The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  I repair, next, to the Ataman’s office, where I receive back my passport before setting out to look for my companions in the square.

  In similar fashion to yesterday those “folk from Russia” are lolling alongside the churchyard wall, and also have seated among them, leaning his back against a log, the fat-jowled youth from Penza, with his bruised face looking even larger and uglier than before, for the reason that his eyes are sunken amid purple protuberances.

  Presently there arrives a newcomer in the shape of an old man with a grey head adorned with a faded velvet skull-cap, a pointed beard, a lean, withered frame, prominent cheekbones, a red, porous-looking, cunningly hooked nose, and the eyes of a thief.

  Him a flaxen-haired youth from Orel joins with a similar youth in accosting.

  “Why are you tramping?” inquires the former.

  “And why are you?” the old man retorts in nasal tones as, looking at no one, he proceeds to mend the handle of a battered metal teapot with a piece of wire.

  “We are travelling in search of work, and therefore living as we have been commanded to live.”

  “By whom commanded?”

  “By God. Have you forgotten?”

  Carelessly, but succinctly, the old man retorts:

  “Take heed lest upon you, some day, God vomit all the dust and litter which you are raising by tramping His earth!”

  “How?” cries one of the youths, a long-eared stripling.

  “Were not Christ and His Apostles also tramps?”

  “Yes, Christ,” is the old man’s meaning reply as he raises his sharp eyes to those of his opponent. “But what are you talking of, you fools? With whom are you daring to compare yourselves? Take care lest I report you to the Cossacks!”

  I have listened to many such arguments, and always found them distasteful, even as I have done discussions regarding the soul. Hence I feel inclined to depart.

  At this moment, however, Konev makes his appearance. His mien is dejected, and his body perspiring, while his eyes keep blinking rapidly.

  “Has any one seen Tanka—that woman from Riazan?” he inquires. “No? Then the bitch must have bolted during the night. The fact is that, overnight, someone gave me a drop or two to drink, a mere dram, but enough to lay me as fast asleep as a bear in winter-time. And in the meantime, she must have run away with that Penza fellow.”

  “No, he is here,” I remark.

  “Oh, he is, is he? Well, as what has the company registered itself? As a set of ikon-painters, I should think!”

  Again he begins to look anxiously about him.

  “Where can she have got to?” he queries.

  “To Mass, maybe.”

  “Of course! Well, I am greatly smitten with her. Yes, my word I am!”

  Nevertheless, when Mass comes to an end, and, to the sound of a merry peal of bells, the well-dressed local Cossacks file out of church, and distribute themselves in gaudy streams about the hamlet, no Tatiana makes her appearance.

  “Then she is gone,” says Konev ruefully. “But I’ll find her yet! I’ll come up with her!”

  That this will happen I do not feel confident. Nor do I desire that it should.

  * * * *

  Five years later I am pacing the courtyard of the Metechski Prison in Tiflis, and, as I do so, trying to imagine for what particular offence I have been incarcerated in that place of confinement.

  Picturesquely grim without, the institution is, inwardly, peopled with a set of cheerful, but clumsy, humourists. That is to say, it would seem as though, “by order of the authorities,” the inmates are presenting a stage spectacle in which they are playing, willingly and zealously, but with a complete lack of experience, imperfectly comprehended roles as prisoners, warders, and gendarmes.

  For instance, today, when a warder and a gendarme came to my cell to escort me to exercise, and I said to them, “May I be excused exercise today? I am not very well, and do not feel like, etcetera, etcetera,” the gendarme, a tall, handsome man with a red beard, held up to me a warning finger.

  “No one,” he said, “has given you permission to feel, or not to feel, like doing things.”

  To which the warder, a man as dark as a chimney-sweep, with large blue “whites” to his eyes, added stutteringly:

  “To no one here has permission been given to feel, or not to feel, like doing things. You hear that?”

  So to exercise I went.

