difference of ten thousand, and now the townspeople regretted it, because they had to build a road to the station, for which the estimate was higher. The ties and rails were already laid the whole length of the line, and service trains were running, bringing building materials and workers, and the only holdup was the bridges, which Dolzhikov was building, and here and there a station wasn’t ready yet.
Dubechnya—so our first station was called—was some ten miles from town. I went on foot. The winter and spring crops were bright green, caught by the morning sunlight. The area was level, cheerful, and the station, the barrows, and some remote estates were clearly outlined in the distance... How good it was here at liberty! And how I wanted to be filled with the awareness of freedom, at least for this one morning, and not think of what was going on in town, not think of my needs, not want to eat! Nothing so prevented me from living as the acute sense of hunger, when my best thoughts were strangely mingled with thoughts of buckwheat kasha, meat cakes, fried fish. Here I am standing alone in the field and looking up at a lark, which is hanging in one place in the air and pouring itself out as if in hysterics, and I’m thinking: ‘‘It would be good now to have some bread and butter!’’ Or here I am sitting down by the roadside and closing my eyes to rest, to listen to this wonderful Maytime clamor, and I recall the smell of hot potatoes. Though I was tall and strongly built, I generally had little to eat, and therefore my main feeling in the course of a day was hunger, and that may have been why I understood perfectly well why so many people worked only for a crust of bread and could talk only about grub.
In Dubechnya they were plastering the inside of the station and building a wooden upper story to the pump house. It was hot, there was a smell of lime, and workers wandered sluggishly over heaps of shavings and rubbish; the switchman was asleep by his booth, and the sun burned down directly on his face. Not a single tree. The telegraph wires hummed faintly, and hawks rested on them here and there. Wandering over the same heaps, not knowing what to do, I remembered how the engineer, to my question of what my duties would be, had answered: ‘‘We’ll see.’’ But what could one see in this desert? The plasterers were talking about the foreman and about some Fedot Vassiliev, I didn’t understand, and anguish gradually came over me—physical anguish, when you feel your arms and legs and your whole big body and don’t know what to do with them or where to take yourself.
After wandering around for at least two hours, I noticed that there were telegraph poles going from the station somewhere to the right of the line, which ended after a mile or a mile and a half at a white stone wall; the workers said the office was there, and I finally realized that that was precisely where I had to go.
It was an old, long-neglected estate. The wall of porous white stone was weathered and had fallen down in places, and the roof on the wing, whose blank wall looked into the fields, was rusty, and tin patches shone on it here and there. Through the gate, you could see a spacious yard overgrown with tall weeds, and an old master’s house with jalousies on the windows and a high roof red-brown with rust. At the sides of the house, to right and left, stood two identical wings; one had its windows boarded up; near the other, whose windows were open, laundry hung on a line, and calves were walking around. The last telegraph pole stood in the yard, and its wire went to the window of the wing whose blank wall looked onto the fields. The door was open, and I went in. At a table by a telegraph machine sat some gentleman with dark curly hair, in a canvas jacket; he looked at me sternly from under his brows but smiled at once and said:
‘‘Greetings, Small Profit!’’
This was Ivan Cheprakov, my schoolmate, who had been expelled from the second class for smoking tobacco. In the autumn he and I used to catch siskins, finches, and grosbeaks and sell them at the market early in the morning, while our parents were still asleep. We lay in wait for flocks of migratory starlings and shot them with birdshot, then gathered up the wounded, and some of them died on us in awful torment (I still remember them moaning at night in the cage I had), but others recovered and we sold them, brazenly swearing to God that they were all males. Once, at the market, I had only one starling left, which I kept offering to buyers and finally let go for a kopeck. ‘‘Still, it’s a small profit!’’ I said to console myself, pocketing the kopeck, and after that the street urchins and schoolboys nicknamed me ‘‘Small Profit’’; and even now the street urchins and shopkeepers tease me with it, though no one but me remembers any longer where the nickname came from.
Cheprakov was not strongly built: narrow-chested, stoop-shouldered, long-legged. A string tie, no waistcoat at all, and boots worse than mine—with crooked heels. He rarely blinked and had a look of urgency, as if he was about to grab something, and was always in a flurry.
‘‘But wait,’’ he said in a flurry. ‘‘No, listen here!... What was it I was just saying?’’
We got to talking. I found out that the estate we were then on had belonged still recently to the Cheprakovs and had passed only last autumn to the engineer Dolzhikov, who thought it more profitable to keep his money in land than in securities, and had already bought three considerable estates in our region, with a transfer of mortgages; at the time of the sale, Cheprakov’s mother had negotiated for herself the right to live in one of the wings for another two years and had managed to obtain for her son a position in the office.
‘‘How can he not go buying up?’’ Cheprakov said of the engineer. ‘‘He fleeces the contractors alone for that much! He fleeces everybody!’’
Then he took me to dinner, having decided in a flurry that I would live in the wing with him and board with his mother.
‘‘She’s a niggard,’’ he said, ‘‘but she won’t take much from you.’’
In the small rooms where his mother lived, it was very crowded; all of them, even the entry and the front room, were cluttered with furniture, which, after the sale of the estate, had been brought there from the big house; and it was all old mahogany furniture. Mrs. Cheprakov, a very stout, elderly lady with slanted Chinese eyes, was sitting in a big armchair by the window and knitting a stocking. She received me ceremoniously.
‘‘This is Poloznev, mama,’’ Cheprakov introduced me. ‘‘He’ll be working here.’’
‘‘Are you a nobleman?’’ she asked in a strange, unpleasant voice; it seemed to me as if fat was gurgling in her throat.
‘‘Yes,’’ I said.
‘‘Be seated.’’
The dinner was bad. All that was served was a pie with rancid cottage cheese and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, the hostess, blinked somehow strangely, now with one eye, now with the other. She talked, ate, but there was something already dead in her whole figure, and it was as if you could even sense the smell of a corpse. There was barely a glimmer of life in her, along with a glimmer of awareness that she was a landowner who had once had her own serfs, that she was a general’s widow whom the servants were obliged to call ‘‘Your Excellency’’; and when these pathetic remnants of life lit up in her for a moment, she would say to her son:
‘‘Jean, you’re holding your knife the wrong way!’’
Or else she would tell me, breathing heavily, with the mincing manner of a hostess wishing to entertain a guest:
