by Maxim Gorky
Presently, with a pattering of claws over the beaten clay of the floor, there entered the dog. Once or twice it paced the length of the room. Then, with a sniff at my legs, and a grumble to itself, it departed as it had come. Perhaps the creature felt too old to bay a dirge to its master after the manner of its kind. In any case, as it vanished through the doorway, the shadows—so I fancied—sought to slip out after it, and, floating in that direction, fanned my face with a breath as of ice, while the flame of the candle flickered the more—as though it too were seeking to wrest itself from the candlestick, and go floating upwards to join the band of stars—a band of luminaries which it might well have deemed to be of a brilliance as small and as pitiful as its own. And I, for my part, since I had no wish to see what light there was disappear, followed the struggles of the tiny flame with a tense anxiety which made my eyes ache. Oppressed and uneasy all over as I stood by the dead man’s shoulder, I strained my ears and listened, listened ever, to the silence encompassing the hut.
Eventually, drowsiness began to steal over me, and proved a feeling hard to resist. Yet still with an effort did I contrive to recall the beautiful prayers of Saints Makari Veliki, Chrysostom, and Damarkin, while at the same time something resembling a swarm of mosquitos started to hum in my head, the words wherein the Sixth Precept issues its injunction to: “all persons about to withdraw to a couch of rest.”
And next, to escape falling asleep, I fell to reciting the kondak [Hymn for the end of the day] which begins:
“Oh Lord, refresh my soul thus grievously made feeble with wrong doing.”
Still engaged in this manner, suddenly I heard something rustle outside the door. Then a dry whisper articulated:
“Oh God of Mercy, receive unto Thyself also my soul!”
Upon that, the fancy occurred to me that probably the old woman’s soul was as grey and timid as a linnet, and that when it should fly up to the throne of the Mother of God, and the Mother should extend to that little soul her tender, white, and gracious hand, the newcomer would tremble all over, and flutter her gentle wings until well nigh death should supervene.
And then the Mother of God would say to Her Son:
“Son, pray see the fearfulness of Thy people on earth, and their estrangement from joy! Oh Son, is that well?”
And He would make answer to Her—
He would make answer to Her, and say I know not what.
* * * *
And suddenly, so I fancied, a voice answered mine out of the brooding hush, as though it too were reciting a prayer. Yet so complete, so profound, was the stillness, that the voice seemed far away, submerged, unreal—a mere phantom of an echo, of the echo of my own voice. Until, on my desisting from my recital, and straining my cars yet more, the sound seemed to approach and grow clearer as shuffling footsteps also advanced in my direction, and there came a mutter of:
“Nay, it cannot be so!”
“Why is it that the dogs have failed to bark?” I reflected, rubbing my eyes, and fancying as I did so that the dead man’s eyebrows twitched, and his moustache stirred in a grim smile.
Presently a deep, hoarse, rasping voice vociferated in the forecourt:
“What do you say, old woman? Yes, that he must die—I knew all along,—so you can cease your chattering? Men like him keep up to the last, then lay them down to rise to more… Who is with him? A stranger? A-ah!”
And, the next moment, a bulk so large and shapeless that it might well have been the darkness of the night embodied, stumbled against the outer side of the door, grunted, hiccuped, and lurching head foremost into the hut, grew wellnigh to the ceiling. Then it waved a gigantic hand, crossed itself in the direction of the candle, and, bending forward until its forehead almost touched the feet of the corpse, queried under its breath:
“How now, Vasil?”
Thereafter, the figure vented a sob whilst a strong smell of vodka arose in the room, and from the doorway the old woman said in an appealing voice:
“Pray give him the book, Father Demid.”
“No indeed! Why should I? I intend to do the reading myself.”
And a heavy hand laid itself upon my shoulder, while a great hairy face bent over mine, and inquired:
“A young man, are you not? A member of the clergy, too, I suppose?”