  In this stone-paved yard the air is as hot as in an oven, for overhead there lours only a small, flat patch of dull, drab-tinted sky, and on three sides of the yard rise high grey walls, with, on the fourth, the entrance-gates, topped by a sort of look-out post.

  Over the roof of the building there comes floating the dull roar of the turbulent river Kura, mingled with shouts from the hucksters of the Avlabar Bazaar (the town’s Asiatic quarter) and as a cross motif thrown into these sounds, the sighing of the wind and the cooing of doves. In fact, to be here is like being in a drum which a myriad drumsticks are beating.

  Through the bars of the double line of windows on the second and the third stories peer the murky faces and towsled heads of some of the inmates. One of the latter spits his furthest into the yard—evidently with the intention of hitting myself: but all his efforts prove vain. Another one shouts with a mordant expletive:

  “Hi, you! Why do you keep tramping up and down like an old hen? Hold up your head!”

  Meanwhile the inmates continue to intone in concert a strange chant which is as tangled as a skein of wool after serving as a plaything for a kitten’s prolonged game of sport. Sadly the chant meanders, wavers, to a high, wailing note. Then, as it were, it soars yet higher towards the dull, murky sky, breaks suddenly into a snarl, and, growling like a wild beast in terror, dies away to give place to a refrain which coils, trickles forth from between the bars of the windows until it has permeated the free, torrid air.

  As I listen to that refrain, long familiar to me, it seems to voice something intelligible, and agitates my soul almost to a sense of agony.…

  Presently, while pacing up and down in the shadow of the building, I happen to glance towards the line of windows. Glued to the framework of one of the iron window-squares, I can discern a blue-eyed face. Overgrown with an untidy sable beard it is, as well as stamped with a look of perpetually grieved surprise.

  “That must be Konev,” I say to myself aloud.

  Konev it is—Konev of the well-remembered eyes. Even at this moment they are regarding me with puckered attention.

  I throw around me a hasty glance. My own warder is dozing on a shady bench near the entrance. Two more warders are engaged in throwing dice. A fourth is superintending the pumping of water by two convicts, and superciliously marking time for their lever with the formula, “Mashkam, dashkam! Dashkam, mashkam!”

  I move towards the wall.

  “Is that you, Konev?” is my inquiry.

  “It is,” he mutters as he thrusts his head a little further through the grating. “Yes, Konev I am, but who you are I have not a notion.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “For a matter of base coin, though, to be truthful, I am here accidentally, without genuine cause.”

  The warder rouses himself, and, with his keys jingling like a set of fetters, utters drowsily the command:

  “Do not stand still. Also, move further from the wall. To approach it is forbidden.”

  “But it is so hot in the middle of the yard, sir!”

  “Everywhere it is hot,” retorts the man reprovingly, and his head subsides again. From above comes the whispered query:

  “Who are you?”

  “Well, do you remember Tatiana, the woman from Riazan?”

  “Do I remember her?” Konev’s voice has in it a touch of subdued resentment. “Do I remember her? Why, I was tried in court together with her!”<
br />
  “Together with her? Was she too sentenced for the passing of base coin?”

  “Yes. Why should she not have been? She was merely the victim of an accident, even as I was.”

  As I resume my walk in the stifling shade I detect that, from the windows of the basement there is issuing a smell of, in equal parts, rotten leather, mouldy grain, and dampness. To my mind there recur Tatiana’s words: “Amid a great sorrow even a small joy becomes a great felicity,” and, “I should like to build a village on some land of my own, and create for myself a new and better life.”

  And to my recollection there recur also Tatiana’s face and yearning, hungry breast. As I stand thinking of these things, there come dropping on to my head from above the low-spoken, ashen-grey words:

  “The chief conspirator in the matter was her lover, the son of a priest. He it was who engineered the plot. He has been sentenced to ten years penal servitude.”

  “And she?”

  “Tatiana Vasilievna? To the same, and I also. I leave for Siberia the day after tomorrow. The trial was held at Kutair. In Russia I should have got off with a lighter sentence than here, for the folk in these parts are, one and all, evil, barbaric scoundrels.”

