II
Well, I lived quietly and peaceably enough with my employer, and yet the pollution, the degrading element which I had so dreaded on becoming a footman ... it was present and made itself felt every day. I was on bad terms with Polya. She was a sleek, spoilt little trollop who adored Orlov because he was the master and scorned me because I was the footman. To a real servant or a cook she was probably quite devastating, with her red cheeks, retrousse nose, screwed-up eyes and buxom build already verging on the plump. She powdered her face, she tinted her eyebrows and lips, she wore a corset, a bustle and a bangle made of coins. She walked with little tripping steps. When she walked she twisted or 'waggled' her shoulders and behind. Her rustling skirts, her creaking stays, her jingling bangle, this plebeian smell of lipstick, toilet-vinegar and scent stolen from the master . . . when I tidied the rooms with her of a morning, these things made me feel like her accomplice in some foul crime.
Whether because I did not help her to steal, or because I evinced no desire whatever to become her lover—which she probably took as an insult—or else, perhaps, because she sensed in me an alien being, she loathed me from the first day. My clumsiness, my unflunkeylike exterior, my illness ... she found these things pitiful, and they disgusted her. I was coughing very badly at the time, and I occasionally kept her awake at night because her room was separated from mine by only a wooden screen.
'You kept me awake again,' she told me every morning. 'You ought to be in hospital, not in a gentleman's service.'
So sincerely did she think me not human, but a thing immeasurably beneath her, that she sometimes appeared before me wearing only her chemise like those Roman matrons who had no scruples about bathing in the presence of their slaves.
One lunch-time (we ordered soup and a roast from the restaurant every day) I was in a marvellous contemplative mood.
'Polya,' I asked her, 'do you believe in God?'
'Yes, of course I do.'
'Then you believe there will be a Day of Judgement?' I went on. 'And that we shall answer to God for all our misdeeds?'
She made no reply, only giving a scornful grimace. Now, as I looked at her smug, cold eyes, I saw that this well-integrated, perfectly rounded being was godless, conscienceless and lawless, and that I could never fmd a better paid accomplice should I ever require to commit murder, arson or burglary. .
In this novel setting, unaccustomed as I was to being addressed curtly, and to the constant lying (saying 'the master's out' when he was in), I found my first week at Orlov's rather an ordeal. My valet's tailcoat made me feel as ifl had donned a suit ofarmour. Later on I settled do^. I performed my little services like any regular footman, I cleaned the rooms, I ran or drove around on errands. When Orlov did not wish to keep a rendezvous with Zinaida Krasnovsky, or when he forgot that he had promised to visit her, I would drive to Znamensky Square, deliver a note to her personaUy and tell lies. It all added up to something quite different from what I had envisaged on becoming a servant. Every day of my new life turned out a waste of time both for me and my cause, since Orlov never spoke of his father, nor did his guests either, and all I could learn about that )VeU-kno^ politician's activities was what I contrived, as I had previously contrived, to glean from newspapers and correspondence with my associates. The hundreds of notes and papers which I found in the study and read . . . they lacked even the remotest connection with what I was seeking. Orlov was absolutely indifferent to his father's much-bruited activity, and looked as if he had never even heard of it, or as if his father had died long ago.
Ill
We had guests every Thursday.
I would order a joint of beef from the restaurant and telephone Yeliseyev's for caviare, cheese, oysters and the like. I bought playing cards. Polya was busy all day preparing the tea things and the supper service. This little bout of activity did rather vary our idle lives, to be honest, and Thursdays were our most interesting days.
There would be three guests only. The most substantial of them— and the most interesting, perhaps—was called Pekarsky: a tall, gaunt person of about forty-five, with a long, hooked nose, a large, black beard and a bald pate. His eyes were big and bulging, and his facial expression was as grave and pensive as a Greek philosopher's. He worked on a railway board and at a bank, he was legal consultant to an important government institution, he was on business terms with a mass of private persons as trustee, chairman of official receivers and so on. His civil service rank was quite low, and he modestly termed himself a 'barrister', but his influence was enormous. A note or card from him was enough to have you received out of turn by a celebrated doctor, a railway director or an important official. One could obtain a pretty senior post through his patronage, it was said, or hush up any unpleasantness whatever. He rated as highly intelligent, but his was a most peculiar and odd sort of brain. He could multiply 213 by 373 in his head in a flash, or convert pounds sterling to German marks without a pencil and tables. He was well up in railway matters and finance, and the entire world of administration was an open book to him. In civil cases he was reckoned a pretty artful advocate, and he was an awkward customer to tangle with at law. Yet this rare intellect was utterly baffied by many things known even to the most limited intelligence. Why do people feel bored ? Why do they weep, shoot themselves— and murder others, even? Why do they fret about things and events which don't concern them personally, and why do they laugh when they read Gogol or Shchedrin? All that was utterly beyond his ken. Everything abstract, everything evanescent in the sphere of thought and feeling ... it was as mysterious and boring to him as music to one who has no ear. He took only the business view of people, dividing them into competent and incompetent. He had no other criterion. Honesty and integrity were merely signs of competence. Drinking, gambling and whoring were all right so long as they didn't interfere with business. Believing in God was rather stupid, but religion must be preserved, since the common people needed some restraining principle or else they wouldn't work. Punishments were only needed as a deterrent. There was no point in going away for one's holidays because life was quite all right in to^n. And so on. He was a widower without children, but he lived on as ample a scale as a family man, paying three thousand a year for his flat.
The second guest, Kukushkin, was young for the fairly senior rank which he held. He was a short man distinguished by the lack of proportion between his stout, podgy trunk and small, thin face: a highly disagreeable combination. His lips were puckered up, his little trimmed moustache looked as if it had been glued on with varnish. The creature had the manners of a lizard. He didn't enter a room, but rather slithered into it with mincing little steps, squirming and tittering, and he bared his teeth when he laughed. He was a clerk of special commissions to someone or other, and did nothing at all though he was paid a large salary: especially in summer when various assignments were invented for him. He was not so much a careerist to the marrow of his bones as, deeper still, to his last drop of blood, and a petty careerist to boot: one lacking in confidence, who had built his whole career on favours received. For the sake of some wretched foreign decoration, or of being mentioned in the newspapers as present with other august personages at some funeral or other service, he would stoop to any conceivable humiliation, beg, fawn and promise. He flattered Orlov and Pekarsky out of cowardice, considering them powerful, while he flattered Polya and me because we were in the service of an influential man. Whenever I helped him off with his coat he would titter and ask: 'Are you married, Stephen?' This was followed by scurrilous vulgarities by way of showing me special attention. Kukushkin flattered Orlov's weaknesses, his perversity and his complacency. To please Orlov he posed as an arrant cynic and atheist, and joined him in criticizing those to whom he elsewhere grovelled slavishly. When, at supper, the talk turned to women and love, he posed as a refined and sophisticated libertine. It is remarkable, by and large, how the gay dogs of St. Petersburg like talking about their unusual tastes. Some youthful officials of high rank make do very well with the embraces of their cook or a wretched street-walker onthe Ncvsky Prospekt, but from the way they speak they are contaminated with all the vices of east and west, being honorary members of a round dozen iniquitous secret societies and already having a police record. Kukushkin told the most barefaced lies about himself, and people didn't so much disbelieve him as let his fantasies go in one ear and out of the other.