IV

Once after dinner he came running into the wing, panting, to say:

"Your sister has come to see you."

I went out and saw a fly standing by the steps of the house. My sister

had brought Aniuta Blagovo and a military gentleman in a summer uniform.

As I approached I recognised the military gentleman as Aniuta's brother,

the doctor.

"We've come to take you for a picnic," he said, "if you've no

objection."

My sister and Aniuta wanted to ask how I was getting on, but they were

both silent and only looked at me. They felt that I didn't like my job,

and tears came into my sister's eyes and Aniuta Blagovo blushed. We went

into the orchard, the doctor first, and he said ecstatically:

"What air! By Jove, what air!"

He was just a boy to look at. He talked and walked like an

undergraduate, and the look in his grey eyes was as lively, simple, and

frank as that of a nice boy. Compared with his tall, handsome sister he

looked weak and slight, and his little beard was thin and so was his

voice--a thin tenor, though quite pleasant. He was away somewhere with

his regiment and had come home on leave, and said that he was going to

Petersburg in the autumn to take his M.D. He already had a family--a

wife and three children; he had married young, in his second year at the

University, and people said he was unhappily married and was not living

with his wife.

"What is the time?" My sister was uneasy. "We must go back soon, for my

father would only let me have until six o'clock."

"Oh, your father," sighed the doctor.

I made tea, and we drank it sitting on a carpet in front of the terrace,

and the doctor, kneeling, drank from his saucer, and said that he was

perfectly happy. Then Cheprakov fetched the key and unlocked the glass

door and we all entered the house. It was dark and mysterious and

smelled of mushrooms, and our footsteps made a hollow sound as though

there were a vault under the floor. The doctor stopped by the piano and

touched the keys and it gave out a faint, tremulous, cracked but still

melodious sound. He raised his voice and began to sing a romance,

frowning and impatiently stamping his foot when he touched a broken key.

My sister forgot about going home, but walked agitatedly up and down the

room and said:

"I am happy! I am very, very happy!"

There was a note of surprise in her voice as though it seemed impossible

to her that she should be happy. It was the first time in my life that I

had seen her so gay. She even looked handsome. Her profile was not good,

her nose and mouth somehow protruded and made her look as if she was

always blowing, but she had beautiful, dark eyes, a pale, very delicate

complexion, and a touching expression of kindness and sadness, and when

she spoke she seemed very charming and even beautiful. Both she and I

took after our mother; we were broad-shouldered, strong, and sturdy, but

her paleness was a sign of sickness, she often coughed, and in her eyes

I often noticed the expression common to people who are ill, but who for

some reason conceal it. In her present cheerfulness there was something

childish and naïve, as though all the joy which had been suppressed and

dulled during our childhood by a strict upbringing, had suddenly

awakened in her soul and rushed out into freedom.

But when evening came and the fly was brought round, my sister became

very quiet and subdued, and sat in the fly as though it were a

prison-van.

Soon they were all gone. The noise of the fly died away.... I remembered

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

"A wonderful girl!" I thought "A wonderful girl."

Lent came and every day we had Lenten dishes. I was greatly depressed by

my idleness and the uncertainty of my position, and, slothful, hungry,

dissatisfied with myself, I wandered over the estate and only waited for

an energetic mood to leave the place.

Once in the afternoon when Radish was sitting in our wing, Dolyhikov

entered unexpectedly, very sunburnt, and grey with dust. He had been out

on the line for three days and had come to Dubechnia on a locomotive and

walked over. While he waited for the carriage which he had ordered to

come out to meet him he went over the estate with his bailiff, giving

orders in a loud voice, and then for a whole hour he sat in our wing and

wrote letters. When telegrams came through for him, he himself tapped

out the answers, while we stood there stiff and silent.

"What a mess!" he said, looking angrily through the accounts. "I shall

transfer the office to the station in a fortnight and I don't know what

I shall do with you then."

"I've done my best, sir," said Cheprakov.

"Quite so. I can see what your best is. You can only draw your wages."

The engineer looked at me and went on. "You rely on getting

introductions to make a career for yourself with as little trouble as

possible. Well, I don't care about introductions. Nobody helped me.

Before I had this line, I was an engine-driver. I worked in Belgium as

an ordinary lubricator. And what are you doing here, Panteley?" he

asked, turning to Radish. "Going out drinking?"

