“Better-than-nothing!” I heard on all sides. “House painter! Yellow ochre!”
And none behaved so ungraciously to me as those who had only lately been humble people themselves, and had earned their bread by hard manual labour. In the streets full of shops I was once passing an ironmonger’s when water was thrown over me as though by accident, and on one occasion someone darted out with a stick at me, while a fishmonger, a grey-headed old man, barred my way and said, looking at me angrily:
“I am not sorry for you, you fool! It’s your father I am sorry for.”
And my acquaintances were for some reason overcome with embarrassment when they met me. Some of them looked upon me as a queer fish and a comic fool; others were sorry for me; others did not know what attitude to take up to me, and it was difficult to make them out. One day I met Anyuta Blagovo in a side street near Great Dvoryansky Street. I was going to work, and was carrying two long brushes and a pail of paint. Recognizing me Anyuta flushed crimson.
“Please do not bow to me in the street,” she said nervously, harshly, and in a shaking voice, without offering me her hand, and tears suddenly gleamed in her eyes. “If to your mind all this is necessary, so be it … so be it, but I beg you not to meet me!”
I no longer lived in Great Dvoryansky Street, but in the suburb with my old nurse Karpovna, a good-natured but gloomy old woman, who always foreboded some harm, was afraid of all dreams, and even in the bees and wasps that flew into her room saw omens of evil, and the fact that I had become a workman, to her thinking, boded nothing good.
“Your life is ruined,” she would say, mournfully shaking her head, “ruined.”
Her adopted son Prokofy, a huge, uncouth, redheaded fellow of thirty, with bristling moustaches, a butcher by trade, lived in the little house with her. When he met me in the passage he would make way for me in respectful silence, and if he was drunk he would salute me with all five fingers at once. He used to have supper in the evening, and through the partition wall of boards I could hear him clear his throat and sigh as he drank off glass after glass.
“Mamma,” he would call in an undertone.
“Well,” Karpovna, who was passionately devoted to her adopted son, would respond: “What is it, sonny?”
“I can show you a testimony of my affection, mamma. All this earthly life I will cherish you in your declining years in this vale of tears, and when you die I will bury you at my expense; I have said it, and you can believe it.”
I got up every morning before sunrise, and went to bed early. We house painters ate a great deal and slept soundly; the only thing amiss was that my heart used to beat violently at night. I did not quarrel with my mates. Violent abuse, desperate oaths, and wishes such as, “Blast your eyes,” or “Cholera take you,” never ceased all day, but, nevertheless, we lived on very friendly terms. The other fellows suspected me of being some sort of religious sectary, and made good-natured jokes at my expense, saying that even my own father had disowned me, and thereupon would add that they rarely went into the temple of God themselves, and that many of them had not been to confession for ten years. They justified this laxity on their part by saying that a painter among men was like a jackdaw among birds.
The men had a good opinion of me, and treated me with respect; it was evident that my not drinking, not smoking, but leading a quiet, steady life pleased them very much. It was only an unpleasant shock to them that I took no hand in stealing oil and did not go with them to ask for tips from people on whose property we were working. Stealing oil and paints from those who employed them was a house painter’s custom, and was not regarded as theft, and it was remarkable that even so upright a man as Radish would always carry away a little white lead and oil as he went home from work. And even the most respectable old fellows, who owned the houses in which they lived in the suburb, were not ashamed to ask for a tip, and it made me feel vexed and ashamed to see the men go in a body to congratulate some nonentity on the commencement or the completion of the job, and thank him with degrading servility when they had received a few coppers.
With people on whose work they were engaged they behaved like wily courtiers, and almost every day I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Polonius.
“I fancy it is going to rain,” the man whose house was being painted would say, looking at the sky.
“It is, there is not a doubt it is,” the painters would agree.
“I don’t think it is a rain-cloud, though. Perhaps it won’t rain after all.”
“No, it won’t, your honour! I am sure it won’t.”
But their attitude to their patrons behind their backs was usually one of irony, and when they saw, for instance, a gentleman sitting in the verandah reading a newspaper, they would observe:
“He reads the paper, but I daresay he has nothing to eat.”
I never went home to see my own people. When I came back from work I often found waiting for me little notes, brief and anxious, in which my sister wrote to me about my father; that he had been particularly preoccupied at dinner and had eaten nothing, or that he had been giddy and staggering, or that he had locked himself in his room and had not come out for a long time. Such items of news troubled me; I could not sleep, and at times even walked up and down Great Dvoryansky Street at night by our house, looking in at the dark windows and trying to guess whether everything was well at home. On Sundays my sister came to see me, but came in secret, as though it were not to see me but our nurse. And if she came in to see me she was very pale, with tear-stained eyes, and she began crying at once.
“Our father will never live through this,” she would say. “If anything should happen to him—God grant it may not—your conscience will torment you all your life. It’s awful, Misail; for our mother’s sake I beseech you: reform your ways.”
“My darling sister,” I would say, “how can I reform my ways if I am convinced that I am acting in accordance with my conscience? Do understand!”
“I know you are acting on your conscience, but perhaps it could be done differently, somehow, so as not to wound anybody.”
“Ah, holy Saints!” the old woman sighed through the door. “Your life is ruined! There will be trouble, my dears, there will be trouble!”
VI
One Sunday Dr. Blagovo turned up unexpectedly. He was wearing a military tunic over a silk shirt and high boots of patent leather.
“I have come to see you,” he began, shaking my hand heartily like a student. “I am hearing about you every day, and I have been meaning to come and have a heart-to-heart talk, as they say. The boredom in the town is awful, there is not a living soul, no one to say a word to. It’s hot, Holy Mother,” he went on, taking off his tunic and sitting in his silk shirt. “My dear fellow, let me talk to you.”
I was dull myself, and had for a long time been craving for the society of someone not a house painter. I was genuinely glad to see him.
“I’ll begin by saying,” he said, sitting down on my bed, “that I sympathize with you from the bottom of my heart, and deeply respect the life you are leading. They don’t understand you here in the town, and, indeed, there is no one to understand, seeing that, as you know, they are all, with very few exceptions, regular Gogolesque pig faces here. But I saw what you were at once that time at the picnic. You are a noble soul, an honest, high-minded man! I respect you, and feel it a great honour to shake hands with you!” he went on enthusiastically. “To have made such a complete and violent change of life as you have done, you must have passed through a complicated spiritual crisis, and to continue this manner of life now, and to keep up to the high standard of your convictions continually, must be a strain on your mind and heart from day to day. Now to begin our talk, tell me, don’t you consider that if you had spent your strength of will, this strained activity, all these powers on something else, for instance, on gradually becoming a great scientist, or artist, your life would have been broader and deeper and would have been more productive?”