"I believe you live opposite?" she questioned me, after a brief
silence.
"Yes."
"I am so bored that I watch you every day out of the window; you
must excuse me," she went on, looking at the newspaper, "and I often
see your sister; she always has such a look of kindness and
concentration."
Dolzhikov came in. He was rubbing his neck with a towel.
"Papa, Monsieur Poloznev," said his daughter.
"Yes, yes, Blagovo was telling me," he turned briskly to me without
giving me his hand. "But listen, what can I give you? What sort of
posts have I got? You are a queer set of people!" he went on aloud
in a tone as though he were giving me a lecture. "A score of you
keep coming to me every day; you imagine I am the head of a department!
I am constructing a railway-line, my friends; I have employment for
heavy labour: I need mechanics, smiths, navvies, carpenters,
well-sinkers, and none of you can do anything but sit and write!
You are all clerks."
And he seemed to me to have the same air of happiness as his rugs
and easy chairs. He was stout and healthy, ruddy-cheeked and
broad-chested, in a print cotton shirt and full trousers like a toy
china sledge-driver. He had a curly, round beard--and not a single
grey hair--a hooked nose, and clear, dark, guileless eyes.
"What can you do?" he went on. "There is nothing you can do! I am
an engineer. I am a man of an assured position, but before they
gave me a railway-line I was for years in harness; I have been a
practical mechanic. For two years I worked in Belgium as an oiler.
You can judge for yourself, my dear fellow, what kind of work can
I offer you?"
"Of course that is so . . ." I muttered in extreme confusion, unable
to face his clear, guileless eyes.
"Can you work the telegraph, any way?" he asked, after a moment's
thought.
"Yes, I have been a telegraph clerk."
"Hm! Well, we will see then. Meanwhile, go to Dubetchnya. I have
got a fellow there, but he is a wretched creature."
"And what will my duties consist of?" I asked.
"We shall see. Go there; meanwhile I will make arrangements. Only
please don't get drunk, and don't worry me with requests of any
sort, or I shall send you packing."
He turned away from me without even a nod.
I bowed to him and his daughter who was reading a newspaper, and
went away. My heart felt so heavy, that when my sister began asking
me how the engineer had received me, I could not utter a single
word.
I got up early in the morning, at sunrise, to go to Dubetchnya.
There was not a soul in our Great Dvoryansky Street; everyone was
asleep, and my footsteps rang out with a solitary, hollow sound.
The poplars, covered with dew, filled the air with soft fragrance.
I was sad, and did not want to go away from the town. I was fond
of my native town. It seemed to be so beautiful and so snug! I loved
the fresh greenery, the still, sunny morning, the chiming of our
bells; but the people with whom I lived in this town were boring,
alien to me, sometimes even repulsive. I did not like them nor
understand them.
I did not understand what these sixty-five thousand people lived
for and by. I knew that Kimry lived by boots, that Tula made samovars
and guns, that Odessa was a sea-port, but what our town was, and
what it did, I did not know. Great Dvoryansky Street and the two
other smartest streets lived on the interest of capital, or on
salaries received by officials from the public treasury; but what
the other eight streets, which ran parallel for over two miles and
vanished beyond the hills, lived upon, was always an insoluble
riddle to me. And the way those people lived one is ashamed to
describe! No garden, no theatre, no decent band; the public library
and the club library were only visited by Jewish youths, so that
the magazines and new books lay for months uncut; rich and well-educated
people slept in close, stuffy bedrooms, on wooden bedsteads infested
with bugs; their children were kept in revoltingly dirty rooms
called nurseries, and the servants, even the old and respected ones,
slept on the floor in the kitchen, covered with rags. On ordinary
days the houses smelt of beetroot soup, and on fast days of sturgeon
cooked in sunflower oil. The food was not good, and the drinking
water was unwholesome. In the town council, at the governor's, at
the head priest's, on all sides in private houses, people had been
saying for years and years that our town had not a good and cheap
water-supply, and that it was necessary to obtain a loan of two
hundred thousand from the Treasury for laying on water; very rich
people, of whom three dozen could have been counted up in our town,
and who at times lost whole estates at cards, drank the polluted
water, too, and talked all their lives with great excitement of a
loan for the water-supply--and I did not understand that; it
seemed to me it would have been simpler to take the two hundred
thousand out of their own pockets and lay it out on that object.
I did not know one honest man in the town. My father took bribes,
and imagined that they were given him out of respect for his moral
qualities; at the high school, in order to be moved up rapidly from
class to class, the boys went to board with their teachers, who
charged them exorbitant sums; the wife of the military commander
took bribes from the recruits when they were called up before the
board and even deigned to accept refreshments from them, and on one
occasion could not get up from her knees in church because she was
drunk; the doctors took bribes, too, when the recruits came up for
examination, and the town doctor and the veterinary surgeon levied
a regular tax on the butchers' shops and the restaurants; at the
district school they did a trade in certificates, qualifying for
partial exemption from military service; the higher clergy took
bribes from the humbler priests and from the church elders; at the
Municipal, the Artisans', and all the other Boards every petitioner
was pursued by a shout: "Don't forget your thanks!" and the petitioner
would turn back to give sixpence or a shilling. And those who did
not take bribes, such as the higher officials of the Department of
Justice, were haughty, offered two fingers instead of shaking hands,
were distinguished by the frigidity and narrowness of their judgments,
spent a great deal of time over cards, drank to excess, married
heiresses, and undoubtedly had a pernicious corrupting influence
on those around them. It was only the girls who had still the fresh
fragrance of moral purity; most of them had higher impulses, pure
and honest hearts; but they had no understanding of life, and
believed that bribes were given out of respect for moral qualities,
and after they were married grew old quickly, let themselves go
completely, and sank hopelessly in the mire of vulgar, petty bourgeois
existence.