tea that had been used and dried again; the police hustled us in church,
the assistants and nurses in the hospital plundered us, and if we were
too poor to give them a bribe they revenged themselves by bringing us
food in dirty vessels. In the post-office the pettiest official
considered he had a right to treat us like animals, and to shout with
coarse insolence: "You wait!" "Where are you shoving to?" Even the
housedogs were unfriendly to us, and fell upon us with peculiar
viciousness. But the thing that struck me most of all in my new position
was the complete lack of justice, what is defined by the peasants in the
words: "They have forgotten God." Rarely did a day pass without
swindling. We were swindled by the merchants who sold us oil, by the
contractors and the workmen and the people who employed us. I need not
say that there could never be a question of our rights, and we always
had to ask for the money we earned as though it were a charity, and to
stand waiting for it at the back door, cap in hand.
I was papering a room at the club next to the reading-room; in the
evening, when I was just getting ready to go, the daughter of Dolzhikov,
the engineer, walked into the room with a bundle of books under her arm.
I bowed to her.
"Oh, how do you do!" she said, recognizing me at once, and holding out
her hand. "I'm very glad to see you."
She smiled and looked with curiosity and wonder at my smock, my pail of
paste, the paper stretched on the floor; I was embarrassed, and she,
too, felt awkward.
"You must excuse my looking at you like this," she said. "I have been
told so much about you. Especially by Dr. Blagovo; he is simply in love
with you. And I have made the acquaintance of your sister too; a sweet,
dear girl, but I can never persuade her that there is nothing awful
about your adopting the simple life. On the contrary, you have become
the most interesting man in the town."
She looked again at the pail of paste and the wallpaper, and went on:
"I asked Dr. Blagovo to make me better acquainted with you, but
apparently he forgot, or had not time. Anyway, we are acquainted all the
same, and if you would come and see me quite simply I should be
extremely indebted to you. I so long to have a talk. I am a simple
person," she added, holding out her hand to me, "and I hope that you
will feel no constraint with me. My father is not here, he is in
Petersburg."
She went off into the reading-room, rustling her skirts, while I went
home, and for a long time could not get to sleep.
That cheerless autumn some kind soul, evidently wishing to alleviate my
existence, sent me from time to time tea and lemons, or biscuits, or
roast game. Karpovna told me that they were always brought by a soldier,
and from whom they came she did not know; and the soldier used to
enquire whether I was well, and whether I dined every day, and whether I
had warm clothing. When the frosts began I was presented in the same way
in my absence with a soft knitted scarf brought by the soldier. There
was a faint elusive smell of scent about it, and I guessed who my good
fairy was. The scarf smelt of lilies-of-the-valley, the favourite scent
of Anyuta Blagovo.
Towards winter there was more work and it was more cheerful. Radish
recovered, and we worked together in the cemetery church, where we were
putting the ground-work on the ikon-stand before gilding. It was a
clean, quiet job, and, as our fellows used to say, profitable. One could
get through a lot of work in a day, and the time passed quickly,
imperceptibly. There was no swearing, no laughter, no loud talk. The
place itself compelled one to quietness and decent behaviour, and
disposed one to quiet, serious thoughts. Absorbed in our work we stood
or sat motionless like statues; there was a deathly silence in keeping
with the cemetery, so that if a tool fell, or a flame spluttered in the
lamp, the noise of such sounds rang out abrupt and resonant, and made us
look round. After a long silence we would hear a buzzing like the
swarming of bees: it was the requiem of a baby being chanted slowly in
subdued voices in the porch; or an artist, painting a dove with stars
round it on a cupola would begin softly whistling, and recollecting
himself with a start would at once relapse into silence; or Radish,
answering his thoughts, would say with a sigh: "Anything is possible!
Anything is possible!" or a slow disconsolate bell would begin ringing
over our heads, and the painters would observe that it must be for the
funeral of some wealthy person. . . .
My days I spent in this stillness in the twilight of the church, and in
the long evenings I played billiards or went to the theatre in the
gallery wearing the new trousers I had bought out of my own earnings.
Concerts and performances had already begun at the Azhogins'; Radish
used to paint the scenes alone now. He used to tell me the plot of the
plays and describe the tableaux vivants which he witnessed. I listened
to him with envy. I felt greatly drawn to the rehearsals, but I could
not bring myself to go to the Azhogins'.
