The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  And I longed to take part in it, and to express, in some way or other, the rapture that filled my heart to overflowing, in the presence of the mysterious force which scatters gloom, and gathering clouds. The blue light which lit up the sky seemed to gleam in my soul too; and how was I to express my passion and my ecstasy at the grandeur of nature? I sang aloud, at the top of my voice. The thunder roared, the lightning flashed, the grass whispered, while I sang and felt myself in close kinship with nature’s music. I was delirious, and it was pardonable, for it harmed no one but myself. I was filled with the desire to absorb, as much as possible, the mighty, living beauty and force that was raging on the steppe; and to get closer to it. A tempest at sea, and a thunderstorm on the steppes! I know nothing grander in nature. And so I shouted to my heart’s content, in the absolute belief that I troubled no one, nor placed any one in a position to criticize my action. But suddenly, I felt my legs seized, and I fell helpless into a pool of water.

  Shakro was looking into my face with serious and wrathful eyes.

  “Are you mad? Aren’t you? No? Well, then, be quiet! Don’t shout! I’ll cut your throat! Do you understand?”

  I was amazed, and I asked him first what harm I was doing him?

  “Why, you’re frightening me! It’s thundering; God is speaking, and you bawl. What are you thinking about?”

  I replied that I had a right to sing whenever I chose. Just as he had.

  “But I don’t want to!” he said.

  “Well, don’t sing then!” I assented.

  “And don’t you sing!” insisted Shakro.

  “Yes, I mean to sing!”

  “Stop! What are you thinking about?” he went on angrily. “Who are you? You have neither home nor father, nor mother; you have no relations, no land! Who are you? Are you anybody, do you suppose? It’s I am somebody in the world! I have everything!”

  He slapped his chest vehemently.

  “I’m a prince, and you—you’re nobody—nothing! You say—you’re this and that! Who else says so? All Koutais and Tiflies know me! You shall not contradict me! Do you hear? Are you not my servant? I’ll pay ten times over for all you have done for me. You shall obey me! You said yourself that God taught us to serve each other without seeking for a reward; but I’ll reward you.

  “Why will you annoy me, preaching to me, and frightening me? Do you want me to be like you? That’s too bad! You can’t make me like yourself! Foo! Foo!”

  He talked, smacked his lips, snuffled, and sighed. I stood staring at him, open-mouthed with astonishment. He was evidently pouring out now all the discontent, displeasure and disgust, which had been gathering up during the whole of our journey. To convince me more thoroughly, he poked me in the chest from time to time with his forefinger, and shook me by the shoulder. During the most impressive parts of his speech he pushed up against me with his whole massive body. The rain was pouring down on us, the thunder never ceased its muttering, and to make me hear, Shakro shouted at the top of his voice. The tragic comedy of my position struck me more vividly than ever, and I burst into a wild fit of laughter. Shakro turned away and spat.

  CHAPTER X

  The nearer we draw to Tiflis, the gloomier and the surlier grew Shakro. His thinner, but still stolid face wore a new expression. Just before we reached Vladikavkas we passed through a Circassian village, where we obtained work in some maize fields.

  The Circassians spoke very little Russian, and as they constantly laughed at us, and scolded us in their own language, we resolved to leave the village two days after our arrival; their increasing enmity had begun to alarm us.

  We had left the village about ten miles behind, when Shakro produced from his shirt a roll of home-spun muslin, and handing it to me, exclaimed triumphantly:

  “You need not work any more now. We can sell this, and buy all we want till we get to Tiflis! Do you see?”

  I was moved to fury, and tearing the bundle from his hands, I flung it away, glancing back.

  The Circassians are not to be trifled with! Only a short time before, the Cossacks had told us the following story:

  A tramp, who had been working for some time in a Circassian village, stole an iron spoon, and carried it away with him. The Circassians followed him, searched him, and found the iron spoon. They ripped open his body with a dagger, and after pushing the iron spoon into the wound, went off quietly, leaving him to his fate on the steppes. He was found by some Cossacks at the point of death. He told them this story, and died on the way to their village. The Cossacks had more than once warned us against the Circassians, relating many other edifying tales of the same sort. I had no reason to doubt the accuracy of these stories. I reminded Shakro of these facts. For some time he listened in silence to what I was saying; then, suddenly, showing his teeth and screwing up his eyes, he flew at me like a wild cat. We struggled for five minutes or so, till Shakro exclaimed angrily: “Enough! Enough!”

