I got up every day before sunrise and went to bed early. We housepainters ate a lot and slept soundly, only for some reason my heart beat hard during the night. I never quarreled with my comrades. Abuse, desperate curses, and such wishes as that your eyes should burst, or you should drop dead from cholera, never ceased all day, but nonetheless we still lived together amicably. The boys suspected I was a religious sectarian and made fun of me good-naturedly, saying that even my own father had renounced me, telling me straight off that they seldom saw the inside of God’s church themselves, and that many of them hadn’t gone to confession for ten years, and justifying such dissipation by saying that a housepainter is among people what a jackdaw is among birds.
The boys respected me and treated me with deference; they apparently liked it that I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and led a quiet, sedate life. They were only unpleasantly shocked that I didn’t take part in stealing drying oil and didn’t go to the clients with them to ask for a tip. Stealing the owner’s oil and paint was habitual among housepainters and was not considered theft, and remarkably, even such an upright man as Radish, each time he left a job, took along a little whiting and oil. And even venerable old men, who owned their own houses in Makarikha, weren’t ashamed to ask for a tip, and I found it vexing and shameful when the boys would go in a bunch to congratulate some nonentity for the start or the finish and, getting ten kopecks from him, thank him humbly.
With clients, they behaved like wily courtiers, and I recalled Shakespeare’s Polonius almost every day.
‘‘But surely it’s going to rain,’’ the client would say, looking at the sky.
‘‘It is, it certainly is!’’ the painters would agree.
‘‘Though the clouds aren’t the rainy sort. Perhaps it won’t rain.’’
‘‘It won’t, Your Honor! It sure won’t.’’
Behind their backs, their attitude to the clients was generally ironic, and when, for instance, they saw a gentleman sitting on a balcony with a newspaper, they would observe:
‘‘Reads the newspaper, but I bet he’s got nothing to eat.’’
I never went home to my family. On returning from work, I often found notes, short and anxious, in which my sister wrote to me about father: now he was somehow especially preoccupied and ate nothing at dinner, now he lost his balance, now he locked himself in his study and didn’t come out for a long time. Such news disturbed me, I couldn’t sleep, and sometimes even went past our house on Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya at night, looking into the dark windows and trying to make out whether everything was all right at home. On Sundays my sister came to see me, but on the sly, as if not to me but to our nanny. And if she came into my room, she would be very pale, with tearful eyes, and would begin to cry at once.
‘‘Our father won’t survive it!’’ she would say. ‘‘If, God forbid, something should happen to him, your conscience will torment you all your life. It’s terrible, Misail! I implore you in our mother’s name: mend your ways!’’
‘‘Sister, dear,’’ I would say, ‘‘how can I mend my ways if I’m convinced that I’m acting according to conscience? Try to understand!’’
‘‘I know it’s according to conscience, but maybe it could be done somehow differently, so as not to upset anyone.’’
‘‘Oh, dear me!’’ the old woman would sigh behind the door. ‘‘It’ll be your head! There’ll be trouble, my dearies, there’ll be trouble!’’
VI
ONE SUNDAY, DR. BLAGOVO unexpectedly appeared at my place. He was wearing a tunic over a silk shirt, and high patent-leather boots.
‘‘I’ve come to see you!’’ he began, shaking my hand firmly, student-fashion. ‘‘I hear about you every day and keep intending to come and have, as they say, a heart-to-heart talk. It’s terribly boring in town, not a single live soul, nobody to talk to. Heavenly Mother, it’s hot!’’ he went on, taking off his tunic and remaining in nothing but the silk shirt. ‘‘Dear heart, allow me to talk with you!’’
I was bored myself and had long wanted to be in the society of other than housepainters. I was sincerely glad to see him.
‘‘I’ll begin by saying,’’ he said, sitting down on my bed, ‘‘that I sympathize with you wholeheartedly and deeply respect this life of yours. Here in town you’re not understood, and there’s nobody to understand you, because, you know yourself, here, with very few exceptions, it’s all Gogol’s pig snouts.8 But I figured you out at once, that time at the picnic. You’re a noble soul, an honest, lofty man! I respect you and regard it as a great honor to shake your hand!’’ he went on rapturously. ‘‘To change your life as sharply and summarily as you did, one must have lived through a complex inner process, and to continue that life now and be constantly at the height of your convictions, you must work intensely in your mind and heart day after day. Now, to begin our conversation, tell me, don’t you find that if you expended this willpower, this intensity, this whole potential on something else, for instance, so as to become in time a great scholar or artist, your life would then expand more widely and deeply, and would be more productive in all respects?’’
We fell to talking, and when we began to discuss physical labor, I expressed the following thought: it is necessary that the strong not enslave the weak, that the minority not be parasites on the majority or a pump constantly pumping its best juices out of it; that is, it is necessary that everyone without exception—the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor—participate equally in the struggle for existence, each for himself, and there is no better means of leveling in this respect than physical labor in the quality of a common service obligatory for everyone.
‘‘So, in your opinion, everyone without exception should be occupied with physical labor?’’ asked the doctor.
‘‘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.’’