“I can’t, Kleopatra!” I said, feeling that a little more and I should give way.  “I cannot!”

“Why not?” my sister went on.  “Why not?  Well, if you can’t get on with the Head, look out for another post.  Why shouldn’t you get a situation on the railway, for instance?  I have just been talking to Anyuta Blagovo; she declares they would take you on the railway-line, and even promised to try and get a post for you.  For God’s sake, Misail, think a little!  Think a little, I implore you.”

We talked a little longer and I gave way.  I said that the thought of a job on the railway that was being constructed had never occurred to me, and that if she liked I was ready to try it.

She smiled joyfully through her tears and squeezed my hand, and then went on crying because she could not stop, while I went to the kitchen for some kerosene.

II

Among the devoted supporters of amateur theatricals, concerts and tableaux vivants for charitable objects the Azhogins, who lived in their own house in Great Dvoryansky Street, took a foremost place; they always provided the room, and took upon themselves all the troublesome arrangements and the expenses.  They were a family of wealthy landowners who had an estate of some nine thousand acres in the district and a capital house, but they did not care for the country, and lived winter and summer alike in the town.  The family consisted of the mother, a tall, spare, refined lady, with short hair, a short jacket, and a flat-looking skirt in the English fashion, and three daughters who, when they were spoken of, were called not by their names but simply:  the eldest, the middle, and the youngest.  They all had ugly sharp chins, and were short-sighted and round-shouldered.  They were dressed like their mother, they lisped disagreeably, and yet, in spite of that, infallibly took part in every performance and were continually doing something with a charitable object—­acting, reciting, singing.  They were very serious and never smiled, and even in a musical comedy they played without the faintest trace of gaiety, with a businesslike air, as though they were engaged in bookkeeping.

I loved our theatricals, especially the numerous, noisy, and rather incoherent rehearsals, after which they always gave a supper.  In the choice of the plays and the distribution of the parts I had no hand at all.  The post assigned to me lay behind the scenes.  I painted the scenes, copied out the parts, prompted, made up the actors’ faces; and I was entrusted, too, with various stage effects such as thunder, the singing of nightingales, and so on.  Since I had no proper social position and no decent clothes, at the rehearsals I held aloof from the rest in the shadows of the wings and maintained a shy silence.

I painted the scenes at the Azhogins’ either in the barn or in the yard.  I was assisted by Andrey Ivanov, a house painter, or, as he called himself, a contractor for all kinds of house decorations, a tall, very thin, pale man of fifty, with a hollow chest, with sunken temples, with blue rings round his eyes, rather terrible to look at in fact.  He was afflicted with some internal malady, and every autumn and spring people said that he wouldn’t recover, but after being laid up for a while he would get up and say afterwards with surprise:  “I have escaped dying again.”