to do with me: some of them used to advise me to volunteer for the army,
others to get a job in a pharmacy, and others in the telegraph
department; now that I am over twenty-five, that grey hairs are
beginning to show on my temples, and that I have been already in the
army, and in a pharmacy, and in the telegraph department, it would seem
that all earthly possibilities have been exhausted, and people have
given up advising me, and merely sigh or shake their heads.
"What do you think about yourself?" my father went on. "By the time they
are your age, young men have a secure social position, while look at
you: you are a proletarian, a beggar, a burden on your father!"
And as usual he proceeded to declare that the young people of to-day
were on the road to perdition through infidelity, materialism, and self-
conceit, and that amateur theatricals ought to be prohibited, because
they seduced young people from religion and their duties.
"To-morrow we shall go together, and you shall apologize to the
superintendent, and promise him to work conscientiously," he said in
conclusion. "You ought not to remain one single day with no regular
position in society."
"I beg you to listen to me," I said sullenly, expecting nothing good
from this conversation. "What you call a position in society is the
privilege of capital and education. Those who have neither wealth nor
education earn their daily bread by manual labour, and I see no grounds
for my being an exception."
"When you begin talking about manual labour it is always stupid and
vulgar!" said my father with irritation. "Understand, you dense fellow-
understand, you addle-pate, that besides coarse physical strength you
have the divine spirit, a spark of the holy fire, which distinguishes
you in the most striking way from the ass or the reptile, and brings you
nearer to the Deity! This fire is the fruit of the efforts of the best
of mankind during thousands of years. Your great-grandfather Poloznev,
the general, fought at Borodino; your grandfather was a poet, an orator,
and a Marshal of Nobility; your uncle is a schoolmaster; and lastly, I,
your father, am an architect! All the Poloznevs have guarded the sacred
fire for you to put it out!"
"One must be just," I said. "Millions of people put up with manual
labour."
"And let them put up with it! They don't know how to do anything else!
Anybody, even the most abject fool or criminal, is capable of manual
labour; such labour is the distinguishing mark of the slave and the
barbarian, while the holy fire is vouchsafed only to a few!"
To continue this conversation was unprofitable. My father worshipped
himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself.
Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of
physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire
as on a secret dread that I should become a workman, and should set the
whole town talking about me; what was worse, all my contemporaries had
long ago taken their degrees and were getting on well, and the son of
the manager of the State Bank was already a collegiate assessor, while
I, his only son, was nothing! To continue the conversation was
unprofitable and unpleasant, but I still sat on and feebly retorted,
hoping that I might at last be understood. The whole question, of
course, was clear and simple, and only concerned with the means of my
earning my living; but the simplicity of it was not seen, and I was
talked to in mawkishly rounded phrases of Borodino, of the sacred fire,
of my uncle a forgotten poet, who had once written poor and artificial
verses; I was rudely called an addlepate and a dense fellow. And how I
longed to be understood! In spite of everything, I loved my father and
my sister and it had been my habit from childhood to consult them-a
habit so deeply rooted that I doubt whether I could ever have got rid of
it; whether I were in the right or the wrong, I was in constant dread of
wounding them, constantly afraid that my father's thin neck would turn
crimson and that he would have a stroke.
"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a
typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What can
the sacred fire have to do with it?"
"It's intellectual work, anyway," said my father. "But that's enough;
let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you: if you
don't go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible
propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts. I
shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!"
With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which I
wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:
"The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me. I shall
renounce it all beforehand."
For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were deeply
resented by my father. He turned crimson.
"Don't dare to talk to me like that, stupid!" he shouted in a thin,
shrill voice. "Wastrel!" and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual
movement he slapped me twice in the face. "You are forgetting yourself."
When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with my
hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight in the
face. And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and, as though I
were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look him in the face. My
father was old and very thin but his delicate muscles must have been as
strong as leather, for his blows hurt a good deal.
I staggered back into the passage, and there he snatched up his
umbrella, and with it hit me several times on the head and shoulders; at
that moment my sister opened the drawing-room door to find out what the
noise was, but at once turned away with a look of horror and pity
without uttering a word in my defence.