So covered with tufts of auburn hair was the enormous head above me—tufts the sheen of which even the semi-obscurity of the pale candlelight failed to render inconspicuous—that the mass, as a whole, resembled a mop. And as its owner lurched to and fro, he made me lurch responsively by now drawing me towards himself, now thrusting me away. Meanwhile he continued to suffuse my face with the hot, thick odour of spirituous liquor.
“Father Demid!” again essayed the old woman with an imploring wail, but he cut her short with the menacing admonition:
“How often have I told you that you must not address a deacon as ‘Father’? Go to bed! Yes, be off with you, and let me mind my affairs myself! Go, I say! But first light me another candle, for I cannot see a single thing in front of me.”
With which, throwing himself upon a bench, the deacon slapped his knee with a book which he had in his hands, and put to me the query:
“Should you care to have a dram of gorielka? [Another name for vodka.]
“No,” I replied. “At all events, not here.”
“Indeed?” the deacon cried, unabashed. “But come, a bottle of the stuff is here, in my very pocket.”
“This is no place in which to be drinking.”
For a moment the deacon said nothing. Then he muttered:
“True, true. So let us adjourn to the forecourt.… Yes, what you say is no more than the truth.”
“Had you not better remain seated where you are, and begin the reading?”
“No, I am going to do no such thing. You shall do the reading. Tonight I, I—well I am not very well, for I have been drinking a little.”
And, thrusting the book into my stomach, he sank his head upon his breast, and fell to swaying it ponderously up and down.
“Folk die,” was his next utterance, “and the world remains as full of grief as ever. Yes, folk die even before they have seen a little good accrue to themselves.”
“I see that your book is not a Psalter,” here I interposed after an inspection of the volume.
“You are wrong.”
“Then look for yourself.”
He grabbed the book by its cover, and, by dint of holding the candle close to its pages, discovered, eventually, that matters were as I had stated.
This took him aback completely.
“What can the fact mean?” he exclaimed. “Oh, I know what has happened. The mistake has come of my being in such a hurry. The other book, the true Psalter, is a fat, heavy volume, whereas this one is—”
For a moment he seemed sobered by the shock. At all events, he rose and, approaching the corpse, said, as he bent over the bed with his beard held back:
“Pardon me, Vasil, but what is to be done?”
Then he straightened himself again, threw back his curls, and, drawing a bottle from his pocket, and thrusting the neck of the bottle into his mouth, took a long draught, with a whistling of his nostrils as he did so.
“Well?” I said.
“Well, I intend to go to bed—my idea is to drink and enjoy myself awhile.”
“Go, then.”
“And what of the reading?”
“Who would wish you to mumble words which you would not be comprehending as you uttered them?”
The deacon reseated himself upon the bench, leaned forward, buried his face in his hands and remained silent.
Fast the July night was waning. Fast its shadows were dissolving into corners, and allowing a whiff of fresh dewy morningtide to enter at the window. Already was the combined light of the two candles growing paler, with the
ir flames looking like the eyes of a frightened child.
“You have lived your life, Vasi,” at length the deacon muttered, “and though once I had a place to which to resort, now I shall have none. Yes, my last friend is dead. Oh Lord—where is Thy justice?”
For myself, I went and took a seat by the window, and, thrusting my head into the open air, lit a pipe, and continued to listen with a shiver to the deacon’s wailings.
“Folk used to gird at my wife,” he went on, “and now they are gnawing at me as pigs might gnaw at a cabbage. That is so, Vasil. Yes that is so.”
Again the bottle made its appearance. Again the deacon took a draught. Again he wiped his beard. Then he bent over the dead man once more, and kissed the corpse’s forehead.
“Good-bye, friend of mine!” he said. Then to myself he added with unlooked-for clarity and vigour:
“My friend here was but a plain man—a man as inconspicuous among his fellows as a rook among a flock of rooks. Yet no rook was he. Rather, he was a snow-white dove, though none but I realised the fact. And now he has been withdrawn from the ‘grievous bondage of Pharaoh.’ Only I am left. Verily, after my passing, shall my soul torment and vomit spittle upon his adversaries!”
