ner. It is now past
seven o'clock and she is not in. She has been going out lately without
telling me, and she has been disrespectful--and I see your filthy,
abominable influence at work. Where is she?"

He had in his hands the familiar umbrella, and I was already taken
aback, and I stood stiff and erect, like a schoolboy, waiting for my
father to thrash me, but he saw the glance I cast at the umbrella and
this probably checked him.

"Live as you like!" he said. "My blessing is gone from you."

"Good God!" muttered my old nurse behind the door. "You are lost. Oh! my
heart feels some misfortune coming. I can feel it."

I went to work on the railway. During the whole of August there was wind
and rain. It was damp and cold; the corn had now been gathered in the
fields, and on the big farms where the reaping was done with machines,
the wheat lay not in stacks, but in heaps; and I remember how those
melancholy heaps grew darker and darker every day, and the grain
sprouted. It was hard work; the pouring rain spoiled everything that we
succeeded in finishing. We were not allowed either to live or to sleep
in the station buildings and had to take shelter in dirty, damp, mud
huts where the "railies" had lived during the summer, and at night I
could not sleep from the cold and the bugs crawling over my face and
hands. And when we were working near the bridges, then the "railies"
used to come out in a crowd to fight the painters--which they regarded
as sport. They used to thrash us, steal our trousers, and to infuriate
us and provoke us to a fight; they used to spoil our work, as when they
smeared the signal-boxes with green paint. To add to all our miseries
Radish began to pay us very irregularly. All the painting on the line
was given to one contractor, who subcontracted with another, and he
again with Radish, stipulating for twenty per cent commission. The job
itself was unprofitable; then came the rains; time was wasted; we did no
work and Radish had to pay his men every day. The starving painters
nearly came to blows with him, called him a swindler, a bloodsucker, a
Judas, and he, poor man, sighed and in despair raised his hands to the
heavens and was continually going to Mrs. Cheprakov to borrow money.

VII

Came the rainy, muddy, dark autumn, bringing a slack time, and I used to
sit at home three days in the week without work, or did various jobs
outside painting; such as digging earth for ballast for twenty copecks