A week before Christmas Dr. Blagovo arrived. And again we argued and
played billiards in the evenings. When he played he used to take off his
coat and unbutton his shirt over his chest, and for some reason tried
altogether to assume the air of a desperate rake. He did not drink much,
but made a great uproar about it, and had a special faculty for getting
through twenty roubles in an evening at such a poor cheap tavern as the
Volga.
My sister began coming to see me again; they both expressed surprise
every time on seeing each other, but from her joyful, guilty face it was
evident that these meetings were not accidental. One evening, when we
were playing billiards, the doctor said to me:
"I say, why don't you go and see Miss Dolzhikov? You don't know Mariya
Viktorovna; she is a clever creature, a charmer, a simple, good-natured
soul."
I described how her father had received me in the spring.
"Nonsense!" laughed the doctor, "the engineer's one thing and she's
another. Really, my dear fellow, you mustn't be nasty to her; go and see
her sometimes. For instance, let's go and see her tomorrow evening. What
do you say?"
He persuaded me. The next evening I put on my new serge trousers, and in
some agitation I set off to Miss Dolzhikov's. The footman did not seem
so haughty and terrible, nor the furniture so gorgeous, as on that
morning when I had come to ask a favour. Mariya Viktorovna was expecting
me, and she received me like an old acquaintance, shaking hands with me
in a friendly way. She was wearing a grey cloth dress with full sleeves,
and had her hair done in the style which we used to call "dogs' ears,"
when it came into fashion in the town a year before. The hair was combed
down over the ears, and this made Mariya Viktorovna's face look broader,
and she seemed to me this time very much like her father, whose face was
broad and red, with something in its expression like a sledge-driver.
She was handsome and elegant, but not youthful looking; she looked
thirty, though in reality she was not more than twenty-five.
"Dear Doctor, how grateful I am to you," she said, making me sit down.
"If it hadn't been for him you wouldn't have come to see me. I am bored
to death! My father has gone away and left me alone, and I don't know
what to do with myself in this town."
Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned,
where I lived.
"Do you spend on yourself nothing but what you earn?" she asked.
"No."
"Happy man!" she sighed. "All the evil in life, it seems to me, comes
from idleness, boredom, and spiritual emptiness, and all this is
inevitable when one is accustomed to living at other people's expense.
Don't think I am showing off, I tell you truthfully: it is not
interesting or pleasant to be rich. 'Make to yourselves friends of the
mammon of unrighteousness' is said, because there is not and cannot be a
mammon that's righteous."
She looked round at the furniture with a grave, cold expression, as
though she wanted to count it over, and went on:
"Comfort and luxury have a magical power; little by little they draw
into their clutches even strong-willed people. At one time father and I
lived simply, not in a rich style, but now you see how! It is something
monstrous," she said, shrugging her shoulders; "we spend up to twenty
thousand a year! In the provinces!"
"One comes to look at comfort and luxury as the invariable privilege of
capital and education," I said, "and it seems to me that the comforts of
life may be combined with any sort of labour, even the hardest and
dirtiest. Your father is rich, and yet he says himself that it has been
his lot to be a mechanic and an oiler."
She smiled and shook her head doubtfully: "My father sometimes eats
bread dipped in kvass," she said. "It's a fancy, a whim!"
At that moment there was a ring and she got up.
"The rich and well-educated ought to work like everyone else," she said,
"and if there is comfort it ought to be equal for all. There ought not
to be any privileges. But that's enough philosophizing. Tell me
something amusing. Tell me about the painters. What are they like?
Funny?"
The doctor came in; I began telling them about the painters, but, being
unaccustomed to talking, I was constrained, and described them like an
ethnologist, gravely and tediously. The doctor, too, told us some
anecdotes of working men: he staggered about, shed tears, dropped on his
knees, and, even, mimicking a drunkard, lay on the floor; it was as good
as a play, and Mariya Viktorovna laughed till she cried as she looked at
him. Then he played on the piano and sang in his thin, pleasant tenor,
while Mariya Viktorovna stood by and picked out what he was to sing, and
corrected him when he made a mistake.
"I've heard that you sing, too?" I enquired.
