The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “W-w-w-hat?”

  Yevsey repeated the question, but this time in a milder tone.

  “That’s not your business, my dear fellow. I want you to know that. But I’m sorry for your stupidity, so I’ll tell you, we have no need for fools, we don’t know them, we don’t comprehend them, we don’t recognize them. You are to understand that, now and forever, for all your life. Remember what I say, and tie your tongue with a string.”

  The little eyes of Solovyov sparkled cold as two silver coins, his voice bespoke evil and cruelty. He shook his short thick fingers at Yevsey. His greedy bluish lips were drawn sullenly. But he was not horrible.

  “It’s all the same,” thought Yevsey. “They are all one gang—they all ought to be—”

  He darted to his overcoat, snatched the revolver from the pocket, aimed at Solovyov, and shouted dully:

  “Well!”

  The old man crawled from his chair, and grovelled on the floor, looking like a large heap of dirt. He seized the leg of the table with one hand, and stretched the other toward Yevsey.

  “Don’t—you mustn’t,” he muttered in a loud whisper. “My dear sir, don’t touch me.”

  Klimkov pressed the trigger more tightly, more tightly. His head chilled with the effort, his hair shook.

  “I will go away—I’m going to get married tomorrow—I’ll go away—for always—I’ll never—” His heavy cowardly words rustled and crept in the air. Grease glistened on his chin, and the napkin over his bosom quivered.

  The revolver did not shoot. Yevsey’s finger pained, and horror took powerful possession of him from head to foot, impeding his breath.

  “I can give you money,” Solovyov whispered more quickly. “I will tell nothing—I will keep quiet—always—I understand—”

  Klimkov raised his hand and flung the revolver at the spy. Then he caught up his overcoat, and ran off. Two feeble shouts overtook him:

  “Ow, ow!”

  CHAPTER XXX

  The shrieks stuck to Yevsey, to the back of his neck, like leeches. They filled him with insane horror, and drove him on, on, and on. Behind him a crowd of people were gathering, it seemed to him, noiselessly, their feet never touching the ground. They ran after him stretching out scores of long clutching hands, which reached his neck, and touched his hair. They played with him, mocked him, disappearing and reappearing. He took cabs, rode for a while, jumped out, ran along the streets, and rode again. For the crowd was near him all the time unseen, yet so much the more horrible.

  He felt more at ease when he saw before him the dark patterned wall of bare boughs, which stretched to meet him. He dived into the thicket of trees, and walked in between them, strangely moving his hands behind his back, as if to draw the trees together more compactly behind him. He descended into a ravine, seated himself on the cold soil, and rose again. Then he walked the length of the ravine, breathing heavily, perspiring, drunk with fear. Soon he saw an opening between the trees. He listened carefully, noiselessly advanced a few steps further, and looked. In front of him stretched the earthwork of a railroad, beyond which rose more trees. These were small and far-between. Through the network of their branches shone the grey roof of a building.

  He walked back quickly up the channel of the ravine, to where the woods were thicker and darker.

  “They’ll catch me,” the cold assurance pushed him on. “They’ll catch me—they must be looking for me already—they’re running.”

  A soft ringing sound strayed through the woods. It came from anear, and shook the thin branches, which swayed in the dusk of the ravine, filling the air with their rustle. Under his feet crackled thin ice, which covered the grey dried-out little pits of the bed of a stream with white skin.

  Klimkov sat down, bent over, and put a piece of ice in his mouth. The next instant he jumped to his feet, and clambered up the steep slope of the ravine. Here he removed his belt and suspenders, and began to tie them together, at the same time carefully examining the branches over his head.

  “I don’t have to take my overcoat off,” he reflected without self-pity. “The heavier, the quicker.”

  He was in a hurry, his fingers trembled, and his shoulders involuntarily rose, as if to conceal his neck. In his head a timorous thought kept knocking.

  “I won’t have time. I’ll be too late.”

