by Maxim Gorky
Several minutes passed quietly. The improving and monotonous reading acted as a sedative.
“‘For the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and’”—
“What do you want?” suddenly cried the old lady to Semka.
“O-oh…nothing. If you would kindly go on reading—I am listening!” he explained meekly.
“Why are you touching the clasp with your dirty great hand?” she said, in exasperation.
“I’m curious, for—it’s such fine work, you see. And it’s in my line. I understand locksmith work. So I just felt it.”
“Listen,” said the old lady drily. “Tell me, what have I been reading about?”
“Why, certainly. I understand.”
“Well, tell me.”
“A sermon—so, of course, it’s teaching on the faith and likewise on sin. It’s very simple, all of it, and—all very true. Just takes hold of the soul—pinches it, like!”
The old lady shook her head sadly and looked round on us all with reproach.
“Lost souls you are—stones. Go back to work!”
“She—seems to be annoyed, mates,” observed Mishka, smiling penitently.
Semka scratched his back, yawned, and looking after the old lady, who, without turning round, was walking away down the narrow path, said reflectively—
“The clasps are silver, no mistake,” and he gave a broad smile, as if enjoying some pleasant prospect.
Having spent the night in the garden by the ruins of the bath-house, which we had finished pulling down that day, towards noon of the next we cleaned out the well, got soaked in the water, smeared all over with mud, and were sitting in the yard by the porch in the expectation of our wages, talking to each other and anticipating a good dinner and supper in the near future; to look farther ahead we none of us were inclined.
“Why the devil doesn’t that old hag come?” said Semka impatiently, but in a low voice.
“Just listen to him!” said Mishka reproachfully, shaking his head. “Now, what on earth is he swearing for? She’s a real godly old lady. And he swears at her. What a disposition!”
“We are clever, aren’t we? You great scarecrow!”
This pleasant and interesting conversation of friends was interrupted by the appearance of the old lady. She came up to us, and holding out her hand with the money in it said scornfully—
“There, take it and go along. I wanted to give you the wash-house planks to break up for firewood, but you are not worth it.”
Unhonoured with the task of breaking up the wash-house planks, which, however, we were not in need of now, we took the money in silence and went.
“Oh, you old she-devil!” began Semka, as soon as we were outside the gate. “Did you ever? We’re not worth it! You dead toad—you! There, go and screech over your book now!”
Plunging his hand into his pocket, he pulled out two bright metal objects and showed them to us in triumph.
Mishka stopped, stretching his neck towards Semka’s uplifted hand.
“You’ve broken the clasps off?” he asked, astonished.
“That’s it, mate. Silver! Get a rouble for them at least.”
“Well, I never! When did you do it? Hide them quick, out of harm’s way!”
“I’ll hide ’em all right.”
We continued our way up the street in silence.
“That’s smart,” Mishka said to himself. “Went and broke it off! Ye-es. But the book is a good book. The old lady will be offended with us very likely.”
“Why, no, mate, not she! She’ll call us back and tip us,” joked Semka.
“How much do you want for them?”
“Lowest price—ninety kopeks.10 Not a copper less. Cost more to me. Broke my nail over it—look.”
“Sell them to me,” said Mishka timidly.
“To you? Thinking of having ’em for studs? They’ll make first-rate ones—just suit your lovely face they would!”
“No; truth—sell them to me!” And Mishka lowered his tone in supplication.
“Why, take ’em, I say. How much will you give?”
“Take. How much is there for my share?”
“Rouble twenty.”
“And how much do you want for them?”
“A rouble.”
“Make it less to oblige a mate.”
“Oh, you fool! What the devil do you want them for?”
“Never mind; you just sell them to me.”
At last the bargain was struck, and the clasps were transferred to Mishka for ninety kopeks.
He stopped and began turning them over in his hand, his touzled head bent low, carefully examining them with knit brows.
“Hang ’em on your nose,” suggested Semka.
“Why should I?” replied Mishka gravely. “I’ll take’em back to the old lady. ‘Here, old lady,’ I’ll say, ‘we just took these little things with us by mistake, so you put’em on again,’ I’ll say, ‘in their places—on that same book there.’ Only you’ve torn them out with the stuff; how can she fix them on now?”
“Are you actually going to take them back?” and Semka opened his mouth.
“Why, yes. You see a book like that—it ought to be all whole, you know. It won’t do to tear off bits of it. The old lady will be offended, too. And she’s not far from her grave. So I’ll just—You wait for me a minute. I’ll run back.”
And before we could hold him, he had disappeared round the street comer.
“There’s a soft-boned fool for you. You dirty insect, you!” cried Semka in indignation, taking in the meaning of the occurrence and its possible consequences. And swearing for all he was worth, he began persuading me.
“Come on, hurry up! He’ll do us. He’s sitting there now, as like as not, with his hands tied behind him, and the old hag’s sent for the policeman already. That’s what philandering round with a ninny like that means. Why, he’ll get you into jail for nothing at all. What a scoundrel! What foul-souled thing would treat his mate like this? Good Lord! That’s what people have come to! Come on, you devil, what are you standing there for? Waiting? The devil wait for you and take you all, the scoundrels. Pah, you damned asses! Not coming? All right, then”—
Promising me something extraordinarily dreadful, Semka gave me a despairing poke in the ribs, and went off with rapid strides.
I wanted to know what was happening to Mishka and the old lady, and walked quietly towards her house. I did not think that I would incur any danger or unpleasantness.
And I was not mistaken.
Approaching the house, I looked through a chink in the board fence, and saw and heard the following:—
The old lady sat on the steps holding the clasps of her Bible, “torn out with the stuff,” in her hand, and looked searchingly and sternly through her spectacles at Mishka’s face, who stood with his back to me.
Notwithstanding the stern, hard gleam in her hard eyes, there were soft lines at the corners of her mouth now; it was clear that the old lady wanted to conceal a kindly smile—the smile of forgiveness.
From behind her back protruded three heads—two women’s—one red-faced, and tied up in a many-coloured handkerchief, the other uncovered, with a cataract in the left eye; over her shoulders appeared a man’s face—wedge-shaped, with little grey side-whiskers and a crest of hair on the top. This face incessantly blinked and winked in a curious manner with both eyes, as if saying to Mishka—
“Cut, man! Run!”
Mishka mumbled, trying to explain.
“Such a rare book! says you’re all beasts and dogs, you are. So I thought to myself—it’s true, Lord. To tell the truth, we are godless scoundrels—miserable wretches. And then, too, I thought, barynia—she’s an old lady; perhaps she’s got but this one book for a comfort. Then the clasps—we wouldn’t get much for them. But on t
he book now, they are a real thing. So I turned it over in my mind, and I said to myself, ‘I’ll go give the old lady some pleasure’—bring her this back. Then too, thanked be the Lord, we earned somewhat yesterday to buy our bread. Well, good-afternoon to you, ma’am; I’ll be going.”
“Wait a moment,” said the old lady. “Did you understand what I read yesterday?”
“Did I? Why, no, how can I understand it? I hear it, that’s so—and even then, how do I hear it? As if our ears were fit for the Word of God? We can’t understand it. You hear it with your heart like, but the ear, it doesn’t take it in. Goodbye to you, ma’am.”
“So—so!” drawled out the old lady. “No, just wait a minute.”
Mishka sighed forlornly, so that you could hear him all over the yard, and moved his weight from one foot to the other like a bear. Evidently this explanation was growing very wearisome to him.
“Would you like me to read you some more?”
“M’m! my mates are waiting for me.”
“Never mind them. You are a good fellow. You must leave them.”
“Very well,” assented Mishka in a low voice.
“You will leave them? Yes?”
“I’ll leave them.”
“That’s a sensible fellow. You’re quite a child. And look at you—a great beard, almost to your waist! Are you married?”
“A widower. My wife, she died.”
“And why do you drink? You are a drunkard, aren’t you?”
“A drunkard, ma’am. I drink.”
“Why?”
“Why do I drink? Why, from foolishness. Being a fool, I drink. If a man had brains, would he go and ruin himself of his own accord?” said Mishka in a desolate tone.
“You are quite right. Then cultivate wisdom and get better. Go to church. Hear God’s Word. In It is all wisdom.”
“That’s so, of course,” almost groaned Mishka.
“I will read some more to you. Would you like it?”
“Just as you please, ma’am.” Mishka was weary to death.
The old lady got her Bible from somewhere behind her, found a place, and the yard was filled with her quavering voice:
“‘Judge not, that ye be not judged, for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be meted unto you.’”
Mishka gave his head a shake, and scratched his left shoulder.
“‘Dost thou think to escape the judgment of God?’”
“Barynia!” began Mishka in a plaintive tone, “let me go, for God’s sake. I had better come some other time to listen. But now I’m real hungry, barynia. My stomach aches, even. We’ve had nothing to eat since last night.”
The barynia shut the door with a bang.
“Go along! Go!” sounded sharply and shortly through the yard.
“Thank you kindly.” And he almost ran to the gate.
“Unrepentant souls, hearts of beasts,” hissed in the yard behind him.
In half an hour we were sitting in an inn, having tea and kalatch.11
“It was as though she was driving a gimlet into me,” said Mishka, smiling at me with his good-natured eyes. “I stood there, and thought to myself, oh my goodness! What on earth did I go for? Went for martyrdom. She might, like a sensible woman, have taken the clasps from me and let me go my way; but no, she begins a-talking. What queer people there are! You want to treat them honest, and they go on, at their own, all the time. I tell her straight. ‘There, barynia,’ I said, ‘here are your clasps. Don’t blame me.’ And she says, ‘No,’ she says, ‘wait a bit—you tell me why you brought them back to me,’ and went ahead as if she was pulling the veins out of my body. I broke out into a sweat, with her talking even—truth I did.”
And he still smiled with that infinitely gentle smile of his.
Semka, sulky, ruffled, and moody, said to him gravely when he had ended his Odyssey—
“You’d better die outright, you precious blockhead, you! Or else to-morrow, with these fine tricks of yours, the flies or beetles will eat you up.”
“How you do talk! Come, let’s have a glass. Drink to the ending of the affair!”
And we heartily drank to the ending of this queer affair.
2An abbreviation or diminutive of Simon, used to express intimacy or contempt.—TR.
3An abbreviation or diminutive of Michael, used to express intimacy or contempt. Bears are nicknamed Mishka in Russia.—TR.
4The Russian exclamation has no English equivalent.—TR.
5A very common food in Russia.—TR.
6Lit., “an addition,” i.e. additional wage.—TR.
7Diminutive of “brothers.”—TR.
8In Russia private dwellings have separate bath-houses, built mostly of wood, and the baths are taken in somewhat the same manner as Turkish.—TR.
9A rouble is about two shillings.—TR.
10A penny is equal to four or five kopeks.—TR.
11A circular roll made of hard dough.—TR.
THE CONFESSION
INTRODUCTION
To me Gorky has never suffered from that change it has become so fashionable for young Russia to mourn.
“Since he has begun to give us doctrines, he has lost all his art,” they say and shake their heads, “We can get all the doctrines we want from the platform of the Social Democratic party or from the theorists of the Social Revolutionaries—why go to Gorky? Or if it is a philosophy of life that we seek, have we not always Tolstoi, who is greater, truer and has more consummate art? Why does he not write again a Foma Gordyeeff, or an Orloff and His Wife, or a Konovaloff!”
I re-read Foma Gordyeeff, Orloff and His Wife, Konovaloff and so on, and read also Mother, The Spy, In Prison, and the little fables with a purpose so sadly decried, and I see nothing there but the old Gorky writing as usual from the by-ways of life as he passes along on the road. The road has lengthened and widened in the twenty-five years of his wandering, that is all. Russia has changed and grown and passed through deepstirring experiences from the year 1890, when Gorky first published his immortal story of Makar Chudra, to her present moment of titanic struggle in the World War—the beginning of the year 1916.
Russia’s changes were Gorky’s changes. He first flung his type of hero, the people from the lowest of the low—water-rats, tramps, petty thieves—into a discouraged, disappointed and hopeless Russia. It was a Russia that had almost decided that there were no more people, that they were without courage, that the misery and degradation in which they lived was there because of their own inefficiency, their lack of idealism, their incapacity to grasp an idea and to strike and fight for it.
The Russia that thought this and the Russia that Gorky awakened from its torpor by introducing to it again the people it had almost learned to scorn, showing them with a capacity of understanding ideas, with deep emotions and great courage, was the Russia that had settled back in bitter disappointment after the sad failure of the Revolutionary movement of the eighties.
Like an eddying pool, the generations in Russia have risen to the surface, made their protest against the anachronism of autocracy and despotism, and then subsided back again into the still and inert waters of the nation. But each rising generation has made a wider and wider eddy, coming ever from a greater depth. Thus in 1825 it was merely a small group of military officers, who having learned from the Napoleonic campaigns that there were such things as constitutional law and order, that liberty and freedom were truths to fight for, broke out in revolt in Petrograd in December of that year only to be immediately crushed. Five of the leaders were hanged, and the rest, intellectuals and writers among them, were sent to Siberia.
The loss of the élite of Russia, despite the names of Pushkin and Lermontoff which graced that period, made great inroads in
the intellectual life of the country. But in the fifties and sixties the seeming quiet was broken into by a new restlessness. This time the student youth, the young sons and daughters of the landlords and the nobles, became inspired by a passion for learning, for new conceptions of education, for new liberties of the people, for the abolition of serfdom and for a Pan-Slavism that would be democratic. It was then that the women left their homes to seek higher education and to enter new fields of work. They had to break with family tyranny which was fostered by tradition and the State, their men comrades standing valiantly by, helping them to make escapes, going through the forms of mock marriage, and conducting them safely to that Mecca of learning for the Russian youth—the medical school of Geneva. It was in this way that Sonya Kovalevsky, who later became the famous mathematician in the University of Stockholm, made her escape into the world, and the untold other heroines of Russia who were soon to return educated, free, and fired with a zeal to spread their new-found freedom to the people.
The abolition of serfdom in ’61 brought with it great discontent, for the peasants had been led to believe that they would be liberated together with the land, since Russian serfdom, unlike the Western, was based on the theory that the peasant was attached to the land and that the landlord’s hold on it came through his ownership of the serf. Consequently it was argued, when the Russian serf was liberated and the ancient communal village form maintained, that all the land the serfs had owned would go to them. Of course, that was very far from what really happened. It is true that the serfs were liberated and the ancient communal form kept, but the land allotted to the village was poor and meager, the plots were scattered, and the tax on them for repayment to the landlords was so great that it took over fifty years to pay.
The peasants foresaw exactly the future that awaited them; the dearth in land, none too much to begin with, and the consequential lessening at each redistribution as the village increased in “souls,” the needed “renting” from the landlord at exorbitant rates, the inability to pay and the resultant “paying in his own labor,” and the eventual reestablishment of a virtual serfdom. Insurrections took place all over the country, the peasants believing firmly that the Government had treated them more kindly but that the landlords were deceiving them. However, the Government came only too gladly to the aid of the landlords, having got used to blood-baths in its drastic quenching of the Polish insurrection of ’63.
