‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘But don’t you find that if everyone, including the best people, the thinkers and great scholars, as they participate in the struggle for existence, each for himself, begins to spend time crushing stone and painting roofs, it may pose a serious threat to progress?’’
‘‘What’s the danger?’’ I asked. ‘‘Progress lies in works of love, in the fulfillment of the moral law. If you don’t enslave anyone, are not a burden to anyone, what more progress do you want?’’
‘‘But excuse me!’’ Blagovo suddenly flared up, getting to his feet. ‘‘But excuse me! If the snail in its shell is occupied with personal self-perfection and dabbles in the moral law, do you call that progress?’’
‘‘Why dabbles?’’ I was offended. ‘‘If you don’t make your neighbors feed you, clothe you, drive you around, protect you from enemies, then isn’t that progress in a life that’s all built on slavery? In my opinion, that is the most genuine progress, and perhaps the only kind possible and necessary for man.’’
‘‘The limits of universally human world progress lie in infinity, and to speak of some ‘possible’ progress, limited by our needs or temporary views—that, forgive me, is even strange.’’
‘‘If the limits of progress lie in infinity, as you say, that means its goals are undefined,’’ I said. ‘‘To live and not know definitely what you’re living for!’’
‘‘So be it! But this ‘not knowing’ is not as boring as your ‘knowing.’ I’m climbing the ladder known as progress, civilization, culture, I go on and on without knowing definitely where I’m going, but really, for the sake of this wonderful ladder alone, life is worth living; while you know what you’re living for—so that some people will not enslave others, so that an artist and the man who grinds pigments for him will have the same dinner. But that is the gray, philistine, kitchen side of life, and to live for that alone—isn’t that disgusting? If some insects enslave others, devil take them, let them eat each other! We shouldn’t think about them—they’ll die and rot anyway, no matter how you save them from slavery—we must think about that great X that awaits all mankind in the distant future.’’
Blagovo argued hotly with me, but at the same time, he was noticeably troubled by some extraneous thought.
‘‘Your sister probably won’t come,’’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘‘Yesterday she visited my family and said she’d be here. You keep saying slavery, slavery...’ he went on. ‘‘But that is a specific problem, and all such problems get solved by mankind gradually, of themselves.’’
We began to talk about gradualness. I said that each of us resolves the question of whether to do good or evil for himself, without waiting until mankind approaches the resolution of the question by way of gradual development. Besides, gradualness was a stick with two ends. Alongside the process of the gradual development of humane ideas, there could be observed the gradual growth of ideas of a different sort. There is no serfdom, but capitalism is growing instead. And at the very height of liberating ideas, the majority, just as in the times of Batu Khan,9 feeds, clothes, and protects the minority while going hungry, naked, and unprotected itself. This order gets along splendidly with all trends and currents, because the art of enslavement is also gradually cultivated. We no longer thrash our lackeys in the stable, but we endow slavery with refined forms, or at least we know how to find a justification for it in each particular case. With us, ideas are ideas, but if now, at the end of the nineteenth century, it were possible to heap our most unpleasant physiological functions on workers, we would do it and then, of course, say in order to justify ourselves that if the best people, the thinkers and great scholars, started wasting their precious time on these functions, it might seriously threaten progress.
But then my sister came. Seeing the doctor, she began bustling, worrying, and right away began saying it was time for her to go home to father.
‘‘Cleopatra Alexeevna,’’ Blagovo said persuasively, pressing both hands to his heart, ‘‘what will happen to your dear papa if you spend a mere half hour with me and your brother?’’
He was simple-hearted and knew how to communicate his animation to others. My sister, having thought for a moment, laughed and became all merry suddenly, unexpectedly, like the other time at the picnic. We went into the fields and, settling in the grass, continued our conversation and looked at the town, where all the windows to the west seemed bright gold because of the setting sun.
