by Maxim Gorky
“Musicians, painters, dancers, actors!” eagerly interrupted the judge; “they made them whatever they liked!”
“That’s quite true. I well remember when I was a boy how our Count’s house-servant was taught to mimic everything he heard.”
“Yes, that was so.”
“Indeed, he learnt to mimic everything, not only human or animal sounds, but even the sound of the sawing of wood, the breaking of glass, or anything else. He would blow out his cheeks and make whatever sound was commanded. The Count would say, ‘Feodka, bark like vixen—like Catcher!’ And Feodka did it. That was how they were taught then. Nowadays a good sum of money might be earned by such tricks!”
“The boats are coming!” shouted Isaiah.
“At last! Kireelka, my horses! No, stop a moment; I will tell the coachman myself.”
“Well, let’s hope our waiting has come to an end,” said Mamaieff, with a smile of relief.
“Yes, I suppose it has come to an end.”
“It’s always like that in life; one waits, and waits; and at last what one was waiting for arrives. Ha! ha! ha! All things in this world come to an end.”
“That’s a comfort, at any rate,” said Isaiah.
Two long objects were to be seen moving along near the opposite bank.
“They are coming nearer,” said Kireelka, as he watched them.
The judge watched him from the corner of his eye.
“Do you still drink as much as you used to?” he asked the peasant.
“If I have a chance, I drink a glass.”
“And do you still steal firewood in the forest?”
“Why should I do that, your honour?”
“Come, tell the truth!”
“I never did steal wood,” replied Kireelka, shaking his head deprecatingly.
“What was it I condemned you for, then?”
“It’s true you condemned me.”
“What was it for, then?”
“Why, your honour, you see, you are put in authority over us; you have a right to condemn us.” “Ah! I see you are a cunning rascal! And you do not steal plums from the barges either, when they are detained; do you?”
“I only tried that once, your honour.”
“And that once you were caught! Wasn’t that so? Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“We are not accustomed to that sort of work. That’s why I was caught.”
“Well, you had better get a little practice at it; hadn’t you? Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“He! He! He!” echoed Mamaieff, laughing also.
The peasants on board the boat pushed away with large iron bars the ice which impeded its course; and, as they drew nearer, we could hear them shouting to each other. Kireelka, putting his hands to his mouth, stood up and shouted back to them, “Steer for the old willow!”
Then he hurried down the bank towards the river, almost tumbling head over heels in his haste. We quickly followed him, and were soon on board; Isaiah and I going in one boat, whilst the judge and Mamaieff went in the other.
“All right, my men!” said the judge, taking off his hat and crossing himself.
The two men in his boat crossed themselves devoutly, and once more started pushing away the ice-blocks which pressed against the sides of the boat.
But the blocks continued to strike the sides of the boat with an angry crashing sound; the air struck cold as it blew over the water. Mamaieff’s face turned livid, and the judge, with knitted brow and with a look of intense anxiety, watched the current which was driving enormous blue-grey heaps of ice against the boats. The smaller pieces grated against the keel with a sound of sharp teeth gnawing through the wooden planks.
The air was damp and full of noises; our eyes were anxiously fixed on the cold, dirty ice—so powerful and yet so helpless. Through the various noises around us I suddenly distinguished the voice of someone shouting from the shore, and glancing in the direction of the sound I saw Kireelka standing bareheaded on the bank behind us. There was a twinkle in his cunning grey eyes as he shouted in a strange, hoarse voice, “Uncle Anthony, when you go to fetch the mail mind you don’t forget to bring some bread for me! The gentry have eaten my loaf of bread whilst they were waiting for the ferry; and it was the last I had!”
1A sort of white bread of a particular shape, which is very popular amongst the Russian peasantry.