My determination not to return to the Government office, but to begin a
new life of toil, was not to be shaken. All that was left for me to do
was to fix upon the special employment, and there was no particular
difficulty about that, as it seemed to me that I was very strong and
fitted for the very heaviest labour. I was faced with a monotonous life
of toil in the midst of hunger, coarseness, and stench, continually
preoccupied with earning my daily bread. And-who knows?-as I returned
from my work along Great Dvoryansky Street, I might very likely envy
Dolzhikov, the engineer, who lived by intellectual work, but, at the
moment, thinking over all my future hardships made me light-hearted. At
times I had dreamed of spiritual activity, imagining myself a teacher, a
doctor, or a writer, but these dreams remained dreams. The taste for
intellectual pleasures-for the theatre, for instance, and for reading-
was a passion with me, but whether I had any ability for intellectual
work I don't know. At school I had had an unconquerable aversion for
Greek, so that I was only in the fourth class when they had to take me
from school. For a long while I had coaches preparing me for the fifth
class. Then I served in various Government offices, spending the greater
part of the day in complete idleness, and I was told that was
intellectual work. My activity in the scholastic and official sphere had
required neither mental application nor talent, nor special
qualifications, nor creative impulse; it was mechanical. Such
intellectual work I put on a lower level than physical toil; I despise
it, and I don't think that for one moment it could serve as a
justification for an idle, careless life, as it is indeed nothing but a
sham, one of the forms of that same idleness. Real intellectual work I
have in all probability never known.
Evening came on. We lived in Great Dvoryansky Street; it was the
principal street in the town, and in the absence of decent public
gardens our beau monde used to use it as a promenade in the evenings.
This charming street did to some extent take the place of a public
garden, as on each side of it there was a row of poplars which smelt
sweet, particularly after rain, and acacias, tall bushes of lilac, wild-
cherries and apple-trees hung over the fences and palings. The May
twilight, the tender young greenery with its shifting shades, the scent
of the lilac, the buzzing of the insects, the stillness, the warmth-how
fresh and marvellous it all is, though spring is repeated every year! I
stood at the garden gate and watched the passers-by. With most of them I
had grown up and at one time played pranks; now they might have been
disconcerted by my being near them, for I was poorly and unfashionably
dressed, and they used to say of my very narrow trousers and huge,
clumsy boots that they were like sticks of macaroni stuck in boats.
Besides, I had a bad reputation in the town because I had no decent
social position, and used often to play billiards in cheap taverns, and
also, perhaps, because I had on two occasions been hauled up before an
officer of the police, though I had done nothing whatever to account for
this.
In the big house opposite someone was playing the piano at Dolzhikov's.
It was beginning to get dark, and stars were twinkling in the sky. Here
my father, in an old top-hat with wide upturned brim, walked slowly by
with my sister on his arm, bowing in response to greetings.
"Look up," he said to my sister, pointing to the sky with the same
umbrella with which he had beaten me that afternoon. "Look up at the
sky! Even the tiniest stars are all worlds! How insignificant is man in
comparison with the universe!"
And he said this in a tone that suggested that it was particularly
agreeable and flattering to him that he was so insignificant. How
absolutely devoid of talent and imagination he was! Sad to say, he was
the only architect in the town, and in the fifteen to twenty years that
I could remember not one single decent house had been built in it. When
any one asked him to plan a house, he usually drew first the reception
hall and drawing-room: just as in old days the boarding-school misses
always started from the stove when they danced, so his artistic ideas
could only begin and develop from the hall and drawing-room. To them he
tacked on a dining-room, a nursery, a study, linking the rooms together
with doors, and so they all inevitably turned into passages, and every
one of them had two or even three unnecessary doors. His imagination
must have been lacking in clearness, extremely muddled, curtailed. As
though feeling that something was lacking, he invariably had recourse to
all sorts of outbuildings, planting one beside another; and I can see
now the narrow entries, the poky little passages, the crooked staircases
leading to half-landings where one could not stand upright, and where,
instead of a floor, there were three huge steps like the shelves of a
bath-house; and the kitchen was invariably in the basement with a brick
floor and vaulted ceilings. The front of the house had a harsh, stubborn
expression; the lines of it were stiff and timid; the roof was low-
pitched and, as it were, squashed down; and the fat, well-fed-looking
chimneys were invariably crowned by wire caps with squeaking black
cowls. And for some reason all these houses, built by my father exactly
like one another, vaguely reminded me of his top-hat and the back of his
head, stiff and stubborn-looking. In the course of years they have grown
used in the town to the poverty of my father's imagination. It has taken
root and become our local style.
This same style my father had brought into my sister's life also,
beginning with christening her Kleopatra (just as he had named me
Misail). When she was a little girl he scared her by references to the
stars, to the sages of ancient times, to our ancestors, and discoursed
at length on the nature of life and duty; and now, when she was twenty-
six, he kept up the same habits, allowing her to walk arm in arm with no
one but himself, and imagining for some reason that sooner or later a
suitable young man would be sure to appear, and to desire to enter into
matrimony with her from respect for his personal qualities. She adored
my father, feared him, and believed in his exceptional intelligence.