"Sing, too!" cried the doctor in horror. "She sings exquisitely, a
perfect artist, and you talk of her 'singing too'! What an idea!"
"I did study in earnest at one time," she said, answering my question,
"but now I have given it up."
Sitting on a low stool she told us of her life in Petersburg, and
mimicked some celebrated singers, imitating their voice and manner of
singing. She made a sketch of the doctor in her album, then of me; she
did not draw well, but both the portraits were like us. She laughed, and
was full of mischief and charming grimaces, and this suited her better
than talking about the mammon of unrighteousness, and it seemed to me
that she had been talking just before about wealth and luxury, not in
earnest, but in imitation of someone. She was a superb comic actress. I
mentally compared her with our young ladies, and even the handsome,
dignified Anyuta Blagovo could not stand comparison with her; the
difference was immense, like the difference between a beautiful,
cultivated rose and a wild briar.
We had supper together, the three of us. The doctor and Mariya
Viktorovna drank red wine, champagne, and coffee with brandy in it; they
clinked glasses and drank to friendship, to enlightenment, to progress,
to liberty, and they did not get drunk but only flushed, and were
continually, for no reason, laughing till they cried. So as not to be
tiresome I drank claret too.
"Talented, richly endowed natures," said Miss Dolzhikov, "know how to
live, and go their own way; mediocre people, like myself for instance,
know nothing and can do nothing of themselves; there is nothing left for
them but to discern some deep social movement, and to float where they
are carried by it."
"How can one discern what doesn't exist?" asked the doctor.
"We think so because we don't see it."
"Is that so? The social movements are the invention of the new
literature. There are none among us."
An argument began.
"There are no deep social movements among us and never have been," the
doctor declared loudly. "There is no end to what the new literature has
invented! It has invented intellectual workers in the country, and you
may search through all our villages and find at the most some lout in a
reefer jacket or a black frock-coat who will make four mistakes in
spelling a word of three letters. Cultured life has not yet begun among
us. There's the same savagery, the same uniform boorishness, the same
triviality, as five hundred years ago. Movements, currents there have
been, but it has all been petty, paltry, bent upon vulgar and mercenary
interests-and one cannot see anything important in them. If you think
you have discerned a deep social movement, and in following it you
devote yourself to tasks in the modern taste, such as the emancipation
of insects from slavery or abstinence from beef rissoles, I congratulate
you, Madam. We must study, and study, and study and we must wait a bit
with our deep social movements; we are not mature enough for them yet;
and to tell the truth, we don't know anything about them."
"You don't know anything about them, but I do," said Mariya Viktorovna.
"Goodness, how tiresome you are to-day!"
"Our duty is to study and to study, to try to accumulate as much
knowledge as possible, for genuine social movements arise where there is
knowledge; and the happiness of mankind in the future lies only in
knowledge. I drink to science!"
"There is no doubt about one thing: one must organize one's life somehow
differently," said Mariya Viktorovna, after a moment's silence and
thought. "Life, such as it has been hitherto, is not worth having. Don't
let us talk about it."
As we came away from her the cathedral clock struck two.
"Did you like her?" asked the doctor; "she's nice, isn't she?"
On Christmas day we dined with Mariya Viktorovna, and all through the
holidays we went to see her almost every day. There was never anyone
there but ourselves, and she was right when she said that she had no
friends in the town but the doctor and me. We spent our time for the
most part in conversation; sometimes the doctor brought some book or
magazine and read aloud to us. In reality he was the first well-educated
man I had met in my life: I cannot judge whether he knew a great deal,
but he always displayed his knowledge as though he wanted other people
to share it. When he talked about anything relating to medicine he was
not like any one of the doctors in our town, but made a fresh, peculiar
impression upon me, and I fancied that if he liked he might have become
a real man of science. And he was perhaps the only person who had a real
influence upon me at that time. Seeing him, and reading the books he
gave me, I began little by little to feel a thirst for the knowledge
which would have given significance to my cheerless labour. It seemed
strange to me, for instance, that I had not known till then that the
whole world was made up of sixty elements, I had not known what oil was,
what paints were, and that I could have got on without knowing these
things. My acquaintance with the doctor elevated me morally too. I was
continually arguing with him and, though I usually remained of my own
opinion, yet, thanks to him, I began to perceive that everything was not
clear to me, and I began trying to work out as far as I could definite
convictions in myself, that the dictates of conscience might be
definite, and that there might be nothing vague in my mind. Yet, though
he was the most cultivated and best man in the town, he was nevertheless
far from perfection. In his manners, in his habit of turning every
conversation into an argument, in his pleasant tenor, even in his
friendliness, there was something coarse, like a divinity student, and
when he took off his coat and sat in his silk shirt, or flung a tip to a
waiter in the restaurant, I always fancied that culture might be all
very well, but the Tatar was fermenting in him still.