  “And Tatiana, has she any children?”

  “How could she have while living such a rough life as this? Of course not! Besides, the priest’s son is a consumptive.”

  “Indeed sorry for her am I!”

  “So I expect.” And in Konev’s tone there would seem to be a touch of meaning. “The woman was a fool—of that there can be no doubt; but also she was comely, as well as a person out of the common in her pity for folk.”

  “Was it then that you found her again?”

  “When?”

  “On that Feast of the Assumption?”

  “Oh no. It was only during the following winter that I came up with her. At the time she was serving as governess to the children of an old officer in Batum whose wife had left him.”

  Something snaps behind me—something sounding like the hammer of a revolver. However, it is only the warder closing the lid of his huge watch before restoring the watch to his pocket, giving himself a stretch, and yawning to the utmost extent of his jaws.

  “You see, she had money, and, but for her restlessness, might have lived a comfortable life enough. As it was, her restlessness—”

  “Time for exercise is up!” shouts the warder.

  “Who are you?” adds Konev hastily. “Somehow I seem to remember your face; but I cannot place it.”

  Yet so stung am I with what I have heard that I move away in silence: save that just as I reach the top of the steps I turn to cry:

  “Goodbye, mate, and give her my greeting.”

  “What are you bawling for?” blusters the warder.…

  The corridor is dim, and filled with an oppressive odour. The warder swings his keys with a dry, thin clash, and I, to dull the pain in my heart, strive to imitate him. But the attempt proves futile; and as the warder opens the door of my cell he says severely:

  “In with you, ten-years man!”

  Entering, I move towards the window. Between some grey spikes on a wall I can just discern the boisterous current of the Kura, with sakli [warehouses] and houses glued to the opposite bank, and the figures of some workmen on the roof of a tanning shed. Below, with his cap pushed to the back of his head, a sentry is pacing backwards and forwards.

  Wearily my mind recalls the many scores of Russian folk whom it has seen perish to no purpose. And as it does so it feels crushed, as in a vice, beneath the burden of great and inexorable sorrow with which all life is dowered.

  IN A MOUNTAIN DEFILE

  In a mountain defile near a little tributary of the Sunzha, there was being built a workman’s barraque—a low, long edifice which reminded one of a large coffin lid.

  The building was approaching completion, and, meanwhile, a score of carpenters were employed in fashioning thin planks into doors of equal thinness, knocking together benches and tables, and fitting window-frames into the small window-squares.

  Also, to assist these carpenters in the task of protecting the barraque from tribesmen’s nocturnal raids, the shrill-voiced young student of civil engineering who had been set in charge of the work had sent to the place, as watchman, an ex-soldier named Paul Ivanovitch, a man of the Cossack type, and myself.

  Yet whereas we were out-at-elbows, the carpenters were sleek, respectable, monied, well-clad fellows. Also, there was something dour and irritating about them, since, for one thing, they had failed to respond to our greeting on our first appearance, and eyed us with nothing but dislike and suspicion. Hence, hurt by their chilly attitude, we had withdrawn from their immediate neighbourhood, constructed a causeway of stepping stones to the eastern bank of the rivulet, and taken up our abode beneath the chaotic grey mists which enveloped the mountain side in that direction.

  Also, over the carpenters there was a foreman—a man whose bony frame, clad in a white shirt and a pair of white trousers, looked always as though it were ready-attired for death. Moreover, he wore no cap to conceal the yellow patch of baldness which covered most of his head, and, in addition, his nose was squat and grey, his neck and face had over them skin of a porous, pumice-like consistency, his eyes were green and dim, and upon his features there was stamped a dead and disagreeable expression. To be candid, however, behind the dark lips lay a set of fine, close teeth, while the hairs of the grey beard (a beard trimmed after the Tartar fashion) were thick and, seemingly, soft.

  Never did this man put a hand actually to the work; always he kept roaming about with the large, rigid-looking fingers of his hands tucked into his belt, and his fixed and expressionless eyes scanning the barraque, the men, and the work as his lips vented some such lines as:

  Oh God our Father, bound hast Thou

  A crown of thorns upon my brow!

