The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  At length the buffeting of the wind had caused an old man with a crooked nose set on a hairy, faun-like face to stumble over one of the woman’s feet; whereupon he had halted, thrown up his head with nonsenile vigour, and exclaimed:

  “May the devil fly away with you, you shameless hussy! Why lie sprawling about the deck like this? See, too, how exposed you are!”

  The woman had not stirred at the words—she had not even opened an eye; only over her lips there had passed a faint tremor. Whereas the young fellow had straightened himself, deposited his tin mug upon the deck, and cried loudly as he laid his disengaged hand upon the woman’s breast.

  “Ah, you envy me, do you, Yakim Petrov? Never mind, though you have done no great harm. But run no risks; do not look for needless trouble, for your day for sucking sugarplums is past.”

  Whereafter, raising both his hands, the young fellow had softly let them sink again upon the woman’s bosom as he added triumphantly:

  “These breasts could feed all Russia!”

  Then, and only then, had the woman smiled a long, slow smile. And as she had done so everything in the vicinity had seemed to smile in unison, and to rise and fall in harmony with her bosom—yes, the whole vessel, and the vessel’s freight. And at the moment when a particularly large wave had struck the bulwarks, and besprinkled all on board with spray, the woman had opened her dark eyes, looked kindly at the old man, and at the young fellow, and at the scene in general—then set herself to recover her bosom.

  “Nay,” the young fellow had cried as he interposed to remove her hands. “There is no need for that, there is no need for that. Let them all look.”

  * * * *

  Such the memories that came back to my recollection that night. Gladly I would have recounted them to my companions, but, unfortunately, these had, by now, succumbed to slumber. The ex-soldier, resting in a sitting posture, and snoring loudly, had his back prised against his wallet, his head sloped sideways, and his hands clasped upon his knees, while Vasili was lying on his back with his face turned upwards, his hands clasped behind his head, his dark, finely moulded brows raised a little, and his moustache erect. Also, he was weeping in his sleep—tears were coursing down his brown, sunburnt cheeks; tears which, in the moonlight, had in them something of the greenish tint of a chrysolite or sea water, and which, on such a manly face, looked strange indeed!

  Still the rivulet was purling as it flowed, and the fire crackling; while bathed in the red glow of the flames there was sitting, bent forward, the dark, stonelike figure of the Molokans’ watchman, with the axe at his feet reflecting the radiant gleam of the moon in the sky above us.

  All the earth seemed to be sleeping as ever the waning stars seemed to draw nearer and nearer.…

  The slow length of the next day was dragged along amid an inertia born of the moist heat, the song of the river, and the intoxicating scents of forest and flowers. In short, one felt inclined to do nothing, from morn till night, save roam the defile without the exchanging of a word, the conceiving of a desire, or the formulating of a thought.

  At sunset, when we were engaged in drinking tea by the fire, the ex-soldier remarked:

  “I hope that life in the next world will exactly resemble life in this spot, and be just as quiet and peaceful and immune from work. Here one needs but to sit and melt like butter and suffer neither from wrong nor anxiety.”

  Then, as carefully he withdrew his pipe from his lips, and sighed, he added:

  “Aye! If I could but feel sure that life in the next world will be like life here, I would pray to God: ‘For Christ’s sake take my soul at the earliest conceivable moment.’”

  “What might suit you would not suit me,” Vasili thoughtfully observed. “I would not always live such a life as this. I might do so for a time, but not in perpetuity.”

  “Ah, but never have you worked hard,” grunted the ex-soldier.

  In every way the evening resembled the previous one; there were to be observed the same luscious flooding of the defile with dove-coloured mist, the same flashing of the silver crags in the roseate twilight, the same rocking of the dense, warm forest’s soft, leafy tree-tops, the same softening of the rocks’ outlines in the gloom, the same gradual uplift of shadows, the same chanting of the “matchmaking” river, the same routine on the part of the big, sleek carpenters around the barraque—a routine as slow and ponderous in its course as the movements of a drove of wild boars.

  More than once during the off hours of the day had we sought to make the carpenters’ acquaintance, to start a conversation with them, but always their answers had been given reluctantly, in monosyllables, and never had a discussion seemed likely to get under way without the whiteheaded foreman shouting to the particular member of the gang concerned: “Hi, you, Pavlushka! Get back to work, there!” Indeed, he, the foreman, had outdone all in his manifestations of dislike for our friendship, and as monotonously as though he had been minded to rival the rivulet as a songster, he had hummed his pious ditties, or else raised his snuffling voice to sing them with an ever-importunate measure of insistence, so that all day long those ditties had been coursing their way in a murky, melancholy-compelling flood. Indeed, as the foreman had stepped cautiously on thin legs from stone to stone during his ceaseless inspection of the work of his men, he had come to seem to have for his object the describing of an invisible, circular path, as a means of segregating us more securely than ever from the society of the carpenters.

  Personally, however, I had no desire to converse with him, for his frozen eyes chilled and repelled me and from the moment when I had approached him, and seen him fold his hands behind him, and recoil a step as he inquired with suppressed sternness, “What do you want?” there had fallen away from me all further ambition to learn the nature of the songs which he sang.

  The ex-soldier gazed at him resentfully, then said with an oath:

  “The old wizard and pilferer! Take my word for it that a lump of piety like that has got a pretty store put away somewhere.”

  Whereafter, as he lit his pipe and squinted in the direction of the carpenters, he added with stifled wrath:

  “The airs that the ‘elect’ give themselves—the sons of bitches!”

  “It is always so,” commented Vasili with a resentment equal to the last speaker’s. “Yes, no sooner, with us, does a man accumulate a little money than he sticks his nose in the air, and falls to thinking himself a real barin.”

  “Why is it that you always say ‘With us,’ and ‘Among us,’ and so on?”

  “Among us Russians, then, if you like it better.”

  “I do like it better. For you are not a German, are you, nor a Tartar?”

  “No. It is merely that I can see the faults in our Russian folk.”

  Upon that (not for the first time) the pair plunged into a discussion which had come so to weary them that now they spoke only indifferently, without effort.

  “The word ‘faults’ is, I consider, an insult,” began the ex-soldier as he puffed at his pipe. “Besides, you don’t speak consistently. Only this moment I observed a change in your terms.”

  “To what?”

  “To the term ‘Russians.’”

  “What should you prefer?”

  A new sound floated into the defile as from some point on the steppe the sound of a bell summoning folk to the usual Saturday vigil service. Removing his pipe from his mouth, the ex-soldier listened for a moment or two. Then, at the third and last stroke of the bell, he doffed his cap, crossed himself with punctilious piety, and said:

  “There are not very many churches in these parts.”

  Whereafter he threw a glance across the river, and added venomously:

  “Those devils there don’t cross themselves, the accursed Serbs!”

  Vasili looked at him, twisted a left-hand moustache, smoothed it again, regarded for a moment the sky and the def
ile, and sank his head.

  “The trouble with me,” he remarked in an undertone, “is that I can never remain very long in one place—always I keep fancying that I shall meet with better things elsewhere, always I keep hearing a bird singing in my heart, ‘Do you go further, do you go further.’”

  “That bird sings in the heart of every man,” the ex-soldier growled sulkily.

  With a glance at us both, Vasili laughed a subdued laugh.

  “‘In the heart of every man’?” he repeated. “Why, such a statement is absurd. For it means, does it not, that every one of us is an idler, every one of us is constantly waiting for something to turn up—that, in fact, no one of us is any better than, or able to do any better than, the folk whose sole utterance is ‘Give unto us, pray give unto us’? Yes, if that be the case, it is an unfortunate case indeed!”

  And again he laughed. Yet his eyes were sorrowful, and as the fingers of his right hand lay upon his knee they twitched as though they were longing to grasp something unseen.

  The ex-soldier frowned and snorted. For my own part, however, I felt troubled for, and sorry for, Vasili. Presently he rose, broke into a soft whistle, and moved away by the side of the stream.

  “His head is not quite right,” muttered the ex-soldier as he winked in the direction of the retreating figure. “Yes, I tell you that straight, for from the first it was clear to me. Otherwise, what could his words in depredation of Russia mean, when of Russia nothing the least hard or definite can be said? Who really knows her? What is she in reality, seeing that each of her provinces is a soul to itself, and no one could state which of the two Holy Mothers stands nearest to God—the Holy Mother of Smolensk, or the Holy Mother of Kazan?”

  For a while the speaker sat scraping greasy deposit from the bottom and sides of the kettle; and all that while he grumbled as though he had a grudge against someone. At length, however, he assumed an attitude of attention, with his neck stretched out as though to listen to some sound.

  “Hist!” was his exclamation.

  What then followed, followed as unexpectedly as when, like an evil bird, a summer whirlwind suddenly sweeps up from the horizon, and discharges a bluish-black cloud in torrents of rain and hail, until everything is overwhelmed and battered to mud.

  That is to say, with much din of whistling and other sounds there now came pouring into the defile, and began to ascend the trail beside the stream, a straggling procession of some thirty workmen with, gleaming dully in the hands of their leading files, flagons of vodka, and, suspended on the backs and shoulders of others, wallets and bags of bread and other comestibles, and, in two instances, poised on the heads of yet other processionists, large black cauldrons the effect of which was to make their bearers look like mushrooms.

  “A vedro [2 3/4 gallons] and a half to the cauldron!” whispered the ex-soldier with a computative grunt as he gained his feet.

  “Yes, a vedro and a half,” he repeated. As he spoke the tip of his tongue protruded until it rested on the under-lip of his half-opened mouth. In his face there was a curiously thirsty, gross expression, and his attitude, as he stood there, was that of one who had just received a blow, and was about to cry out in consequence.

  Meanwhile the defile rumbled like a barrel into which heavy weights are being dropped, for one of the newcomers was beating an empty tin pail, and another one whistling in a manner the tossed echoes of which drowned even the rivulet’s murmur as nearer and nearer came the mob of men, a mob clad variously in black, grey, or russet, with sleeves rolled up, and heads, in many cases, bare save for their own towsled, dishevelled locks, and bodies bent with fatigue, or carried stumblingly along on legs bowed outwards. Meanwhile, as the dull, polyphonous roar of voices swept through the neck of the defile, a man shouted in broken, but truculent, accents:

  “I say no! Fiddlesticks! Not a man is there who could drink more than a vedro of ‘blood-and-sweat’ in a day.”

  “A man could drink a lake of it.”

  “No, a vedro and a half. That is the proper reckoning.”

  “Aye, a vedro and a half.” And the ex-soldier, as he repeated the words, spoke both as though he were an expert in the matter and as though he felt for the matter a touch of respect. Then, lurching forward like a man pushed by the scruff of the neck, he crossed the rivulet, intercepted the crowd, and became swallowed up in its midst.

  Around the barraque the carpenters (the foreman ever glimmering among them) were hurriedly collecting tools. Presently Vasili returned—his right hand thrust into his pocket, and his left holding his cap.

  “Before long those fellows will be properly drunk!” he said with a frown. “Ah, that vodka of ours! It is a perfect curse!” Then to me: “Do you drink?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Thank God for that! If one does not drink one will never really get into trouble.”

  For a moment he gazed gloomily in the direction of the newcomers. Then he said without moving, without even looking at me:

  “You have remarkable eyes, young fellow. Also, they seem familiar to me—I have seen them somewhere before. Possibly that happened in a dream, though I cannot be sure. Where do you come from?”

  I answered, but, after scanning me perplexedly, he shook his head.

  “No,” he remarked. “I have never visited that part of the country, or indeed, been so far from home.”

  “But this place is further still?”

  “Further still?”

  “Yes—from Kursk.”

  He laughed.

