by Maxim Gorky
It was oppressive and I went away. Thousands of eyes were looking toward the distance, and like a cloud there floated toward me the warm, dull whisper: “They are carrying it.”
Heavily and slowly the crowd proceeded up the mountain like a dark wave of the sea, and the golden banners burned like red foam, shooting out their sheaves of bright sparks. The ikon of the holy virgin floated and swung like a fiery bird shining in the rays of the sun. From the human body a mighty sigh arose, a thousand-voiced song: “Intercede for us, O mother of the Lord, most high.”
The song was cut short by cries: “Hurry! Move faster! Hurry!”
The lake smiled brightly in the frame-work of the blue wood; the red sun melted, sinking into the wood, and the copper sound of the bells rang out gaily. Around me were anxious faces, the quiet and sorrowful whispering of prayers, eyes dimmed with tears, and the waving of many, many arms, making the sign of the cross.
I was alone. All this was sad error for me, weak despair, a weary desire for grace.
The procession marched on, their faces covered with dust, streams of sweat pouring down their cheeks. They breathed heavily, they gazed strangely as if they saw nothing, and pushed one another and stumbled along.
I pitied them. I pitied the strength of their faith which was wasted on the air. There was no end to this stream of people. A vigorous and mighty cry arose, but it was dark and sounded reproachful:
“Rejoice, O merciful one,” and again, “Hurry! Hurry!”
In this whole cloud of dust I saw hundreds of black faces, thousands of eyes like stars on the milky way. I saw that those eyes were fiery sparks from one soul, eagerly awaiting an unknowm joy.
The people went down as one body, pressing close upon one another, holding one another’s hands and walking fast, as if the road was terribly long, but they were ready to go to what was their end without stopping.
My soul trembled with an unknown pain. Like a prayer the words of Juna rose in my memory: “The people—the creators of God.”
I started forward. I rushed from the mountain to meet the people, went along with them and sang with a full throat: “Rejoice, beneficent strength of all strengths!”
They seized and embraced me, and I seemed to float away and to melt under their hot breathing. I did not know that the earth was under my feet, nor did I recognize myself. There was no time nor space, only joy, vast like the heavens. I was like a glowing coal, flaming with faith. I was unimportant yet great and resembled all who were around me at the time of our general flight.
“Hurry! Hurry!”
The people flew over the earth irresistibly, ready to stride over all obstacles and abysses, all doubts and dark fears. I remember that the procession stopped close to me, that confusion occurred, that I was dragged near the wagon of the sick girl and heard the cries and the murmuring:
“Let us sing the Te Deum; let us sing the Te Deum.”
There was great excitement. They pushed the wagon, and the head of the young girl rocked to and fro, helpless and without strength. Her large eyes gazed out with fear. Tens of eyes poured their rays out upon her; hundreds of force streams crossed themselves over her weak body, calling her to life with an imperious desire to see her rise from her bed.
I, too, looked into the depths of her eyes, and an inexpressible desire came over me, in common with all, that she arise; not for my sake, nor for her own sake, but for some special reason, before which she and I were like a bird’s feather in a fire.
As rain saturates the earth with its live moisture, so the people filled the dry body of the girl with their strength, and they whispered and cried to her and to me:
“Rise, dear one, rise. Lift your arms. Be not afraid. Arise, arise without fear. Sick one, arise; dear one, lift your arms.”
Hundreds of stars arose in her soul and a pink shadow lit up her death-like face, and her surprised and happy eyes opened still wider. Her shoulders moved slowly and humbly she raised her trembling arms and obediently held them up. Her mouth was open like a fledgling’s about to leave its nest for the first time. A deep sigh rose around her. As though the earth where a copper bell, struck upon by a giant sviatogor with all his strength, the people trembled, and laughing cried:
“On your feet. Help her. Arise little one, on your feet. Help her.”
We caught the girl, lifted her and put her on her feet, holding her lightly. She bent like an ear of corn in the wind, and cried out:
“Oh, dear one, Lord; oh, Holy Virgin!”
“Walk!” the people cried. “Walk!”
I remember their dusty faces, tearful and sweaty. Through the damp tears a miraculous strength shone out masterful, the faith in the power to create miracles.
The recovered girl walked quietly among us. Confidently she pressed her revived body against the body of the people, and smiling and pale like a flower, she said:
“Let me go alone.”
She stopped, swayed, then walked. She walked as if on knives which cut her feet, but she walked alone; fearful yet bold, like a little child; and the people around her rejoiced and were friendly as to a little child. She was excited. Her body trembled. She held her hands out before her as if she were leaning against the air. She was filled by the strength of the people and she was sustained from every side by hundreds of luminous rays.
I lost sight of her at the gates of the monastery, and recovering myself, I gazed about me. Everywhere there was holiday tumult. There was a ringing of bells and the powerful talk of the people. The evening red fell brilliantly from the heavens and the lake clothed itself in the purple of the reflection. A man walked past me, smiled and asked:
“Did you see it?”
I embraced him and kissed him, like a brother after a long separation, and we found no words to say to each other. Smiling, we remained silent and separated.
* * * *
At night I sat in the wood above the lake. Again I was alone, but now forever and inseparably united to the soul of the people, the masters and miracle workers of the earth. I sat and listened to all that I had seen and known grow and burn within me in one fire.—I, too, would reflect to the world this light in which everything flamed with great significance and was clothed with the miraculous. It winged my soul with a desire to accept the world as it had accepted me.
I have no words to describe the exultation of that night, when, alone in the darkness, I embraced the whole earth with my love and stood on the height of my experience and saw the world, like a fiery stream of life-force, flowing turbidly to unite into one current, the end of which I could not see. I joyfully understood that the inaccessibility of the end was the source of the infinite growth of my soul and the great earthly beauty. And in this infinity were the innumerable joys of the live human soul.
In the morning the sun appeared to me with a new face. I saw how its rays cautiously and lovingly sank into the darkness and turned it away; how it lifted from the earth the veils of night, and there she stood before me in the beautiful and magnificent jewels of autumn; the emerald field of the great play of peoples and the fight for free play was the holy place in the procession of the celebration of beauty and truth.
I saw the earth, my mother, in space between the stars, and brightly she gazed out with her ocean eyes into the distance and the depths. I saw her like a full bowl of bright red, incessantly seething, human blood, and I saw her master, the all-powerful, immortal people.
They winged her life with a great activity and hope, and I prayed:
“Thou art my God, the creator of all gods, which thou weavest out of the beauty of thy soul and the labor and agony of thy seeking.
“There shall be no God but thou, for thou art the one God, the creator of miracles.”
This is what I believe and confess.
And always do I return there where people free the souls of their neighbors from the yoke of darkness and superstition and unite the
m and disclose to them their own secret physiognomy, and aid them to recognize the strength of their own wills and teach them the one and true path to a general union for the sake of the great cause, the cause of the universal creating of God.
1A vegetable fiber made from the bark of the lime tree.
ORLÓFF AND HIS WIFE
TALES OF THE BAREFOOT BRIGADE
TRANSLATED BY ISABEL F. HAPGOOD
ORLÓFF AND HIS WIFE
Almost every Saturday, just before the All-Night Vigil Service,1 from two windows in the cellar of merchant Petúnnikoff’s old and filthy house, opening on the narrow court-yard encumbered with various utensils, and built up with wooden servants’-quarters ricketty with age, broke forth the vehement shrieks of a woman:
“Stop! Stop, you drunken devil!” the woman cried in a low contralto voice.
“Let go!” replied a man’s tenor voice.
“I won’t, I won’t. I’ll give it to you, you monster!”
“You li-ie! You will let me go!”
“You may kill me—but I won’t!”
“You? You li-ie, you heretic!”
“Heavens! He has murdered me…he-eavens!”
“Will you let go?!”
“Beat away, you wild beast, beat me to death!”
“You can wait.… I won’t do it all at once!”
At the first words of this dialogue, Sénka Tchízhik, the apprentice of house-painter Sutchkóff, who ground paint whole days together in one of the small sheds in the court-yard, flew headlong thence, his little eyes, black as those of a mouse, sparkling, yelling at the top of his voice:
“Shoemaker Orlóff and his wife are fighting! My eye! what a lively time they’re having!”
