I felt the impossibility of achieving anything because there were too many of them, and I therefore felt angry with them for being so numerous; but besides that, taking them separately, they did not attract me. I felt that each of them was telling me lies or not telling the whole truth, and saw in me merely a purse from which money might be extracted. And it very often seemed to me that the money a man wheedled out of me would do him more harm than good. The oftener I went to the place and the more I got to know the people there the plainer the impossibility of doing anything became, but I did not abandon my enterprise till the last night of the Census.
I am particularly ashamed to remember that last visit. Previously I had gone alone, but now we went some twenty of us together. At seven o’clock those who wished to take part in this last night’s round collected at my house. They were nearly all strangers to me: students, an officer, and two of my society acquaintances, who saying in the usual way C’est tres interessant! asked me to include them among the Census-takers.
My society acquaintances had dressed specially in shooting jackets and high travelling boots, a costume in which they went on hunting expeditions, and which in their opinion was adapted for a visit to the night-lodging-houses. They took with them peculiar notebooks and extraordinary pencils. They were in that special state of excitement people are in when preparing for a hunt, a duel, or to start for the war. In their case the stupidity and falseness of our position was particularly noticeable, but the rest of us were in the same false situation. Before we started we held a consultation, like a council of war, as to how and with what to begin, how to divide our party, and so forth.
The consultation was just like those which take place in councils, assemblies, and committees that is to say, everybody spoke not because he had something that needed saying or because he wanted to learn something, but each devised something to say so as not to seem to lag behind the others. But in the course of these conversations no one referred to charity, of which I had spoken to them all so often.
Abashed as I was I felt that I must again refer to charity, that is to the need of entering up during our round all whom we found to be in a state of poverty. I had always felt ashamed to speak of this, but now, amid our excited preparations for the campaign, I could scarcely utter it. All listened to me as it seemed with regret, and at the same time all agreed verbally; but it was evident that they all knew it was folly and that nothing would come of it, and all immediately began to talk about something else. This continued till it was time to start and we drove off.
We arrived at the dark tavern, roused the attendants, and began to sort our papers. When we were told that the people had heard of our visit and were leaving the quarters, we asked the landlord to have the gates closed, and ourselves went out into the yard to reassure those who were leaving, telling them that no one would ask to see their passports.1 I remember the strange and unpleasant impression those excited night-lodgers produced on me: tattered, half-dressed, by the light of the lamp In the dark yard all appearing to me to be tall; frightened and terrible in their fright they stood in a group near the stinking privy and heard our assurances but did not believe them. Evidently, like hunted animals, they were ready for anything merely to escape from us.
Gentlemen in various guises-as police-officers in town or country, as examining magistrates, and as Judges-had harassed them all their lives in the towns and in the villages and on the highroads and in the streets and in taverns and dosshouses, and now suddenly these gentlemen had come and shut the gates on them merely to count them; it was as hard for them to believe this as it would be for hares to believe that dogs had come not to catch them but to count them. But the gates were closed, and the alarmed night lodgers went back to their quarters, and having separated Into groups we set to work. With me went the two society men and two students. Before us in the darkness went Vanya in overcoat and white trousers, carrying a lantern, and we followed him.
We visited lodgings I already knew and in which I also knew some of the lodgers, but most of the people were new and the spectacle was new and terrible-more terrible than I had seen at Lyapin House. All the lodgings were full, all the bunks were occupied, and often by two people. The sight was horrible from the way they were crowded together, and from the mingling of women and men.
All the women who were not dead drunk were sleeping with men. Many women with children were sleeping with strange men on the narrow bunks. Terrible was the sight of these people’s destitution, dirt, raggedness, and terror. And terrible, above all, was the immense number in this condition. One tenement, another, a third, a tenth, a twentieth, and no end to them! Everywhere the same stench, the same stifling atmosphere, the same overcrowding, the same mingling of the sexes, the same spectacle of men and women drunk to stupefaction, and the same fear, submissiveness, and culpability on all faces; and again I felt pained and ashamed of
1 To be without a passport, or to have a false one, was a serious offence in Russian law and police practice.-A.M.
myself as I had done in Lyapin House, and I understood that what I had undertaken was horrid, stupid, and therefore impossible. And I no longer questioned anyone or took notes about anything, knowing that nothing would come of it.
I suffered profoundly, at Lyapin House I had been like one who happens to see a horrible sore on a man’s body, he is sorry for the man and conscience-stricken at not having pitied him before, but he may still hope to help him. But now I was like a doctor who has come to the sufferer with his medicines, has uncovered his wound and chafed it, but has himself to admit that he has done it all in vain and that his medicine is of no use.
CHAPTER XI
THAT visit dealt the last blow to my self-deception, it became obvious to me that what I had undertaken was not merely stupid but horrid. Yet, though I knew this, it seemed to me that it would not do to throw up the whole affair at once. It seemed as. if I was bound to go on, first, because by the article I had written and by my visits and promises I had raised hopes among the poor; and secondly, because I had also by my article and by conversations evoked the sympathy of charitable people, many of whom had promised to co-operate both with work and money. And I awaited applications from both classes and meant to deal with them as best I could.
As to the needy, this is what occurred. I received more than a hundred letters and applications; these were all from the rich-poor, if I may use the expression. I went to see some of them and to some I did not reply. Nowhere did I succeed in doing anything. All the applications were from people who had once occupied a privileged position (I mean a position in which a man receives from others more than he gives), had lost it, and wished to regain it.
One wanted two hundred rubles to maintain his declining business and complete the education of his children another wanted a photographic establishment; third wanted his debts paid and to get his respectable clothes out of pawn; a fourth wanted a piano in order to perfect himself and to support his family by giving lessons. Most of them simply asked for help without defining how much money they wanted, but when one looked into what they wanted, it turned out that their needs grew In proportion to the amount of help available, and there was not and could not be any satisfying them. I repeat that this may have occurred because I did not know how to deal with them, but the fact remains that I helped nobody though in some cases I tried to.
As to the co-operation of the charitable, what happened seemed to me very strange and unexpected. Of all who promised me money for the poor and even fixed the amount, not one gave me a single ruble. From the promises given me I might have counted on receiving some three thousand rubles but of all those people not one remembered the conversation or gave me a single farthing. Only the students gave me what they received for their work on the census, which was, I think twelve rubles.1 So that my whole undertaking, which was to have dealt with tens of thousands of rubles given by the rich and to have saved hundreds and thousands of people from poverty and vice, came merely to this: that I distributed haphazard some dozens of rubles to those who
