Nikolai Lesin burst into the room without knocking: "Gavriil Vladimirovich, there's a mess going on in there!" His face was filled with something unnatural, something that had never occurred before.
"You should get some rest. – Said Hora, standing up from the table and picking up a chair lying by the door. – Just sit for a while. Don't do anything."
Coming out of his office, the prefect immediately realized what the matter was: two miners, right in his soma, were fighting with each other.
The prefect understood this situation, but Gavriil Vladimirovich didn't get it at once – his mind was going through some hitherto unknown thought processes: "Two miners got into a fight… They are both miners. They share the same fate. Shoulder to shoulder. And they fight. Fighting is a way of showing dislike, hatred, maybe attempted murder, loss of self-control…
Hate. Murder. Emotion."
One miner beats up another. When did that happen?
Nearly two hundred people, including Rich, were watching all of this, and no one had a thought to do anything about it.
No one could believe it.
The oldest man still living underground, miner Nikolai Pavlovich Krasnenko, thought he was suffering from marasmus. He thought that by the time he was eighty-two years old, it was time for his mind to move. And to this he was presented with strong evidence … That he himself has ever even thought of the fact that you can hit his comrade … Yes never. Never even a thought. Getting mad at someone, yes. An argument, yes. But not hitting. The plagues do that for us. But to hit a fellow man. Never. How can you do that? We're shoulder to shoulder. You can't survive here without each other. We're all family here! No, such things just don't make sense. "Young people? No. What youth? We didn't do that when we were their age," thought Galina Borisovna. It seemed to her that all this was some ridiculous coincidence that these two had misunderstood something about the relations between everyone at the mine, about the fact that here one individual person does not represent anything without the rest of the collective.
And in spite of all the excuses for their stupidity, she still felt sorry for them.
The thoughts of all the miners went around these two words: stupidity and pity.
Gora moved toward the fighting men. They were fifteen meters away, and when it became ten, they both spotted the approaching man. Immediately they separated and froze in their places.