“Have you known much sorrow?”
The deacon did not reply at once. When he did so he said dully:
“All of us have known much sorrow. In some cases we have known more than was rightfully our due. I certainly, have known much. But go to sleep, for only in sleep do we recover what is ours.”
And he added as he tripped over his own feet, and lurched heavily against me:
“I have a longing to sing something. Yet I feel that I had best not, for song at such an hour awakens folk, and starts them bawling… But beyond all things would I gladly sing.”
With which he buzzed into my ear:
“To whom shall I sing of my grief?
To whom resort for relief?
To the One in whose ha-a-and—”
At this point the sharp bristles of his beard so tickled my neck as to cause me to edge further away.
“You do not like me?” he queried. “Then go to sleep, and to the devil too!”
“It was your beard that was tickling me.”
“Indeed? Ought I to have shaved for your benefit before I came?”
He reflected awhile—then subsided on to the floor with a sniff and an angry exclamation of:
“Read, you, whilst I sleep. And see to it that you do not make off with the book, for it belongs to the church, and is very valuable. Yes. I know you hard-ups! Why do you go roaming about as you do—what is it you hope to gain by your tramping?… However, tramp as much as you like. Yes, be off, and tell people that a deacon has come by misfortune, and is in need of some good person to take pity upon his plight.… Diomid Kubasov my name is—that of a man lost beyond recall.”
With which he fell asleep. Opening the book at random, I read the words:
“A land unapportioned that shall produce a nourisher of humanity, a being that shall put forth the bounty of his hand to feed every creature.”
“A nourisher of humanity.” Before my eyes that “nourisher” lay outspread, a nourisher overlaid with dry and fragrant herbage. And as I gazed, in the haze of a vision, upon that nourisher’s dark and enigmatical face, I saw also the thousands of men who have seamed this earth with furrows, to the end that dead things should become things of life. And in particular, there uprose before me a picture strange indeed. In that picture I saw marching over the steppe, where the expanse lay bare and void—yes, marching in circles that increasingly embraced a widening area—a gigantic, thousand-handed being in whose train the dead steppe gathered unto itself vitality, and became swathed in juicy, waving verdure, and studded with towns and villages. And ever, as the being receded further and further into the distance, could I see him sowing with tireless hands that which had in it life, and was part of himself, and human as, with thoughts intent upon the benefiting of humanity, he summoned all men to put forth the mysterious force that is in them, and thus to conquer death, and eternally and invincibly to convert, dead things into things of life, while traversing in company the road of death towards that which has no knowledge of death, and ensuring that, in swallowing up mankind, the jaws of death should not close upon death’s victims.
And this caused my heart to beat with emotions the pulsing wings of which at once gladdened me, and cooled my fervour… And how greatly, at that moment, did I feel the need of someone able to respond to my questions without passion, yet with truth, and in the language of simplicity! For beside me there lay but a man dead and a man drunken, while without the threshold there was stationed one who had far outlived her span of years. No matter, however. If not today, then tomorrow, should I find a fellow-creature with whom my soul might commune.
Mentally I left the hut, and passed on to the steppe, that I might contemplate thence the little dwelling in which alone, though lost amid the earth’s immensity, the windows were not blind and black as in its fellow huts, but showed, burning over the head of a dead human being, the fire which humanity had conquered for humanity’s benefit.