For some reason or other he called all simple people Panteley, while he

despised men like Cheprakov and myself, and called us drunkards, beasts,

canaille. As a rule he was hard on petty officials, and paid and

dismissed them ruthlessly without any explanation.

At last the carriage came for him. When he left he promised to dismiss

us all in a fortnight; called the bailiff a fool, stretched himself out

comfortably in the carriage, and drove away.

"Andrey Ivanich," I said to Radish, "will you take me on as a labourer?"

"What! Why?"

We went together toward the town, and when the station and the farm were

far behind us, I asked:

"Andrey Ivanich, why did you come to Dubechnia?"

"Firstly because some of my men are working on the line, and secondly to

pay interest to Mrs. Cheprakov. I borrowed fifty roubles from her last

summer, and now I pay her one rouble a month."

The decorator stopped and took hold of my coat.

"Misail Alereich, my friend," he went on, "I take it that if a common

man or a gentleman takes interest, he is a wrong-doer. The truth is not

in him."

Radish, looking thin, pale, and rather terrible, shut his eyes, shook

his head, and muttered in a philosophic tone:

"The grub eats grass, rust eats iron, lies devour the soul. God save us

miserable sinners!"

V

Radish was unpractical and he was no business man; he undertook more

work than he could do, and when he came to payment he always lost his

reckoning and so was always out on the wrong side. He was a painter, a

glazier, a paper-hanger, and would even take on tiling, and I remember

how he used to run about for days looking for tiles to make an

insignificant profit. He was an excellent workman and would sometimes

earn ten roubles a day, and but for his desire to be a master and to

call himself a contractor, he would probably have made quite a lot of

money.

He himself was paid by contract and paid me and the others by the day,

between seventy-five copecks and a rouble per day. When the weather was

hot and dry he did various outside jobs, chiefly painting roofs. Not

being used to it, my feet got hot, as though I were walking over a

red-hot oven, and when I wore felt boots my feet swelled. But this was

only at the beginning. Later on I got used to it and everything went all

right. I lived among the people, to whom work was obligatory and

unavoidable, people who worked like dray-horses, and knew nothing of the

moral value of labour, and never even used the word "labour" in their

talk. Among them I also felt like a dray-horse, more and more imbued

with the necessity and inevitability of what I was doing, and this made

my life easier, and saved me from doubt.

At first everything amused me, everything was new. It was like being

born again. I could sleep on the ground and go barefoot--and found it

exceedingly pleasant. I could stand in a crowd of simple folks, without

embarrassing them, and when a cab-horse fell down in the street, I used

to run and help it up without being afraid of soiling my clothes. But,

best of all, I was living independently and was not a burden on any one.

The painting of roofs, especially when we mixed our own paint, was

considered a very profitable business, and, therefore, even such good

workmen as Radish did not shun this rough and tiresome work. In short

trousers, showing his lean, muscular legs, he used to prowl over the

roof like a stork, and I used to hear him sigh wearily as he worked his

brush:

"Woe, woe to us, miserable sinners!"

He could walk as easily on a roof as on the ground. In spite of his

looking so ill and pale and corpse-like, his agility was extraordinary;

like any young man he would paint the cupola and the top of the church

without scaffolding, using only ladders and a rope, and it was queer and

strange when, standing there, far above the ground, he would rise to his

full height and cry to the world at large:

"Grubs eat grass, rust eats iron, lies devour the soul!"

Or, thinking of something, he would suddenly answer his own thought:

"Anything may happen! Anything may happen!"

When I went home from work all the people sitting outside their doors,

the shop assistants, dogs, and their masters, used to shout after me and

jeer spitefully, and at first it seemed monstrous and distressed me

greatly.

"Little Profit," they used to shout. "House-painter! Yellow ochre!"

And no one treated me so unmercifully as those who had only just risen

above the people and had quite recently had to work for their living.

Once in the market-place as I passed the ironmonger's a can of water was

spilled over me as if by accident, and once a stick was thrown at me.

And once a fishmonger, a grey-haired old man, stood in my way and looked

at me morosely and said:

"It isn't you I'm sorry for, you fool, it's your father."

And when my acquaintances met me they got confused. Some regarded me as

a queer fish and a fool, and they were sorry for me; others did not know

how to treat me and it was difficult to understand them. Once, in the

daytime, in one of the streets off Great Gentry Street, I met Aniuta

Blagovo. I was on my way to my work and was carrying two long brushes

and a pot of paint. When she recognised me, Aniuta blushed.

"Please do not acknowledge me in the street," she said nervously,

sternly, in a trembling voice, without offering to shake hands with me,

and tears suddenly gleamed in her eyes. "If you must be like this, then,

so--so be it, but please avoid me in public!"

I had left Great Gentry Street and was living in a suburb called

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

who was always looking for evil, and was frightened by her dreams, and

saw omens and ill in the bees and wasps which flew into her room. And in

her opinion my having become a working man boded no good.

"You are lost!" she said mournfully, shaking her head. "Lost!"

With her in her little house lived her adopted son, Prokofyi, a butcher,

a huge, clumsy fellow, of about thirty, with ginger hair and scrubby

moustache. When he met me in the hall, he would silently and

respectfully make way for me, and when he was drunk he would salute me

with his whole hand. In the evenings he used to have supper, and

through the wooden partition I could hear him snorting and snuffling as

he drank glass after glass.

"Mother," he would say in an undertone.

"Well," Karpovna would reply. She was passionately fond of him. "What is

it, my son?"

"I'll do you a favour, mother. I'll feed you in your old age in this

vale of tears, and when you die I'll bury you at my own expense. So I

say and so I'll do."

I used to get up every day before sunrise and go to bed early. We

painters ate heavily and slept soundly, and only during the night would

we have any excitement. I never quarrelled with my comrades. All day

long there was a ceaseless stream of abuse, cursing and hearty good

wishes, as, for instance, that one's eyes should burst, or that one

might be carried off by cholera, but, all the same, among ourselves we

were very friendly. The men suspected me of being a religious crank and

used to laugh at me good-naturedly, saying that even my own father

denounced me, and they used to say that they very seldom went to church

and that many of them had not been to confession for ten years, and

they justified their laxness by saying that a decorator is among men

like a jackdaw among birds.

My mates respected me and regarded me with esteem; they evidently liked

my not drinking or smoking, and leading a quiet, steady life. They were

only rather disagreeably surprised at my not stealing the oil, or going

with them to ask our employers for a drink. The stealing of the

employers' oil and paint was a custom with house-painters, and was not

regarded as theft, and it was remarkable that even so honest a man as

Radish would always come away from work with some white lead and oil.

And even respectable old men who had their own houses in Makarikha were

not ashamed to ask for tips, and when the men, at the beginning or end

of a job, made up to some vulgar fool and thanked him humbly for a few

pence, I used to feel sick and sorry.

With the customers they behaved like sly courtiers, and almost every day

I was reminded of Shakespeare's Polonius.

"There will probably be rain," a customer would say, staring at the sky.

"It is sure to rain," the painters would agree.

"But the clouds aren't rain-clouds. Perhaps it won't rain."

"No, sir. It won't rain. It won't rain, sure."

Behind their backs they generally regarded the customers ironically, and

when, for instance, they saw a gentleman sitting on his balcony with a

newspaper, they would say:

"He reads newspapers, but he has nothing to eat."

I never visited my people. When I returned from work I often found

short, disturbing notes from my sister about my father; how he was very

absent-minded at dinner, and then slipped away and locked himself in his

study and did not come out for a long time. Such news upset me. I could

not sleep, and I would go sometimes at night and walk along Great

Gentry Street by our house, and look up at the dark windows, and try to

guess if all was well within. On Sundays my sister would come to see me,

but by stealth, as though she came not to see me, but my nurse. And if

she came into my room she would look pale, with her eyes red, and at

once she would begin to weep.

"Father cannot bear it much longer," she would say. "If, as God forbid,

something were to happen to him, it would be on your conscience all your

life. It is awful, Misail! For mother's sake I implore you to mend your

ways."

"My dear sister," I replied. "How can I reform when I am convinced that

I am acting according to my conscience? Do try to understand me!"

"I know you are obeying your conscience, but it ought to be possible to

do so without hurting anybody."

"Oh, saints above!" the old woman would sigh behind the door. "You are

lost. There will be a misfortune, my dear. It is bound to come."