‘‘Misail, bring me some whiting!’’
I fetched him some whiting, and as I came down the flimsy scaffolding afterwards, she watched me, moved to tears and smiling.
‘‘How nice you are!’’ she said.
The memory had stayed with me since childhood of how a green parrot belonging to one of our wealthy people escaped its cage, and how after that the beautiful bird wandered about town for a whole month, lazily flying from one garden to another, lonely, shelterless. And Marya Viktorovna reminded me of that bird.
‘‘I now have positively nowhere to go except the cemetery,’’ she said to me, laughing. ‘‘This town bores me to the point of loathing. At the Azhogins’ they read, sing, lisp, I can’t bear them lately; your sister is unsociable, Mlle. Blagovo hates me for some reason, I don’t like the theater. What do you suggest I do?’’
When I called on her, I smelled of paint and turpentine, my hands were dark—and she liked that; she also wanted me to come to her not otherwise than in my ordinary working clothes; but those clothes hampered me in the drawing room, I was embarrassed, as if I was wearing a uniform, and therefore, when I went to her, I always put on my new tricot suit. And she didn’t like it.
‘‘But confess, you don’t quite feel comfortable in your new role,’’ she said to me once. ‘‘Your working costume hampers you, you feel awkward in it. Tell me, isn’t that because you have no assurance and are not satisfied? The very kind of work you’ve chosen, this painting spell of yours, can it be that it satisfies you?’’ she asked, laughing. ‘‘I know painting makes things prettier and more durable, but these things belong to the townspeople, the rich, and in the end constitute a luxury. Besides, you yourself have said more than once that each man should procure his bread with his own hands, while you procure money, not bread. Why don’t you stick to the literal meaning of your words? You should procure precisely bread, that is, you should plow, sow, mow, thresh, or do something that has a direct relation to farming, for instance, tend cattle, till the earth, build cottages...’
She opened a pretty bookcase that stood by her desk and said:
‘‘I’m saying all this because I want to initiate you into my secret. Voilà! This is my farming library. Here are fields, and kitchen garden, and orchard, and cattle yard, and apiary. I read them avidly and in terms of theory have already studied everything to the last jot. My dream, my sweet dream, is to go to our Dubechnya as soon as March comes. It’s wonderful there, marvelous! Isn’t that so? For the first year I’ll observe things and get accustomed to them, and the next year I’ll work myself in a real way, give it my all, as they say. Father has promised me Dubechnya, and I can do whatever I like with it.’’
All flushed, excited to the point of tears, and laughing, she dreamed aloud of how she would live in Dubechnya and what an interesting life it would be. And I envied her. March was already near, the days were getting longer and longer, and on bright sunny afternoons the roofs dripped and it smelled of spring. I would have liked to go to the country myself.
And when she said she would move to live in Dubechnya, I vividly pictured how I would remain alone in town, and I felt jealous of her bookcase and of farming. I didn’t know and didn’t like farming, and was about to tell her that farming was a slavish occupation, but remembered that my father had said something like that more than once, and kept silent.
Lent came. The engineer Viktor Ivanych, whose existence I was beginning to forget, arrived from Petersburg. He arrived unexpectedly, without even a warning telegram. When I came in the evening as usual, he, scrubbed, hair trimmed, looking ten years younger, was pacing the drawing room and telling about something; his daughter was on her knees, taking boxes, flacons, and books from the suitcases and handing it all to the footman Pavel. Seeing the engineer, I involuntarily stepped back, but he held out both arms to me and said, smiling, showing his white, strong coachman’s teeth:
‘‘Here he is, here he is! Very glad to see you, Mr. Housepainter! Masha has told me everything, she’s sung a whole panegyric to you here. I fully understand and approve of you!’’ he went on, taking me under the arm. ‘‘To be a decent worker is much more intelligent and honest than to waste official stationery and wear a cockade on your forehead. I myself worked in Belgium, with these hands, then spent two years as an engine driver...’
He was wearing a short jacket and slippers for around the house, and walked like a man with gout, waddling slightly and rubbing his hands. Humming something, he murmured softly and kept hugging himself with satisfaction that he had finally come back home and taken his beloved shower.
‘‘Indisputably,’’ he said to me over supper, ‘‘indisputably, you’re all nice, sympathetic people, but for some reason, gentlemen, as soon as you undertake some physical labor or start saving muzhiks, it all comes down in the end to sectarianism. Aren’t you a sectarian? Look, you don’t drink vodka. What’s that if not sectarianism?’’
To give him pleasure, I drank some vodka. I also drank some wine. We sampled cheeses, sausages, pâtés, pickles, and various delicacies the engineer had brought along, and the wines received from abroad during his absence. The wines were excellent. For some reason, the engineer received wines and cigars from abroad tax-free; someone sent him caviar and smoked fish gratis, he paid no rent for his apartment because the owner of the house supplied the railway line with kerosene; and in general, he and his daughter gave me the impression that everything best in the world was at their disposal, and they received it completely gratis.
I continued to frequent them, but no longer as willingly. The engineer hampered me, and I felt constrained in his presence. I couldn’t stand his clear, innocent eyes, his reasonings oppressed me, disgusted me; oppressive, too, was the memory of my being so recently a subordinate of this well-nourished, ruddy man, and of his being mercilessly rude to me. True, he put his arm around my waist, patted me benignly on the shoulder, approved of my life, but I felt that he scorned my nonentity as much as before and put up with me only to please his daughter; I could no longer laugh and say what I liked, I behaved unsociably and kept waiting every moment for him to call me Pantelei, as he did his footman Pavel. How exasperated my provincial, philistine pride was! I, a proletarian, a housepainter, go every day to see rich people, strangers to me, whom the whole town looks upon as foreigners, and every day drink expensive wines with them and eat exotic things—my conscience refused to be reconciled with it! On the way to them, I sullenly avoided passersby and looked from under my brows, as if I was indeed a sectarian, and when I went home from the engineer’s, I was ashamed of my satiety.
And above all, I was afraid of becoming infatuated. Whether I was walking down the street, or working, or talking with the boys, all I thought about the whole time was how in the evening I would go to Marya Viktorovna’s, and I imagined her voice, her laughter, her gait. Before going to her each time, I stood for a long while in front of my nanny’s crooked mirror, tying my necktie; I found my tricot suit repulsive, and I suffered and at the same time despised myself for being so petty. When she called to me from the other room to say she was undressed and asked me to wait, I listened to her getting dressed; this excited me, I felt as if the floor was giving way under me. And when I saw a female figure in the street, even from afar, I invariably made the comparison; it seemed to me then that all our women and girls were vulgarly, absurdly dressed and did not know how to behave; and these comparisons aroused a feeling of pride in me: Marya Viktorovna was the best of all! And at night I saw the two of us in my dreams.