  A train passed along the edge of the woods. The trees hummed in displeasure, and the ground quivered. The white vapor threaded its way between the branches. It stole through the air, and melted away, as though to get a look at this man, and then disappear from his eyes.

  Titmice came flying and whistling boldly. They gleamed in the dark nets of the branches, and their quick bustle hastened the movements of Yevsey’s cold and disobedient fingers.

  He made a slipknot in the strap, threw it over a branch, and tugged at it. It was firm. Then, just as hurriedly, he began to make a slipknot in his suspenders, which he had twisted into a braid. When everything was ready, he heaved a sigh.

  “Now I ought to say my prayers.”

  But no prayer came to him. He thought for a few seconds. The words flashed up, but were instantly extinguished, without forming themselves into a prayer.

  “Rayisa knew my fate,” he recalled unexpectedly.

  Thrusting his head into the noose, he said quietly, simply, and without a quiver in his breast:

  “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—”

  He pushed the ground with his feet, and jumped into the air, doubling his legs under him. There was a painful tug at his ears, a strange inward blow hit his head, and stunned him. He fell. His entire body struck the hard earth, turned over, and rolled down the declivity. His arms caught in the roots of trees, his head knocked against trunks. He lost consciousness.

  When he recovered his senses, he found himself sitting at the bottom of the ravine, the torn suspenders dangling over his breast. His trousers were burst, his scratched, blood-stained knees looked through the cloth pitifully. His body was a mass of pain, especially his neck; and the cold seemed to be flaying his skin. Throwing himself on his back Yevsey looked up the incline. There under a white birch branch the strap swung in the air like a thin serpent, and lured him to itself.

  “I can’t,” he said to himself in despair. “I can’t—nothing—I don’t know how.”

  He began to cry fine tears of impotence and insult. He lay with his back on the ground, and through his tears saw over him the one-toned dim sky, streaked by the dry designs of the dark branches.

  He lay for a long time muffled in his overcoat, suffering from cold and pain. Without his willing it, his strange senseless life passed before him like a chain of smoke-dark rings. It passed by him impetuously. It trampled pitilessly upon his half-dead soul, crushing it finally with heavy blows, which prevented one spark of hope from glimmering in his heart. It pressed him to the ground.

  A dismal chord hummed and trembled brokenly in his breast. Its lugubrious song spread through his bones. His little dry body, quivering with a sickly tremor, shrivelled up in the cold of the twilight into a shelterless heap, pressed itself more and more closely to the ground, so firm and so powerful.

  Trains passed the woods several times, filling it with a creaking and rumbling, with clouds of steam and rays of light. The rays glided by the trunks of the trees, as if feeling them, as if in search of somebody there. Then they hastily disappeared, quick, trembling, and cold.

  When they found Yevsey and touched him, he raised himself to his feet with difficulty, and plunged into the obscurity of the woods in pursuit of them. He stopped at the edge, and leaned against a tree, waiting and listening to the distant angry hum of the city. It was already evening, the sky had grown purple. Over the city quietly flared a dim red. The lights were being kindled to meet the night.

  From a distance sprang up a howling noise and a drone. The rails began to sing and
ring. A train was passing over them, its red eyes twinkling in the twilight. And the dusk quickly sailed after it, growing ever thicker and darker. Yevsey went to the roadbed as fast as he could, sank on his knees, then laid his side across the road, with his back to the train, and his neck upon the rail. He enveloped his head closely in the skirts of his overcoat.

  For some seconds it was pleasant to feel the burning contact of the iron. It appeased the pain in his neck, but the rail trembled and sang louder, more alarmingly. It filled his whole body with an aching groan. The earth, too, now quivered with a fine tremor, as if swimming away from under his body and pushing him from itself.

  The train rolled heavily and slowly, but the clang of its couplings, the even raps of the wheels upon the joinings of the rails were already deafening. Its snorting breath pushed Klimkov in the back. Everything round about him and with him shook in tempestuous agitation, and tore him from the ground.

