighboring smithies, hearing noises of carousing in the pot-house and supposing it had been broken into, wanted to force their way in. A fight started on the porch.
The landlord was fighting with a blacksmith in the doorway, and just as the factory workers came out, the blacksmith tore himself away from the landlord and fell facedown on the pavement.
Another blacksmith was straining in the doorway, heaving the whole weight of his chest against the landlord.
The fellow with the pushed-up sleeve, still in motion, hit the blacksmith straining in the doorway in the face and shouted wildly:
“Hey! they’re beating our boys!”
Just then the first blacksmith got up from the ground and, scraping at the blood on his smashed-in face, cried in a tearful voice:
“Help! Murder!…A man’s been killed! Brothers!…”
“Good heavens, they’ve killed him, they’ve killed a man!” shrieked a woman who came out of the neighboring gates. A crowd of people gathered around the blood-smeared blacksmith.
“It’s not enough that you rob people, take the shirts off their backs,” someone’s voice said, addressing the landlord, “did you have to go and kill the man? Brigand!”
The tall fellow, standing on the porch, shifted his bleary eyes from the landlord to the blacksmiths and back, as if considering whom he should fight now.
“Fiend!” he suddenly cried to the landlord. “Tie him up, boys!”
“Sure, just you try it!” cried the landlord, waving away the men who came at him, and, tearing his hat off, he flung it on the ground. As if this act had some mysterious threatening significance, the workmen who surrounded the landlord stopped in indecision.
“I know the rules, brother, I know them perfectly! I’ll take it to the police. You think I won’t? Nobody’s given any orders for robbery lately!” cried the landlord, picking up his hat.
“Let’s go, then! Let’s go!…” the landlord and the tall fellow repeated one after the other, and they both set off down the street. The blood-smeared blacksmith walked beside them. The workmen and some other people, talking and shouting, followed after them.
At the corner of Maroseika, across from a big house with closed shutters on which a cobbler’s shingle hung, stood some twenty cobblers with glum faces—thin, worn-out men in smocks and tattered coats.
“He ought to square it properly with people!” a skinny artisan with a sparse beard and frowning eyebrows was saying. “Or else, what, he’s sucked our blood—and he’s quits. He led us on, led us on—for a whole week. And now he’s brought it to the final end, and off he goes.”
Seeing the people and the blood-smeared man, the talking workman fell silent, and the cobblers, with hasty curiosity, all joined the moving crowd.
“Where are these people going?”
“To the authorities, sure enough.”
“So, is it true our forces weren’t up to it?”
“And what do you think? Look at what people are saying.”
There were more questions and answers. The landlord, taking advantage of the increased crowd, fell behind and went back to his pot-house.
The tall fellow, not noticing the disappearance of his enemy, the landlord, swinging his bared arm, never stopped talking, attracting general attention to himself. People pressed mainly around him, supposing they would receive answers from him to the questions that occupied them.
“He should show order, show the law, that’s what the authorities are there for! Is it right what I’m saying, good Christian people?” the tall fellow said with a barely perceptible smile.
“Does he think there are no authorities? Can we do without the authorities? There’s enough thievery as it is.”
“Why this