The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “Why should I do so?” retorted the young fellow without moving.

  Taking a red handkerchief from his bosom, the old man shook it out and applied it cautiously to his eyes. Then he said through its folds in the quiet accents of a man who is determined to persevere:

  “Why, you say? For the reason that the occasion is one when all ought to know the tru—”

  Lurching forward, the bearded peasant interposed with a rasp:

  “Yes, do you tell us all about it, and things will become easier for you. For a sin always needs to be made known.”

  While, like an echo, a voice said in bold and sarcastic accents:

  “It would be better to seize him and tie him up.”

  Upon this the young fellow raised his brows a little, and retorted in an undertone:

  “Let me bide.”

  “The rascal!” the crowd commented, while the old man, neatly folding and replacing his handkerchief, raised a hand as dry as a cock’s leg, and remarked with a sharp, knowing smile:

  “Possibly it is not merely out of idle curiosity that folk are making this request.”

  “Go and be damned to you!” the young fellow exclaimed with a grim snap. Whereupon the big peasant bellowed out in a blustering fashion:

  “What? Then you will not tell us at least your destination?”

  Whereafter the same speaker continued to hold forth on humanity, God, and the human conscience—staring wildly around him as he did so, waving his arms about, and growing ever more frantic, until really it was curious to watch him.

  At length the crowd grew similarly excited, and took to encouraging the speaker with cries of “True! That is so!”

  As for the young fellow, he listened awhile in silence, without moving. Then, straightening his back, he rose, thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers, and, swaying his body to and fro, began to glare at the crowd with greenish eyes which were manifestly lightening to a vicious gleam. At length, thrusting forth his chest, he cried hoarsely:

  “So you ask me whither I am bound? I am bound for the brigands’ lair, for the brigands’ lair, where, unless you first take and put me in fetters, I intend to cut the throat of every man that I meet. Yes, a hundred murders will I commit, for all folk will be the same to me, and not a soul will I spare. Aye, the end of my tether is reached, so take and fetter me whilst you can.”

  His breath was issuing with difficulty, and as he spoke his shoulders heaved, and his legs trembled beneath him. Also, his face had turned grey and become distorted with tremors.

  Upon this, the crowd broke into a gruff, ugly, resentful roar, and edged away from the man. Yet, in doing so, many of its members looked curiously like the man himself in the way that they lowered their heads, caught at their breath, and let their eyes flash. Clearly the man was in imminent danger of being assaulted.

  Suddenly he recovered his subdued demeanour—he, as it were, thawed in the sunlight: until, as suddenly, his legs gave way beneath him, and, narrowly escaping injury to his face from the corner of a bale, he fell forward upon his knees as though felled with an axe. Thereafter, clutching at his throat, he shouted in a strange voice, and crowding the words upon one another:

  “Tell me what I am to do. Is all of it my fault? Long I lay in prison before I was tried and told to go free… yet—”

  Tearing at his ears and cheeks, he rocked his head to and fro as though seeking to rend it from its socket. Then he continued:

  “Yet I am not free. Nor is it in my power to say what will become of me. For me there remains neither life nor death.”

  “Aha!” exclaimed the big peasant; and at the sound the crowd drew back as in consternation, while some hastened to depart altogether. As for the remainder (numbering a dozen or so), they herded sullenly, nervously, involuntarily into a mass as the young fellow continued in distracted tones and with a trembling head:

  “Oh that I could sleep for the next ten years! For then could I prove myself, and decide whether I am guilty or not. Last night I struck a man with a faggot. As I was walking about I saw asleep a man who had angered me, and thereupon thought, ‘Come! I should like to deal him a blow, but can I actually do it?’ And strike him I did. Was it my fault? Always I keep asking myself, ‘Can I, or can I not, do a thing?’ Aye, lost, lost am I!”

  Apparently this outburst caused the man to reach the end of his power, for presently he sank from knees to heels—then on to his side, with hands clasping his head, and his tongue finally uttering the words, “Better had you kill me!”

