Suddenly he interrupted the manager to ask, “Look here – who’s that girl?”
Shelkovnikov glanced out of the window.
“There, that one with the yellow feather in her hat.” Kvashnin pointed impatiently.
“Oh, that one?” With an eager look the manager bent to Kvashnin’s ear and whispered mysteriously in French, “She’s the daughter of our warehouse manager. His name is Zinenko.”
Kvashnin nodded heavily. Shelkovnikov resumed his report, but his chief interrupted him again.
“Zinenko?” he drawled thoughtfully, staring out of the window. “Which Zinenko is that? Where have I heard the name?”
“He’s in charge of our warehouse,” Shelkovnikov said again respectfully, with deliberate indifference.
“Oh, yes, now I remember,” said Kvashnin. “They told me about him in Petersburg. All right, go on, please.”
Nina realized by her infallible feminine intuition that just then Kvashnin was looking at her and speaking about her. She turned slightly away, but still Kvashnin could see her face, rosy with coquettish pleasure and showing all its pretty moles.
At last the report was finished, and Kvashnin passed into the roomy glass compartment built at the end of the carriage.
It was a moment which Bobrov thought would have been well worth perpetuating with a good camera. Kvashnin lingered for some reason behind the glass wall, his bulky figure towering above the group that clustered round the carriage entrance, his feet planted wide apart and his face wearing a sullen look, the whole giving the impression of a crudely wrought Japanese idol. The great man’s immobility apparently dismayed those who had come to meet him: the prepared smiles froze on their lips as they stared up at Kvashnin with a servility that bordered on fear. The dashing conductors had stiffened into soldierly postures on either side of the door. Glancing by chance at Nina, Bobrov with a pang noticed on her face the same smile as he saw on the other faces, and the same fear of a savage looking at his idol.
“Is this really nothing but a disinterested, respectful amazement at a yearly income of three hundred thousand rubles?” he thought. “If so, what makes all these people wag their tails so cringingly before a man who never so much as looks at them? Perhaps what’s at work here is some inconceivable psychological law of servility?”
Having stood above for a while, Kvashnin decided to start, and descended the steps, preceded by his belly and carefully supported by the train crew.
In response to the respectful bows of the crowd, which parted quickly to let him pass, he nodded carelessly, thrusting out his thick lower lip, and said in a nasal voice, “Gentlemen, you’re dismissed till tomorrow.”
Before reaching the exit he beckoned to the manager.
“You’ll introduce him to me, Sergei Valerianovich,” he said in an undertone.
“You mean Zinenko?” asked Shelkovnikov obligingly.
“Who else, damn it!” growled Kvashnin, suddenly irritated. “No, not here!” He held the manager by the sleeve as he was about to rush off. “You’ll do it at the mill.”
VII
The laying of the foundations and the blowing in of the new blast-furnace were to start four days after Kvashnin’s arrival. It was planned to celebrate the two events with the utmost pomp, and printed invitations had been sent to the iron and steel mills in the neighbouring towns of Krutogori, Voronino, and Lvovo.
Two more members of the Board of Directors, four Belgian engineers, and several big shareholders arrived from Petersburg after Kvashnin. It was rumoured among the mill personnel that the Board had allocated about two thousand rubles for the celebration dinner, but so far nothing had happened to bear out these rumours, and the contractors had to shoulder the whole burden of buying wines and food.
Luckily the day of the celebration was fine – one of those bright, limpid days of early autumn when the sky seems so intensely blue and deep and the cool air is like exquisite, strong wine. The square pits, dug out for the foundations of the new blower and bessemer, were surrounded by a dense crowd of workers forming a U. In the middle of this living wall, on the edge of the pit, stood plain, unpainted table covered with a white cloth, on which a cross and a gospel-book lay beside a sprinkler and a tin bowl for holy water. The priest, attired in a green chasuble embroidered with golden crosses, was standing a little way off, at the head of fifteen workmen who had volunteered to serve as choristers. The open side of the U was taken up by engineers, contractors, senior foremen, clerks – a motley, bustling crowd of two hundred-odd people. A photographer was busy on the embankment, with a black cloth thrown over his head and the camera.
Ten minutes later Kvashnin arrived at the site in a troika of magnificent greys. He was all alone in the carriage, for no one else could possibly have squeezed in beside him. He was followed by five or six more vehicles. Instinctively the workmen at once recognized him as “the boss” and took off their caps as one man. Kvashnin stalked past them and nodded to the priest.
The hush that fell was broken by the jarring little nasal tenor of the priest, who chanted meekly, “Bless’d be the Lord, for ever and ever.”
“Amen,” the improvised choir responded, harmoniously enough.
The workmen – there were some three thousand of them – crossed themselves broadly, doing it simultaneously as they had greeted Kvashnin, bowed their heads, raised them again, and tossed back their hair. Bobrov could not help looking at them closely. Standing in the two front rows were staid stone-masons, all of them wearing white aprons, and nearly all tow-haired and red bearded; behind them were smelters and forge workers in wide, dark blouses styled after those worn by the French and British workmen, their faces grimy with iron dust which could not be washed off; among them appeared the hook-nosed faces of foreign ouvriers; still farther away, behind the smelters and forge workers, you could catch glimpses of limekiln workers, recognizable from afar by their faces, which seemed to be thickly powdered with flour, and by their inflamed, bloodshot eyes.
Whenever the choir chanted in loud unison, “Save Thy servants from calamity, О Lady!” all the three thousand people assiduously crossed themselves with a soft, monotonous rustle, and bowed deeply. Bobrov fancied that there was something elemental and powerful, and at the same time childish and touching, in that common prayer of the huge grey crowd. Next day the workmen would set about their hard twelve-hour toil. Who knew which of them was already doomed to pay for that toil with his life – to fall from a high scaffold, to be scorched with molten metal, or to be buried under a pile of broken stone or bricks? And was it by any chance this immutable decision of fate that they were thinking of as they made deep bows and tossed back their fair locks, while the choir prayed Our Lady to save her servants from calamity? And in whom but the Virgin could they trust, these big children with stout, simple hearts, these humble heroes who came out daily from their dank, cold mud-huts to carry out their habitual feat of patience and daring?
Such, or almost such, were the thoughts of Bobrov, who had an inclination for vast, poetic pictures; and although he had long since grown out of the habit of praying, a thrill of nervous excitement ran down his spine whenever the priest’s jarring, distant voice was succeeded by the harmonious response of the choir. There was something powerful, submissive, and self-sacrificing in the naive prayer of those simple toilers, who had come together from God knew what far-away regions, snatched from their homes for hard and perilous work.
The service was over. With a careless air Kvashnin threw a gold coin into the pit, but was unable to bend down with the little spade he held, and so Shelkovnikov did it for him. Then the group started for the blast-furnaces whose black towers rose on stone foundations.
The newly-built Fifth Furnace was going “full blast,” to use the technical jargon. A seething white-hot stream of molten slag sent blue sulphur flames darting about as it gushed from a hole pierced in the furnace, about thirty inches above the ground. It flowed down a shoot into ladles placed against the vertical base of the fur-mace, and there hardened into a thick greenish mass like barley sugar.