Blagovo argued hotly with me, but at the same time, he was noticeably troubled by some extraneous thought.
‘‘Your sister probably won’t come,’’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘‘Yesterday she visited my family and said she’d be here. You keep saying slavery, slavery...’ he went on. ‘‘But that is a specific problem, and all such problems get solved by mankind gradually, of themselves.’’
We began to talk about gradualness. I said that each of us resolves the question of whether to do good or evil for himself, without waiting until mankind approaches the resolution of the question by way of gradual development. Besides, gradualness was a stick with two ends. Alongside the process of the gradual development of humane ideas, there could be observed the gradual growth of ideas of a different sort. There is no serfdom, but capitalism is growing instead. And at the very height of liberating ideas, the majority, just as in the times of Batu Khan,9 feeds, clothes, and protects the minority while going hungry, naked, and unprotected itself. This order gets along splendidly with all trends and currents, because the art of enslavement is also gradually cultivated. We no longer thrash our lackeys in the stable, but we endow slavery with refined forms, or at least we know how to find a justification for it in each particular case. With us, ideas are ideas, but if now, at the end of the nineteenth century, it were possible to heap our most unpleasant physiological functions on workers, we would do it and then, of course, say in order to justify ourselves that if the best people, the thinkers and great scholars, started wasting their precious time on these functions, it might seriously threaten progress.
But then my sister came. Seeing the doctor, she began bustling, worrying, and right away began saying it was time for her to go home to father.
‘‘Cleopatra Alexeevna,’’ Blagovo said persuasively, pressing both hands to his heart, ‘‘what will happen to your dear papa if you spend a mere half hour with me and your brother?’’
He was simple-hearted and knew how to communicate his animation to others. My sister, having thought for a moment, laughed and became all merry suddenly, unexpectedly, like the other time at the picnic. We went into the fields and, settling in the grass, continued our conversation and looked at the town, where all the windows to the west seemed bright gold because of the setting sun.
After that, each time my sister came to see me, Blagovo appeared as well, and the two greeted each other as if their meeting at my place was accidental. My sister listened to me and the doctor arguing, and her expression then was joyfully rapturous, tender, and curious, and it seemed to me that a different world was gradually opening before her eyes, which she had never seen before even in dreams, and which she now tried to puzzle out. Without the doctor, she was quiet and sad, and if she wept occasionally, sitting on my bed, it was now for reasons she did not speak about.
In August, Radish told us to get ready to go to the railway line. A couple of days before we were ‘‘herded’’ out of town, my father came to see me. He sat down and wiped his red face unhurriedly, without looking at me, then took our town Messenger from his pocket and slowly, emphasizing each word, read that my peer, the son of the office manager of the State Bank, had been appointed head of a section in the treasury department.
‘‘And now look at yourself,’’ he said, folding the newspaper, ‘‘a beggar, a ragamuffin, a scoundrel! Even tradesmen and peasants get educated in order to become human beings, while you, a Poloznev, with noble, wellborn forebears, are striving towards the mud! But I haven’t come here to talk to you; I’ve already waved you aside,’’ he went on in a stifled voice, getting up. ‘‘I’ve come to find out where your sister is, you scoundrel! She left home after dinner, and it’s now past seven o’clock, and she’s not back. She’s started going out frequently without telling me, she’s less respectful—and I see in it your wicked, mean influence. Where is she?’’
In his hands was the umbrella I knew so well, and I already felt at a loss and stood at attention like a schoolboy, expecting my father to start beating me, but he noticed the glance I cast at the umbrella, and that probably held him back.
‘‘Live as you like!’’ he said. ‘‘I deprive you of my blessing!’’
‘‘Saints alive!’’ my nanny muttered behind the door. ‘‘Your poor, miserable head! Oh, there’s a foreboding in my heart, a foreboding!’’
I worked on the line. It rained ceaselessly all August, it was damp and cold; the grain wasn’t taken in from the fields, and on large estates, where they harvested with machines, the wheat lay not in sheaves but in heaps, and I remember how those sad heaps grew darker every day, and the grain sprouted in them. It was hard to work; the downpour ruined everything we managed to get done. We weren’t allowed to live and sleep in the station buildings, and took shelter in dirty, damp dugouts where the ‘‘railboys’’ lived in summer, and I couldn’t sleep at night from the cold and from the woodlice that crawled over my face and hands. And when we worked near the bridges, bands of ‘‘railboys’’ came in the evenings just to beat us painters—for them it was a kind of sport. They beat us, stole our brushes, and to taunt us and provoke us to fight, they ruined our work, for instance, by smearing green paint all over the booths. To crown all our troubles, Radish began to pay very irregularly. All the painting work at the site had been given to a contractor, who had subcontracted it to someone else, who in turn had subcontracted it to Radish, having negotiated twenty percent for himself. The work itself was unprofitable, and there was rain besides; time was lost for nothing, we didn’t work, but Radish was obliged to pay the boys by the day. The hungry painters almost beat him up, called him a crook, a blood-sucker, a Christ-selling Judas, and he, poor man, sighed, raised his hands to heaven in despair, and kept going to Mrs. Cheprakov for money.
VII
A RAINY, DIRTY, dark autumn came. Joblessness came, and I would sit at home for three days in a row with nothing to do, or perform various nonpainting jobs, for instance, carting earth for subflooring, getting twenty kopecks a day for it. Dr. Blagovo left for Petersburg. My sister stopped coming to see me. Radish lay at home sick, expecting to die any day.
My mood, too, was autumnal. Maybe because, having become a worker, I now saw our town life only from its underside, making discoveries almost every day that simply drove me to despair. Those of my fellow townsmen of whom I had previously had no opinion, or who from the outside had seemed quite decent, now turned out to be low people, cruel, capable of every nastiness. We simple people were deceived, cheated, made to wait whole hours in cold entries or kitchens; we were insulted and treated extremely rudely. In the autumn I hung wallpaper in the reading room and two other rooms of our club; I was paid seven kopecks a roll but was told to sign for twelve, and when I refused to do so, a decent-looking gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one of the club elders, said to me:
‘‘If you say any more about it, you blackguard, I’ll push your face in.’’
And when the footman whispered to him that I was the son of the architect Poloznev, he became embarrassed, turned red, but recovered at once and said:
‘‘Ah, devil take him!’’
In the shops, we workers were fobbed off with rotten meat, lumpy flour, and once-brewed tea; the police shoved us in church, the orderlies and nurses robbed us in hospitals, and if we, poor as we were, did not give them bribes, they fed us from dirty dishes in revenge; at the post office, the least clerk considered it his right to treat us like animals and shout rudely and insolently: ‘‘Wait! No shoving ahead!’’ The yard dogs—even they were unfriendly to us and attacked us with some special viciousness. But the main thing that struck me in my new condition was the total lack of fairness, precisely what is defined among the people by the words: ‘‘They have forgotten God.’’ Rarely did a day pass without cheating. The shopkeepers who sold us oil cheated; so did the contractors, and the workmen, and the clients themselves. It goes without saying that there could be no talk of any rights for us, and each time, we had to beg for the money we had earned as if it was alms, standing at the back door with our hats off.