After that, each time my sister came to see me, Blagovo appeared as well, and the two greeted each other as if their meeting at my place was accidental. My sister listened to me and the doctor arguing, and her expression then was joyfully rapturous, tender, and curious, and it seemed to me that a different world was gradually opening before her eyes, which she had never seen before even in dreams, and which she now tried to puzzle out. Without the doctor, she was quiet and sad, and if she wept occasionally, sitting on my bed, it was now for reasons she did not speak about.
In August, Radish told us to get ready to go to the railway line. A couple of days before we were ‘‘herded’’ out of town, my father came to see me. He sat down and wiped his red face unhurriedly, without looking at me, then took our town Messenger from his pocket and slowly, emphasizing each word, read that my peer, the son of the office manager of the State Bank, had been appointed head of a section in the treasury department.
‘‘And now look at yourself,’’ he said, folding the newspaper, ‘‘a beggar, a ragamuffin, a scoundrel! Even tradesmen and peasants get educated in order to become human beings, while you, a Poloznev, with noble, wellborn forebears, are striving towards the mud! But I haven’t come here to talk to you; I’ve already waved you aside,’’ he went on in a stifled voice, getting up. ‘‘I’ve come to find out where your sister is, you scoundrel! She left home after dinner, and it’s now past seven o’clock, and she’s not back. She’s started going out frequently without telling me, she’s less respectful—and I see in it your wicked, mean influence. Where is she?’’
In his hands was the umbrella I knew so well, and I already felt at a loss and stood at attention like a schoolboy, expecting my father to start beating me, but he noticed the glance I cast at the umbrella, and that probably held him back.
‘‘Live as you like!’’ he said. ‘‘I deprive you of my blessing!’’
‘‘Saints alive!’’ my nanny muttered behind the door. ‘‘Your poor, miserable head! Oh, there’s a foreboding in my heart, a foreboding!’’
I worked on the line. It rained ceaselessly all August, it was damp and cold; the grain wasn’t taken in from the fields, and on large estates, where they harvested with machines, the wheat lay not in sheaves but in heaps, and I remember how those sad heaps grew darker every day, and the grain sprouted in them. It was hard to work; the downpour ruined everything we managed to get done. We weren’t allowed to live and sleep in the station buildings, and took shelter in dirty, damp dugouts where the ‘‘railboys’’ lived in summer, and I couldn’t sleep at night from the cold and from the woodlice that crawled over my face and hands. And when we worked near the bridges, bands of ‘‘railboys’’ came in the evenings just to beat us painters—for them it was a kind of sport. They beat us, stole our brushes, and to taunt us and provoke us to fight, they ruined our work, for instance, by smearing green paint all over the booths. To crown all our troubles, Radish began to pay very irregularly. All the painting work at the site had been given to a contractor, who had subcontracted it to someone else, who in turn had subcontracted it to Radish, having negotiated twenty percent for himself. The work itself was unprofitable, and there was rain besides; time was lost for nothing, we didn’t work, but Radish was obliged to pay the boys by the day. The hungry painters almost beat him up, called him a crook, a blood-sucker, a Christ-selling Judas, and he, poor man, sighed, raised his hands to heaven in despair, and kept going to Mrs. Cheprakov for money.
VII
A RAINY, DIRTY, dark autumn
came. Joblessness came, and I would sit at home for three days in a row with nothing to do, or perform various nonpainting jobs, for instance, carting earth for subflooring, getting twenty kopecks a day for it. Dr. Blagovo left for Petersburg. My sister stopped coming to see me. Radish lay at home sick, expecting to die any day.
My mood, too, was autumnal. Maybe because, having become a worker, I now saw our town life only from its underside, making discoveries almost every day that simply drove me to despair. Those of my fellow townsmen of whom I had previously had no opinion, or who from the outside had seemed quite decent, now turned out to be low people, cruel, capable of every nastiness. We simple people were deceived, cheated, made to wait whole hours in cold entries or kitchens; we were insulted and treated extremely rudely. In the autumn I hung wallpaper in the reading room and two other rooms of our club; I was paid seven kopecks a roll but was told to sign for twelve, and when I refused to do so, a decent-looking gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one of the club elders, said to me:
‘‘If you say any more about it, you blackguard, I’ll push your face in.’’
