The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “Don’t put me off like that!” growls the young fellow.

  “And don’t you make any attempt upon me! I am not the sort of woman to be forced.”

  The next moment there arises a cry of pain and astonishment.

  “What was that for? What was that for?” the woman wails.

  With an answering exclamation I spring to my feet, for my feelings have become those of a wild beast.

  At once everything grows quiet again, save that someone, crawls over the floor and, in leaving the hut, jars the latch of the crazy, single-hinged portal.

  “It was not my fault,” grumbles the young fellow. “It all came of that stinking woman offering herself to me. Besides, the place is full of bugs, and I cannot sleep.”

  “Beast!” pants someone in the vicinity.

  “Hold your tongue, bitch!” is the fellow’s retort.

  By now the rain has ceased, and such air as filters through the window seems increasedly stifling. Momentarily the hush grows deeper, until the breast feels filled with a sense of oppression, and the face and eyes as though they were glued over with a web. Even when I step into the yard I find the place to be like a cellar on a summer’s day, when the very ice has melted in the dark retreat, and the latter’s black cavity is charged with hot, viscous humidity.

  Somewhere near me a woman is gulping out sobs. For a moment or two I listen; then I approach her, and come upon her seated in a corner with her head in her hands, and her body rocking to and fro as though she were doing me obeisance.

  Yet I feel angry, somehow, and remain standing before her without speaking—until at length I ask:

  “Are you mad?”

  “Go away,” is, after a pause, her only reply.

  “I heard all that you said to that young fellow.”

  “Oh, did you? Then what business is it of yours? Are you my brother?”

  Yet she speaks the words absent-mindedly rather than angrily. Around us the dim, blurred walls are peering in our direction with sightless eyes, while in the vicinity a bullock is drawing deep breaths.

  I seat myself by her side.

  “Should you remain much longer in that position,” I remark, “you will have a headache.”

  There follows no reply.

  “Am I disturbing you?” I continue.

  “Oh no; not at all.” And, lowering her hands, she looks at me. “Whence do you come?”

  “From Nizhni Novgorod.”

  “Oh, from a long way off!”

  “Do you care for that young fellow?”

  Not for a moment or two does she answer; and when she does so she answers as though the words have been rehearsed.

  “Not particularly. It is that he is a strong young fellow who has lost his way, and is too much of a fool (as you too must have seen) to find it again. So I am very sorry for him. A good muzhik ought to be well placed.”

  On the bell of the church there strikes the hour of two. Without interrupting herself, the woman crosses her breast at each stroke.

  “Always,” she continues, “I feel sorry when I see a fine young fellow going to the dogs. If I were able, I would take all such young men, and restore them to the right road.”

  “Then you are not sorry for yourself?”

  “Not for myself? Oh yes, for myself as well.”

  “Then why flaunt yourself before this booby, as you have been doing?”

  “Because I might reform him. Do you not think so? Ah, you do not know me.”

  A sigh escapes her.

  “He hit you, I think?” I venture.

  “No, he did not. And in any case you are not to touch him.”

  “Yet you cried out?”

  Suddenly she leans towards me, and says:

  “Yes, he did strike me—he struck me on the breast, and would have overpowered me had it not been that I cannot, I will not, do things heartlessly, like a cat. Oh, the brutes that men can be!”

  Here the conversation undergoes an interruption through the fact that someone has come out to the hut door, and is whistling softly, as for a dog.

  “There he is!” whispers the woman.

  “Then had I not best send him about his business?”

  “No, no!” she exclaims, catching at my knees. “No need is there for that, no need is there for that!”

  Then with a low moan she adds:

  “Oh Lord, how I pity our folk and their lives! Oh God our Father!”

  Her shoulders heave, and presently she bursts into tears, with a whisper, between the pitiful sobs, of:

  “How, on such a night as this, one remembers all that one has ever seen, and the folk that ever one has known! And oh, how wearisome, wearisome it all is! And how I should like to cry throughout the world—But to cry what? I know not—I have no message to deliver.”

  That feeling I can understand as well as she, for all too often has it seemed to crush my soul with voiceless longing.

  Then, as I stroke her bowed head and quivering shoulder, I ask her who she is; and presently, on growing a little calmer, she tells me the history of her life.

  She is, it appears, the daughter of a carpenter and bee-keeper. On her mother’s death, this man married a young woman, and allowed her, as stepmother, to persuade him to place the narrator, Tatiana, in a convent, where she (Tatiana) lived from the age of nine till adolescence, and, meanwhile, was taught her letters, and also a certain amount of manual labour; until, later, her father married her off to a friend of his, a well-to-do ex-soldier, who was acting as forester on the convent’s estate.

  As the woman relates this, I feel vexed that I cannot see her face—only a dim, round blur amid which there looms what appears to be a pair of closed eyes. Also, so complete is the stillness, that she can narrate her story in a barely audible whisper; and I gain the impression that the pair of us are sitting plunged in a void of darkness where life does not exist, yet where we are destined to begin life.