It was quite dark, and gradually the street grew empty. The music had
ceased in the house opposite; the gate was thrown wide open, and a team
with three horses trotted frolicking along our street with a soft tinkle
of little bells. That was the engineer going for a drive with his
daughter. It was bedtime.
I had my own room in the house, but I lived in a shed in the yard, under
the same roof as a brick barn which had been built some time or other,
probably to keep harness in; great hooks were driven into the wall. Now
it was not wanted, and for the last thirty years my father had stowed
away in it his newspapers, which for some reason he had bound in half-
yearly volumes and allowed nobody to touch. Living here, I was less
liable to be seen by my father and his visitors, and I fancied that if I
did not live in a real room, and did not go into the house every day to
dinner, my father's words that I was a burden upon him did not sound so
offensive.
My sister was waiting for me. Unseen by my father, she had brought me
some supper: not a very large slice of cold veal and a piece of bread.
In our house such sayings as: "A penny saved is a penny gained," and
"Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves,"
and so on, were frequently repeated, and my sister, weighed down by
these vulgar maxims, did her utmost to cut down the expenses, and so we
fared badly. Putting the plate on the table, she sat down on my bed and
began to cry.
"Misail," she said, "what a way to treat us!"
She did not cover her face; her tears dropped on her bosom and hands,
and there was a look of distress on her face. She fell back on the
pillow, and abandoned herself to her tears, sobbing and quivering all
over.
"You have left the service again . . ." she articulated. "Oh, how awful
it is!"
"But do understand, sister, do understand . . . ." I said, and I was
overcome with despair because she was crying.
As ill-luck would have it, the kerosene in my little lamp was exhausted;
it began to smoke, and was on the point of going out, and the old hooks
on the walls looked down sullenly, and their shadows flickered.
"Have mercy on us," said my sister, sitting up. "Father is in terrible
distress and I am ill; I shall go out of my mind. What will become of
you?" she said, sobbing and stretching out her arms to me. "I beg you, I
implore you, for our dear mother's sake, I beg you to go back to the
office!"
"I can't, Kleopatra!" I said, feeling that a little more and I should
give way. "I cannot!"
"Why not?" my sister went on. "Why not? Well, if you can't get on with
the Head, look out for another post. Why shouldn't you get a situation
on the railway, for instance? I have just been talking to Anyuta
Blagovo; she declares they would take you on the railway-line, and even
promised to try and get a post for you. For God's sake, Misail, think a
little! Think a little, I implore you."
We talked a little longer and I gave way. I said that the thought of a
job on the railway that was being constructed had never occurred to me,
and that if she liked I was ready to try it.
She smiled joyfully through her tears and squeezed my hand, and then
went on crying because she could not stop, while I went to the kitchen
for some kerosene. II
Among the devoted supporters of amateur theatricals, concerts and
tableaux vivants for charitable objects the Azhogins, who lived in their
own house in Great Dvoryansky Street, took a foremost place; they always
provided the room, and took upon themselves all the troublesome
arrangements and the expenses. They were a family of wealthy landowners
who had an estate of some nine thousand acres in the district and a
capital house, but they did not care for the country, and lived winter
and summer alike in the town. The family consisted of the mother, a
tall, spare, refined lady, with short hair, a short jacket, and a flat-
looking skirt in the English fashion, and three daughters who, when they
were spoken of, were called not by their names but simply: the eldest,
the middle, and the youngest. They all had ugly sharp chins, and were
short-sighted and round-shouldered. They were dressed like their mother,
they lisped disagreeably, and yet, in spite of that, infallibly took
part in every performance and were continually doing something with a
charitable object-acting, reciting, singing. They were very serious and
never smiled, and even in a musical comedy they played without the
faintest trace of gaiety, with a businesslike air, as though they were
engaged in bookkeeping.
I loved our theatricals, especially the numerous, noisy, and rather
incoherent rehearsals, after which they always gave a supper. In the
choice of the plays and the distribution of the parts I had no hand at
all. The post assigned to me lay behind the scenes. I painted the
scenes, copied out the parts, prompted, made up the actors' faces; and I
was entrusted, too, with various stage effects such as thunder, the
singing of nightingales, and so on. Since I had no proper social
position and no decent clothes, at the rehearsals I held aloof from the
rest in the shadows of the wings and maintained a shy silence.
I painted the scenes at the Azhogins' either in the barn or in the yard.
I was assisted by Andrey Ivanov, a house painter, or, as he called
himself, a contractor for all kinds of house decorations, a tall, very
thin, pale man of fifty, with a hollow chest, with sunken temples, with
blue rings round his eyes, rather terrible to look at in fact. He was
afflicted with some internal malady, and every autumn and spring people
said that he wouldn't recover, but after being laid up for a while he
would get up and say afterwards with surprise: "I have escaped dying
again."