  He could wait no longer. He jumped to his feet, ran along the rails, and shouted in a high screech:

  “I am guilty—I will—everything—I will, I will!”

  Along the smoothly polished metal of the rails darted reddish rays of light, outstripping Klimkov. They glared more and more fiercely. Now glowing strips to each side of him ran impetuously into the distance, directing his course.

  “I will—” he yelled, waving his hands.

  Something hard and wide struck his back. He fell across the sleepers between the red cords of rail, and the harsh iron rumble crushed his feeble screams.

  THE OUTCASTS

  I

  The High Street consists of two rows of one-storeyed hovels, squeezed close one against another; old hovels with leaning walls and crooked windows, with dilapidated roofs, disfigured by time, patched with shingles, and overgrown with moss; here and there above them rise tall poles surmounted with starling houses, whilst the roofs are shaded by the dusty green of pollard willows and elder bushes, the sole miserable vegetation of suburbs where dwell the poorest classes.

  The windows of these hovels, their glass stained green with age, seem to watch each other with the shifty, cowardly glance of thieves. Up the middle of the street crawls a winding channel passing between deep holes, washed out by the heavy rain; here and there lie heaps of old, broken bricks and stones overgrown with weeds, the remains of the various attempts made from time to time by the inhabitants to build dwellings; but these attempts have been rendered useless by the torrents of stormwater sweeping down from the town above. On the hill nestle, amongst the luxuriant green of gardens, magnificent stone-built houses; the steeples of churches rise proudly towards the blue heavens, their golden crosses glittering in the sun.

  In wet weather the town pours into this outlying suburb all its surface water, and in the dry weather all its dust, and this miserable row of hovels has the appearance of having been swept down at one of these moments by some powerful hand.

  Crushed into the ground, these half-rotten human shelters seem to cover all the hill, whilst, stained by the sun, by the dust, and by the rains, they take on them the dirty nondescript colour of old decaying wood.

  At the end of this miserable street stood an old, long, two-storeyed house, which seemed to have been cast out in this way from the town, and which had been bought by the merchant Petounnikoff. This was the last house in the row, standing just under the hill, and stretching beyond it were fields, ending at a distance of half a verst from the house in an abrupt fall towards the river. This large and very old house had a more sinister aspect than its neighbours; all its walls were crooked, and in its rows of windows there was not one that had preserved its regular form; whilst the remnants of the window panes were of the dirty green colour of stagnant water.

  The spaces between the windows were disfigured with discoloured patches of fallen plaster, as if time had written the history of the house in these hieroglyphics. Its roof, sagging forwards towards the street, increased its pathetic aspect; it seemed as if the house were bowing itself towards the ground, and were humbly waiting for the last stroke of fate to crumble it into dust, or into a deformed heap of half-rotten ruins.

  The front gates were ajar. One side, torn from its hinges, lay on the ground, and from the cracks between the boards sprang grass, which also covered the great desolate yard. At the farther end of this yard stood a low, smoke-blackened shed with an iron roof. The house itself was uninhabited, but in this mean shed, which had been a forge, was installed a common lodging-house or doss-house, kept by a retired cavalry officer, Aristide Fomitch Kouvalda.

  Inside, this doss-house appeared as a long, dark den, lighted by four square windows and a wide door. The brick unplastered walls were dark with smoke, which had also blackened the ceiling. In the middle stood a large stove, round which, and along the walls, were ranged wooden bunks containing bundles of rubbish which served the dossers for beds. The walls reeked with smoke, the earthen floor with damp, and the bunks with sweat and rotten rags.

  The master’s bunk was on the stove, and those in its immediate neighbourhood were looked upon as places of honour, and were granted to the inmates who rejoiced in his favour and friendship. The master spent the greater part of the day seated at the door of the shed in a sort of arm-chair, which he had himself constructed of bricks, or else in the beerhouse of Jegor Vaviloff, just across the way, where Aristide dined and drank vodka.

  Before starting the lodging-house, Aristide Kouvalda used to keep a servants’ registry office in the town; and glancing farther back into his life, we should find he had had a printing establishment; and before the printing business, according to his own account, he lived—and “lived, devil take it, well; lived as a connoisseur, I can assure you!”

  He was a broad-shouldered man of about fifty, with a pock-marked face, bloated with drink, and a bushy, yellow beard. His eyes were grey, large, audaciously gay; he spoke with a bass voice, and almost always held between his teeth a German china pipe with a curved stem. When he was angry the nostrils of his red crooked nose would dilate wide, and his lips would quiver, showing two rows of large yellow teeth like those of a wolf. Long-handed and bow-legged, he dressed always in an old dirty military overcoat and a greasy cap with a red band, but without a peak; and in worn felt boots reaching to his knees. In the morning he was always in a state of drunken stupor, and in the evening he became lively. Drunk he never could be; for however much liquor he stowed away, he never lost his gay humour.

  In the evening he might be seen seated in his brick arm-chair, his pipe between his teeth, receiving his lodgers.

  “Who are you?” he would ask, on the approach of some ragged, depressed-looking individual, who had been turned out of the town for drunkenness or for some other reason.

  The man would reply.

  “Show me your papers, to prove that you are not lying!”

  The papers were shown, if there were any forthcoming. The master would push them into his shirt, not caring to look at their contents.

  “All right! For one night two kopecks; a week, ten kopecks; a month, twenty kopecks; go and take your place, but mind not to take anyone else’s, or you will catch it. The people who live here are particular.”

  The new-comer would ask him, “Can one get tea, bread, and grub? Don’t you sell them?”

  “I sell only walls and roof, for which I pay the rogue Petounnikoff, the owner of this hole, five roubles a month,” Kouvalda would explain in a business-like tone. “People who come to me are not used to luxury, and if you are in the habit of guzzling every day, there’s a beershop just opposite. But you’d better get out of that bad habit as soon as possible, you skulker; you are not a gentleman born, then why do you want to eat? You had better eat yourself!”

  For these and like speeches, uttered in a pretended severe voice, but always with a laugh in his eyes, and for his attention to his lodgers, Kouvalda was very popular among the outcasts of the town.

 
It sometimes happened that a former client would come into the doss-house, no longer ragged and down-trodden, but in more or less decent clothes, and with a cheerful face.

  “Good-day, your honour; how are you?”

  “All right; quite well; what do you want?”

  “Don’t you recognise me?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Don’t you remember last winter I spent a month with you, when you had a police raid and three were taken up?”

  “Oh, my good fellow, the police often come under my hospitable roof!”

  “And, good Lord! don’t you remember how you cheeked the police officer?”

  “Well, that will do with recollections; just say simply what you want.”

  “Let me stand you something. When I lived with you, you were so”—

  “Gratitude should be always encouraged, my friend, for we seldom meet with it. You must be a really good fellow, though I can’t remember you; but I’ll accompany you to the vodka shop with pleasure, and drink to your success in life.”

  “Ah! you’re always the same—always joking.”

  “Well, what else can one do when one lives among a miserable set like you?”

  Then they would go off, and often the former lodger would return staggering to the doss-house. Next day the entertainment would begin anew; and one fine morning the lodger would come to his senses, to find that he had drunk away all that he possessed.

  “See, your honour! Once more I am one of your crew; what am I to do now?”

  “Well, it’s a position you can’t boast about, but being in it, it’s no use crying,” argued the captain. “You must look at your position with equanimity, my friend, and not spoil life with philosophising and reasoning. Philosophy is always useless, and to philosophise before the drink is out of one is inexpressibly foolish. When you are getting over a bout of drinking you want vodka, and not remorse and grinding of teeth. You must take care of your teeth, otherwise there will be none to knock out. Here are twenty kopecks; go and bring some vodka and a piece of hot tripe or lights, a pound of bread, and two cucumbers. When we get over our drink then we’ll think over the state of affairs.”