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."
VI
On Sunday, Doctor Blagovo came to see me unexpectedly. He was wearing a
white summer uniform over a silk shirt, and high glac? boots.
"I came to see you!" he began, gripping my hand in his hearty,
undergraduate fashion. "I hear of you every day and I have long intended
to go and see you to have a heart-to-heart, as they say. Things are
awfully boring in the town; there is not a living soul worth talking to.
How hot it is, by Jove!" he went on, taking off his tunic and standing
in his silk shirt. "My dear fellow, let us have a talk."
I was feeling bored and longing for other society than that of the
decorators. I was really glad to see him.
"To begin with," he said, sitting on my bed, "I sympathise with you
heartily, and I have a profound respect for your present way of living.
In the town you are misunderstood and there is nobody to understand you,
because, as you know, it is full of Gogolian pig-faces. But I guessed
what you were at the picnic. You are a noble soul, an honest, high-
minded man! I respect you and think it an honour to shake hands with
you. To change your life so abruptly and suddenly as you did, you must
have passed through a most trying spiritual process, and to go on with
it now, to live scrupulously by your convictions, you must have to toil
incessantly both in mind and in heart. Now, please tell me, don't you
think that if you spent all this force of will, intensity, and power on
something else, like trying to be a great scholar or an artist, that
your life would be both wider and deeper, and altogether more
productive?"
We talked and when we came to speak of physical labour, I expressed this
idea: that it was necessary that the strong should not enslave the weak,
and that the minority should not be a parasite on the majority, always
sucking up the finest sap, i. e., it was necessary that all without
exception--the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor--should share
equally in the struggle for existence, every man for himself, and in
that respect there was no better means of levelling than physical labour
and compulsory service for all.
"You think, then," said the doctor, "that all, without, exception,
should be employed in physical labour?"
"Yes."
"But don't you think that if everybody, including the best people,
thinkers and men of science, were to take part in the struggle for
existence, each man for himself, and took to breaking stones and
painting roofs, it would be a serious menace to progress?"
"Where is the danger?" I asked. "Progress consists in deeds of love, in
the fulfilment of the moral law. If you enslave no one, and are a burden
upon no one, what further progress do you want?"
"But look here!" said Blagovo, suddenly losing his temper and getting
up. "I say! If a snail in its shell is engaged in self-perfection in
obedience to the moral law--would you call that progress?"
"But why?" I was nettled. "If you make your neighbours feed you, clothe
you, carry you, defend you from your enemies, their life is built up on
slavery, and that is not progress. My view is that that is the most real
and, perhaps, the only possible, the only progress necessary."
"The limits of universal progress, which is common to all men, are in
infinity, and it seems to me strange to talk of a 'possible' progress
limited by our needs and temporal conceptions."
"If the limits of peoples are in infinity, as you say, then it means
that its goal is indefinite," I said. "Think of living without knowing
definitely what for!"
"Why not? Your 'not knowing' is not so boring as your 'knowing.' I am
walking up a ladder which is called progress, civilisation, culture. I
go on and on, not knowing definitely where I am going to, but surely it
is worth while living for the sake of the wonderful ladder alone. And
you know exactly what you are living for--that some should not enslave
others, that the artist and the man who mixes his colours for him should
dine together. But that is the bourgeois, kitchen side of life, and
isn't it disgusting only to live for that? If some insects devour
others, devil take them, let them! We need not think of them, they will
perish and rot, however you save them from slavery--we must think of that
great Cross which awaits all mankind in the distant future."
Blagovo argued hotly with me, but it was noticeable that he was
disturbed by some outside thought.
"Your sister is not coming," he said, consulting his watch. "Yesterday
she was at our house and said she was going to see you. You go on
talking about slavery, slavery," he went on, "but it is a special
question, and all these questions are solved by mankind gradually."
