Came the rainy, muddy, dark autumn, bringing a slack time, and I used to
sit at home three days in the week without work, or did various jobs
outside painting; such as digging earth for ballast for twenty copecks
a day. Doctor Blagovo had gone to Petersburg. My sister did not come to
see me. Radish lay at home ill, expecting to die every day.
And my mood was also autumnal; perhaps because when I became a working
man I saw only the seamy side of the life of our town, and every day
made fresh discoveries which brought me to despair. My fellow townsmen,
both those of whom I had had a low opinion before, and those whom I had
thought fairly decent, now seemed to me base, cruel, and up to any dirty
trick. We poor people were tricked and cheated in the accounts, kept
waiting for hours in cold passages or in the kitchen, and we were
insulted and uncivilly treated. In the autumn I had to paper the library
and two rooms at the club. I was paid seven copecks a piece, but was
told to give a receipt for twelve copecks, and when I refused to do it,
a respectable gentleman in gold spectacles, one of the stewards of the
club, said to me:
"If you say another word, you scoundrel, I'll knock you down."
And when a servant whispered to him that I was the son of Pologniev, the
architect, then I got flustered and blushed, but he recovered himself at
once and said:
"Damn him."
In the shops we working men were sold bad meat, musty flour, and coarse
tea. In church we were jostled by the police, and in the hospitals we
were mulcted by the assistants and nurses, and if we could not give them
bribes through poverty, we were given food in dirty dishes. In the
post-office the lowest official considered it his duty to treat us as
animals and to shout rudely and insolently: "Wait! Don't you come
pushing your way in here!" Even the dogs, even they were hostile to us
and hurled themselves at us with a peculiar malignancy. But what struck
me most of all in my new position was the entire lack of justice, what
the people call "forgetting God." Rarely a day went by without some
swindle. The shopkeeper, who sold us oil, the contractor, the workmen,
the customers themselves, all cheated. It was an understood thing that
our rights were never considered, and we always had to pay for the money
we had earned, going with our hats off to the back door.
I was paper-hanging in one of the club-rooms, next the library, when,
one evening as I was on the point of leaving, Dolyhikov's daughter came
into the room carrying a bundle of books.