awkwardness, for, a young fellow of only fifteen, I had been
appointed by the contractor, a distant relative of mine, to the
task of superintending the expenditure of material. That is to
say, I had to see to it that the carpenters did not make away
with nails, or dispose of planks in return for drink. Yet all
the time my presence was practically useless, seeing that the
men stole nails as though I were not even in existence and
strove to show me that among them I was a person too many, a
sheer incubus, and seized every opportunity of giving me covert
jogs with a beam, and similarly affronting me.

This, of course, made my relations with them highly difficult,
embarrassing, and irksome; and though moments occurred when I
longed to say something that might ingratiate me, and
endeavoured to effect an advance in that direction, the words
always failed me at the necessary juncture, and I found myself
lying crushed as before under a burdensome sense of the
superfluity of my existence.

Again, if ever I tried to make an entry as to some material
which had been used, Ossip would approach me, and, for instance,
say:

"Is it jotted down, eh? Then let me look at it."

And, eyeing the notebook with a frown, he would add vaguely:

"What a nice hand you write!" (He himself could write only in
printing fashion, in the large scriptory characters of the
Ecclesiastical Rubric, not in those of the ordinary kind.)