The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “What’s the matter?”

  “She’s a thief, they say!”

  “She?”

  “Would a thief shout?”

  “Such a respectable one! My, my, my!”

  “Whom did they catch?”

  “I’m not a thief,” said the mother in a full voice, somewhat calmed at the sight of the people who pressed closely upon her from all sides.

  “Yesterday they tried the political prisoners; my son was one of them, Vlasov. He made a speech. Here it is. I’m carrying it to the people in order that they should read, think about the truth.”

  One paper was carefully pulled from her hands. She waved the papers in the air and flung them into the crowd.

  “She won’t get any praise for that, either!” somebody exclaimed in a frightened voice.

  “Whee-ee-w!” was the response.

  The mother saw that the papers were being snatched up, were being hidden in breasts and pockets. This again put her firmly on her feet; more composed than forceful, straining herself to her utmost, and feeling how agitated pride grew in her raising her high above the people, how subdued joy flamed up in her, she spoke, snatching bundles of papers from the valise and throwing them right and left into some person’s quick, greedy hands.

  “For this they sentenced my son and all with him. Do you know? I will tell you, and you believe the heart of a mother; believe her gray hair. Yesterday they sentenced them because they carried to you, to all the people, the honest, sacred truth. How do you live?”

  The crowd grew silent in amazement, and noiselessly increased in size, pressing closer and closer together, surrounding the woman with a ring of living bodies.

  “Poverty, hunger, and sickness—that’s what work gives to the poor people. This order of things pushes us to theft and to corruption; and over us, satiated and calm, live the rich. In order that we should obey the police, the authorities, the soldiers, all are in their hands, all are against us, everything is against us. We perish all our lives day after day in toil, always in filth, in deceit. And others enjoy themselves and gormandize themselves with our labor; and they hold us like dogs on chains, in ignorance. We know nothing, and in terror we fear everything. Our life is night, a dark night; it is a terrible dream. They have poisoned us with strong intoxicating poison, and they drink our blood. They glut themselves to corpulence, to vomiting—the servants of the devil of greed. Is it not so?”

  “It’s so!” came a dull answer.

  Back of the crowd the mother noticed the spy and two gendarmes. She hastened to give away the last bundles; but when her hand let itself down into the valise it met another strange hand.

  “Take it, take it all!” she said, bending down.

  A dirty face raised itself to hers, and a low whisper reached her:

  “Whom shall I tell? Whom inform?”

  She did not answer.

  “In order to change this life, in order to free all the people, to raise them from the dead, as I have been raised, some persons have already come who secretly saw the truth in life; secretly, because, you know, no one can say the truth aloud. They hunt you down, they stifle you; they make you rot in prison, they mutilate you. Wealth is a force, not a friend to truth. Thus far truth is the sworn enemy to the power of the rich, an irreconcilable enemy forever! Our children are carrying the truth into the world. Bright people, clean people are carrying it to you. Thus far there are few of them; they are not powerful; but they grow in number every day. They put their young hearts into free truth, they are making it an invincible power. Along the route of their hearts it will enter into our hard life; it will warm us, enliven us, emancipate us from the oppression of the rich and from all who have sold their souls. Believe this.”

  “Out of the way here!” shouted the gendarmes, pushing the people. They gave way to the jostling unwillingly, pressed the gendarmes with their mass, hindered them perhaps without desiring to do so. The gray-haired woman with the large, honest eyes in her kind face attracted them powerfully; and those whom life held asunder, whom it tore from one another, now blended into a whole, warmed by the fire of the fearless words which, perhaps, they had long been seeking and thirsting for in their hearts—their hearts insulted and revolted by the injustice of their severe life. Those who were near stood in silence. The mother saw their gloomy faces, their frowning brows, their eyes, and felt their warm breath on her face.

  “Get up on the bench,” they said.

  “I’ll be arrested immediately. It’s not necessary.”

  “Speak quicker! They’re coming!”

  “Go to meet the honest people. Seek those who advise all the poor disinherited. Don’t be reconciled, comrades, don’t! Don’t yield to the power of the powerful. Arise, you working people! you are the masters of life! All live by your labor; and only for your labor do they untie your hands. Behold! you are bound, and they have killed, robbed your soul. Unite with your heart and your mind into one power. It will overcome everything. You have no friends except yourselves. That’s what their only friends say to the working people, their friends who go to them and perish on the road to prison. Not so would dishonest people speak, not so deceivers.”

  “Out of the way! Disperse!” the shouts of the gendarmes came nearer and nearer. There were more of them already; they pushed more forcibly; and the people in front of the mother swayed, catching hold of one another.

  “Is that all you have in the valise?” whispered somebody.

  “Take it! Take all!” said the mother aloud, feeling that the words disposed themselves into a song in her breast, and noticing with pain that her voice did not hold out, that it was hoarse, trembled, and broke.

