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Creatures That Once Were Men | Maxim Gorky | |
Twenty-Six Men And A Girl |
Page 4 of 12 |
And beside~though our life of penal labor had made us dull beasts, oxen, we were still men, and, like all men, could not live without worshipping something or other. Better than her we had none, and none but her took any notice of us, living in the cellar--no one, though there were dozens of people in the house. And then, to--most likely, this was the chief thing--we all regarded her as something of our own, something existing as it were only by virtue of our kringels. We took on ourselves in turns the duty of providing her with hot kringels, and this became for us like a daily sacrifice to our idol, it became almost a sacred rite, and every day it bound us more closely to her. Besides kringels, we gave Tanya a great deal of advice to wear warmer clothes, not to run upstairs too quickly, not to carry heavy bundles of wood. She listened to all our counsels with a smile, answered them by a laugh, and never took our advice, but we were not offended at that; all we wanted was to show how much care we bestowed upon her. Often she would apply to us with different requests, she asked us, for instance; to open the heavy door into the store-cellar, and to chop wood: with delight and a sort of pride, we did this for her, and everything else she wanted. But when one of us asked her to mend his solitary shirt for him, she said, with a laugh of contempt: "What next! A likely idea!" |
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Creatures That Once Were Men Maxim Gorky |
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