I
THE Superintendent said to me: "I only keep you out of regard for
your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying
long ago." I replied to him: "You flatter me too much, your Excellency,
in assuming that I am capable of flying." And then I heard him say:
"Take that gentleman away; he gets upon my nerves."
Two days later I was dismissed. And in this way I have, during the
years I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to
the great mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I
have served in various departments, but all these nine jobs have
been as alike as one drop of water is to another: I had to sit,
write, listen to rude or stupid observations, and go on doing so
till I was dismissed.
When I came in to my father he was sitting buried in a low arm-chair
with his eyes closed. His dry, emaciated face, with a shade of dark
blue where it was shaved (he looked like an old Catholic organist),
expressed meekness and resignation. Without responding to my greeting
or opening his eyes, he said:
"If my dear wife and your mother were living, your life would have
been a source of continual distress to her. I see the Divine
Providence in her premature death. I beg you, unhappy boy," he
continued, opening his eyes, "tell me: what am I to do with you?"
In the past when I was younger my friends and relations had known
what to do with me: some of them used to advise me to volunteer for
the army, others to get a job in a pharmacy, and others in the
telegraph department; now that I am over twenty-five, that grey
hairs are beginning to show on my temples, and that I have been
already in the army, and in a pharmacy, and in the telegraph
department, it would seem that all earthly possibilities have been
exhausted, and people have given up advising me, and merely sigh
or shake their heads.
"What do you think about yourself?" my father went on. "By the time
they are your age, young men have a secure social position, while
look at you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on your
father!"
And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of to-day
were on the road to perdition through infidelity, materialism, and
self-conceit, and that amateur theatricals ought to be prohibited,
because they seduced young people from religion and their duties.
"To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the
superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously," he said
in conclusion. "You ought not to remain one single day with no
regular position in society."
"I beg you to listen to me," I said sullenly, expecting nothing
good from this conversation. "What you call a position in society
is the privilege of capital and education. Those who have neither
wealth nor education earn their daily bread by manual labour, and
I see no grounds for my being an exception."
"When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid and
vulgar!" said my father with irritation. "Understand, you dense
fellow--understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse physical
strength you have the divine spirit, a spark of the holy fire, which
distinguishes you in the most striking way from the ass or the
reptile, and brings you nearer to the Deity! This fire is the fruit
of the efforts of the best of mankind during thousands of years.
Your great-grandfather Poloznev, the general, fought at Borodino;
your grandfather was a poet, an orator, and a Marshal of Nobility;
your uncle is a schoolmaster; and lastly, I, your father, am an
architect! All the Poloznevs have guarded the sacred fire for you
to put it out!"
"One must be just," I said. "Millions of people put up with manual
labour."
"And let them put up with it! They don't know how to do anything
else! Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable
of manual labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the
slave and the barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only to
a few!"
To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father worshipped
himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself.
Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked
of physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred
fire as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should
set the whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my
contemporaries had long ago taken their degrees and were getting
on well, and the son of the manager of the State Bank was already
a collegiate assessor, while I, his only son, was nothing! To
continue the conversation was unprofitable and unpleasant, but I
still sat on and feebly retorted, hoping that I might at last be
understood. The whole question, of course, was clear and simple,
and only concerned with the means of my earning my living; but the
simplicity of it was not seen, and I was talked to in mawkishly
rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire, of my uncle a
forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial verses; I
was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I longed
to be understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and my
sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them--
a habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got
rid of it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in
constant dread of wounding them, constantly afraid that my father's
thin neck would turn crimson and that he would have a stroke.
"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a
typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What
can the sacred fire have to do with it?"
"It's intellectual work, anyway," said my father. "But that's enough;
let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you: if
you don't go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible
propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts.
I shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!"
With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which
I wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:
"The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me. I
shall renounce it all beforehand."
For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were
deeply resented by my father. He turned crimson.
"Don't dare to talk to me like that, stupid!" he shouted in a thin,
shrill voice. "Wastrel!" and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual
movement he slapped me twice in the face. "You are forgetting
yourself."
When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with
my hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight
in the face. And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and,
as though I were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look
him in the face. My father was old and very thin but his delicate
muscles must have been as strong as leather, for his blows hurt a
good deal.
I staggered back into the passage, and there he snatched up his
umbrella, and with it hit me several times on the head and shoulders;
at that moment my sister opened the drawing-room door to find out
what the noise was, but at once turned away with a look of horror
and pity without uttering a word in my defence.
My determination not to return to the Government office, but to
begin a new life of toil, was not to be shaken. All that was left
for me to do was to fix upon the special employment, and there was
no particular difficulty about that, as it seemed to me that I was
very strong and fitted for the very heaviest labour. I was faced
with a monotonous life of toil in the midst of hunger, coarseness,
and stench, continually preoccupied with earning my daily bread.
And--who knows?--as I returned from my work along Great Dvoryansky
Street, I might very likely envy Dolzhikov the, engineer, who lived
by intellectual work, but, at the moment, thinking over all my
future hardships made me light-hearted. At times I had dreamed of
spiritual activity, imagining myself a teacher, a doctor, or a
writer, but these dreams remained dreams. The taste for intellectual
pleasures--for the theatre, for instance, and for reading--was
a passion with me, but whether I had any ability for intellectual
work I don't know. At school I had had an unconquerable aversion
for Greek, so that I was only in the fourth class when they had to
take me from school. For a long while I had coaches preparing me
for the fifth class. Then I served in various Government offices,
spending the greater part of the day in complete idleness, and I
was told that was intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic
and official sphere had required neither mental application nor
talent, nor special qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was
mechanical. Such intellectual work I put on a lower level than
physical toil; I despise it, and I don't think that for one moment
it could serve as a justification for an idle, careless life, as
it is indeed nothing but a sham, one of the forms of that same
idleness. Real intellectual work I have in all probability never
known.