  A hush fell, for all now stood confounded and silent, with, about them, a greyer, a more subdued, look which made all more resemble their fellows. In fact, to all had the atmosphere become oppressive, as though everyone’s breast had had clamped into it a large, soft clod of humid, viscid earth. Until at last someone said in a low, shamefaced, but friendly, tone:

  “Good brother, we are not your judges.”

  To which someone else added with an equal measure of gentleness:

  “Indeed, we may be no better than you.”

  “We pity you, but we must not judge you. Only pity is permitted.”

  As for the well-dressed peasant, his loud, triumphant utterance was:

  “Let God judge him, but men suffer him. Of judging of one another there has been enough.”

  And a fifth man remarked to a friend as he walked away:

  “What are we to make of this? To judge by the book, the young fellow is at once guilty and not guilty.”

  “Bygones ought to be bygones. Of all courses that is the best.”

  “Yes, for we are too quick. What good can that do?”

  “Aye, what?”

  At length the dark-browed woman stepped forward. Letting her shawl to her shoulders, straightening hair streaked with grey under a bright blue scarf, and deftly putting aside a skirt she so seated herself beside the young fellow as to screen from the crowd with the height of her figure. Then, raising kindly face, she said civilly, but authoritatively, to the bystanders:

  “Do all of you go away.”

  Whereupon the crowd began to depart, the big peasant saying as he went:

  “There! Just as I foretold has the matter turned out. Conscience has asserted itself.”

  Yet the words were spoken without self-complacency, rather, thoughtfully, and with a sense of awe.

  As for the red-nosed old man who was walking like a shadow behind the last speaker, he opened his snuff-box, peered therein with his moist eyes, and drawled to no one in particular:

  “How often does one see a man play with conscience, yes, even though he be a rogue! He erects that conscience as a screen to his knaveries and tricks and wiles, and masks the whole with a cloud of words. Yes, we know how it is done, even though folk may stare at him, and say to one another, ‘How fervently his soul is glowing!’ Aye, all the time that he is holding his hand to his heart he will be dipping the other hand into your pocket.”

  The lover of proverbs, for his part, unbuttoned his jacket, thrust his hands under his coat-tails, and said in a loud voice:

  “There is a saying that you can trust any wild beast, such as a fox or a hedgehog or a toad, but not—”

  “Quite so, dear sir. The common folk are exceedingly degenerate.”

  “Well, they are not developing as they ought to do.”

  “No, they are over-cramped,” was the big peasant’s rasped-out comment. “They have no room for growth.”

  “Yes, they do grow, but only as regards beard and moustache, as a tree grows to branch and sap.”

  With a glance at the purveyor of proverbs the old man assented by remarking: “Yes, true it is that the common folk are cramped.” Whereafter he thrust a pinch of snuff into his nostrils, and threw back his head in anticipation of the sneeze which failed to come. At length, drawing a deep breath through his parted lips, he said
as he measured the peasant again with his eyes:

  “My friend, you are of a sort calculated to last.”

  In answer the peasant nodded.

  “Some day,” he remarked, “we shall get what we want.”

  In front of us now, was Kazan, with the pinnacles of its churches and mosques piercing the blue sky, and looking like garlands of exotic blooms. Around them lay the grey wall of the Kremlin, and above them soared the grim Tower of Sumbek.

  Here one and all were due to disembark.

  I glanced towards the stern once more. The dark-browed woman was breaking off morsels from a wheaten scone that was lying in her lap, and saying as she did so:

  “Presently we will have a cup of tea, and then keep together as far as Christopol.”

  In response the young fellow edged nearer to her, and thoughtfully eyed the large hands which, though inured to hard work, could also be very gentle.

  “I have been trodden upon,” he said.

  “Trodden upon by whom?”

  “By all. And I am afraid of them.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because I am.”

  Breathing upon a morsel of the scone, the woman offered it him with the quiet words:

  “You have had much to bear. Now, shall I tell you my history, or shall we first have tea?”