  “However, the man was a libertine and a drunkard, and many a riotous night did he spend with his cronies in the porter’s lodge of the convent. Also, he tried to arouse a similar taste in myself; and though for a time I resisted the tendency, I at length, on his taking to beating me, yielded. Only for one man, however, had I really a liking; and with him it was, and not with my husband, that I first learnt the meaning of spousehood.… Unfortunately, my lover himself was married; and in time his wife came to hear of me, and procured my husband’s dismissal. The chief reason was that the lady, a person of great wealth, was herself handsome, albeit stout, and did not care to see her place assumed by a nobody. Next, my husband died of drink; and as my father had long been dead, and I found myself alone, I went to see and consult my stepmother. All that she said, however, was: ‘Why come to me? Go and think things out for yourself.’ And I too then reflected: ‘Yes, why should I have gone to her?’ and repaired to the convent. Yet even there there seemed to be no place left for me, and eventually old Mother Taisia, who had once been my governess, said: ‘Tatiana, do you return to the world, for there, and only there, will you have a chance of happiness. So to the world I returned—and still am roaming it.”

  “Your quest of happiness is not following an easy road!”

  “It is following the road that it best can.”

  By now the darkness has ceased to keep spread over us, as it were, the stretched web of a heavy curtain, but has grown thinner and more transparent with the tension, save that, in places (for instance, in the window of the hut), it still lies in thick folds or clots as it peers at us with its sightless eyes.

  Over the hummock-like roofs of the huts rise the church’s steeple and the poplar trees; while hither and thither on the wall of the hut, the cracks and holes in the crumbling plaster have caused the wall to resemble the map of an unknown country.

  Glancing at the woman’s dark eyes, I perceive t
hem to be shining as pensively, innocently as the eyes of a young maiden.

  “You are indeed a curious woman!” I remark.

  “Perhaps I am,” she replies as she moistens her lips with a slender, almost feline tongue.

  “What are you really seeking?”

  “I have considered the matter, and know, at last, my mind. It is this: I hope some day to fall in with a good muzhik with whom to go in search of land. Probably land of the kind, I mean, is to be found in the neighbourhood of New Athos, [A monastery in the Caucasus, built on the reputed site of a cave tenanted by Simeon the Canaanite] for I have been there already, and know of a likely spot for the purpose. And there we shall set our place in order, and lay out a garden and an orchard, and prepare as much plough land as we may need for our working.”

  Her words are now firmer, more assured.

  “And when we have put everything in order, other folk may join us; and then, as the oldest settlers in the place, we shall hold the position of honour. And thus things will continue until a new village, really a fine settlement, will have become formed—a settlement of which my husband will be selected the warden until such time as I shall have made of him a barin [Gentleman or squire] outright. Also, children may one day play in that garden, and a summer-house be built there. Ah, how delightful such a life appears!”

  In fact, she has planned out the future so thoroughly that already she can describe the new establishment in as much detail as though she has long been a resident in it.

  “Yes, I yearn indeed for a nice home!” she continues. “Oh that such a home could fall to my lot! But the first requisite, of course, is a muzhik.”

  Her gentle face and eyes peer into the waning night as though they aspire to caress everything upon which they may light.

  And all the while I am feeling sorry for her—sorry almost to tears. To conceal the fact I murmur:

  “Should I myself suit you?”

  She gives a faint laugh.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the ideas in your mind are different from mine.”

  “How do you know what my ideas are?”

  She edges away from me a little, then says drily:

  “Because I can see them in your eyes. To be plain, I could never consent.”

  With a finger tapping upon the mouldy, gnarled old oaken stump on which we are sitting, she adds:

  “The Cossacks, for instance, live comfortably enough; yet I do not like them.”

  “What in them is it that displeases you?”

  “Somehow they repel me. True, much of everything is theirs; yet also they have ways which alienate me.”

  Unable any longer to conceal from her my pity, I say gently:

  “Never, I fear, will you discover what you are seeking.”

  She shakes her head protestingly.

  “And never ought a woman to be discouraged,” she retorts. “Woman’s proper round is to wish for a child, and to nurse it, and, when it has been weaned, to get herself ready to have another one. That is how woman should live. She should live as pass spring and summer, autumn and winter.”

  I find it a pleasure to watch the play of the woman’s intellectual features; and though, also, I long to take her in my arms, I feel that my better plan will be to seek once more the quiet, empty steppe, and, bearing in me the recollection of this woman, to resume my lonely journey towards the region where the silver wall of the mountains merges with the sky, and the dark ravines gape at the steppe with their chilly jaws. At the moment, however, I cannot so do, for the Cossacks have temporarily deprived me of my passport.

  “What are you yourself seeking?” she asks suddenly as again she edges towards me.

  “Simply nothing. My one desire is to observe how folk live.”

  “And are you travelling alone?”

  “I am.”

  “Even as am I. Oh God, how many lonely people there are in the world!”

  By this time the cattle are awakening from slumber, and, with their soft lowings, reminding one of a pipe which I used to hear played by a certain blind old man. Next, four times, with unsteady touch, the drowsy watchman strikes his gong—twice softly, once with a vigour that clangs the metal again, and a fourth time with a mere tap of the iron hammer against the copper plate.