And that heart which had ceased to beat in the dead man—had everything conceived in life by that heart found due expression in a world poverty, stricken of heart-conceived ideas? I knew that the man just passed away had been but a plain and insignificant mortal, yet as I reflected upon even the little that he had done, his labour loomed before me as greater than prowess of larger magnitude. Yes, to my mind there recurred the immature, battered ears of corn lying in the ruts of the steppe track, the swallows traversing the blue sky above the golden, brocaded grain, the kite hovering in the void over the landscape’s vast periphery.…
And along with these thoughts, there struck upon my ears a whistling of pinions as the shadow of a bird flitted across the brilliant, dew-bespangled green of the forecourt, and five cocks crowed in succession, and a flock of geese announced the fact of their awakening, and a cow lowed, and the gate of the cattle-pen creaked.
And with that I fell to thinking how I should like really to go out on to the steppe, and there to fall asleep under a warm, dry bank.
As for the deacon, he was still slumbering at my feet—slumbering with his breast, the breast of a prize-fighter, turned uppermost, and his fine, golden shock of hair falling like a nimbus around his head, and hot, fat, flushed red features and gaping mouth and ceaselessly twitching moustache. In passing, I had noticed that his hands were long, and that they were set upon shovel-shaped wrists.
Next I found myself imagining the scene as the powerful figure of this man embraced a woman. Probably her face would become lost to sight in his beard, until nothing of her features remained visible. Then, when the beard began to tickle her, she would throw back her head, and laugh. And the children that such a man might have begotten!
All this only made it the more painful and disagreeable to me to reflect that the breast of a human being of such a type should be bearing a burden of sorrow. Surely naught but joy should have been present therein!
Meanwhile, the old woman’s gentle face was still peering at me through the doorway, and presently the first beam of sunlight came glancing through the window-space. Above the rivulet’s silky glimmer, a transparent mist lay steaming, while trees and herbage alike were passing through that curiously inert stage when at any moment (so one fancied) they might give themselves a shake, and burst into song, and in keys intelligible to the soul alone, set forth the wondrous mystery of their existence.
“What a good man he is!” the old woman whispered plaintively as she gazed at the deacon’s gigantic frame. Whereafter, as though reading aloud from a book invisible to my sight, she proceeded quietly and simply to relate the story of his wife.
“You see,” she went on “his lady committed a certain sin with a certain man; and folk remarked this, and, after setting
the husband on to the couple, derided him—yes, him, our Demid!—for the reason that he persisted in forgiving the woman her fault. At length the jeers made her take to her room and him to liquor, and for two years past he has been drinking, and soon is going to be deprived of his office. One who scarcely drank at all, my poor husband, used to say: ‘Ah, Demid, yield not to these folk, but live your own life, and let theirs be theirs, and yours, yours.’”
With the words, tears welled from the old woman’s dim, small eyes, and became merged with the folds and wrinkles on her grief-stained cheeks. And in the presence of that little head, a head shaking like a dead leaf in the autumn time, and of those kindly features so worn with age and sorrow, my eyes fell, and I felt smitten with shame to find that, on searching my soul for at least a word of consolation to offer to the poor fellow-mortal before me, I could discover none that seemed suitable.
But at length there recurred to my mind some strange words which I had encountered in I know not what antique volume—words which ran:
“Let not the servants of the Gods lament but, rather, rejoice, in that weeping and lamentation grieve both the Gods and mankind.”
Thereafter, I muttered confusedly:
“It is time that I was going.”
“What?” was her hasty exclamation, an exclamation uttered as though the words had affrighted her. Whereafter, with quivering lips, she began hesitantly and uncertainly to fumble in her bodice.
“No, I have no need of money,” I interposed. “Only, if you should be so willing, give me a piece of bread.”
“You have no need of money?” she re-echoed dubiously.
“No, none. For that matter, of what use could it be to me?”
“Well, well!” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Then be it as you wish, and—and I thank you.”
* * * *
The sun, as he rose and ascended towards the blue of the firmament, was spreading over the earth a braggart, peacock-like tail of beams. And as he did so, I winked at him, for by experience I knew that some two hours later his smiles would be scorching me with fire. Yet for the time being he and I had no fault to find with one another. Wherefore, I set myself to search for a bank whence I might sing to him, as to the Lord of Life:
