A railway-line was being constructed in our neighbourhood. On the
eve of feast days the streets were thronged with ragged fellows
whom the townspeople called "navvies," and of whom they were afraid.
And more than once I had seen one of these tatterdemalions with a
bloodstained countenance being led to the police station, while a
samovar or some linen, wet from the wash, was carried behind by way
of material evidence. The navvies usually congregated about the
taverns and the market-place; they drank, ate, and used bad language,
and pursued with shrill whistles every woman of light behaviour who
passed by. To entertain this hungry rabble our shopkeepers made
cats and dogs drunk with vodka, or tied an old kerosene can to a
dog's tail; a hue and cry was raised, and the dog dashed along the
street, jingling the can, squealing with terror; it fancied some
monster was close upon its heels; it would run far out of the town
into the open country and there sink exhausted. There were in the
town several dogs who went about trembling with their tails between
their legs; and people said this diversion had been too much for
them, and had driven them mad.
A station was being built four miles from the town. It was said
that the engineers asked for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles for
bringing the line right up to the town, but the town council would
only consent to give forty thousand; they could not come to an
agreement over the difference, and now the townspeople regretted
it, as they had to make a road to the station and that, it was
reckoned, would cost more. The sleepers and rails had been laid
throughout the whole length of the line, and trains ran up and down
it, bringing building materials and labourers, and further progress
was only delayed on account of the bridges which Dolzhikov was
building, and some of the stations were not yet finished.
Dubetchnya, as our first station was called, was a little under
twelve miles from the town. I walked. The cornfields, bathed in the
morning sunshine, were bright green. It was a flat, cheerful country,
and in the distance there were the distinct outlines of the station,
of ancient barrows, and far-away homesteads. . . . How nice it was
out there in the open! And how I longed to be filled with the sense
of freedom, if only for that one morning, that I might not think
of what was being done in the town, not think of my needs, not feel
hungry! Nothing has so marred my existence as an acute feeling of
hunger, which made images of buckwheat porridge, rissoles, and baked
fish mingle strangely with my best thoughts. Here I was standing
alone in the open country, gazing upward at a lark which hovered
in the air at the same spot, trilling as though in hysterics, and
meanwhile I was thinking: "How nice it would be to eat a piece of
bread and butter!"
Or I would sit down by the roadside to rest, and shut my eyes to
listen to the delicious sounds of May, and what haunted me was the
smell of hot potatoes. Though I was tall and strongly built, I had
as a rule little to eat, and so the predominant sensation throughout
the day was hunger, and perhaps that was why I knew so well how it
is that such multitudes of people toil merely for their daily bread,
and can talk of nothing but things to eat.
At Dubetchnya they were plastering the inside of the station, and
building a wooden upper storey to the pumping shed. It was hot;
there was a smell of lime, and the workmen sauntered listlessly
between the heaps of shavings and mortar rubble. The pointsman lay
asleep near his sentry box, and the sun was blazing full on his
face. There was not a single tree. The telegraph wire hummed faintly
and hawks were perching on it here and there. I, wandering, too,
among the heaps of rubbish, and not knowing what to do, recalled
how the engineer, in answer to my question what my duties would
consist in, had said: "We shall see when you are there"; but what
could one see in that wilderness?
The plasterers spoke of the foreman, and of a certain Fyodot Vasilyev.
I did not understand, and gradually I was overcome by depression
--the physical depression in which one is conscious of one's arms
and legs and huge body, and does not know what to do with them or
where to put them.
After I had been walking about for at least a couple of hours, I
noticed that there were telegraph poles running off to the right
from the station, and that they ended a mile or a mile and a half
away at a white stone wall. The workmen told me the office was
there, and at last I reflected that that was where I ought to go.
It was a very old manor house, deserted long ago. The wall round
it, of porous white stone, was mouldering and had fallen away in
places, and the lodge, the blank wall of which looked out on the
open country, had a rusty roof with patches of tin-plate gleaming
here and there on it. Within the gates could be seen a spacious
courtyard overgrown with rough weeds, and an old manor house with
sunblinds on the windows, and a high roof red with rust. Two lodges,
exactly alike, stood one on each side of the house to right and to
left: one had its windows nailed up with boards; near the other,
of which the windows were open, there was washing on the line, and
there were calves moving about. The last of the telegraph poles
stood in the courtyard, and the wire from it ran to the window of
the lodge, of which the blank wall looked out into the open country.
The door stood open; I went in. By the telegraph apparatus a gentleman
with a curly dark head, wearing a reefer coat made of sailcloth,
was sitting at a table; he glanced at me morosely from under his
brows, but immediately smiled and said:
"Hullo, Better-than-nothing!"
It was Ivan Tcheprakov, an old schoolfellow of mine, who had been
expelled from the second class for smoking. We used at one time,
during autumn, to catch goldfinches, finches, and linnets together,
and to sell them in the market early in the morning, while our
parents were still in their beds. We watched for flocks of migrating
starlings and shot at them with small shot, then we picked up those
that were wounded, and some of them died in our hands in terrible
agonies (I remember to this day how they moaned in the cage at
night); those that recovered we sold, and swore with the utmost
effrontery that they were all cocks. On one occasion at the market
I had only one starling left, which I had offered to purchasers in
vain, till at last I sold it for a farthing. "Anyway, it's better
than nothing," I said to comfort myself, as I put the farthing in
my pocket, and from that day the street urchins and the schoolboys
called after me: "Better-than-nothing"; and to this day the street
boys and the shopkeepers mock at me with the nickname, though no
one remembers how it arose.
Tcheprakov was not of robust constitution: he was narrow-chested,
round-shouldered, and long-legged. He wore a silk cord for a tie,
had no trace of a waistcoat, and his boots were worse than mine,
with the heels trodden down on one side. He stared, hardly even
blinking, with a strained expression, as though he were just going
to catch something, and he was always in a fuss.