THE AFFAIR OF THE CLASPS
There were three of us friends—Semka2 Kargouza, myself, and Mishka,3 a bearded giant with great blue eyes that perpetually beamed on everything and were always swollen from drink. We lived in a field beyond the town in an old tumbledown building, called for some reason “the glass factory,” perhaps because there was not a single whole pane in its windows, and undertook all kinds of work, despising nothing; cleaned yards, dug ditches and sewers, pulled down old buildings and fences, and once even tried to build a henhouse. But in this we were unsuccessful. Semka, who was pedantically honest about the duties he took upon himself, began to doubt our knowledge of the architecture of hen-houses, and one day at noon, when we were all resting, took the nails that had been given out to us, two new planks, and the master’s axe to the public-house. For this we lost our work, but as we possessed nothing no one demanded compensation.
We struggled on, living from hand to mouth,4 and all three of us felt a very natural and lawful dissatisfaction with our fate. Sometimes this took an acute form, giving us a hostile feeling to all around us, and drawing us into somewhat riotous exploits provided for in the “Statutes on Penalties inflicted by the Justices of the Peace”; but as a rule we were weighed down by a dull melancholy, anxiously preoccupied in the search of a meagre earning, and responded but feebly to all those impressions which we could not turn to material advantage. In our spare time—and there was always more of it than we required—we built castles in the air. Semka, the eldest and most matter-of-fact of us, was a thick-set, Penza-born peasant. He used to be a gardener, but, ruined by drink, as fate willed it, he struck at the town of K—— a year ago, on his way to the Nigny Fair, where he hoped somehow to “get on.” His dreams, the embittered sceptic’s, took a clear and definite form. He required but little.
“Damn my soul!”he used to say, when we, lying on our empty stomachs on the ground, somewhere in the shade, beyond the town, tried to illumine our future, little by little, but insistently looking into its darkness.
“If I could just cut to Siberia. I’d make my way there, meet a good business-like man, apprentice myself to him directly. ‘Take me, mate,’ I’d say, ‘to share your luck. Pals in prison, pals in hunger.’ Then I’d polish off one or two little jobs with him. That would be something like. Ye-es.”
“Why should you go to Siberia particularly?” I asked him once.
“Why? It’s there the real smart ones are, man. Lots of ’em—easy to find. But here—here you can’t for the life of you find a good one. As for trying alone, you’d only go hang for nothing. Not used to it. Skill it wants—experience.”
Mishka could not express his dreams in words, but there was not the slightest doubt that he dreamed continually and persistently. You had but to look at his good-natured blue eyes, always gazing into space, at his gentle tipsy smile, constantly parting his thick moustache and beard, which always contained some extraneous matter, such as bird’s feathers, bits of straw, a shaving or two, breadcrumbs, pieces of eggshell, etc.; you had but to glance at his simple open face to see in him the typical peasant-dreamer. I had my dreams too, but the direction of my thoughts is even now interesting to no one but myself.
We had all three met in a night shelter a fortnight or so before the incident I want to describe, deeming it interesting. In a day or two we were friends—that is, went everywhere together, told each other our aims and wishes, divided everything that fell to one equally amongst us, and, in fact, made a tacit defensive and offensive alliance against Life,
which treated us in an extremely hostile manner.
During the day we tried with great energy to find something to saw or take to pieces, to pull down, to dig, to carry, and, if such an opportunity occurred, at first set to work with a will.
But, perhaps because each of us in his heart thought himself destined for the fulfilment of higher-business than, for instance, the digging of cesspools, or cleaning them, which is still worse, I may add, for the information of those not initiated into that art, after some two hours of the work our ardour somewhat abated. Then Semka would begin to doubt its necessity.
“They dig a ditch… And what for? For slops. Why can’t they just pour them out on the ground? ‘Won’t do. They’ll smell,’ they say. Get along with you! Slops smell! What stuff people do talk, just from having nothing to do. Now throw a salt cucumber5 out. Why should it smell if it’s a little one? It’ll lie there a day or two, and there you are—it’s gone, rotted away. If you throw a dead man out into the sun, now, he’ll smell a bit, to be sure, for it’s a big carcass.”