  * * * *

  On the bank there was now to be seen the frontage of the gay, wealthy suburb of Uslon, with its brightly-dressed, rainbow-tinted women and girls tripping through the streets, and the water of its foaming river sparkling hotly, yet dimly, in the sunlight.

  It was a scene like a scene beheld in a vision.

  3The word means ship’s hold or stokehole, but here is, probably, equivalent to the English “Heads below!”

  A WOMAN

  The wind is scudding over the steppe, and beating upon the rampart of the Caucasian heights until their backbone seems to be bellying like a huge sail, and the earth to be whirling and whizzing through unfathomable depths of blue, and leaving behind it a rack of wind-torn clouds which, as their shadows glide over the surface of the land, seem ever to be striving to keep in touch with the onrush of the gale, and, failing to maintain the effort, dissolving in tears and despondency.

  The trees too are bending in the attitude of flight—their boughs are brandishing their foliage as a dog worries a fleece, and littering the black soil with leaves among which runs a constant querulous hissing and rustling. Also, storks are uttering their snapping cry, sleek rooks cawing, steppe grasshoppers maintaining their tireless chirp, sturdy, well-grown husbandmen uttering shouts like words of command, the threshing-floors of the rolling steppe diffusing a rain of golden chaff, and eddying whirlwinds catching up stray poultry feathers, dried-onion strips, and leaves yellowed with the heat, to send them dancing again over the trim square of the little Cossack hamlet.

  Similarly does the sun keep appearing and disappearing as though he were pursuing the fugitive earth, and ever and anon halting through weariness before his decline into the dark, shadowy vista where the snowclad peaks of the western mountains are rearing their heads, and fast-reddening clouds are reminding one of the surface of a ploughed field.

  At times those clouds part their bulk to reveal in blinding splendour the silvery saddle of Mount Elburz, and the crystal fangs of other peaks—all, apparently, striving to catch and detain the scudding vapours. And to such a point does one come to realise the earth’s flight through space that one can scarcely draw one’s breath for the tension, the rapture, of the thought that with the rush of that dear and beautiful earth oneself is keeping pace towards, and ever tending towards, the region where, behind the eternal, snow-clad peaks, there lies a boundless ocean of blue—an ocean beside which there may lie stretched yet other proud and marvellous lands, a void of azure amid which one may come to descry far-distant, many-tinted spheres of planets as yet unknown, but sisters, all, to this earth of ours.

  Meanwhile from the steppe slow, ponderous grey oxen with sharp horns are drawing an endless succession of wagon-loads of threshed grain through rich, black, sootlike dust. Patiently the beasts’ round eyes regard the earth, while on the top of each load there lolls a Cossack who, with face sunburnt to the last pitch of swarthiness, and eyes reddened with exposure to the wind, and beard matted, seemingly solidified, with dust and sweat, is clad in a shirt drab with grime, and has a shaggy Persian cap thrust to the back of his head. Occasionally, also, he may be seen riding on the pole in front of his team, and being buffeted from behind by the wind which inflates his shirt. And as sleek and comfortable as the carcasses of the bullocks are these Cossacks’ frames in proportion their eyes are sluggishly intelligent, and in their every movement is the deliberate air of men who know precisely what they have to do.

  “Tsob, tsobe!” such fellows shout to their teams. This year they are reaping a splendid harvest.

  Yet though these folk, one and all, look fat and prosperous, their mien is dour, and they speak reluctantly, and through their teeth. Possibly this is because they are over-weary with toil. However that may be, the full-fed country people of the region laugh but little, and seldom sing.