  “The word of my son is the honest word of a workingman, of an unsold soul. You will recognize its incorruptibility by its boldness. It is fearless, and if necessary it goes even against itself to meet the truth. It goes to you, working people, incorruptible, wise, fearless. Receive it with an open heart, feed on it; it will give you the power to understand everything, to fight against everything for the truth, for the freedom of mankind. Receive it, believe it, go with it toward the happiness of all the people, to a new life with great joy!”

  She received a blow on the chest; she staggered and fell on the bench. The gendarmes’ hands darted over the heads of the people, and seizing collars and shoulders, threw them aside, tore off hats, flung them far away. Everything grew dark and began to whirl before the eyes of the mother. But overcoming her fatigue, she again shouted with the remnants of her power:

  “People, gather up your forces into one single force!”

  A large gendarme caught her collar with his red hand and shook her.

  “Keep quiet!”

  The nape of her neck struck the wall; her heart was enveloped for a second in the stifling smoke of terror; but it blazed forth again clearly, dispelling the smoke.

  “Go!” said the gendarme.

  “Fear nothing! There are no tortures worse than those which you endure all your lives!”

  “Silence, I say!” The gendarme took her by the arm and pulled her; another seized her by the other arm, and taking long steps, they led her away.

  “There are no tortures more bitter than those which quietly gnaw at your heart every day, waste your breast, and drain your power.”

  The spy came running up, and shaking his fist in her face, shouted:

  “Silence, you old hag!”

  Her eyes widened, sparkled; her jaws quivered. Planting her feet firmly on the slippery stones of the floor, she shouted, gathering the last remnants of her strength:

  “The resuscitated soul they will not kill.”

  “Dog!”

  The spy struck her face with a short swing of his hand.

  Something black and red blinded her eyes for a second. The salty taste of blood filled her mouth.

  A clear outburst of shout
s animated her:

  “Don’t dare to beat her!”

  “Boys!”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, you scoundrel!”

  “Give it to him!”

  “They will not drown reason in blood; they will not extinguish its truth!”

  She was pushed in the neck and the back, beaten about the shoulders, on the head. Everything began to turn around, grow giddy in a dark whirlwind of shouts, howls, whistles. Something thick and deafening crept into her ear, beat in her throat, choked her. The floor under her feet began to shake, giving way. Her legs bent, her body trembled, burned with pain, grew heavy, and staggered powerless. But her eyes were not extinguished, and they saw many other eyes which flashed and gleamed with the bold sharp fire known to her, with the fire dear to her heart.

  She was pushed somewhere into a door.

  She snatched her hand away from the gendarmes and caught hold of the doorpost.

  “You will not drown the truth in seas of blood—”

  They struck her hand.

  “You heap up only malice on yourself, you unwise ones! It will fall on you—”

  Somebody seized her neck and began to choke her. There was a rattle in her throat.

  “You poor, sorry creatures—”

  ONE AUTUMN NIGHT

  Once in the autumn I happened to be in a very unpleasant and inconvenient position. In the town where I had just arrived and where I knew not a soul, I found myself without a farthing in my pocket and without a night’s lodging.

  Having sold during the first few days every part of my costume without which it was still possible to go about, I passed from the town into the quarter called “Yste,” where were the steamship wharves—a quarter which during the navigation season fermented with boisterous, laborious life, but now was silent and deserted, for we were in the last days of October.

  Dragging my feet along the moist sand, and obstinately scrutinising it with the desire to discover in it any sort of fragment of food, I wandered alone among the deserted buildings and warehouses, and thought how good it would be to get a full meal.

  In our present state of culture hunger of the mind is more quickly satisfied than hunger of the body. You wander about the streets, you are surrounded by buildings not bad-looking from the outside and—you may safely say it—not so badly furnished inside, and the sight of them may excite within you stimulating ideas about architecture, hygiene, and many other wise and high-flying subjects. You may meet warmly and neatly dressed folks—all very polite, and turning away from you tactfully, not wishing offensively to notice the lamentable fact of your existence. Well, well, the mind of a hungry man is always better nourished and healthier than the mind of the well-fed man; and there you have a situation from which you may draw a very ingenious conclusion in favour of the ill fed.

  The evening was approaching, the rain was falling, and the wind blew violently from the north. It whistled in the empty booths and shops, blew into the plastered window-panes of the taverns, and whipped into foam the wavelets of the river which splashed noisily on the sandy shore, casting high their white crests, racing one after another into the dim distance, and leaping impetuously over one another’s shoulders. It seemed as if the river felt the proximity of winter, and was running at random away from the fetters of ice which the north wind might well have flung upon her that very night. The sky was heavy and dark; down from it swept incessantly scarcely visible drops of rain, and the melancholy elegy in nature all around me was emphasised by a couple of battered and misshapen willow-trees and a boat, bottom upwards, that was fastened to their roots.

  The overturned canoe with its battered keel and the miserable old trees rifled by the cold wind—everything around me was bankrupt, barren, and dead, and the sky flowed with undryable tears… Everything around was waste and gloomy … it seemed as if everything were dead, leaving me alone among the living, and for me also a cold death waited.

  I was then eighteen years old—a good time!

