are so worried with business! but to-morrow everything will be finished—to-morrow, without fail. Really, I am mortified.” And all this accompanied by the most fascinating manners.
But neither on the morrow, nor on the day after, nor on the day after that, are the papers brought to the petitioner at his house. The petitioner falls to thinking, “Doesn’t this signify something?” He makes inquiries: he is told “The copyists must be given something.”—“Why not? I am willing to give them twenty- five copecks!” he exclaims. “Why do you get so heated over it?” comes the reply. “This is the way it must be arranged: give a white-note to the copyist; he himself will get a quarter of a rouble out of it, and the rest will go to the head of the department.”
The slow-witted petitioner deals himself a blow on the forehead, and curses the way in which the world is arranged nowadays, as well as the new customs, and the loftily courteous manners of the officials. “In former times, you used at least to know what you were about,” he reflects. “If you presented the head of the department with a red bank-note,5 your business was as good as done, but now you have to spend a white-note,6 and waste a week into the bargain, before you can guess what they are up to. May the Devil fly away with their disinterestedness and official generosity!”
The petitioner was in the right, of course; but, on the other hand, there were no longer any direct bribe- takers among the heads of departments, they were the most honest and the noblest of men: only the secretaries and the petty clerks were rascals. A much more extensive field soon presented itself to Tchitchikoff. A commission was appointed for the erection of some extremely important government building. He got himself appointed on this commission, and appeared to be one of the most active of its members. The commission set to work at once. The process of erection dragged on for six years; but the climate in some way interfered, or the building materials were not what they should have been; at all events, that government edifice never got any further than the foundations. But in the meantime, at the other extremity of the town, a handsome house, in the urban style of architecture, rose up for each member of the commission: obviously the soil was more propitious there. The members began to gather courage, too, and commenced to marry.
It was only then that Tchitchikoff gradually began to relax in his strict rules of conduct and his pitiless self-sacrifice. It was only then that his long-continued fast was lightened; and it appeared that he had never been averse to the various forms of enjoyment, from which he had known how to refrain during the fiery years of his youth, when no other man is able to control himself entirely. Some luxuries made their appearance at his place; he indulged in a tolerably good cook, and in fine cambric shirts. He had already begun to purchase some cloth for his own use, such as no one else in the whole province wore; and from that time forth he began to wear it—it was light brown or reddish in shade, and his coats were very much cut away in front. Then he had already set up an excellent pair of horses, and drove the team himself; he had also already contracted a habit of rubbing himself down with a sponge dipped in water mixed with eau-de-Cologne, he had already purchased some expensive soap for the purpose of imparting smoothness to his skin; he had already——
But all at once there was despatched, in the place of the easy-going chief, a new head of the department, who was a military man, a fierce general, a sworn foe of bribery, and of everything which is reckoned unjust. He frightened all the under-officials, down to the very last one; on the second day he demanded their accounts, detected various deficits, found money missing at every step; then he took note of his subordinates’ handsome houses of urban architecture, and instituted an investigation. The officials were dismissed from the service; the houses of an urban style of architecture were turned over to the treasury, and converted into various benevolent institutions and district schools; everybody was blown into atoms, and Tchitchikoff worse than all the rest.
All of a sudden, his face, in spite of its agreeable expression, ceased to please the chief, just why God only knows—sometimes there is no cause whatever for such a thing. At all events, the chief conceived a deadly hatred for Tchitchikoff and sacked him. But as this chief was a military man, it stood to reason that he did not understand all the refinements in the methods of transacting official affairs; indeed, after