  Listen to my humble prayer!

  Lighten the burden which I bear!

  “What on earth can be in the man’s mind?” once remarked the ex-soldier, with a frowning glance at the singer.

  As for our duties, my mates and I had nothing to do, and soon began to find the time tedious. For his part, the man with the Cossack physiognomy scaled the mountain side; whence he could be heard whistling and snapping twigs with his heavy feet, while the ex-soldier selected a space between two rocks for a shelter of ace-rose boughs, and, stretching himself on his stomach, fell to smoking strong mountain tobacco in his large meerschaum pipe as dimly, dreamily he contemplated the play of the mountain torrent. Lastly, I myself selected a seat on a rock which overhung the brook, dipped my feet in the coolness of the water, and proceeded to mend my shirt.

  At intervals, the defile would convey to our ears a dull echo of sounds so wholly at variance with the locality as muffled hammer-blows, a screeching of saws, a rasping of planes, and a confused murmur of human voices.

  Also, a moist breeze blew constantly from the dark-blue depths of the defile, and caused the stiff, upright larches on the knoll behind the barraque to rustle their boughs, and distilled from the rank soil the voluptuous scents of ace-rose and pitch-pine, and evoked in the trees’ quiet gloom a soft, crooning, somnolent lullaby.

  About a sazhen [Fathom] below the level of the barraque there coursed noisily over its bed of stones a rivulet white with foam. Yet though of other sounds in the vicinity there were but few, the general effect was to suggest that everything in the neighbourhood was speaking or singing a tale of such sort as to shame the human species into silence.

  On our own side of the valley the ground lay bathed in sunshine—lay scorched to the point of seeming to have spread over it a tissue-cloth. Old gold in colour, while from every side arose the sweet perfume of dried grasses, and in dark clefts there could be seen sprouting the long, straight spears and fiery, reddish, cone-shaped blossoms of that bold, hardy plant wh
ich is known to us as saxifrage—the plant of which the contemplation makes one long to burst into music, and fills one’s whole body with sensuous languor.

  Laced with palpitating, snow-white foam, the beautiful rivulet pursued its sportive way over tessellated stones which flashed through the eddies of the glassy, sunlit, amber-coloured water with the silken sheen of a patchwork carpet or costly shawl of Cashmir.

  Through the mouth of the defile one could reach the valley of the Sunzha, whence, since men were ther, building a railway to Petrovsk on the Caspian Sea, there kept issuing and breaking against the crags a dull rumble of explosions, of iron rasped against stone, of whistles of works locomotives, and of animated human voices.

  From the barraque the distance to the point where the defile debouched upon the valley was about a hundred paces, and as one issued thence one could see, away to the left, the level steppes of the Cis-Caucasus, with a boundary wall of blue hills, topped by the silver-hewn saddle of Mount Elburz behind it. True, for the most part the steppes had a dry, yellow, sandy look, with merely here and there dark patches of gardens or black poplar clumps which rendered the golden glare more glaring still; yet also there could be discerned on the expanse farm buildings shaped like lumps of sugar or butter, with, in their vicinity, toylike human beings and diminutive cattle—the whole shimmering and melting in a mirage born of the heat. And at the mere sight of those steppes, with their embroidery of silk under the blue of the zenith, one’s muscles tightened, and one felt inspired with a longing to spring to one’s feet, close one’s eyes, and walk for ever with the soft, mournful song of the waste crooning in one’s ears.

  To the right also of the defile lay the winding valley of the Sunzha, with more hills; and above those hills hung the blue sky, and in their flanks were clefts which, full of grey mist, kept emitting a ceaseless din of labour, a sound of dull explosions, as a great puissant force attained release.

  Yet almost at the same moment would that hurly-burly so merge with the echo of our defile, so become buried in the defile’s verdure and rock crevices, that once more the place would seem to be singing only its own gentle, gracious song.