The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories Part 16

"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 G.o.d 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 glace 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.l 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 cla.s.ses 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 gra.s.s, 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, n.o.ble 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 G.o.d!" 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 pa.s.sages 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 fl.u.s.tered and blushed, but he recovered himself at once and said:

"d.a.m.n him."

In the shops we working men were sold bad meat, musty flour, and coa.r.s.e tea. In church we were jostled by the police, and in the hospitals we were mulcted by the a.s.sistants 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 G.o.d." 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 embarra.s.sed and she also felt awkward.