Tchízhik, who was passionately fond of all possible sorts of events, rushed to the windows of the Orlóffs’ lodgings, flung himself on the ground on his stomach, and hanging down his shaggy, saucy head, with its bold, thin face streaked with ochre and reddish-brown paint, he gazed down with eager eyes into the dark, damp hole, which reeked of mould, shoemakers’ wax and musty leather. There, at the bottom of it, two figures were jerking about in a fury, screaming hoarsely, groaning and cursing.
“You’ll kill me.…” warned the woman, with a sigh.
“N-ne-ever m-mind!”—her husband soothed her confidently, and with concentrated venom.
Dull, heavy blows on some soft object resounded, sighs, piercing screams, the strained groaning of a man who is moving about a heavy weight.
“Oh my! I-is-n’t he just giving it to her with the last!” said Tchízhik with a lisp, illustrating the course of events in the cellar, while the audience which had gathered around him—tailors, messenger of the courts Levtchénko, Kislyakóff the accordeon-player, and others who were fond of gratuitous entertainments—kept asking Sénka, pulling, in their impatience, at his legs and little breeches all impregnated with greasy paints:
“Well? What’s going on now? What’s he doing to her?”
“He’s sitting astride of her, and banging her snout against the floor,” reported Sénka, curling up voluptuously with the impressions which he was experiencing.
The spectators bent over also, to the Orlóffs’ windows, being seized with a burning desire to see all the details of the fight for themselves; and although they had long known the ways which Grísha2 Orlóff employed in his war with his wife, still they expressed surprise:
“Akh, the devil! Has he smashed her up?”
“Her nose is all bloody…and he keeps on banking her!” reported Sénka, choking with delight.
“Akh, Lord my God!” cried the women.—“Akh, the tormenting-monster!”
The men judged more objectively.
“Without fail, he’ll beat her to death!” said they.
And the accordeon-player announced in the tone of a seer:
“Remember my words—he’ll disembowel her with a knife! One of these days he’ll get tired of cutting up in this fashion, and he’ll put an end to the music at one blow!”
“He’s done!” reported Sénka, springing up from the ground, and bounding away like a ball from the windows, to one side, to a nook where he took up another post of observation, being aware that Grísha Orlóff would immediately emerge into the court-yard.
The spectators rapidly dispersed, as they did not care to fall under the eye of the savage shoemaker; now that the battle was over, he had lost all interest in their eyes, and he was decidedly dangerous, to boot.
And generally, there was not a living soul in the courtyard except Sénka, when Orlóff made his appearance from his cellar. Breathing heavily, in a torn shirt, with his hair rumpled all over his head, with scratches on his perspiring and excited face, he scrutinized the court-yard with a sidelong glance, with eyes suffused with blood, and clasping his hands behind his back, he walked slowly to an old carrier’s sledge, which lay with runners upward, against the wall of the wood-shed. Sometimes he whistled valiantly as he did so, and stared about in all directions exactly as though he had the intention of challenging the entire population of the Petúnnikoff house to a fight. Then he seated himself on the runners of the sledge, wiped the blood and sweat from his face with his shirt-sleeve, and fell into a fatigued attitude, gazing dully at the wall of the house, which was dirty with peeling stucco and decorated with motley-hued stripes of paint,—as Sutchkóf’s painters, on their return from work, had a habit of cleaning their brushes against that part of the wall.
Orlóff was about thirty years of age. His bronzed, nervous face, with delicate features, was adorned with a small, dark mustache, which sharply shaded his full, red lips. His eyebrows almost met above his large, cartilaginous nose; from beneath them gazed black eyes which always blazed uneasily. His curly hair, tangled in front, fell behind over a sinewy, light-brown neck. Of medium stature, and somewhat round-shouldered from his work, muscular and ardent, he sat for a long time on the sledge, in a sort of benumbed condition, and surveyed the paint-bedaubed wall, breathing deeply with his healthy, swarthy breast.
