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s wife, still in the same pose as though she had not moved since morning. She was waiting for her husband, who was getting his money.
    Suddenly sleet began to fall. The coachman climbed down from his box to put up the leather hood. While he tugged at the stiff struts, one leg braced against the back of the carriage, Fuflygin sat admiring the silver beads of sleet glittering in the light of the office lamps; her unblinking dreamy eyes were fixed on a point above the heads of the workers in a manner suggesting that her glance could, in case of need, go through them as through sleet or mist.
    Tiverzin caught sight of her expression. It gave him a turn. He walked past without greeting her and decided to call for his wages later, so as not to run into her husband at the office. He crossed over to the darker side of the square, toward the workshops and the black shape of the turntable with tracks fanning out from it toward the depot.
    " Tiverzin! Kuprik! " Several voices called out of the darkness. There was a little crowd outside the workshops. Inside, someone was yelling and a boy was crying. " Do go in and help that boy, Kuprian Savelievich, " said a woman in the crowd.
    As usual, the old foreman, Piotr Khudoleiev, was walloping his young apprentice Yusupka.
    Khudoleiev had not always been a tormentor of apprentices and a brawling drunkard. There had been a time when, as a dashing young workman, he had attracted the admiring glances of merchants ' and priests ' daughters in Moscow ' s industrial suburbs. But the girl he courted, Marfa, who had graduated that year from the diocesan convent school, had turned him down and had married his comrade, the mechanic Savelii Nikitich, Tiverzin ' s father.
    Five years after Savelii ' s horrible end (he was burned to death in the sensational railway crash of 1888) Khudoleiev renewed his suit, but again Marfa Gavrilovna rejected him. So Khudoleiev took to drink and rowdiness, trying to get even with a world which was to blame, so he believed, for all his misfortunes.
    Yusupka was the son of Gimazetdin, the janitor at the block of tenements where Tiverzin lived. Tiverzin had taken the boy under his wing, and this added fuel to Khudoleiev ' s hostility.
    " Is that the way to hold a file, you Asiatic? " bellowed Khudoleiev, dragging Yusupka by the hair and pummelling the back of his neck. " Is that the way to strip down a casting, you slit-eyed Tartar? "
    " Ouch, I won ' t do it any more, mister, ow, I won ' t do it any more, ouch, it hurts! "
    " He ' s been told a thousand times: first adjust the mandrel and then screw up the chuck, but no, he must do it his own way! Nearly broke the spindle, the bastard. "
    " I didn ' t touch the spindle, honest I didn ' t. "
    " Why do you tyrannize the boy? " asked Tiverzin, elbowing his way through the crowd.
    " It ' s none of your business, " Khudoleiev snapped.
    " I ' m asking you why you tyrannize the boy. "
    " And I ' m telling you to move off before there ' s trouble, you socialist meddler. Killing ' s too good for him, such scum, he nearly broke my spindle. He should thank his lucky stars he ' s still alive, the slit-eyed devil—all I did was tweak his ears and pull his hair a bit. "
    " So you think he should be beheaded for this. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, really, an old foreman like you—you ' ve got gray hair but you still haven ' t learned sense. "
    " Move on, move on, I tell you, while you ' re still in one piece. I ' ll knock the stuffing out of you, preaching at me, you dog ' s arse. You were made on the tracks, you jellyfish, under your father ' s very nose. I know your mother, the slut, the mangy cat, the crumpled skirt! "
    What happened next was over in a minute. Both men seized the first thing that came to hand on the lathe benches where heavy tools and pieces of iron were lying about, and would have killed each other if the crowd had not rushed in to separate them. Khudoleiev and Tiverzin stood with their heads bent down, their