  I walked and walked along the cold wet sand, making my chattering teeth warble in honour of cold and hunger, when suddenly, as I was carefully searching for something to eat behind one of the empty crates, I perceived behind it, crouching on the ground, a figure in woman’s clothes dank with the rain and clinging fast to her stooping shoulders. Standing over her, I watched to see what she was doing. It appeared that she was digging a trench in the sand with her hands—digging away under one of the crates.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked, crouching down on my heels quite close to her.

  She gave a little scream and was quickly on her legs again. Now that she stood there staring at me, with her wide-open grey eyes full of terror, I perceived that it was a girl of my own age, with a very pleasant face embellished unfortunately by three large blue marks. This spoilt her, although these blue marks had been distributed with a remarkable sense of proportion, one at a time, and all were of equal size—two under the eyes, and one a little bigger on the forehead just over the bridge of the nose. This symmetry was evidently the work of an artist well inured to the business of spoiling the human physiognomy.

  The girl looked at me, and the terror in her eyes gradually died out… She shook the sand from her hands, adjusted her cotton head-gear, cowered down, and said:

  “I suppose you too want something to eat? Dig away then! My hands are tired. Over there”—she nodded her head in the direction of a booth—“there is bread for certain … and sausages too… That booth is still carrying on business.”

  I began to dig. She, after waiting a little and looking at me, sat down beside me and began to help me.

  We worked in silence. I cannot say now whether I thought at that moment of the criminal code, of morality, of proprietorship, and all the other things about which, in the opinion of many experienced persons, one ought to think every moment of one’s life. Wishing to keep as close to the truth as possible, I must confess that apparently I was so deeply engaged in digging under the crate that I completely forgot about everything else except this one thing: What could be inside that crate?

  The evening drew on. The grey, mouldy, cold fog grew thicker and thicker around us. The waves roared with a hollower sound than before, and the rain pattered down on the boards of that crate more loudly and more frequently. Somewhere or other the night-watchman began springing his rattle.

  “Has it got a bottom or not?” softly inquired my assistant. I did not understand what she was talking about, and I kept silence.

  “I say, has the crate got a bottom? If it has we shall try in vain to break into it. Here we are digging a trench, and we may, after all, come upon nothing but solid boards. How shall we take them off? Better smash the lock; it is a wretched lock.”

  Good ideas rarely visit the heads of women, but, as you see, they do visit them sometimes. I have always valued good ideas, and have always tried to utilise them as far as possible.

  Having found the lock, I tugged at it and wrenched off the whole thing. My accomplice immediately stooped down and wriggled like a serpent into the gaping-open, four cornered cover of the crate whence she called to me approvingly, in a low tone:

  “You’re a brick!”

  Nowadays a little crumb of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole dithyramb from a man, even though he be more eloquent than all the ancient and modern orators put together. Then, however, I was less amiably disposed than I am now, and, paying no attention to the compliment of my comrade, I asked her curtly and anxiously:

  “Is there anything?”

  In a monotonous tone she set about calculating our discoveries.

  “A basketful of bottles—thick furs—a sunshade—an iron pail.”

  All this was uneatable. I felt that my hopes had vanished… But suddenly she exclaimed vivaciously:

  “Aha! here it is!”

  “What?”

 
“Bread … a loaf … it’s only wet … take it!”

  A loaf flew to my feet and after it herself, my valiant comrade. I had already bitten off a morsel, stuffed it in my mouth, and was chewing it…

  “Come, give me some too!… And we mustn’t stay here… Where shall we go?” she looked inquiringly about on all sides… It was dark, wet, and boisterous.

  “Look! there’s an upset canoe yonder … let us go there.”

  “Let us go then!” And off we set, demolishing our booty as we went, and filling our mouths with large portions of it… The rain grew more violent, the river roared; from somewhere or other resounded a prolonged mocking whistle—just as if Someone great who feared nobody was whistling down all earthly institutions and along with them this horrid autumnal wind and us its heroes. This whistling made my heart throb painfully, in spite of which I greedily went on eating, and in this respect the girl, walking on my left hand, kept even pace with me.

  “What do they call you?” I asked her—why I know not.

  “Natasha,” she answered shortly, munching loudly.

  I stared at her. My heart ached within me; and then I stared into the mist before me, and it seemed to me as if the inimical countenance of my Destiny was smiling at me enigmatically and coldly.

  * * * *

  The rain scourged the timbers of the skiff incessantly, and its soft patter induced melancholy thoughts, and the wind whistled as it flew down into the boat’s battered bottom through a rift, where some loose splinters of wood were rattling together—a disquieting and depressing sound. The waves of the river were splashing on the shore, and sounded so monotonous and hopeless, just as if they were telling something unbearably dull and heavy, which was boring them into utter disgust, something from which they wanted to run away and yet were obliged to talk about all the same. The sound of the rain blended with their splashing, and a long-drawn sigh seemed to be floating above the overturned skiff—the endless, labouring sigh of the earth, injured and exhausted by the eternal changes from the bright and warm summer to the cold misty and damp autumn. The wind blew continually over the desolate shore and the foaming river—blew and sang its melancholy songs…