easy chairs. He was stout and healthy, ruddy-cheeked and broad-chested,
in a print cotton shirt and full trousers like a toy china sledge-
driver. He had a curly, round beard-and not a single grey hair-a hooked
nose, and clear, dark, guileless eyes.
"What can you do?" he went on. "There is nothing you can do! I am an
engineer. I am a man of an assured position, but before they gave me a
railway-line I was for years in harness; I have been a practical
mechanic. For two years I worked in Belgium as an oiler. You can judge
for yourself, my dear fellow, what kind of work can I offer you?"
"Of course that is so . . ." I muttered in extreme confusion, unable to
face his clear, guileless eyes.
"Can you work the telegraph, any way?" he asked, after a moment's
thought.
"Yes, I have been a telegraph clerk."
"Hm! Well, we will see then. Meanwhile, go to Dubetchnya. I have got a
fellow there, but he is a wretched creature."
"And what will my duties consist of?" I asked.
"We shall see. Go there; meanwhile I will make arrangements. Only please
don't get drunk, and don't worry me with requests of any sort, or I
shall send you packing."
He turned away from me without even a nod.
I bowed to him and his daughter who was reading a newspaper, and went
away. My heart felt so heavy, that when my sister began asking me how
the engineer had received me, I could not utter a single word.
I got up early in the morning, at sunrise, to go to Dubetchnya. There
was not a soul in our Great Dvoryansky Street; everyone was asleep, and
my footsteps rang out with a solitary, hollow sound. The poplars,
covered with dew, filled the air with soft fragrance. I was sad, and did
not want to go away from the town. I was fond of my native town. It
seemed to be so beautiful and so snug! I loved the fresh greenery, the
still, sunny morning, the chiming of our bells; but the people with whom
I lived in this town were boring, alien to me, sometimes even repulsive.
I did not like them nor understand them.
I did not understand what these sixty-five thousand people lived for and
by. I knew that Kimry lived by boots, that Tula made samovars and guns,
that Odessa was a sea-port, but what our town was, and what it did, I
did not know. Great Dvoryansky Street and the two other smartest streets
lived on the interest of capital, or on salaries received by officials
from the public treasury; but what the other eight streets, which ran
parallel for over two miles and vanished beyond the hills, lived upon,
was always an insoluble riddle to me. And the way those people lived one
is ashamed to describe! No garden, no theatre, no decent band; the
public library and the club library were only visited by Jewish youths,
so that the magazines and new books lay for months uncut; rich and well-
educated people slept in close, stuffy bedrooms, on wooden bedsteads
infested with bugs; their children were kept in revoltingly dirty rooms
called nurseries, and the servants, even the old and respected ones,
slept on the floor in the kitchen, covered with rags. On ordinary days
the houses smelt of beetroot soup, and on fast days of sturgeon cooked
in sunflower oil. The food was not good, and the drinking water was
unwholesome. In the town council, at the governor's, at the head
priest's, on all sides in private houses, people had been saying for
years and years that our town had not a good and cheap water-supply, and
that it was necessary to obtain a loan of two hundred thousand from the
Treasury for laying on water; very rich people, of whom three dozen
could have been counted up in our town, and who at times lost whole
estates at cards, drank the polluted water, too, and talked all their
lives with great excitement of a loan for the water-supply-and I did not
understand that; it seemed to me it would have been simpler to take the
two hundred thousand out of their own pockets and lay it out on that
object.
I did not know one honest man in the town. My father took bribes, and
imagined that they were given him out of respect for his moral
qualities; at the high school, in order to be moved up rapidly from
class to class, the boys went to board with their teachers, who charged
them exorbitant sums; the wife of the military commander took bribes
from the recruits when they were called up before the board and even
deigned to accept refreshments from them, and on one occasion could not
get up from her knees in church because she was drunk; the doctors took
bribes, too, when the recruits came up for examination, and the town
doctor and the veterinary surgeon levied a regular tax on the butchers'
shops and the restaurants; at the district school they did a trade in
certificates, qualifying for partial exemption from military service;
the higher clergy took bribes from the humbler priests and from the
church elders; at the Municipal, the Artisans', and all the other Boards
every petitioner was pursued by a shout: "Don't forget your thanks!" and
the petitioner would turn back to give sixpence or a shilling. And those
who did not take bribes, such as the higher officials of the Department
of Justice, were haughty, offered two fingers instead of shaking hands,
were distinguished by the frigidity and narrowness of their judgments,
spent a great deal of time over cards, drank to excess, married
heiresses, and undoubtedly had a pernicious corrupting influence on
those around them. It was only the girls who had still the fresh
fragrance of moral purity; most of them had higher impulses, pure and
honest hearts; but they had no understanding of life, and believed that
bribes were given out of respect for moral qualities, and after they
were married grew old quickly, let themselves go completely, and sank
hopelessly in the mire of vulgar, petty bourgeois existence. III
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. 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.