When we were in the cab my master said to me:
“They used to beat me too, Pyeshkov. What do you think of that?
They did beat me, my lad!
And you have me to pity you; but I had no one, no one.
People are very hard everywhere; but one gets no pity — no, not from any one.
Ekh! Wild fowl!”
He grumbled all the way home. I was very sorry for him, and grateful to him for treating me like a man.
They welcomed me at the house as if it had been my name-day. The women insisted on hearing in detail how the doctor had treated me and what he had said. They listened and sighed, then kissed me tenderly, wrinkling their brows.
This intense interest in illness, pain, and all kinds of unpleasantness always amazed me.
I saw that they were pleased with me for not complaining of them, and I took advantage of the mo — ment to ask if I might have some books from the tail — or’s wife.
They did not have the heart to refuse me. Only the old lady cried in surprise:
“What a demon he is!”
The next day I stood before the tailor’s wife, who said to me kindly:
“They told me that you were ill, and that you had been taken to hospital. You see what stories get about.”
I was silent.
I was ashamed to tell her the truth. Why should she know of such sad and coarse things?
It was nice to think that she was different from other people.
Once more I read the thick books of Dumas pere, Ponson de Terraille, Montepaine, Zakonier, Gaboriau, and Bourgobier. I devoured all these books quickly, one after the other, and I was happy.
I felt myself to be part of a life which was out of the ordinary, which stirred me sweetly and aroused my courage.
Once more I burned my improvised candle, and read all through the night till the morning, so that my eyes began to hurt me a little. The old mistress said to me kindly:
“Take care, bookworm. You will spoil your sight and grow blind!”
However, I soon realized that all these interestingly complicated books, despite the different incidents, and the various countries and town? about which they were written, had one common theme: good people made unhappy and oppressed by bad people, the latter were always more successful and clever than the good, but in the end something unexpected always overthrowing the wicked, and the good winning.
The “love,” of which both men and women spoke in the same terms, bored me.
In fact, it was not only uninteresting to me, but it aroused a vague contempt.
Sometimes from the very first chapters I began to wonder who would win or who would be vanquished, and as soon as the course of the story became clear, I would set myself to unravel the skein of events by the aid of my own fancy.
When I was not reading I was thinking of the books I had on hand, as one would think about the problems in an arithmetic. I became more skilful every day in guessing which of the characters would enter into the paradise of happiness and which would be utterly confounded.
But through all this I saw the glimmer of living and, to me, significant truths, the outlines of another life, other standards.
It was clear to me that in Paris the cabmen, working men, soldiers, and all “black people” 4 were not at all as they were in Nijni, Kazan, or Perm. They dared to speak to gentlefolk, and behaved toward them more simply and independently than our people.
Here, for example, was a soldier quite unlike any I had known, unlike Sidorov, unlike the Viatskian on the boat, and still more unlike Ermokhin. He was more human than any of these.
He had something of Smouri about him, but he was not so savage and coarse.
Here was a shopkeeper, but he was much better than any of the shopkeepers I had known.
And the priests in books were not like the priests I knew. They had more feeling, and seemed to enter more into the lives of their flocks.
And in general it seemed to me that life abroad, as it appeared in books, was more interesting, easier, better than the life I knew. Abroad, people did not behave so brutally. They never jeered at other human creatures as cruelly as the Viatskian soldier had been jeered at, nor prayed to God as importunately as the old mistress did.
What I noticed particularly was that, when villains, misers, and low characters were depicted in books, they did not show that incomprehensible cruelty, that inclination to jeer at humanity, with which I was ac — quainted, and which was often brought to my notice.
There was method in the cruelty of these bookish villains. One could almost always understand why they were cruel; but the cruelty which I witnessed was aimless, senseless, an amusement from which no one ex — pected to gain any advantage. 4 The common people.
With every book that I read this dissimilarity between Russian life and that of other countries stood out more clearly, causing a perplexed feeling of irritation within me, strengthening my suspicion of the veracity of the old, well-read pages with their dirty “dogs’-ears.”
And then there fell into my hands Goncourt’s novel,
“The Brothers Zemganno.” I read it through in one night, and, surprised at the new experience, read the simple, pathetic story over again.
There was nothing complicated about it, nothing interesting at first sight. In fact, the first pages seemed dry, like the lives of the saints.
Its language, so precise and stripped of all adornment, was at first an unpleasant surprise to me; but the paucity of words, the strongly constructed phrases, went straight to the heart. It so aptly described the drama of the acrobat brothers that my hands trembled with the enjoyment of reading the book.
I wept bitterly as I read how the unfortunate artist, with his legs broken, crept up to the loft where his brother was secretly engaged in his favorite art.
When I returned this glorious book to the tailor’s wife I begged her to give me another one like it.
“How do you mean like that?” she asked, laughing.
This laugh confused me, and I could not explain what I wanted. Then she said:
“That is a dull book. Just wait! I will give you another more interesting.”
In the course of a day or two she gave me Greenwood’s
“The True History of a little Waif.” The title of the book at first turned me agairieTit, but the first pages called up a smile of joy, and still smiling, I read it from beginning to end, rereading some of the pages two or three times.
So in other countries, also, boys lived hard and harassing lives!
After all, I was not so badly off; I need not complain.
Greenwood gave me a lot of courage, and soon after that I was given a “real” book, “Eugenie Grandet.”