  Exhausted with the struggle, we sat in silence for some time, facing each other. Shakro glanced covetously toward the spot, where I had flung the red muslin, and said:

  “What were we fighting about? Fa—Fa—Fa! It’s very stupid. I did not steal it from you did I? Why should you care? I was sorry for you that is why I took the linen. You have to work so hard, and I cannot help you in that way, so I thought I would help you by stealing. Tse’! Tse’!

  “I made an attempt to explain to him how wrong it was to steal.

  “Hold your tongue, please! You’re a blockhead!” he exclaimed contemptuously; then added: “When one is dying of hunger, there is nothing for it but to steal; what sort of a life is this?”

  I was silent, afraid of rousing his anger again. This was the second time he had committed a theft. Some time before, when we were tramping along the shores of the Black Sea, he stole a watch belonging to a fisherman. We had nearly come to blows then.

  “Well, come along,” he said; when, after a short rest, we had once more grown quiet and friendly.

  So we trudged on. Each day made him grow more gloomy, and he looked at me strangely, from under his brows.

  As we walked over the Darial Pass, he remarked: “Another day or two will bring us to Tiflis. Tse’! Tse’!”

  He clicked his tongue, and his face beamed with delight.

  “When I get home, they will ask me where I have been? I shall tell them I have been travelling. The first thing I shall do will be to take a nice bath. I shall eat a lot. Oh! what a lot. I have only to tell my mother ‘I am hungry!’ My father will forgive when I tell him how much trouble and sorrow I have undergone. Tramps are a good sort of people! Whenever I meet a tramp, I shall always give him a rouble, and take him to the beer-house, and treat him to some wine. I shall tell him I was a tramp myself once. I shall tell my father all about you. I shall say: ‘This man—he was like an elder brother to me. He lectured me, and beat me, the dog! He fed me, and now, I shall say, you must feed him.’ I shall tell him to feed you for a whole year. Do you hear that, Maxime?”

  I liked to hear him talk in this strain; at those times he seemed so simple, so child-like. His words were all the more pleasant because I had not a single friend in all Tiflis. Winter was approaching. We had already been caught in a snowstorm in the Goudaour hills. I reckoned somewhat on Shakro’s promises. We walked on rapidly till we reached Mesket, the ancient capital of Iberia. The next day we hoped to be in Tiflis.

  I caught sight of the capital of the Caucasus in the distance, as it lay some five versts farther on, nestling between two high hills. The end of our journey was fast approaching! I was rejoicing, but Shakro was indifferent. With a vacant look he fixed his eyes on the distance, and began spitting on one side; while he kept rubbing his stomach with a grimace of pain. The pain in his stomach was caused by his having eaten too many raw carrots, which he had pulled up by the wayside.

  “Do you think I, a nobleman of Georgia, will show mys
elf in my native town, torn and dirty as I am now? No, indeed, that I never could! We must wait outside till night. Let us rest here.”

  We twisted up a couple of cigarettes from our last bit of tobacco, and, shivering with cold, we sat down under the walls of a deserted building to have a smoke. The piercing cold wind seemed to cut through our bodies. Shakro sat humming a melancholy song; while I fell to picturing to myself a warm room, and other advantages of a settled life over a wandering existence.

  “Let us move on now!” said Shakro resolutely.

  It had now become dark. The lights were twinkling down below in the town. It was a pretty sight to watch them flashing one after the other, out of the mist of the valley, where the town lay hidden.

  “Look here, you give me your bashleek,2 I want to cover my face up with it. My friends might recognize me.”

  I gave him my bashleek. We were already in Olga Street, and Shakro was whistling boldly.