  “I must tell you the truth,” he said. “I am not a Kurskan at all, but a Pskovian. The reason why I told the ex-soldier that I was from Kursk was that I neither liked him nor cared to tell him the whole truth-he was not worth the trouble. And as for my real name, it is Paul, not Vasili—Paul Nikolaev Silantiev—and is so marked on my passport (for a passport, and a passport quite in order, I have got).”

  “And why are you on your travels?”

  “For the reason that I am so—I can say no more. I look back from a given place, and wave my hand, and am gone again as a feather floats before the wind.”

  * * * *

  “Silence!” a threatening voice near the barraque broke in. “I am the foreman here.”

  The voice of the ex-soldier replied:

  “What workmen are these of yours? They are mere sectarians, fellows who are for ever singing hymns.”

  To which someone else added:

  “Besides, old devil that you are, aren’t you bound to finish all building work before the beginning of a Sunday?”

  “Let us throw their tools into the stream.”

  “Yes, and start a riot,” was Silantiev’s comment as he squatted before the embers of the fire.

  Around the barraque, picked out against the yellow of its framework, a number of dark figures were surging to and fro as around a conflagration. Presently we heard something smashed to pieces—at all events, we heard the cracking and scraping of wood against stone, and then the strident, hilarious command:

  “Hold on there! I’ll soon put things to rights! Carpenters, just hand over the saw!”

  Apparently there were three men in charge of the proceedings: the one a red-bearded muzhik in a seaman’s blouse; the second a tall man with hunched shoulders, thin legs, and long arms who kept grasping the foreman by the collar, shaking him, and bawling, “Where are your lathes? Bring them out!” (while noticeable also was a broad-shouldered young fellow in a ragged red shirt who kept thrusting pieces of scantling through the windows of the barraque, and shouting, “Catch hold of these! Lay them out in a row!”); and the third the ex-soldier himself. The last-named, as he jostled his way among the crowd, kept vociferating, viciously, virulently, and with a curious system of division of his syllables:

  “Aha-a, ra-abble, secta-arians. Yo-ou would have nothing to say to me, you Se-erbs! Yet I say
to you: Go along, my chickens, for the re-est of us are ti-ired of you, and come to sa-ay so!”

  “What does he want?” asked Silantiev quietly as he lit a cigarette. “Vodka? Oh, they’ll give him vodka!… Yet are you not sorry for fellows of that stamp?”

  Through the blue tobacco-smoke he gazed into the glowing embers; until at last he took a charred stick, and collected the embers into a heap glowing red-gold like a bouquet of fiery poppies; and as he did so, his handsome eyes gleamed with just such a reverent affection, such a prayerful kindliness, as must have lurked in the eyes of primeval, nomadic man in the presence of the dancing, beneficent source of light and heat.

  “At least I am sorry for such fellows,” Vasili continued. “Aye, the very thought of the many, many folk who have come to nothing! The very thought of it! Terrible, terrible!”

  A touch of daylight was still lingering on the tops of the mountains, but in the defile itself night was beginning to loom, and to lull all things to sleep—to incline one neither to speak oneself nor to listen to the dull clamour of those others on the opposite bank, where even to the murmur of the rivulet the distasteful din seemed to communicate a note of anger.

  There the crowd had lit a huge bonfire, and then added to it a second one which, crackling, hissing, and emitting coils of bluish-tinted smoke, had fallen to vying with its fellow in lacing the foam of the rivulet with muslin-like patterns in red. As the mass of dark figures surged between the two flares an hilarious voice shouted to us the invitation:

  “Come over here, you! Don’t be backward! Come over here, I say!”

  Upon which followed a clatter as of the smashing of a drinking-vessel, while from the red-bearded muzhik came a thick, raucous shout of:

  “These fellows needed to be taught a lesson!”

  Almost at the same moment the foreman of the carpenters broke his way clear of the crowd, and, carefully crossing the rivulet by the stepping-stones which we had constructed, squatted down upon his heels by the margin, and with much puffing and blowing fell to rinsing his face, a face which in the murky firelight looked flushed and red.