Such reasoning and conclusions on Semka’s part considerably damped our ardour for work. And this was rather advantageous for us if the job was by the day, but if it was by the piece it invariably happened that we took our wages and spent them on food before the work was finished. Then we used to go to our employer to ask for a “pribavka”;6 he generally told us to clear out, and threatened, with the help of the police, to make us finish the job already paid for. We argued that we could not work hungry, and more or less hotly insisted on the “pribavka,” which in the majority of cases we got. Of course it was not exactly honourable, but really it was extremely advantageous, and it is not our fault if life is so clumsily arranged that the honourable and the advantageous nearly always clash. The wages disputes with our employers Semka always took upon himself, and really he conducted them with an artist’s skill, detailing the proofs of his rights in the tones of a man worn out with work and exhausted by the burden of it.
Meanwhile Mishka looked on in silence, and blinked his blue eyes, smiling from time to time with his good-natured, kindly smile, as if he were trying to say something but could not summon up courage. He generally spoke very little, and only when half-seas-over was he capable of delivering something like an oration.
“Bratsi!”7 he would then cry, smiling, and his lips twitched curiously, his throat grey husky, and he would cough for some time after the beginning of the speech, pressing his hand to his throat.
“W-e-ll?” would be Semka’s impatient and ungracious encouragement.
“Bratsi! We live like dogs, we do. And worse even. And what for? Nobody knows. But I suppose by the will of God. Everything is done by His will—eh, bratsi? Well, then—So there…it shows we deserve to live like dogs, for we are bad men. We’re bad men, eh? Well, then—Now I say, serve’em right, the dogs. Isn’t it true what I say? So it shows it’s for our sins. And we must put up with it, eh? Isn’t it true?”
“Fool!” briefly and indifferently answered Semka to the anxious questioning of his comrade. And the other would penitently shrink up into himself, smile timidly, and fall silent, blinking his eyes, which he could scarcely keep open from drunken sleepiness.
Once we were in luck.
We were waiting for likely employers, elbowing our way through the market, when we came upon a small wizened old lady with a stern, wrinkled face. Her head shook, and on her beak-like nose hopped large spectacles with heavy silver rims; she was constantly putting them straight as her small, coldly glittering eyes gleamed out from behind them.
“You are free? Are you looking for work?” she asked us, when we all stared at her longingly. “Very well,” she said, on receiving a quick and respectful answer in the affirmative from Semka. “I want to have an old bath-house8 pulled down, and a well cleaned. How much would you charge for it?”
“We should have to see, barynia, what sort of size your bath-house is,” said Semka, politely and reasonably. “And the well too. They run different depths. Sometimes they are very deep.”
We were invited to look, and in an hour’s time, already armed with axes and a lever, we were lustily pulling down the rafters of the bath-house, having agreed to take it to pieces and to clean the well for five roubles.9 The bath-house stood in the corner of an old neglected garden. Not far from it, among some cherry trees, was a summer-house, and from the top of the bath-house we saw that the old lady sat reading in there, holding a large open book on her lap. Now and then she cast a sharp, attentive glance at us, the book on her lap moved, and its massive clasps, evidently of silver, shone in the sun.
No work is so rapid as the work of destruction. We zealously bustled about among clouds of grey, pungent dust, sneezing, coughing, blowing our noses, and rubbing our eyes every minute. The bathhouse, half rotten, and old like its mistress, was soon crashing and falling to pieces.
“Now, mates, hard on it—ea-sy!” commanded Semka, and row after row of beams fell creaking to the ground.
“Wonder what book that is she’s got. Such a thick one!” said Mishka, reflectively leaning upon his lever and wiping the sweat off his face with his palm. Immediately turned into a mulatto, he spat on his hands, raised the lever to drive it into a crack between two beams, drove it in, and added in the same reflective tone, “Suppose it’s the Gospels—seems to me it’s too thick.”
“What’s that to you?” asked Semka.
“To me? Why, nothing. I like to hear a book read—if it’s a holy one. We had a soldier in the village, African his name was; he’d begin to reel off the psalms sometimes, just like a drum—fine.”