  “Maxime, do you see that bridge over yonder? The train stops there. Go and wait for me there, please. I want first to go and ask a friend, who lives close by, about my father and mother.”

  “You won’t be long, will you?”

  “Only a minute. Not more!”

  He plunged rapidly down the nearest dark, narrow lane, and disappeared—disappeared for ever.

  I never met him again—the man who was my fellow-traveller for nearly four long months; but I often think of him with a good-humored feeling, and light-hearted laughter.

  He taught me much that one does not find in the thick volumes of wise philosophers, for the wisdom of life is always deeper and wider than the wisdom of men.

  2A kind of hood worn by men to keep their ears warm.

  ON A RAFT

  Heavy clouds drift slowly across the sleepy river and hang every moment lower and thicker. In the distance their ragged gray edges seem almost to touch the surface of the rapid and muddy waters, swollen by the floods of spring, and there, where they touch, an impenetrable wall rises to the skies, barring the flow of the river and the passage of the raft.

  The stream, swirling against this wall—washing vainly against it with a wistful wailing swish—seems to be thrown back on itself, and then to hasten away on either side, where lies the moist fog of a dark spring night.

  The raft floats onward, and the distance opens out before it into heavy cloud—massed space. The banks of the rivers are invisible; darkness covers them, and the lapping waves of a spring flood seem to have washed them into space.

  The river below has spread into a sea; while the heavens above, swatched in cloud masses, hang heavy, humid, and leaden.3

  There is no atmosphere, no color in this gray blurred picture.

  The raft glides down swiftly and noiselessly, while out of the darkness appears, suddenly bearing down on it, a steamer, pouring from its funnels a merry crowd of sparks, and churning up the water with the paddles of its great revolving wheels.

  The two red forward lights gleam every moment larger and brighter, and the mast-head lantern sways slowly from side to side, as if winking mysteriously at the night. The distance is filled with the noise of the troubled water, and the heavy thud-thud of the engines.

  “Look ahead!” is heard from the raft. The voice is that of a deep-chested man.

  In order to enter into the sociology of this story of Gorkv’s it must be explained that among ancient Russian folk-customs, as the young peasants were married at a very early age, the father of the bridegroom considered he had rights over his daughter-in-law. In later times, this custom although occasionally continued, was held in disrepute among the peasantry; but that it has not entirely died out is proved by the little drama sketched in by the hand of a genius in “On a Raft.”

  Two men are standing aft, grasping each a long pole, which propel the raft and act as rudders; Mitia, the son of the owner, a fair, weak, melancholy-looking lad of twenty-two; and Sergei, a peasant, hired to help in the work on board the raft, a bluff, healthy, red-bearded fellow, whose upper lip, raised with a mocking sneer, discloses a mouth filled with large, strong teeth.

  “Starboard!” A second cry vibrates through the darkness ahead of the rafts.

  “What are you shouting for; we know our business!” Sergei growls raspingly; pressing his expanded chest against the pole. “Ouch! Pull harder, Mitia!” Mitia pushes with his feet against the damp planks that form the raft, and with his thin hands draws toward him the heavy steering pole, coughing hoarsely the while.

  “Harder, to starboard! You cursed loafers!” The master cries again, anger and anxiety in his voice.

  “Shout away!” mutters Sergei. “Here’s your miserable devil of a son, who couldn’t break a straw across his knee, and you put him to steer a raft; and then you yell so that all the river hears you. You were mean enough not to take a second steersman; so now you may tear your throat to pieces shouting!”

  These last words were growled out loud enough to be heard forward, and as if Sergei wished they should be heard.

  The steamer passed rapidly alongside the raft sweeping the frothing water from under her paddle wheels. The planks tossed up and down in the wash, and the osier branches fastening them together, groaned and scraped with a moist, plaintive sound.

  The lit-up portholes of the steamer seem for a moment to rake the raft and the river with fiery eyes, reflected in the seething water, like luminous trembling spots. Then all disappears.

  The wash of the steamer sweeps backward and forward, over the raft; the planks dance up and down. Mitia, swaying with the movements of the water, clutches convulsively the steering pole to save himself from falling.