At Epiphany he went back to Petersburg. He went off in the morning, and
after dinner my sister came in. Without taking off her fur coat and her
cap she sat down in silence, very pale, and kept her eyes fixed on the
same spot. She was chilled by the frost and one could see that she was
upset by it.
"You must have caught cold," I said.
Her eyes filled with tears; she got up and went out to Karpovna without
saying a word to me, as though I had hurt her feelings. And a little
later I heard her saying, in a tone of bitter reproach:
"Nurse, what have I been living for till now? What? Tell me, haven't I
wasted my youth? All the best years of my life to know nothing but
keeping accounts, pouring out tea, counting the halfpence, entertaining
visitors, and thinking there was nothing better in the world! Nurse, do
understand, I have the cravings of a human being, and I want to live,
and they have turned me into something like a housekeeper. It's
horrible, horrible!"
She flung her keys towards the door, and they fell with a jingle into my
room. They were the keys of the sideboard, of the kitchen cupboard, of
the cellar, and of the tea-caddy, the keys which my mother used to
carry.
"Oh, merciful heavens!" cried the old woman in horror. "Holy Saints
above!"
Before going home my sister came into my room to pick up the keys, and
said:
"You must forgive me. Something queer has happened to me lately." VIII
On returning home late one evening from Mariya Viktorovna's I found
waiting in my room a young police inspector in a new uniform; he was
sitting at my table, looking through my books.
"At last," he said, getting up and stretching himself. "This is the
third time I have been to you. The Governor commands you to present
yourself before him at nine o'clock in the morning. Without fail."
He took from me a signed statement that I would act upon his
Excellency's command, and went away. This late visit of the police
inspector and unexpected invitation to the Governor's had an
overwhelmingly oppressive effect upon me. From my earliest childhood I
have felt terror-stricken in the presence of gendarmes, policemen, and
law court officials, and now I was tormented by uneasiness, as though I
were really guilty in some way. And I could not get to sleep. My nurse
and Prokofy were also upset and could not sleep. My nurse had earache
too; she moaned, and several times began crying with pain. Hearing that
I was awake, Prokofy came into my room with a lamp and sat down at the
table.
"You ought to have a drink of pepper cordial," he said, after a moment's
thought. "If one does have a drink in this vale of tears it does no
harm. And if Mamma were to pour a little pepper cordial in her ear it
would do her a lot of good."
Between two and three he was going to the slaughter-house for the meat.
I knew I should not sleep till morning now, and to get through the time
till nine o'clock I went with him. We walked with a lantern, while his
boy Nikolka, aged thirteen, with blue patches on his cheeks from
frostbites, a regular young brigand to judge by his expression, drove
after us in the sledge, urging on the horse in a husky voice.
"I suppose they will punish you at the Governor's," Prokofy said to me
on the way. "There are rules of the trade for governors, and rules for
the higher clergy, and rules for the officers, and rules for the
doctors, and every class has its rules. But you haven't kept to your
rules, and you can't be allowed."
The slaughter-house was behind the cemetery, and till then I had only
seen it in the distance. It consisted of three gloomy barns, surrounded
by a grey fence, and when the wind blew from that quarter on hot days in
summer, it brought a stifling stench from them. Now going into the yard
in the dark I did not see the barns; I kept coming across horses and
sledges, some empty, some loaded up with meat. Men were walking about
with lanterns, swearing in a disgusting way. Prokofy and Nikolka swore
just as revoltingly, and the air was in a continual uproar with
swearing, coughing, and the neighing of horses.
There was a smell of dead bodies and of dung. It was thawing, the snow
was changing into mud; and in the darkness it seemed to me that I was
walking through pools of blood.