“Well?” Semka said again, busy making a cigarette.
“Well—nothing. Only it was fine! Couldn’t understand it, still it’s the Word of God—don’t hear it in the street like. Can’t understand it, still you feel it’s a word for the soul.”
“Can’t understand it, you say. Still you can see you’re a blockhead,” said Semka, imitating him.
“I know you’re always swearing at me,” sighed the other.
“How else can you talk to fools? They can’t understand anything. Come on—let’s have a go at this rotten plank.”
The bath-house was falling to pieces, surrounded by splinters and drowned in clouds of dust, which had even made the leaves of the nearest trees a light grey. The July sun mercilessly scorched our backs and shoulders. One could not tell from our faces, streaked with dust and sweat, to which precisely of the four coloured races we belonged.
“The book’s got silver on too,” again began Mishka.
Semka raised his head and looked attentively in the direction of the summer-house.
“Looks like it,” he said shortly.
“Must be the Gospels, then.”
“Well, and what if it is?”
“Nothing.”
“Got enough and to spare of that stuff, my boy. If you’re so fond of Holy Scripture you’d better go to her. Go to her and say, ‘Read to me a bit, grannie. For we can’t get that sort of thing.’ Say, ‘We don’t go to church, by reason of our dirtiness. But we’ve got souls too, all as they should be, in the right place.’ Go on—go along.”
“Truth, shall I?”
“Go on.”
Mishka threw down his lever, pulled his shirt straight, smeared the dust over his face with his sleeve, and jumped down from the bath-house.
“She’ll give it you, devil of a fool, you,” mumbled Semka, smiling sceptically, but watching with extreme curiosity the figure of his comrade, making its way to the summer-house through the mass of dock-leaves.
Tall and bent, with bare, dirty hands, heavily lurching as he walked and catching the branches of the bushes now and then, he was moving clumsily forward, a confused, gentle smile on his face.
The sun glistened on the glasses of the old lady’s spectacles and on their silver rims.
Contrary to Semka
’s supposition, she did not “give it him.” We could not hear for the rustle of the foliage what Mishka was saying to her, but we presently saw him heavily sitting down at her feet, so that his nose almost touched the open book. His face was dignified and calm; we saw him blow on his beard, to try and get the dust off it, fidget, and at last settle down in an uncomfortable position, with his neck stretched out, expectantly watching the old lady’s little shrivelled hands as they methodically turned over the leaves of the book.
“Look at him, the hairy dog! Got a fine rest for himself. Let’s go too! He’ll be taking it easy there, and we’ve got to do his work for him. Come on!”
In two or three minutes Semka and I were also sitting on the ground, one on each side of our comrade. The old lady did not say a word to us when we appeared, only looked at us attentively and sharply, and again began to turn over the leaves of the book, searching for something. We sat in a luxuriant green ring of fresh, sweet-smelling foliage, and above us was spread the kindly, soft, cloudless sky. Now and then came a light breeze, and the leaves began to rustle with that mysterious sound which always speaks to the heart, waking in it gentleness and peace, and turning the thoughts to something indefinite, yet dear to man, cleansing his soul from foulness, or, at any rate, making him forget it for a time and breathe freely, and, as it were, anew.
“‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ,’” began the old lady’s voice. Shaking and cracked from age, it was yet full of a stern and pompous piety. At its first sound Mishka energetically crossed himself.
Semka began fidgeting on the ground, trying to find a more comfortable position. The old lady cast a glance at him, but continued to read.
“‘For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established—that is, that I with you may be comforted in you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine.’”
Semka, like the true heathen he was, gave a loud yawn. His comrade cast a reproachful glance at him from his blue eyes and hung his touzled head, all covered with dust. The old lady also looked at him severely without leaving off reading, and this somewhat abashed him. He wrinkled up his nose, looked sideways, and, evidently wishing to atone for his yawn, gave a long, pious sigh.
