I worked on the railway-line.  It rained without stopping all August; it was damp and cold; they had not carried the corn in the fields, and on big farms where the wheat had been cut by machines it lay not in sheaves but in heaps, and I remember how those luckless heaps of wheat turned blacker every day and the grain was sprouting in them.  It was hard to work; the pouring rain spoiled everything we managed to do.  We were not allowed to live or to sleep in the railway buildings, and we took refuge in the damp and filthy mud huts in which the navvies had lived during the summer, and I could not sleep at night for the cold and the woodlice crawling on my face and hands.  And when we worked near the bridges the navvies used to come in the evenings in a gang, simply in order to beat the painters—­ it was a form of sport to them.  They used to beat us, to steal our brushes.  And to annoy us and rouse us to fight they used to spoil our work; they would, for instance, smear over the signal boxes with green paint.  To complete our troubles, Radish took to paying us very irregularly.  All the painting work on the line was given out to a contractor; he gave it out to another; and this subcontractor gave it to Radish after subtracting twenty per cent. for himself.  The job was not a profitable one in itself, and the rain made it worse; time was wasted; we could not work while Radish was obliged to pay the fellows by the day.  The hungry painters almost came to beating him, called him a cheat, a blood-sucker, a Judas, while he, poor fellow, sighed, lifted up his hand to Heaven in despair, and was continually going to Madame Tcheprakov for money.

VII

Autumn came on, rainy, dark, and muddy.  The season of unemployment set in, and I used to sit at home out of work for three days at a stretch, or did various little jobs, not in the painting line.  For instance, I wheeled earth, earning about fourpence a day by it.  Dr. Blagovo had gone away to Petersburg.  My sister had given up coming to see me.  Radish was laid up at home ill, expecting death from day to day.

And my mood was autumnal too.  Perhaps because, having become a workman, I saw our town life only from the seamy side, it was my lot almost every day to make discoveries which reduced me almost to despair.  Those of my fellow-citizens, about whom I had no opinion before, or who had externally appeared perfectly decent, turned out now to be base, cruel people, capable of any dirty action.  We common people were deceived, cheated, and kept waiting for hours together in the cold entry or the kitchen; we were insulted and treated with the utmost rudeness.  In the autumn I papered the reading-room and two other rooms at the club; I was paid a penny three-farthings the piece, but had to sign a receipt at the rate of twopence halfpenny, and when I refused to do so, a gentleman of benevolent appearance in gold-rimmed spectacles, who must have been one of the club committee, said to me: