IV

One day, after dinner, he ran breathless into the lodge and said:

"Go along, your sister has come."

I went out, and there I found a hired brake from the town standing

before the entrance of the great house. My sister had come in it

with Anyuta Blagovo and a gentleman in a military tunic. Going up

closer I recognized the latter: it was the brother of Anyuta Blagovo,

the army doctor.

"We have come to you for a picnic," he said; "is that all right?"

My sister and Anyuta wanted to ask how I was getting on here, but

both were silent, and simply gazed at me. I was silent too. They

saw that I did not like the place, and tears came into my sister's

eyes, while Anyuta Blagovo turned crimson.

We went into the garden. The doctor walked ahead of us all and said

enthusiastically:

"What air! Holy Mother, what air!"

In appearance he was still a student. And he walked and talked like

a student, and the expression of his grey eyes was as keen, honest,

and frank as a nice student's. Beside his tall and handsome sister

he looked frail and thin; and his beard was thin too, and his voice,

too, was a thin but rather agreeable tenor. He was serving in a

regiment somewhere, and had come home to his people for a holiday,

and said he was going in the autumn to Petersburg for his examination

as a doctor of medicine. He was already a family man, with a wife

and three children, he had married very young, in his second year

at the University, and now people in the town said he was unhappy

in his family life and was not living with his wife.

"What time is it?" my sister asked uneasily. "We must get back in

good time. Papa let me come to see my brother on condition I was

back at six."

"Oh, bother your papa!" sighed the doctor.

I set the samovar. We put down a carpet before the verandah of the

great house and had our tea there, and the doctor knelt down, drank

out of his saucer, and declared that he now knew what bliss was.

Then Tcheprakov came with the key and opened the glass door, and

we all went into the house. There it was half dark and mysterious,

and smelt of mushrooms, and our footsteps had a hollow sound as

though there were cellars under the floor. The doctor stopped and

touched the keys of the piano, and it responded faintly with a

husky, quivering, but melodious chord; he tried his voice and sang

a song, frowning and tapping impatiently with his foot when some

note was mute. My sister did not talk about going home, but walked

about the rooms and kept saying:

"How happy I am! How happy I am!"

There was a note of astonishment in her voice, as though it seemed

to her incredible that she, too, could feel light-hearted. It was

the first time in my life I had seen her so happy. She actually

looked prettier. In profile she did not look nice; her nose and

mouth seemed to stick out and had an expression as though she were

pouting, but she had beautiful dark eyes, a pale, very delicate

complexion, and a touching expression of goodness and melancholy,

and when she talked she seemed charming and even beautiful. We both,

she and I, took after our mother, were broad shouldered, strongly

built, and capable of endurance, but her pallor was a sign of

ill-health; she often had a cough, and I sometimes caught in her

face that look one sees in people who are seriously ill, but for

some reason conceal the fact. There was something naïve and childish

in her gaiety now, as though the joy that had been suppressed and

smothered in our childhood by harsh education had now suddenly

awakened in her soul and found a free outlet.

But when evening came on and the horses were brought round, my

sister sank into silence and looked thin and shrunken, and she got

into the brake as though she were going to the scaffold.

When they had all gone, and the sound had died away . . . I remembered

that Anyuta Blagovo had not said a word to me all day.

"She is a wonderful girl!" I thought. "Wonderful girl!"

St. Peter's fast came, and we had nothing but Lenten dishes every

day. I was weighed down by physical depression due to idleness and

my unsettled position, and dissatisfied with myself. Listless and

hungry, I lounged about the garden and only waited for a suitable

mood to go away.

Towards evening one day, when Radish was sitting in the lodge,

Dolzhikov, very sunburnt and grey with dust, walked in unexpectedly.

He had been spending three days on his land, and had come now to

Dubetchnya by the steamer, and walked to us from the station. While

waiting for the carriage, which was to come for him from the town,

he walked round the grounds with his bailiff, giving orders in a

loud voice, then sat for a whole hour in our lodge, writing letters.

While he was there telegrams came for him, and he himself tapped

off the answers. We three stood in silence at attention.

"What a muddle!" he said, glancing contemptuously at a record book.

"In a fortnight I am transferring the office to the station, and I

don't know what I am to do with you, my friends."

"I do my best, your honour," said Tcheprakov.

"To be sure, I see how you do your best. The only thing you can do

is to take your salary," the engineer went on, looking at me; "you

keep relying on patronage to _faire le carrière_ as quickly and as

easily as possible. Well, I don't care for patronage. No one took

any trouble on my behalf. Before they gave me a railway contract I

went about as a mechanic and worked in Belgium as an oiler. And

you, Panteley, what are you doing here?" he asked, turning to Radish.

"Drinking with them?"

He, for some reason, always called humble people Panteley, and such

as me and Tcheprakov he despised, and called them drunkards, beasts,

and rabble to their faces. Altogether he was cruel to humble

subordinates, and used to fine them and turn them off coldly without

explanations.

At last the horses came for him. As he said good-bye he promised

to turn us all off in a fortnight; he called his bailiff a blockhead;

and then, lolling at ease in his carriage, drove back to the town.

"Andrey Ivanitch," I said to Radish, "take me on as a workman."

"Oh, all right!"

And we set off together in the direction of the town. When the

station and the big house with its buildings were left behind I

asked: "Andrey Ivanitch, why did you come to Dubetchnya this evening?"

"In the first place my fellows are working on the line, and in the

second place I came to pay the general's lady my interest. Last

year I borrowed fifty roubles from her, and I pay her now a rouble

a month interest."

The painter stopped and took me by the button.

"Misail Alexeyitch, our angel," he went on. "The way I look at it

is that if any man, gentle or simple, takes even the smallest

interest, he is doing evil. There cannot be truth and justice in

such a man."

Radish, lean, pale, dreadful-looking, shut his eyes, shook his head,

and, in the tone of a philosopher, pronounced:

"Lice consume the grass, rust consumes the iron, and lying the soul.

Lord, have mercy upon us sinners."

V

Radish was not practical, and was not at all good at forming an

estimate; he took more work than he could get through, and when

calculating he was agitated, lost his head, and so was almost always

out of pocket over his jobs. He undertook painting, glazing,

paperhanging, and even tiling roofs, and I can remember his running

about for three days to find tilers for the sake of a paltry job.

He was a first-rate workman; he sometimes earned as much as ten

roubles a day; and if it had not been for the desire at all costs

to be a master, and to be called a contractor, he would probably

have had plenty of money.

He was paid by the job, but he paid me and the other workmen by the

day, from one and twopence to two shillings a day. When it was fine

and dry we did all kinds of outside work, chiefly painting roofs.

When I was new to the work it made my feet burn as though I were

walking on hot bricks, and when I put on felt boots they were hotter

than ever. But this was only at first; later on I got used to it,

and everything went swimmingly. I was living now among people to

whom labour was obligatory, inevitable, and who worked like

cart-horses, often with no idea of the moral significance of labour,

and, indeed, never using the word "labour" in conversation at all.

Beside them I, too, felt like a cart-horse, growing more and more

imbued with the feeling of the obligatory and inevitable character

of what I was doing, and this made my life easier, setting me free

from all doubt and uncertainty.

At first everything interested me, everything was new, as though I

had been born again. I could sleep on the ground and go about

barefoot, and that was extremely pleasant; I could stand in a crowd

of the common people and be no constraint to anyone, and when a cab

horse fell down in the street I ran to help it up without being

afraid of soiling my clothes. And the best of it all was, I was

living on my own account and no burden to anyone!

Painting roofs, especially with our own oil and colours, was regarded

as a particularly profitable job, and so this rough, dull work was

not disdained, even by such good workmen as Radish. In short breeches,

and wasted, purple-looking legs, he used to go about the roofs,

looking like a stork, and I used to hear him, as he plied his brush,

breathing heavily and saying: "Woe, woe to us sinners!"

He walked about the roofs as freely as though he were upon the

ground. In spite of his being ill and pale as a corpse, his agility

was extraordinary: he used to paint the domes and cupolas of the

churches without scaffolding, like a young man, with only the help

of a ladder and a rope, and it was rather horrible when standing

on a height far from the earth; he would draw himself up erect, and

for some unknown reason pronounce:

"Lice consume grass, rust consumes iron, and lying the soul!"

Or, thinking about something, would answer his thoughts aloud:

"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"

When I went home from my work, all the people who were sitting on

benches by the gates, all the shopmen and boys and their employers,

made sneering and spiteful remarks after me, and this upset me at

first and seemed to be simply monstrous.

"Better-than-nothing!" I heard on all sides. "House painter! Yellow

ochre!"

And none behaved so ungraciously to me as those who had only lately

been humble people themselves, and had earned their bread by hard

manual labour. In the streets full of shops I was once passing an

ironmonger's when water was thrown over me as though by accident,

and on one occasion someone darted out with a stick at me, while a

fishmonger, a grey-headed old man, barred my way and said, looking

at me angrily:

"I am not sorry for you, you fool! It's your father I am sorry for."

And my acquaintances were for some reason overcome with embarrassment

when they met me. Some of them looked upon me as a queer fish and

a comic fool; others were sorry for me; others did not know what

attitude to take up to me, and it was difficult to make them out.

One day I met Anyuta Blagovo in a side street near Great Dvoryansky

Street. I was going to work, and was carrying two long brushes and

a pail of paint. Recognizing me Anyuta flushed crimson.

"Please do not bow to me in the street," she said nervously, harshly,

and in a shaking voice, without offering me her hand, and tears

suddenly gleamed in her eyes. "If to your mind all this is necessary,

so be it . . . so be it, but I beg you not to meet me!"

I no longer lived in Great Dvoryansky Street, but in the suburb

with my old nurse Karpovna, a good-natured but gloomy old woman,

who always foreboded some harm, was afraid of all dreams, and even

in the bees and wasps that flew into her room saw omens of evil,

and the fact that I had become a workman, to her thinking, boded

nothing good.

"Your life is ruined," she would say, mournfully shaking her head,

"ruined."

Her adopted son Prokofy, a huge, uncouth, red-headed fellow of

thirty, with bristling moustaches, a butcher by trade, lived in the

little house with her. When he met me in the passage he would make

way for me in respectful silence, and if he was drunk he would

salute me with all five fingers at once. He used to have supper in

the evening, and through the partition wall of boards I could hear

him clear his throat and sigh as he drank off glass after glass.

"Mamma," he would call in an undertone.

"Well," Karpovna, who was passionately devoted to her adopted son,

would respond: "What is it, sonny?"

"I can show you a testimony of my affection, mamma. All this earthly

life I will cherish you in your declining years in this vale of

tears, and when you die I will bury you at my expense; I have said

it, and you can believe it."

I got up every morning before sunrise, and went to bed early. We

house painters ate a great deal and slept soundly; the only thing

amiss was that my heart used to beat violently at night. I did not

quarrel with my mates. Violent abuse, desperate oaths, and wishes

such as, "Blast your eyes," or "Cholera take you," never ceased all

day, but, nevertheless, we lived on very friendly terms. The other

fellows suspected me of being some sort of religious sectary, and

made good-natured jokes at my expense, saying that even my own

father had disowned me, and thereupon would add that they rarely

went into the temple of God themselves, and that many of them had

not been to confession for ten years. They justified this laxity

on their part by saying that a painter among men was like a jackdaw

among birds.

The men had a good opinion of me, and treated me with respect; it

was evident that my not drinking, not smoking, but leading a quiet,

steady life pleased them very much. It was only an unpleasant shock

to them that I took no hand in stealing oil and did not go with

them to ask for tips from people on whose property we were working.

Stealing oil and paints from those who employed them was a house

painter's custom, and was not regarded as theft, and it was remarkable

that even so upright a man as Radish would always carry away a

little white lead and oil as he went home from work. And even the

most respectable old fellows, who owned the houses in which they

lived in the suburb, were not ashamed to ask for a tip, and it made

me feel vexed and ashamed to see the men go in a body to congratulate

some nonentity on the commencement or the completion of the job,

and thank him with degrading servility when they had received a few

coppers.

With people on whose work they were engaged they behaved like wily

courtiers, and almost every day I was reminded of Shakespeare's

Polonius.

"I fancy it is going to rain," the man whose house was being painted

would say, looking at the sky.

"It is, there is not a doubt it is," the painters would agree.

"I don't think it is a rain-cloud, though. Perhaps it won't rain

after all."

"No, it won't, your honour! I am sure it won't."

But their attitude to their patrons behind their backs was usually

one of irony, and when they saw, for instance, a gentleman sitting

in the verandah reading a newspaper, they would observe:

"He reads the paper, but I daresay he has nothing to eat."

I never went home to see my own people. When I came back from work

I often found waiting for me little notes, brief and anxious, in

which my sister wrote to me about my father; that he had been

particularly preoccupied at dinner and had eaten nothing, or that

he had been giddy and staggering, or that he had locked himself in

his room and had not come out for a long time. Such items of news

troubled me; I could not sleep, and at times even walked up and

down Great Dvoryansky Street at night by our house, looking in at

the dark windows and trying to guess whether everything was well

at home. On Sundays my sister came to see me, but came in secret,

as though it were not to see me but our nurse. And if she came in

to see me she was very pale, with tear-stained eyes, and she began

crying at once.

"Our father will never live through this," she would say. "If

anything should happen to him--God grant it may not--your

conscience will torment you all your life. It's awful, Misail; for

our mother's sake I beseech you: reform your ways."

"My darling sister," I would say, "how can I reform my ways if I

am convinced that I am acting in accordance with my conscience? Do

understand!"

"I know you are acting on your conscience, but perhaps it could be

done differently, somehow, so as not to wound anybody."

"Ah, holy Saints!" the old woman sighed through the door. "Your

life is ruined! There will be trouble, my dears, there will be

trouble!"