Of course he burns the candles, because he reads books. He gets them from the shop. I know.
Just look among his things in the attic.”
The old woman ran up to the attic, found a book, and burned it to ashes.
This made me very angry, as you may imagine, but my love of reading increased.
I understood that if a saint had entered that household, my employers would have set to work to teach him, tried to set him to their own tune. They would have done this for something to do.
If they had left off judging people, scolding them, jeering at them, they would have forgotten how to talk, would have been stricken with dumbness, and would not have been themselves at all.
When a man is aware of himself, it must be through his relations with other people.
My employers could not behave themselves toward those about them otherwise than as teachers, always ready to condemn; and if they had taught somebody to live exactly as they lived themselves, to think and feel in the same way, even then they would have condemned him for that very reason.
They were that sort of people.
I continued to read on the sly. The old woman destroyed books several times, and I suddenly found my — self in debt to the shopkeeper for the enormous amount of forty-seven copecks.
He demanded the money, and threatened to take it from my employers’ money when they sent me to make purchases.
“What would happen then?” he asked jeeringly.
To me he was unbearably repulsive. Apparently he felt this, and tortured me with various threats from which he derived a peculiar enjoyment. When I went into the shop his pimply face broadened, and he would ask gently:
“Have you brought your debt?”
“No.”
This startled him. He frowned.
“How is that?
Am I supposed to give you things out of charity?
I shall have to get it from you by sending you to the reformatory.”
I had no way of getting the money, my wages were paid to grandfather. I lost my presence of mind. What would happen to me?
And in answer to my entreaty that he wait for settlement of the debt, the shopkeeper stretched out his oily, puffy hand, like a bladder, and said:
“Kiss my hand and I will wait.”
But when I seized a weight from the counter and brandished it at him, he ducked and cried:
“What are you doing? What are you doing? I was only joking.”
Knowing well that he was not joking, I resolved to steal the money to get rid of him.
In the morning when I was brushing the master’s clothes, money jingled in his trousers’ pockets, and sometimes it fell out and rolled on the floor. Once some rolled into a crack in the boards under the staircase. I forgot to say anything about this, and remembered it only several days afterward when I found two greven between the boards.
When I gave it back to the master his wife said to him:
“There, you see!
You ought to count your money when you leave it in your pockets.”
But my master, smiling at me, said:
“He would not steal, I know.”
Now, having made up my mind to steal, I remembered these words and his trusting smile, and felt how hard it would be for me to rob him.
Several times I took silver out of the pockets and counted it, but I could not take it.
For three days I tormented myself about this, and suddenly the whole affair settled itself quickly and simply. The master asked me unexpectedly:
“What is the matter with you, Pyeshkov? You have become dull lately. Aren’t you well, or what?”
I frankly told him all my troubles. He frowned.
“Now you see what books lead to!
From them, in some way or another, trouble always comes.”
He gave me half a ruble and admonished me sternly:
“Now look here; don’t you go telling my wife or my mother, or there will be a row.”
Then he smiled kindly and said:
“You are very persevering, devil take you!
Never mind; it is a good thing.
Anyhow, give up books.
When the New Year comes, I will order a good paper, and you can read that.”
And so in the evenings, from tea-time till supper-time, I read aloud to my employers
“The Moscow Gazette,” the novels of Bashkov, Rokshnin, Rudinskovski, and other literature, for the nourishment of people who suffered from deadly dullness.
I did not like reading aloud, for it hindered me from understanding what I read. But my employers listened attentively, with a sort of reverential eagerness, sighing, amazed at the villainy of the heroes, and saying proudly to one another:
“And we live so quietly, so peacefully; we know nothing of such things, thank God!”
They mixed up the incidents, ascribed the deeds of the famous brigand Churkin to the post-boy Thoma Kruchin, and mixed the names. When I corrected their mistakes they were surprised.