“Tiverzin! Kuprik!” several voices called to him from the darkness. In front of the workshops stood a bunch of people. Inside there was shouting and a child’s weeping could be heard. “Kiprian Savelyevich, step in for the boy,” said some woman in the crowd.
The old master Pyotr Khudoleev was again giving a habitual hiding to his victim, the young apprentice Yusupka.
Khudoleev had not always been a torturer of apprentices, a drunkard and a heavy-fisted brawler. Time was when merchants’ and priests’ daughters from the industrial suburbs near Moscow cast long glances at the dashing workman. But Tiverzin’s mother, to whom he proposed just after she graduated from the diocesan girls’ school, refused him and married his comrade, the locomotive engineer Savely Nikitich Tiverzin.
In the sixth year of her widowhood, after the terrible death of Savely Nikitich (he was burned up in 1888 in one of the sensational train collisions of that time), Pyotr Petrovich renewed his suit, and again Marfa Gavrilovna refused him. After that Khudoleev started drinking and became violent, settling accounts with the whole world, which was to blame, as he was convinced, for his present misfortunes.
Yusupka was the son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from the Tiverzins’ courtyard. Tiverzin protected the boy in the workshops. This added heat to Khudoleev’s dislike of him.
“Look how you’re holding your file, you slope-head,” Khudoleev shouted, pulling Yusupka’s hair and beating him on the neck. “Is that any way to file down a casting? I’m asking you, are you going to foul up the work for me, you Kasimov bride,2 allah-mullah, slant-eyes?”
“Ow, I won’t, mister, ow, ow, I won’t, I won’t, ow, that hurts!”
“A thousand times he’s been told, first bring the mandril under, then tighten the stop, but no, he’s got his own way. Nearly broke the spendler on me, the son of a bitch.”
“I didn’t touch the spindle, mister, by God, I didn’t.”
“Why do you tyrannize the boy?” asked Tiverzin, squeezing through the crowd.
“Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business,” Khudoleev snapped.
“I’m asking you, why do you tyrannize the boy?”
“And I’m telling you to shove the hell off, social commander. Killing’s too good for him, the scum, he nearly broke the spendler on me. He can go on his knees to me for getting off alive, the slant-eyed devil—I just boxed his ears and pulled his hair a little.”
“So according to you, Uncle Khudolei, he should have his head torn off for it? You really ought to be ashamed. An old master, gray in your hair, but no brains in your head.”
“Shove off, shove off, I said, while you’re still in one piece. I’ll knock your soul through your shoes for teaching me, you dog’s ass! You got made on the ties, fish-blood, right under your father’s nose. I know your mother, the wet-tail, all too well, the mangy cat, the skirt-dragger!”
What came next took no more than a minute. They each grabbed the first thing that came to hand among the heavy tools and pieces of iron that lay about on the machines, and they would have killed each other if at that same moment people had not rushed in a mob to pull them apart. Khudoleev and Tiverzin stood, their heads lowered, their foreheads almost touching, pale, with bloodshot eyes. They were unable to speak from agitation. Their arms were seized and held tightly from behind. At moments, gathering their strength, they would try to tear free, their whole bodies writhing and dragging the comrades who were hanging on to them. Hooks and buttons were torn from their clothes, their jackets and shirts were pulled from their bared shoulders. The disorderly uproar around them would not quiet down.
“The chisel! Take the chisel from him—he’ll split his skull.” “Easy, easy, Uncle Pyotr, we’ll sprain your arm.” “Are we just going to keep dancing around them? Pull them apart, lock them up, and be done with it.”
Suddenly, with a superhuman effort, Tiverzin shook off the tangle of bodies holding him and, breaking free of them, found himself running for the door. They were about to rush after him, but, seeing that he had something else in mind, let him go. He went out, slamming the door, and marched off without looking back. He was surrounded by autumnal dampness, night, darkness. “You reach them a hand and they bite it off,” he muttered, having no idea where he was going or why.
This world of baseness and falsity, where a well-fed little lady dares to look like that at witless working people, and the drunken victim of this order finds pleasure in jeering at one of his own kind, this world was now more hateful to him than ever. He walked quickly, as if the speed of his pace could bring closer the time when everything in the world would be as reasonable and harmonious as it now was in his feverish head. He knew that their strivings in recent days, the disorders on the line, the speeches at meetings, and their decision to go on strike—not yet brought to fulfillment, but also not renounced—were all separate parts of that great path which still lay before them.
But now his excitement had reached such a degree that he was impatient to run the whole of that distance at once, without stopping for breath. He did not realize where he was going with such long strides, but his feet knew very well where they were taking him.
Tiverzin did not suspect for a long time that, after he and Antipov left the dugout, the committee had decided to start the strike that same evening. The members of the committee at once assigned who among them was to go where and who would relieve whom. When the hoarse, gradually clearing and steadying signal burst from the engine repair shop, as if from the bottom of Tiverzin’s soul, a crowd from the depot and the freight yard was already moving towards the city from the semaphore at the entrance, merging with a new crowd which, at Tiverzin’s whistle, had dropped their work in the boiler room.
For many years Tiverzin thought that he alone had stopped all work and movement on the railway that night. Only later trials, in which he was judged collectively and the accusations did not include inciting to strike, led him out of that error.
People came running out, asking: “Why is the whistle blowing?” The response came from the darkness: “Are you deaf? Can’t you hear? It’s the alarm. There’s a fire.” “But where is it?” “Must be somewhere, since the whistle’s blowing.”
Doors banged, new people came out. Other voices were heard. “Go on—a fire! Country hicks! Don’t listen to the fool. It’s what’s called a walkout, understand? Here’s my hat and here’s the door, I’m not your servant anymore. Let’s go home, boys.”
More and more people joined in. The railway was on strike.
7