Having piled up the sledges full of meat we set off to the butcher's
shop in the market. It began to get light. Cooks with baskets and
elderly ladies in mantles came along one after another. Prokofy, with a
chopper in his hand, in a white apron spattered with blood, swore
fearful oaths, crossed himself at the church, shouted aloud for the
whole market to hear, that he was giving away the meat at cost price and
even at a loss to himself. He gave short weight and short change, the
cooks saw that, but, deafened by his shouts, did not protest, and only
called him a hangman. Brandishing and bringing down his terrible chopper
he threw himself into picturesque attitudes, and each time uttered the
sound "Geck" with a ferocious expression, and I was afraid he really
would chop off somebody's head or hand.
I spent all the morning in the butcher's shop, and when at last I went
to the Governor's, my overcoat smelt of meat and blood. My state of mind
was as though I were being sent spear in hand to meet a bear. I remember
the tall staircase with a striped carpet on it, and the young official,
with shiny buttons, who mutely motioned me to the door with both hands,
and ran to announce me. I went into a hall luxuriously but frigidly and
tastelessly furnished, and the high, narrow mirrors in the spaces
between the walls, and the bright yellow window curtains, struck the eye
particularly unpleasantly. One could see that the governors were
changed, but the furniture remained the same. Again the young official
motioned me with both hands to the door, and I went up to a big green
table at which a military general, with the Order of Vladimir on his
breast, was standing.
"Mr. Poloznev, I have asked you to come," he began, holding a letter in
his hand, and opening his mouth like a round "o," "I have asked you to
come here to inform you of this. Your highly respected father has
appealed by letter and by word of mouth to the Marshal of the Nobility
begging him to summon you, and to lay before you the inconsistency of
your behaviour with the rank of the nobility to which you have the
honour to belong. His Excellency Alexandr Pavlovitch, justly supposing
that your conduct might serve as a bad example, and considering that
mere persuasion on his part would not be sufficient, but that official
intervention in earnest was essential, presents me here in this letter
with his views in regard to you, which I share."
He said this, quietly, respectfully, standing erect, as though I were
his superior officer and looking at me with no trace of severity. His
face looked worn and wizened, and was all wrinkles; there were bags
under his eyes; his hair was dyed; and it was impossible to tell from
his appearance how old he was-forty or sixty.
"I trust," he went on, "that you appreciate the delicacy of our honoured
Alexandr Pavlovitch, who has addressed himself to me not officially, but
privately. I, too, have asked you to come here unofficially, and I am
speaking to you, not as a Governor, but from a sincere regard for your
father. And so I beg you either to alter your line of conduct and return
to duties in keeping with your rank, or to avoid setting a bad example,
remove to another district where you are not known, and where you can
follow any occupation you please. In the other case, I shall be forced
to take extreme measures."
He stood for half a minute in silence, looking at me with his mouth
open.
"Are you a vegetarian?" he asked.
"No, your Excellency, I eat meat."
He sat down and drew some papers towards him. I bowed and went out.
It was not worth while now to go to work before dinner. I went home to
sleep, but could not sleep from an unpleasant, sickly feeling, induced
by the slaughter house and my conversation with the Governor, and when
the evening came I went, gloomy and out of sorts, to Mariya Viktorovna.
I told her how I had been at the Governor's, while she stared at me in
perplexity as though she did not believe it, then suddenly began
laughing gaily, loudly, irrepressibly, as only good-natured laughter-
loving people can.
"If only one could tell that in Petersburg!" she brought out, almost
falling over with laughter, and propping herself against the table. "If
one could tell that in Petersburg!" IX
Now we used to see each other often, sometimes twice a day. She used to
come to the cemetery almost every day after dinner, and read the
epitaphs on the crosses and tombstones while she waited for me.
Sometimes she would come into the church, and, standing by me, would
look on while I worked. The stillness, the naïve work of the painters
and gilders, Radish's sage reflections, and the fact that I did not
differ externally from the other workmen, and worked just as they did in
my waistcoat with no socks on, and that I was addressed familiarly by
them-all this was new to her and touched her. One day a workman, who was
painting a dove on the ceiling, called out to me in her presence:
"Misail, hand me up the white paint."