  “Well, well,” says Sergei, laughing. “So you’re beginning to dance! Your father will start yelling again. Or he’ll perhaps come and give you one or two in the ribs; then you’ll dance to another tune! Port side now! Ouch!”

  And with his muscles strung like steel springs, Sergei gives a powerful push to his pole, forcing it deep down into the water. Energetic, tall, mocking and rather malicious, he stands bare-footed, rigid, as if a part of the planks; looking straight ahead, ready at any moment to change the direction of the raft.

  “Just look there at your father kissing Marka! Aren’t they a pair of devils? No shame, and no conscience. Why don’t you get away from them, Mitia—away from these Pagan pigs? Why? Do you hear?”

  “I hear,” answered Mitia in a stifled voice, without looking toward the spot which Sergei pointed to through the darkness, where the form of Mitia’s father could be seen.

  “I hear,” mocked Sergei, laughing ironically.

  “You poor half-baked creature! A pleasant state of things indeed!” he continued, encouraged by the apathy of Mitia. “And what a devil that old man is! He finds a wife for his son; he takes the son’s wife away from him; and all’s well! The old brute!”

  Mitia is silent, and looks astern up the river, where another wall of mist is formed. Now the clouds close in all round, and the raft hardly appears to move, but to be standing still in the thick, dark water, crushed down by the heavy gray-black vaporous masses, which drift across the heavens, and bar the way.

  The whole river seems like a fathomless, hidden whirlpool, surrounded by immense mountains, rising toward heaven, and capped with shrouding mists.

  The stillness suffocates, and the water seems spellbound with expectation, as it beats softly against the raft. A great sadness, and a timid questioning is heard in that faint sound—the only voice of the night—accentuating still more the silence. “We want a little wind now,” says Sergei. “No it’s not exactly wind we want that would bring rain,” he replies to himself, as he begins to fill his pipe. A match strikes, and the bubbling sound of a pipe being lighted is heard. A red gleam appears, throwing a glow over the big face of Sergei; and then, as the light dies down he is lost in the darkness.

  “Mitia!” he cries.
His voice is now less brutal and more mocking.

  “What is it?” replies Mitia, without moving his gaze from the distance, where be seems with his big sad eyes to be searching for something.

  “How did it happen, mate? How did it happen?”

  “What?” answers Mitia, displeased.

  “How did you come to marry? What a queer set out! How was it? You brought your wife home!—and then? Ha! ha! ha!”

  “What are you cackling about? Look out there!” came threateningly across the river.

  “Damned beast!” ejaculates with delight Sergei; and returns to the theme that interests him. “Come, Mitia; tell me; tell me at once—why not?”

  “Leave me alone, Sergei,” Mitia murmurs entreatingly; “I told you once.”

  But knowing by experience that Sergei will not leave him in peace, he begins hurriedly: “Well, I brought her home—and I told her: ‘I can’t be your husband, Marka; you are a strong girl, and I am a feeble, sick man. I didn’t wish at all to marry you, but my father would force me to marry.’ He was always saying to me, ‘Get married! Get married!’ I don’t like women, I said: and you especially, you are too bold. Yes—and I can’t have anything to do—with it. Do you understand? For me, it disgusts me, and it is a sin. And children—one is answerable to God for one’s children.”

  “Disgusts,” yells Sergei and laughs. “Well! and what did Marka reply? What?”

  “She said, ‘What shall I do now?’ and then she began to cry. ‘What have you got against me? Am I so dreadfully ugly?’ She is shameless, Sergei, and wicked! ‘With all this health and strength of mine, must I go to my father-in-law?’ And I answered: ‘If you like—go where you wish, but I can’t act against my soul. If I had love for you, well and good; but being as it is, how is it possible? Father Ivan says it’s the deadliest sin. We are not beasts, are we?’ She went on crying: ‘You have ruined my chances in life!’ And I pitied her very much. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said; ‘things will come all right. Or,’ I continued, ‘you can go into a convent.’ And she began to insult me. ‘You are a stupid fool, Mitia! a coward!’”