The sun had already set, but it was stifling in the courtyard; it smelled of oil-paints, tar, sour cabbage, and something rotten. From all the windows in both stories of the house which opened on the court-yard, poured songs and scolding; from time to time someone’s intoxicated countenance inspected Orlóff for a minute, being thrust forth from behind a window-jamb and withdrawn with a laugh.
The painters made their appearance from their work; as they passed Orlóff they cast furtive glances at him, exchanging winks among themselves, and filling the courtyard with the lively dialect of Kostromá, they made ready to go out, some to the bath, some to the pot-house. From above, from the second story, tailors crept out into the court—a half-clad, consumptive and bow-legged lot of men—and began to make fun of the Kostromá painters for their mode of speech, which rattled about like peas. The whole court was filled with noise, with daring, lively laughter, with jests.… Orlóff sat in his corner and maintained silence, not even casting a glance at anyone. No one approached him, and no one could make up his mind to ridicule him, for everyone knew that now he was—a raging wild beast.
He sat there, the prey to a dull and heavy wrath, which oppressed his breast, made breathing difficult, and his nostrils quivered rapaciously from time to time while his lips curled in a snarl, laying bare two rows of large, strong, yellow teeth. Within him something dark and formless was springing up, red, turbid spots swam before his eyes, grief and a thirst for vódka sucked at his entrails. He knew that he would feel better when he had had a drink, but it was still daylight, and it mortified him to go to the dram-shop in such a tattered and disreputable condition through the street where everybody knew him, Grigóry Orlóff.
He knew his own value, and did not wish to go out as a general laughing-stock, but neither could he go home to wash and dress himself. There, on the floor, lay his wife whom he had
unmercifully beaten, and now she was repulsive to him in every way.
She was groaning there, and he felt that she was a martyr, and that she was right, so far as he was concerned—he knew that. He knew, also, that she was really in the right, and he was to blame, but this still further augmented his hatred toward her, because, along with this consciousness a dark, evil feeling was seething in his soul, and it was more powerful than the consciousness. Everything within him was heavy and confused, and, without any exertion of his will, he gave himself over to the weight of his inward sensations, unable to disentangle them, and knowing that nothing but half a bottle of vódka would afford him relief.
Now Kislyakóff the accordeon-player comes along. He is clad in a sleeveless cotton-velvet jacket, over a red silk shirt, with voluminous trousers tucked into dandified boots. Under his arm is his accordeon in a green bag, the ends of his small black mustache are twisted into arrows, his cap is set dashingly on one side, and his whole countenance is beaming with audacity and jollity. Orlóff loves him for his audacity, for his playing, and for his merry character, and envies him his easy, care-free life.
“Congratulations, Grísha, on your vi-ic-to-ory,
And on your well-scra-a-atched cheek!”
Orlóff did not fly into a rage with him for this joke, although he had already heard it fifty times, and besides, the accordeon-player did not say it out of malice, but simply because he was fond of joking.
“What now, brother! Had another Plevna?”—asked Kislyakóff, halting for a minute in front of the shoemaker.
“Ekh, Grísha, you’re a ripe melon! You ought to go where the road for all of us lies.… You and I might have a bite together.…’
“I’m coming soon.…” said Orlóff, without raising his head.
“I’ll wait and suffer for you.…”
And before long, Orlóff went off after him.
Then, from the cellar emerged a small, plump woman, clinging to the wall as she went. Her head wad closely enveloped in a kerchief, and from the aperture over the face, only one eye, and a bit of the cheek and forehead peeped out. She walked, staggering, across the court, and seated herself on the same spot where her husband had been sitting not long before. Her appearance surprised no one—they had got used to it, and everybody knew that there she would sit until Grísha, intoxicated and in a repentant mood, should make his appearance from the dram-shop. She came out into the court, because it was suffocating in the cellar, and for the purpose of leading drunken Grísha down the stairs. The staircase was half-decayed, and steep; Grísha had tumbled down it one day, and had sprained his wrist, so that he had not worked for a fortnight, and, during that time, they had pawned nearly all their chattels to feed themselves.