  “What sort of lives do the majority of folk lead?”

  “Sorry lives.”

  “Yes, that is what I too have found.”

  A pause follows. Then the woman says quietly:

  “See, dawn is breaking, yet never this night have my eyes closed. Often I am like that; often I keep thinking and thinking until I seem to be the only human being in the world, and the only human being destined to re-order it.”

  “Many folk live unworthy lives. They live them amid discord, abasement, and wrongs innumerable, wrongs born of want and stupidity.”

  And as the words leave my lips my mind loses itself in recollections of all the dark and harrowing and shameful scenes that I have beheld.

  “Listen,” I say. “You may approach a man with nothing but good in your heart, and be prepared to surrender both your freedom and your strength; yet still he may fail to understand you aright. And how shall he be blamed for this, seeing that never may he have been shown what is good?”

  She lays a hand upon my shoulder, and looks straight into my eyes as she parts her comely lips.

  “True,” she rejoins—“But, dear friend, it is also true that goodness never bargains.”

  Together she and I seem to be drifting towards a vista which is coming to look, as it sloughs the shadow of night, ever clearer and clearer. It is a vista of white huts, silvery trees, a red church, and dew-bespangled earth. And as the sun rises he reveals to us clustered, transparent clouds which, like thousands of snow-white birds, go gliding over our heads.

  “Yes,” she whispers again as gently she gives me a nudge. “As one pursues one’s lonely way one thinks and thinks—but of what? Dear friend, you have said that no one really cares what is the matter. Ah, how true that is!”

  Here she springs to her feet, and, pulling me up with her, glues herself to my breast with a vehemence which causes me momentarily to push her away. Upon this, bursting into tears, she tends towards me again, and kisses me with lips so dry as almost to cut me—she kisses me in a way which penetrates to my very soul.

  “You have been oh, so good!” she whispers softly. As she speaks, the earth seems to be sinking under my feet.

  Then she tears herself away, glances around the courtyard, and darts to a corner where, under a fence, a clump of herbage is sprouting.

  “Go now,” she adds in a whisper. “Yes, go.”

  Then, with a confused smile, as, crouching among the herbage as though it had been a small cave, she rearranges her hair, she adds:

  “It has befallen so. Ah, me! May God grant unto me His pardon!”

  Astonished, feeling that I must be dreaming, I gaze at her with gratitude, for I sense an extraordinary lightness to be present in my breast, a radiant void through which joyous, intangible words and thoughts keep flying as swallows wheel across the firmament.

  “Amid a great sorrow,” she adds, “even a small joy becomes a great felicity.”

  Yet as I glance at the woman’s bosom, whereon moist beads are standing like dewdrops on the outer earth; as I glance at that bosom, whereon the sun’s rays are finding a roseate reflection, as though the blood were oozing through the skin, my rapture dies away, and turns to sorrow, heartache, and tears. For in me there is a presentiment that before the living juice within that bosom shall have borne fruit, it will have become dried up.

  Presently, in a tone almost of self-excuse, and one wherein the words sound a little sadly, she continues:

  “Times there are when something comes pouring into my soul which makes my breasts ac
he with the pain of it. What is there for me to do at such moments save reveal my thoughts to the moon, or, in the daytime, to a river? Oh God in Heaven! And afterwards I feel as ashamed of myself!… Do not look at me like that. Why stare at me with those eyes, eyes so like the eyes of a child?”

  “Your face, rather, is like a child’s,” I remark.

  “What? Is it so stupid?”

  “Something like that.”

  As she fastens up her bodice she continues:

  “Soon the time will be five o’clock, when the bell will ring for Mass. To Mass I must go today, for I have a prayer to offer to the Mother of God… Shall you be leaving here soon?”

  “Yes—as soon, that is to say, as I have received back my passport.”

  “And for what destination?”

  “For Alatyr. And you?”

  She straightens her attire, and rises. As she does so I perceive that her hips are narrower than her shoulders, and that throughout she is well-proportioned and symmetrical.

  “I? As yet I do not know. True, I had thought of proceeding to Naltchik, but now, perhaps, I shall not do so, for all my future is uncertain.”

  Upon that she extends to me a pair of strong, capable arms, and proposes with a blush:

  “Shall we kiss once more before we part?”

  She clasps me with the one arm, and with the other makes the sign of the cross, adding:

  “Good-bye, dear friend, and may Christ requite you for all your words, for all your sympathy!”

  “Then shall we travel together?”

  At the words she frees herself, and says firmly, nay, sternly:

  “Not so. Never would I consent to such a plan. Of course, had you been a muzhik—but no. Even then what would have been the use of it, seeing that life is to be measured, not by a single hour, but by years?”

  And, quietly smiling me a farewell, she moves away towards the hut, whilst I, remaining seated, lose myself in thoughts of her. Will she ever overtake her quest in life? Shall I ever behold her again?

  The bell for early Mass begins, though for some time past the hamlet has been astir, and humming in a sedate and non-festive fashion.

  I enter the hut to fetch my wallet, and find the place empty. Evidently the whole party has left by the gap in the broken-down wall.