Evening came on. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street; it was the
principal street in the town, and in the absence of decent public
gardens our _beau monde_ used to use it as a promenade in the
evenings. This charming street did to some extent take the place
of a public garden, as on each side of it there was a row of poplars
which smelt sweet, particularly after rain, and acacias, tall bushes
of lilac, wild-cherries and apple-trees hung over the fences and
palings. The May twilight, the tender young greenery with its
shifting shades, the scent of the lilac, the buzzing of the insects,
the stillness, the warmth--how fresh and marvellous it all is,
though spring is repeated every year! I stood at the garden gate
and watched the passers-by. With most of them I had grown up and
at one time played pranks; now they might have been disconcerted
by my being near them, for I was poorly and unfashionably dressed,
and they used to say of my very narrow trousers and huge, clumsy
boots that they were like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats. Besides,
I had a bad reputation in the town because I had no decent social
position, and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and
also, perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before
an officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to
account for this.
In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov's.
It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky.
Here my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked
slowly by with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.
"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same
umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look up at
the sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant
is man in comparison with the universe!"
And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly
agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How
absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he
was the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty
years that I could remember not one single decent house had been
built in it. When any one asked him to plan a house, he usually
drew first the reception hall and drawing-room: just as in old days
the boarding-school misses always started from the stove when they
danced, so his artistic ideas could only begin and develop from the
hall and drawing-room. To them he tacked on a dining-room, a nursery,
a study, linking the rooms together with doors, and so they all
inevitably turned into passages, and every one of them had two or
even three unnecessary doors. His imagination must have been lacking
in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As though feeling that
something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to all sorts of
outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see now the
narrow entries, the poky little passages, the crooked staircases
leading to half-landings where one could not stand upright, and
where, instead of a floor, there were three huge steps like the
shelves of a bath-house; and the kitchen was invariably in the
basement with a brick floor and vaulted ceilings. The front of the
house had a harsh, stubborn expression; the lines of it were stiff
and timid; the roof was low-pitched and, as it were, squashed down;
and the fat, well-fed-looking chimneys were invariably crowned by
wire caps with squeaking black cowls. And for some reason all these
houses, built by my father exactly like one another, vaguely reminded
me of his top-hat and the back of his head, stiff and stubborn-looking.
In the course of years they have grown used in the town to the
poverty of my father's imagination. It has taken root and become
our local style.
This same style my father had brought into my sister's life also,
beginning with christening her Kleopatra (just as he had named me
Misail). When she was a little girl he scared her by references to
the stars, to the sages of ancient times, to our ancestors, and
discoursed at length on the nature of life and duty; and now, when
she was twenty-six, he kept up the same habits, allowing her to
walk arm in arm with no one but himself, and imagining for some
reason that sooner or later a suitable young man would be sure to
appear, and to desire to enter into matrimony with her from respect
for his personal qualities. She adored my father, feared him, and
believed in his exceptional intelligence.
It was quite dark, and gradually the street grew empty. The music
had ceased in the house opposite; the gate was thrown wide open,
and a team with three horses trotted frolicking along our street
with a soft tinkle of little bells. That was the engineer going for
a drive with his daughter. It was bedtime.
I had my own room in the house, but I lived in a shed in the yard,
under the same roof as a brick barn which had been built some time
or other, probably to keep harness in; great hooks were driven into
the wall. Now it was not wanted, and for the last thirty years my
father had stowed away in it his newspapers, which for some reason
he had bound in half-yearly volumes and allowed nobody to touch.
Living here, I was less liable to be seen by my father and his
visitors, and I fancied that if I did not live in a real room, and
did not go into the house every day to dinner, my father's words
that I was a burden upon him did not sound so offensive.
My sister was waiting for me. Unseen by my father, she had brought
me some supper: not a very large slice of cold veal and a piece of
bread. In our house such sayings as: "A penny saved is a penny
gained," and "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care
of themselves," and so on, were frequently repeated, and my sister,
weighed down by these vulgar maxims, did her utmost to cut down the
expenses, and so we fared badly. Putting the plate on the table,
she sat down on my bed and began to cry.
"Misail," she said, "what a way to treat us!"
She did not cover her face; her tears dropped on her bosom and
hands, and there was a look of distress on her face. She fell back
on the pillow, and abandoned herself to her tears, sobbing and
quivering all over.
"You have left the service again . . ." she articulated. "Oh, how
awful it is!"
"But do understand, sister, do understand . . . ." I said, and I
was overcome with despair because she was crying.
As ill-luck would have it, the kerosene in my little lamp was
exhausted; it began to smoke, and was on the point of going out,
and the old hooks on the walls looked down sullenly, and their
shadows flickered.
"Have mercy on us," said my sister, sitting up. "Father is in
terrible distress and I am ill; I shall go out of my mind. What
will become of you?" she said, sobbing and stretching out her arms
to me. "I beg you, I implore you, for our dear mother's sake, I beg
you to go back to the office!"
"I can't, Kleopatra!" I said, feeling that a little more and I
should give way. "I cannot!"
"Why not?" my sister went on. "Why not? Well, if you can't get on
with the Head, look out for another post. Why shouldn't you get a
situation on the railway, for instance? I have just been talking
to Anyuta Blagovo; she declares they would take you on the railway-line,
and even promised to try and get a post for you. For God's sake,
Misail, think a little! Think a little, I implore you."
We talked a little longer and I gave way. I said that the thought
of a job on the railway that was being constructed had never occurred
to me, and that if she liked I was ready to try it.
She smiled joyfully through her tears and squeezed my hand, and
then went on crying because she could not stop, while I went to the
kitchen for some kerosene.