The clerk Ilya Petrovitch Dementev is but a chickenhearted fellow.
3rd September.
The greatest misfortune has happened to me. It has taken me four days to pluck up sufficient courage to write it. I ought to have foreseen that it would happen. I ought to have known by the way business was decreasing, and the general difficulties attending it, that it was bound to come, but my wanton blindness made me trust, and kept me from worrying. Our bank has gone smash, and the office is closed. Our chief died suddenly. They say he killed himself, and that the family are keeping it dark. All the employees were paid off. Those who, like myself, had been with the firm for a long time, were generously treated and received a full month’s salary. It was certainly generous, considering the complete failure of the house.
What shall I do now to support myself and the children? The question is more alarming than the coming of the Germans. The Germans may or may not come, we do not know, but here am I faced by this fact. In a very little time the children and I will be starving.
I haven’t told Sashenka yet; I dare not; I can’t find the words with which to do it decently. At home no one knows. I leave the house at the usual time in the morning and wander about the streets, dodging acquaintances or sitting in the Taurida Garden. At five I return home as though from the office. I must think of some plan; I must make up my mind what to do.
4th September.
For the first time in my life I find myself out of work, not counting, of course, the few occasions when in my youth, I happened to find myself without a post for two or three weeks, but one took it so lightly then, as one does everything else in youth. I even forget what the experience was like. Now I am forty-six, and have a family. …
What good am I to anyone now? What right have I to live? I have no justification other than my willingness to work. So long as I had work and supported my helpless little ones, I was a man with a claim to respect and consideration, but now … I’m no better than the lowest ne’er-do-well; I’m the most insignificant person on the face of the earth. I cannot even supply the needs of my own miserable existence, let alone the needs of those depending on me. A sparrow pecking manure on the road has a greater right to live than I!
As long as I worked I was a personality, a visible, tangible quantity; my little efforts helped to make the common wheel go round; now I am dead, as it were. I am no more than a ghost among the living, though to outward impressions alive. What a horrible condition to be in! My voice even has changed, and assumed an ingratiating quality it used not to possess; my walk has become slouching and cautious. I seem to be tiptoeing through the house, the only person awake, trying not to disturb the others. If it were not for the fact that most people were a little unlike themselves just now, mother would notice that it was only the ghost of my former self that went and came each day. I act very cleverly in Sashenka’s presence not to let her see anything, but we so rarely meet now; I do my best to avoid her as much as I can, on plea of pressing work.
I know that I’m not to blame for what has happened; I’m only the victim of circumstances, but that is small consolation. No self-respecting man could find consolation and satisfaction in the thought of being a victim. The more I think of it the more I hate myself for my inefficiency and limitations. My life hangs on the merest thread that any casual person can break at his will. What have I accomplished to sit calmly with folded arms. Where are the indelible traces of my personality, the fruits of my labour? Some chairs and tables, a few garments, two children, is the sum total of all my achievements. … But what am I saying? I have chests of drawers, down pillows, four hundred roubles in the savings bank, a lottery ticket in my pocket with which I stand the chance of winning two hundred thousand roubles. It would be both interesting and instructive to make a complete inventory of the things I have acquired by my own efforts during the whole of my life.
It’s overwhelming and shameful to think what little there is! I can’t stay in this flat for more than another month, and then. … Poor children, what a wretched father you possess!
7th September.
I have made the round of my acquaintances, entered some two hundred doors with my letters of recommendation, but no one seems to have any use for “an honest, conscientious worker.” Many are not slow to give advice. One man advised me, from the height of his patriotic self-satisfaction, to get some war work, and to “mobilise industry” with the millionaire Riabushinsky, those