"You wait a minute," he would say fussily. "You listen. . . .
Whatever was I talking about?"
We got into conversation. I learned that the estate on which I now
was had until recently been the property of the Tcheprakovs, and
had only the autumn before passed into the possession of Dolzhikov,
who considered it more profitable to put his money into land than
to keep it in notes, and had already bought up three good-sized
mortgaged estates in our neighbourhood. At the sale Tcheprakov's
mother had reserved for herself the right to live for the next two
years in one of the lodges at the side, and had obtained a post for
her son in the office.
"I should think he could buy!" Tcheprakov said of the engineer.
"See what he fleeces out of the contractors alone! He fleeces
everyone!"
Then he took me to dinner, deciding fussily that I should live with
him in the lodge, and have my meals from his mother.
"She is a bit stingy," he said, "but she won't charge you much."
It was very cramped in the little rooms in which his mother lived;
they were all, even the passage and the entry, piled up with furniture
which had been brought from the big house after the sale; and the
furniture was all old-fashioned mahogany. Madame Tcheprakov, a very
stout middle-aged lady with slanting Chinese eyes, was sitting in
a big arm-chair by the window, knitting a stocking. She received
me ceremoniously.
"This is Poloznev, mamma," Tcheprakov introduced me. "He is going
to serve here."
"Are you a nobleman?" she asked in a strange, disagreeable voice:
it seemed to me to sound as though fat were bubbling in her throat.
"Yes," I answered.
"Sit down."
The dinner was a poor one. Nothing was served but pies filled with
bitter curd, and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, who presided, kept
blinking in a queer way, first with one eye and then with the other.
She talked, she ate, but yet there was something deathly about her
whole figure, and one almost fancied the faint smell of a corpse.
There was only a glimmer of life in her, a glimmer of consciousness
that she had been a lady who had once had her own serfs, that she
was the widow of a general whom the servants had to address as "your
Excellency"; and when these feeble relics of life flickered up in
her for an instant she would say to her son:
"Jean, you are not holding your knife properly!"
Or she would say to me, drawing a deep breath, with the mincing air
of a hostess trying to entertain a visitor:
"You know we have sold our estate. Of course, it is a pity, we are
used to the place, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster
of Dubetchnya, so we shall not have to go away; we shall live here
at the station, and that is just the same as being on our own
property! The engineer is so nice! Don't you think he is very
handsome?"
Until recently the Tcheprakovs had lived in a wealthy style, but
since the death of the general everything had been changed. Elena
Nikiforovna had taken to quarrelling with the neighbours, to going
to law, and to not paying her bailiffs or her labourers; she was
in constant terror of being robbed, and in some ten years Dubetchnya
had become unrecognizable.
Behind the great house was an old garden which had already run wild,
and was overgrown with rough weeds and bushes. I walked up and down
the verandah, which was still solid and beautiful; through the glass
doors one could see a room with parquetted floor, probably the
drawing-room; an old-fashioned piano and pictures in deep mahogany
frames--there was nothing else. In the old flower-beds all that
remained were peonies and poppies, which lifted their white and
bright red heads above the grass. Young maples and elms, already
nibbled by the cows, grew beside the paths, drawn up and hindering
each other's growth. The garden was thickly overgrown and seemed
impassable, but this was only near the house where there stood
poplars, fir-trees, and old limetrees, all of the same age, relics
of the former avenues. Further on, beyond them the garden had been
cleared for the sake of hay, and here it was not moist and stuffy,
and there were no spiders' webs in one's mouth and eyes. A light
breeze was blowing. The further one went the more open it was, and
here in the open space were cherries, plums, and spreading apple-trees,
disfigured by props and by canker; and pear-trees so tall that one
could not believe they were pear-trees. This part of the garden was
let to some shopkeepers of the town, and it was protected from
thieves and starlings by a feeble-minded peasant who lived in a
shanty in it.
The garden, growing more and more open, till it became definitely
a meadow, sloped down to the river, which was overgrown with green
weeds and osiers. Near the milldam was the millpond, deep and full
of fish; a little mill with a thatched roof was working away with
a wrathful sound, and frogs croaked furiously. Circles passed from
time to time over the smooth, mirror-like water, and the water-lilies
trembled, stirred by the lively fish. On the further side of the
river was the little village Dubetchnya. The still, blue millpond
was alluring with its promise of coolness and peace. And now all
this--the millpond and the mill and the snug-looking banks--
belonged to the engineer!
And so my new work began. I received and forwarded telegrams, wrote
various reports, and made fair copies of the notes of requirements,
the complaints, and the reports sent to the office by the illiterate
foremen and workmen. But for the greater part of the day I did
nothing but walk about the room waiting for telegrams, or made a
boy sit in the lodge while I went for a walk in the garden, until
the boy ran to tell me that there was a tapping at the operating
machine. I had dinner at Madame Tcheprakov's. Meat we had very
rarely: our dishes were all made of milk, and Wednesdays and Fridays
were fast days, and on those days we had pink plates which were
called Lenten plates. Madame Tcheprakov was continually blinking
--it was her invariable habit, and I always felt ill at ease in
her presence.
As there was not enough work in the lodge for one, Tcheprakov did
nothing, but simply dozed, or went with his gun to shoot ducks on
the millpond. In the evenings he drank too much in the village or
the station, and before going to bed stared in the looking-glass
and said: "Hullo, Ivan Tcheprakov."
When he was drunk he was very pale, and kept rubbing his hands and
laughing with a sound like a neigh: "hee-hee-hee!" By way of bravado
he used to strip and run about the country naked. He used to eat
flies and say they were rather sour.