We began to talk of evolution. I said that every man decides the
question of good and evil for himself, and does not wait for mankind to
solve the question by virtue of gradual development. Besides, evolution
is a stick with two ends. Side by side with the gradual development of
humanitarian ideas, there is the gradual growth of ideas of a different
kind. Serfdom is past, and capitalism is growing. And with ideas of
liberation at their height the majority, just as in the days of Baty,
feeds, clothes, and defends the minority; and is left hungry, naked, and
defenceless. The state of things harmonises beautifully with all your
tendencies and movements, because the art of enslaving is also being
gradually developed. We no longer flog our servants in the stables, but
we give slavery more refined forms; at any rate, we are able to justify
it in each separate case. Ideas remain ideas with us, but if we could,
now, at the end of the nineteenth century, throw upon the working
classes all our most unpleasant physiological functions, we should do
so, and, of course, we should justify ourselves by saying that if the
best people, thinkers and great scholars, had to waste their time on
such functions, progress would be in serious jeopardy.
Just then my sister entered. When she saw the doctor, she was flurried
and excited, and at once began to say that it was time for her to go
home to her father.
"Cleopatra Alexeyevna," said Blagovo earnestly, laying his hands on his
heart, "what will happen to your father if you spend half an hour with
your brother and me?"
He was a simple kind of man and could communicate his cheerfulness to
others. My sister thought for a minute and began to laugh, and suddenly
got very happy, suddenly, unexpectedly, just as she did at the picnic.
We went out into the fields and lay on the grass, and went on with our
conversation and looked at the town, where all the windows facing the
west looked golden in the setting sun.
After that Blagovo appeared every time my sister came to see me, and
they always greeted each other as though their meeting was unexpected.
My sister used to listen while the doctor and I argued, and her face was
always joyful and rapturous, admiring and curious, and it seemed to me
that a new world was slowly being discovered before her eyes, a world
which she had not seen before even in her dreams, which now she was
trying to divine; when the doctor was not there she was quiet and sad,
and if, as she sat on my bed, she sometimes wept, it was for reasons of
which she did not speak.
In August Radish gave us orders to go to the railway. A couple of days
before we were "driven" out of town, my father came to see me. He sat
down and, without looking at me, slowly wiped his red face, then took
out of his pocket our local paper and read out with deliberate emphasis
on each word that a schoolfellow of my own age, the son of the director
of the State Bank, had been appointed chief clerk of the Court of the
Exchequer.
"And now, look at yourself," he said, folding up the newspaper. "You are
a beggar, a vagabond, a scoundrel! Even the bourgeoisie and other
peasants get education to make themselves decent people, while you, a
Pologniev, with famous, noble ancestors, go wallowing in the mire! But I
did not come here to talk to you. I have given you up already." He went
on in a choking voice, as he stood up: "I came here to find out where
your sister is, you scoundrel! She left me after dinner. It is now past
seven o'clock and she is not in. She has been going out lately without
telling me, and she has been disrespectful--and I see your filthy,
abominable influence at work. Where is she?"
He had in his hands the familiar umbrella, and I was already taken
aback, and I stood stiff and erect, like a schoolboy, waiting for my
father to thrash me, but he saw the glance I cast at the umbrella and
this probably checked him.
"Live as you like!" he said. "My blessing is gone from you."
"Good God!" muttered my old nurse behind the door. "You are lost. Oh! my
heart feels some misfortune coming. I can feel it."
I went to work on the railway. During the whole of August there was wind
and rain. It was damp and cold; the corn had now been gathered in the
fields, and on the big farms where the reaping was done with machines,
the wheat lay not in stacks, but in heaps; and I remember how those
melancholy heaps grew darker and darker every day, and the grain
sprouted. It was hard work; the pouring rain spoiled everything that we
succeeded in finishing. We were not allowed either to live or to sleep
in the station buildings and had to take shelter in dirty, damp, mud
huts where the "railies" had lived during the summer, and at night I
could not sleep from the cold and the bugs crawling over my face and
hands. And when we were working near the bridges, then the "railies"
used to come out in a crowd to fight the painters--which they regarded as
sport. They used to thrash us, steal our trousers, and to infuriate us
and provoke us to a fight; they used to spoil our work, as when they
smeared the signal-boxes with green paint. To add to all our miseries
Radish began to pay us very irregularly. All the painting on the line
was given to one contractor, who subcontracted with another, and he
again with Radish, stipulating for twenty per cent commission. The job
itself was unprofitable; then came the rains; time was wasted; we did no
work and Radish had to pay his men every day. The starving painters
nearly came to blows with him, called him a swindler, a bloodsucker, a
Judas, and he, poor man, sighed and in despair raised his hands to the
heavens and was continually going to Mrs. Cheprakov to borrow money.
VII
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.
I bowed to her.
"Ah! How are you?" she said, recognising me at once and holding out her
hand. "I am very glad to see you."
She smiled and looked with a curious puzzled expression at my blouse and
the pail of paste and the papers lying on the floor; I was embarrassed
and she also felt awkward.
"Excuse my staring at you," she said. "I have heard so much about you.
Especially from Doctor Blagovo. He is enthusiastic about you. I have met
your sister; she is a dear, sympathetic girl, but I could not make her
see that there is nothing awful in your simple life. On the contrary,
you are the most interesting man in the town."
Once more she glanced at the pail of paste and the paper and said:
"I asked Doctor Blagovo to bring us together, but he either forgot or
had no time. However, we have met now. I should be very pleased if you
would call on me. I do so want to have a talk. I am a simple person,"
she said, holding out her hand, "and I hope you will come and see me
without ceremony. My father is away, in Petersburg."
She went into the reading-room, with her dress rustling, and for a long
time after I got home I could not sleep.
During that autumn some kind soul, wishing to relieve my existence, sent
me from time to time presents of tea and lemons, or biscuits, or roast
pigeons. Karpovna said the presents were brought by a soldier, though
from whom she did not know; and the soldier used to ask if I was well,
if I had dinner every day, and if I had warm clothes. When the frost
began the soldier came while I was out and brought a soft knitted scarf,
which gave out a soft, hardly perceptible scent, and I guessed who my
good fairy had been. For the scarf smelled of lily-of-the-valley, Aniuta
Blagovo's favourite scent.
Toward winter there was more work and things became more cheerful.
Radish came to life again and we worked together in the cemetery church,
where we scraped the holy shrine for gilding. It was a clean, quiet,
and, as our mates said, a specially good job. We could do a great deal
in one day, and so time passed quickly, imperceptibly. There was no
swearing, nor laughing, nor loud altercations. The place compelled quiet
and decency, and disposed one for tranquil, serious thoughts. Absorbed
in our work, we stood or sat immovably, like statues; there was a dead
silence, very proper to a cemetery, so that if a tool fell down, or the
oil in the lamp spluttered, the sound would be loud and startling, and
we would turn to see what it was. After a long silence one could hear a
humming like that of a swarm of bees; in the porch, in an undertone, the
funeral service was being read over a dead baby; or a painter painting a
moon surrounded with stars on the cupola would begin to whistle quietly,
and remembering suddenly that he was in a church, would stop; or Radish
would sigh at his own thoughts: "Anything may happen! Anything may
happen!" or above our heads there would be the slow, mournful tolling of
a bell, and the painters would say it must be a rich man being brought
to the church....
The days I spent in the peace of the little church, and during the
evenings I played billiards, or went to the gallery of the theatre in
the new serge suit I had bought with my own hard-earned money. They were
already beginning plays and concerts at the Azhoguins', and Radish did
the scenery by himself. He told me about the plays and tableaux vivants
at the Azhoguins', and I listened to him enviously. I had a great
longing to take part in the rehearsals, but I dared not go to the
Azhoguins'.
A week before Christmas Doctor Blagovo arrived, and we resumed our
arguments and played billiards in the evenings. When he played billiards
he used to take off his coat, and unfasten his shirt at the neck, and
generally try to look like a debauchee. He drank a little, but rowdily,
and managed to spend in a cheap tavern like the Volga as much as twenty
roubles in an evening.
Once more my sister came to see me, and when they met they expressed
surprise, but I could see by her happy, guilty face that these meetings
were not accidental. One evening when we were playing billiards the
doctor said to me:
"I say, why don't you call on Miss Dolyhikov? You don't know Maria
Victorovna. She is a clever, charming, simple creature."
I told him how the engineer had received me in the spring.