And so my relations with my employer were quiet and peaceful, but still
the unclean and degrading element which I so dreaded on becoming a
footman was conspicuous and made itself felt every day. I did not get on
with Polya. She was a well-fed and pampered hussy who adored Orlov
because he was a gentleman and despised me because I was a footman.
Probably, from the point of view of a real flunkey or cook, she was
fascinating, with her red cheeks, her turned-up nose, her coquettish
glances, and the plumpness, one might almost say fatness, of her person.
She powdered her face, coloured her lips and eyebrows, laced herself in,
and wore a bustle, and a bangle made of coins. She walked with little
ripping steps; as she walked she swayed, or, as they say, wriggled her
shoulders and back. The rustle of her skirts, the creaking of her stays,
the jingle her bangle and the vulgar smell of lip salve, toilet vinegar,
and scent stolen from her master, aroused in me whilst I was doing the
rooms with her in the morning a sensation as though I were taking part
with her in some abomination.
Either because I did not steal as she did, or because I displayed no
desire to become her lover, which she probably looked upon as an insult,
or perhaps because she felt that I was a man of a different order, she
hated me from the first day. My inexperience, my appearance--so unlike
a flunkey--and my illness, seemed to her pitiful and excited her
disgust. I had a bad cough at that time, and sometimes at night I
prevented her from sleeping, as our rooms were only divided by a wooden
partition, and every morning she said to me:
"Again you didn't let me sleep. You ought to be in hospital instead of
in service."
She so genuinely believed that I was hardly a human being, but something
infinitely below her, that, like the Roman matrons who were not ashamed
to bathe before their slaves, she sometimes went about in my presence in
nothing but her chemise.
Once when I was in a happy, dreamy mood, I asked her at dinner (we had
soup and roast meat sent in from a restaurant every day):
"Polya, do you believe in God?"
"Why, of course!"
"Then," I went on, "you believe there will be a day of judgment, and
that we shall have to answer to God for every evil action?"
She gave me no reply, but simply made a contemptuous grimace, and,
looking that time at her cold eyes and over-fed expression, I realised
that for her complete and finished personality no God, no conscience, no
laws existed, and that if I had had to set fire to the house, to murder
or to rob, I could not have hired a better accomplice.
In my novel surroundings I felt very uncomfortable for the first week at
Orlov's before I got used to being addressed as "thou," and being
constantly obliged to tell lies (saying "My master is not at home" when
he was). In my flunkey's swallow-tail I felt as though I were in armour.
But I grew accustomed to it in time. Like a genuine footman, I waited at
table, tidied the rooms, ran and drove about on errands of all sorts.
When Orlov did not want to keep an appointment with Zinaida Fyodorovna,
or when he forgot that he had promised to go and see her, I drove to
Znamensky Street, put a letter into her hands and told a lie. And the
result of it all was quite different from what I had expected when I
became a footman. Every day of this new life of mine was wasted for me
and my cause, as Orlov never spoke of his father, nor did his visitors,
and all I could learn of the stateman's doings was, as before, what I
could glean from the newspapers or from correspondence with my comrades.
The hundreds of notes and papers I used to find in the study and read
had not the remotest connection with what I was looking for. Orlov was
absolutely uninterested in his father's political work, and looked as
though he had never heard of it, or as though his father had long been
dead.