And when the footman whispered to him that I was the son of the architect Poloznev, he became embarrassed, turned red, but recovered at once and said:
‘‘Ah, devil take him!’’
In the shops, we workers were fobbed off with rotten meat, lumpy flour, and once-brewed tea; the police shoved us in church, the orderlies and nurses robbed us in hospitals, and if we, poor as we were, did not give them bribes, they fed us from dirty dishes in revenge; at the post office, the least clerk considered it his right to treat us like animals and shout rudely and insolently: ‘‘Wait! No shoving ahead!’’ The yard dogs—even they were unfriendly to us and attacked us with some special viciousness. But the main thing that struck me in my new condition was the total lack of fairness, precisely what is defined among the people by the words: ‘‘They have forgotten God.’’ Rarely did a day pass without cheating. The shopkeepers who sold us oil cheated; so did the contractors, and the workmen, and the clients themselves. It goes without saying that there could be no talk of any rights for us, and each time, we had to beg for the money we had earned as if it was alms, standing at the back door with our hats off.
I was hanging wallpaper in the club, in one of the rooms adjacent to the reading room; in the evening, as I was about to leave, the daughter of the engineer Dolzhikov came into the room with a stack of books in her hands.
I bowed to her.
‘‘Ah, hello!’’ she said, recognizing me at once and offering her hand. ‘‘I’m very glad to see you.’’
She was smiling and, with curiosity and perplexity, examined my smock, the bucket of paste, the wallpaper spread out on the floor. I was embarrassed, and she also felt awkward.
‘‘Excuse me for looking at you like this,’’ she said. ‘‘They’ve told me a lot about you. Especially Dr. Blagovo— he’s simply in love with you. And I’ve become acquainted with your sister; a dear, sympathetic girl, but I haven’t been able to convince her that there’s nothing terrible in your simplification. On the contrary, you’re now the most interesting person in town.’’
She glanced again at the bucket of paste, at the wallpaper, and went on:
‘‘I asked Dr. Blagovo to make me better acquainted with you, but he obviously forgot or had no time. Be that as it may, we’re acquainted anyway, and if you were so good as simply to call on me one day, I’d be very much obliged to you. I do so want to talk! I’m a simple person,’’ she said, giving me her hand, ‘‘and I hope you won’t feel any constraint with me. Father’s not there, he’s in Petersburg.’’
She went to the reading room, rustling her skirts, and I, when I got home, was unable to fall asleep for a long time.
During this cheerless autumn, some kindly soul, evidently wishing to alleviate my existence a little, occasionally sent me now some tea and lemons, now some pastry, now a roast hazel grouse. Karpovna said it was brought each time by a soldier, but from whom she didn’t know; and the soldier asked whether I was in good health, whether I had dinner every day, and whether I had warm clothes. When the frosts struck, I received in the same way—in my absence, through a soldier—a soft knitted scarf that gave off a delicate, barely perceptible odor of perfume, and I guessed who my good fairy was. The scarf smelled of lily of the valley, Anyuta Blagovo’s favorite scent.
Towards winter we got more work, and things became more cheerful. Radish revived again, and we worked together in the cemetery church, where we primed the iconostasis10 for gilding. This was clean, peaceful work and, as our boys used to say, gainful. We could do a lot in one day, and the time passed quickly, imperceptibly. There was no cursing, or laughter, or loud talk. The place itself imposed silence and good order and was conducive to quiet, serious thoughts. Immersed in our work, we stood or sat motionless, like statues; there was a dead silence, as befitted a cemetery, so that if a tool was dropped or the flame sizzled in an icon lamp, these noises resounded sharply and hollowly—and we turned to look. After long silence, a humming would be heard, like the buzz of bees: this was a funeral service for an infant, being sung unhurriedly, softly, in a side chapel; or the artist painting a dove on the cupola with stars around it would start whistling quietly, then catch himself and fall silent at once; or Radish, answering his own thoughts, would say with a sigh: ‘‘Everything’s possible! Everything’s possible!’’; or a slow, mournful ringing would resound over our heads, and the painters would remark that it must be some rich man’s burial...
I spent my days in this silence, in this churchly dimness, and during the long evenings played billiards or went to the gallery of the theater in my new tricot suit, which I had bought with the money I earned. At the Azhogins’, theatricals and concerts had already begun; the sets were now painted by Radish alone. He told me the contents of the plays and tableaux vivants he saw at the Azhogins’, and I listened to him with envy. I had a strong yearning to attend the rehearsals, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to the Azhogins’.
A week before Christmas, Dr. Blagovo arrived. Again we argued and in the evenings played billiards. When he played, he took off his frock coat and unbuttoned his shirt on his chest, and generally tried to make himself look like a desperate carouser. He drank little but noisily and, in such a poor, cheap tavern as the Volga, managed to leave twenty roubles an evening.
Again my sister began to frequent me; the two of them, seeing each other, were surprised each time, but from her joyful, guilty face it was evident that these meetings were not accidental. One evening while we were playing billiards, the doctor said to me:
‘‘Listen, why don’t you ever call on Miss Dolzhikov? You don’t know Marya Viktorovna, she’s intelligent, lovely, a simple, kind soul.’’
I told him how the engineer had received me in the spring.
‘‘Trifles!’’ the doctor laughed. ‘‘The engineer’s one thing, and she’s another. Really, dear heart, don’t offend her, go and see her one day. For instance, we could go and see her tomorrow evening. Do you want to?’’
He persuaded me. The next evening, donning my new tricot suit and feeling worried, I went to see Miss Dolzhikov. The footman no longer seemed so arrogant and fearsome, nor the furniture so luxurious, as on that morning when I went there as a petitioner. Marya Viktorovna was expecting me and greeted me like an old acquaintance, and gave my hand a firm, friendly shake. She was wearing a gray flannel dress with full sleeves, and a hairstyle which, when it became fashionable in our town a year later, was known as ‘‘dog’s ears.’’ The hair was combed down from the temples and over the ears, and it made Marya Viktorovna’s face seem broader, and this time she looked to me very much like her father, whose face was broad, ruddy, and had something of the coachman in its expression. She was beautiful and graceful but not young, around thirty by the look of it, though in reality she was no more than twenty-five.
‘‘The dear doctor, how grateful I am to him!’’ she said as
she was seating me. ‘‘If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t have come to see me. I’m bored to death! Father went away and left me alone, and I don’t know what to do in this town.’’
Then she began asking me where I was working now, how much I earned, where I lived.
‘‘You spend on yourself only what you earn?’’ she asked.
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Lucky man!’’ she sighed. ‘‘All the evil in life, it seems to me, comes from idleness, from boredom, from inner emptiness, and that is all inevitable when one is used to living at the expense of others. Don’t think I’m showing off, I tell you sincerely: it’s uninteresting and unpleasant to be rich. Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness 11—so it says, because generally there is not and cannot be a mammon of righteousness.’’
She looked the furniture over with a serious, cold expression, as if she was taking an inventory, and went on:
‘‘Comfort and conveniences possess a magic power; they gradually suck in even strong-willed people. My father and I once lived moderately and simply, but now you see how. Who ever heard of it,’’ she said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘‘we go through twenty thousand a year! In the provinces!’’
‘‘Comfort and conveniences are to be regarded as the inevitable privilege of capital and education,’’ I said, ‘‘and it seems to me that life’s conveniences can be combined with any sort of labor, even the heaviest and dirtiest. Your father is rich, yet, as he says, he had to work as an engine driver and a simple oiler.’’
She smiled and shook her head doubtfully.
‘‘Papa sometimes eats bread soaked in kvass,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s a whim, for fun!’’
Just then the bell rang, and she got up.
‘‘The educated and the rich should work like everyone else,’’ she went on, ‘‘and if there’s comfort, it should be the same for everyone. There should be no privileges. Well, God help philosophy! Tell me something merry. Tell me about housepainters. What are they like? Funny?’’
The Complete Short Novels Page 49