I waved my hand in despair and went away.  I don’t remember what happened afterwards, that night and next day.

I am told that I walked about the streets bareheaded, staggering, and singing aloud, while a crowd of boys ran after me, shouting: 

“Better-than-nothing!”

XX

If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be:  “Nothing passes away.”  I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.

What I have been through has not been for nothing.  My great troubles, my patience, have touched people’s hearts, and now they don’t call me “Better-than-nothing,” they don’t laugh at me, and when I walk by the shops they don’t throw water over me.  They have grown used to my being a workman, and see nothing strange in my carrying a pail of paint and putting in windows, though I am of noble rank; on the contrary, people are glad to give me orders, and I am now considered a first-rate workman, and the best foreman after Radish, who, though he has regained his health, and though, as before, he paints the cupola on the belfry without scaffolding, has no longer the force to control the workmen; instead of him I now run about the town looking for work, I engage the workmen and pay them, borrow money at a high rate of interest, and now that I myself am a contractor, I understand how it is that one may have to waste three days racing about the town in search of tilers on account of some twopenny-halfpenny job.  People are civil to me, they address me politely, and in the houses where I work, they offer me tea, and send to enquire whether I wouldn’t like dinner.  Children and young girls often come and look at me with curiosity and compassion.

One day I was working in the Governor’s garden, painting an arbour there to look like marble.  The Governor, walking in the garden, came up to the arbour and, having nothing to do, entered into conversation with me, and I reminded him how he had once summoned me to an interview with him.  He looked into my face intently for a minute, then made his mouth like a round “O,” flung up his hands, and said:  “I don’t remember!”

I have grown older, have become silent, stern, and austere, I rarely laugh, and I am told that I have grown like Radish, and that like him I bore the workmen by my useless exhortations.

Mariya Viktorovna, my former wife, is living now abroad, while her father is constructing a railway somewhere in the eastern provinces, and is buying estates there.  Dr. Blagovo is also abroad.  Dubetchnya has passed again into the possession of Madame Tcheprakov, who has bought it after forcing the engineer to knock the price down twenty per cent.  Moisey goes about now in a bowler hat; he often drives into the town in a racing droshky on business of some sort, and