  In the centre of the hamlet soars the red brick church of the place—an edifice which, with its five pinnacles, its belfry over its porch, and its yellow plaster window-mouldings, looks like an edifice that has been fashioned of meat, and cemented with grease. Nay, its very shadow seems so richly heavy as to be the shadow of a fane erected by men endowed with a plethora of this world’s goods to a god otiose in his grandeur. Ranged around the building in ring fashion, the hamlet’s squat white huts stand girdled with belts of plaited wattle, shawled in the gorgeous silken scarves of gardens, and crowned with a flowered brocadework of reed-thatched roofs. In fact, they resemble a bevy of buxom babi, [Peasant women] as over and about them wave silver poplar trees, with quivering, lacelike leaves of acacias, and dark-leaved chestnuts (the leaves of the latter like the palms of human hands) which rock to and fro as though they would fain seize, and detain the driving clouds. Also, from court to court scurry Cossack women who, with skirt-tails tucked up to reveal muscular legs bare to the knee, are preparing to array themselves for the morrow’s festival, and, meanwhile, chattering to one another, or shouting to plump infants which may be seen bathing in the dust like sparrows, or picking up handfuls of sand, and tossing them into the air.

  Sheltered from the wind by the churchyard wall, there may be seen also, as they sprawl on the dry, faded herbage, a score of “strollers for work” that is to say, of folk who, a community apart, consist of “nowhere people,” of dreamers who live constantly in expectation of some stroke of luck, some kindly smile from fortune, and of wastrels who, intoxicated with the abundant bounty of the opulent region, have fallen passive victims to the Russian craze for vagrancy. These folk tramp from hamlet to hamlet in parties of two or three, and, while purporting to seek employment, merely contemplate that employment lethargically, express astonishment at the plenitude which it produces, and then decline to put their hands to toil save when dire necessity renders it no longer possible to satisfy hunger’s pangs through the expedients of mendicancy and theft. Dull, or cowed, or timid, or furtive of eye, these folk have lost all sense of the difference between that which constitutes honesty and that which does not.

  The morrow being the Feast of the Assumption, these people have, in the present instance, gathered from every quarter of the country, for the reason that they hope to be provided with food and drink without first being made to earn their entertainment.

  For the most part they are Russians from the central provinces, vagabonds whose faces are blackened, and heads blanched with the unaccustomed sunshine of the South, but whose bodies are clad merely in rags tossed and tumbled by the wind. True, the wearers of those rags declare themselves to be peaceful, respectable citizens whom toil and life’s buffetings have exhausted, and compelled t
o seek temporary rest and prayer; yet never does a creaking, groaning, ponderous grain wagon, with its Cossack driver, pass them by without their according the latter a humble, obsequious salute as, with straw in mouth, and omitting, always, to raise his cap, the man glances at them askance and with contempt, or, more frequently, does not even descry these tattered, grimy hulks between whom and himself there is absolutely nothing in common.

  Lower even, and more noticeably, more pretentiously, than the rest does a certain “needy” native of Tula named Konev salute each Cossack. A hardbitten muzhik as sunburnt as a stick of ergot, he has a black beard distributed irregularly over a lean face, a fawning smile, and eyes deep-sunken in their sockets.

  Most of these persons I have met for the first time today; but Konev is an old acquaintance of mine, for he and I have more than once encountered one another on the road between Kursk and the province of Ter. An “artelni,” that is to say, a member of a workman’s union, he cultivates his fellows’ good graces for the reason that he is also an arrant coward, and accustomed, everywhere save in his own village (which lies buried among the sands of Alexin), to assert that:

  “Certainly, this countryside is rich, yet I cannot hit things off with its inhabitants. In my own part of the country folk are more spiritual, more truly Russian, by far than here—they are folk with whom the natives of this region are not to be compared, since in the one locality the population has a human soul, whereas in the other locality it is a flint-stone.”

  And with a certain quiet reflectiveness, he loves also to recount a marvellous example of unlooked-for enrichment. He will say to you:

  “Maybe you do not believe in the virtue of horseshoes? Yet I tell you that once, when a certain peasant of Efremov found a horseshoe, the next three weeks saw it befall that that peasant’s uncle, a tradesman of Efremov, was burnt to death with all his family, and the property devolved to the peasant. Did you ever hear of such a thing? What is going to happen cannot be foretold, for at any moment fortune may pity a man, and send him a windfall.”