My father would work only a couple of days a week. He was lazy. The remainder of the week he idled away and drank. My sisters served as nurse-maids, while my mother worked in a bakery, keeping the baby and me with her. We slept in the loft of a stable, with the horses stamping below us. Our bed was of straw laid on the floor, which consisted of unshaven planks thrown across logs. Soon the baker’s wife began to object to feeding an extra mouth, which belonged to me. I was then over eight years old.
“Why don’t you send her to work? She can earn her own bread,” she argued.
My mother would draw me to her breast, weep and beg for mercy. But the proprietress became impatient, threatening to throw us all out.
Finally my father came to see us, with the good tidings that he had found a place for me. I was to care for a five-year-old boy, in return for my board and eighty-five kopeks a month.
“If you do well,” my father added, “you will by and by receive a rouble.”
Such was the beginning of my career in life. I was eight and a half years old, small and very thin. I had never before left my mother’s side, and both of us wept bitterly at parting. It was a grey, painful, incomprehensible world into which I was being led by my father. My view of it was further blurred by a stream of tears.
I took care of the little boy for several days. One afternoon, while amusing him by making figures in the sand, I myself became so engrossed in the game that I quarrelled with my charge, which led to a fight. I remember feeling keenly that I was in the right. But the child’s mother did not inquire into the matter. She heard his screams and whipped me for it.
I was deeply hurt by the undeserved whipping administered by a strange woman.
“Where was my mother? Why did not she come to avenge me?”
My mother did not answer my cries. Nobody did. I felt miserable. How wrong was the world, how unjust. It was not worth while living in such a world.