In the town he was called Radish, and they declared that this was his
real name. He was as fond of the theatre as I was, and as soon as
rumours reached him that a performance was being got up he threw aside
all his work and went to the Azhogins' to paint scenes.
The day after my talk with my sister, I was working at the Azhogins'
from morning till night. The rehearsal was fixed for seven o'clock in
the evening, and an hour before it began all the amateurs were gathered
together in the hall, and the eldest, the middle, and the youngest
Azhogins were pacing about the stage, reading from manuscript books.
Radish, in a long rusty-red overcoat and a scarf muffled round his neck,
already stood leaning with his head against the wall, gazing with a
devout expression at the stage. Madame Azhogin went up first to one and
then to another guest, saying something agreeable to each. She had a way
of gazing into one's face, and speaking softly as though telling a
secret.
"It must be difficult to paint scenery," she said softly, coming up to
me. "I was just talking to Madame Mufke about superstitions when I saw
you come in. My goodness, my whole life I have been waging war against
superstitions! To convince the servants what nonsense all their terrors
are, I always light three candles, and begin all my important
undertakings on the thirteenth of the month."
Dolzhikov's daughter came in, a plump, fair beauty, dressed, as people
said, in everything from Paris. She did not act, but a chair was set for
her on the stage at the rehearsals, and the performances never began
till she had appeared in the front row, dazzling and astounding everyone
with her fine clothes. As a product of the capital she was allowed to
make remarks during the rehearsals; and she did so with a sweet
indulgent smile, and one could see that she looked upon our performance
as a childish amusement. It was said she had studied singing at the
Petersburg Conservatoire, and even sang for a whole winter in a private
opera. I thought her very charming, and I usually watched her through
the rehearsals and performances without taking my eyes off her.
I had just picked up the manuscript book to begin prompting when my
sister suddenly made her appearance. Without taking off her cloak or
hat, she came up to me and said:
"Come along, I beg you."
I went with her. Anyuta Blagovo, also in her hat and wearing a dark
veil, was standing behind the scenes at the door. She was the daughter
of the Assistant President of the Court, who had held that office in our
town almost ever since the establishment of the circuit court. Since she
was tall and had a good figure, her assistance was considered
indispensable for tableaux vivants, and when she represented a fairy or
something like Glory her face burned with shame; but she took no part in
dramatic performances, and came to the rehearsals only for a moment on
some special errand, and did not go into the hall. Now, too, it was
evident that she had only looked in for a minute.
"My father was speaking about you," she said drily, blushing and not
looking at me. "Dolzhikov has promised you a post on the railway-line.
Apply to him to-morrow; he will be at home."
I bowed and thanked her for the trouble she had taken.
"And you can give up this," she said, indicating the exercise book.
My sister and she went up to Madame Azhogin and for two minutes they
were whispering with her looking towards me; they were consulting about
something.
"Yes, indeed," said Madame Azhogin, softly coming up to me and looking
intently into my face. "Yes, indeed, if this distracts you from serious
pursuits"-she took the manuscript book from my hands-"you can hand it
over to someone else; don't distress yourself, my friend, go home, and
good luck to you."
I said good-bye to her, and went away overcome with confusion. As I went
down the stairs I saw my sister and Anyuta Blagovo going away; they were
hastening along, talking eagerly about something, probably about my
going into the railway service. My sister had never been at a rehearsal
before, and now she was most likely conscience-stricken, and afraid her
father might find out that, without his permission, she had been to the
Azhogins'!
I went to Dolzhikov's next day between twelve and one. The footman
conducted me into a very beautiful room, which was the engineer's
drawing-room, and, at the same time, his working study. Everything here
was soft and elegant, and, for a man so unaccustomed to luxury as I was,
it seemed strange. There were costly rugs, huge arm-chairs, bronzes,
pictures, gold and plush frames; among the photographs scattered about
the walls there were very beautiful women, clever, lovely faces, easy
attitudes; from the drawing-room there was a door leading straight into
the garden on to a verandah: one could see lilac-trees; one could see a
table laid for lunch, a number of bottles, a bouquet of roses; there was
a fragrance of spring and expensive cigars, a fragrance of happiness-and
everything seemed as though it would say: "Here is a man who has lived
and laboured, and has attained at last the happiness possible on earth."
The engineer's daughter was sitting at the writing-table, reading a
newspaper.
"You have come to see my father?" she asked. "He is having a shower
bath; he will be here directly. Please sit down and wait."
I sat down.
"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."