by Maxim Gorky
The teacher thoughtfully traced some figures on the table with his finger, and as he inspected them he said:
“You see, Yákoff, the reason I’m not pleased is this.… Let’s make a thorough examination into what you are doing, and what you may expect from it. Your wife is with child: you beat her, yesterday, on her body and on her sides—which means, that you beat not only her, but the baby also. You might have killed him, and your wife would have died in childbed, or from this, or have fallen into very bad health. It’s unpleasant and troublesome to worry over a sick wife, and it will cost you dear, for illness requires medicines, and medicines require money. But if you haven’t yet killed the child, you certainly have crippled it, and perhaps it will be born deformed; lopsided, or hunchbacked. That means, that it will not be fit to work, but it is important for you that he should be a worker. Even if he is born merely ailing,—and that’s bad—he will tie his mother down, and require doctoring. Do you see what you have prepared for yourself? People who live by the toil of their hands ought to be born healthy, and ought to bring forth healthy children.… Am I speaking the truth?”
“Yes,”—the audience hacked him up.
“Well, I don’t think…that will happen,”—said Yáshka, somewhat abashed at the prospect as depicted by the teacher.—“She’s healthy…you can’t get through her to the child, can you now? For she, the devil, is an awful witch!”—he exclaimed bitterly. “As soon as I do anything…she starts in to nag at me, as rust gnaws iron!”
“I understand, Yákoff, that you can’t help beating your wife,”—the teacher’s calm, thoughtful voice made itself heard again;—“you have many causes for that.… It’s not your wife’s character that is to blame for your beating her so incautiously…but your whole sad and gloomy life.…”
“There, now, that’s so,”—ejaculated Yákoff,—“we really do live in darkness like that in the bosom of a chimneysweep.”
“You’re enraged at life in general, but your wife suffers…your wife, the person who is nearest to you—and suffers without being to blame toward you, simply because you are stronger than she is; she is always at your elbow, she has no place to go to get away from you. You see how…foolish…it is!”
“So it is…devil take her! And what am I to do? Ain’t I a man?”
“Exactly so, you are a man!… Well, this is what I want to say to you: beat her, if you must, if you can’t get along without it, but beat her cautiously: remember, that you may injure her health, or the health of the child. In general, it is never right to beat women who are with child…on the body, the breast, or the sides…beat her on the neck, or take a rope, and…strike on the soft places.…”
The orator finished his speech, and his deeply-sunken, dark eyes gazed at his audience, and seemed to be apologizing to them or guiltily asking them about something.
And the audience rustled with animation. This morality of a man who had seen better days, the morality of the dram-shop and of misery, was comprehensible to it.
“Well, brother Yáshka, do you understand?”
“That’s what the truth is like!”
Yákoff understood: to beat his wife incautiously was—injurious to himself.
He said nothing, replying to his comrades’ jeers with an abashed smile.
“And then again—what is a wife?”—philosophized rusk-peddler Mokéi Anísimoff:—“A wife’s a friend, if you get rightly at the root of the matter. She’s in the nature of a chain, that has been riveted on you for life…and both you and she are, after a fashion, hard-labor convicts. So try to walk evenly, in step with her…and if you can’t, you will feel the chain.…”
“Hold on,”—said Yákoff,—“you beat your wife, too, don’t you?”
“And did I say that I didn’t? I do.… One can’t get along otherwise.… Whom have I to thump my fists against—the wall?—when I can’t endure things any longer?”
“Well, there then, it’s the same way with me.…” said Yákoff.
“Well, what a cramped and doleful life is ours, my brethren! We haven’t space anywhere for a regular good swing of our arms!”
“And you must even beat your wife with care!”—moaned someone humorously. And thus they went on talking until late at night, or until they fell into a fight, which arose on the basis of intoxication, or of the moods which these discussions inspired.
The rain dashed against the windows of the tavern, and the cold wind howled wildly. Inside the tavern the air was close, impregnated with smoke, but warm; outside all was damp, cold, and dark. The wind beat upon the windows, as though it were impudently summoning all these men forth from the tavern, and threatening to disperse them over the earth, like dust. Sometimes, amid its roar, a repressed, hopeless groan became audible, and then a cold, cruel laugh rang out. This music prompted to melancholy thoughts about the close approach of winter, the accursed short days without sunshine, the long nights, and the indispensable necessity of having warm clothing and plenty to eat. One sleeps so badly on an empty stomach during the endless winter nights. Winter was coming, coming.… How were they to live?
These sorrowful meditations evoked in the inhabitants of Vyézhaya Street an augmented thirst, and in the speeches of the men with pasts the quantity of sighs increased and the number of wrinkles on their foreheads, their voices became duller, their relations to one another more blunt. And all of a sudden, savage wrath blazed up among them, the exasperation of outcasts, tortured by their harsh fate, awoke. Or they were conscious of the approach of that implacable enemy, which converted their whole life into one cruel piece of stupidity. But this enemy was intangible, for it was invisible.
And so they thrashed one another; they thrashed mercilessly, they thrashed savagely, and again, having made peace, they began to drink, drinking up everything that Vavíloff, who was not very exacting, would accept as a pledge.
Thus, in dull wrath, in sadness which clutched at their hearts, in ignorance as to the outcome of their wretched existence, they passed the autumnal days, in anticipation of the still more inclement days of winter.
At such times, Kuválda came to their aid with philosophy.
“Don’t get down in the mouth, my boys! There’s an end to everything—that’s the merit of life.—The winter will pass, and summer will come again…a splendid season, when, they say, the sparrows have beer.”—But his harangues had no effect—a starving man cannot be fed to satiety with a swallow of water.
Deacon Tarás also tried to divert the public, by singing songs and narrating his stories. He was more successful. Sometimes his efforts led to the result that desperate, audacious mirth bubbled up in the tavern; they sang, danced, roared with laughter, and, for the space of several hours, resembled madmen. Only.…
And then again they fell back into dull, indifferent despair, and sat around the tavern tables, in the soot of the lamps and tobacco-smoke, morose, tattered, languidly chatting together, listening to the triumphant howl of the gale, and meditating as to how they might get a drink of vódka, and drink until they lost their senses.
And all of them were profoundly opposed to each, and each concealed within himself unreasonable wrath against all.
II.
Everything is comparative in this world, and there is for man no situation so utterly bad that nothing could be worse.
On a bright day, toward the end of September, Captain Aristíd Kuválda was sitting, as was his wont, in his arm-chair at the door of the night lodging-house, and as he gazed at the stone47 building erected by merchant Petúnnikoff, next door to Vavíloff’s tavern, he meditated.
The building, which was still surrounded by scaffolding, was intended for a candle-factory, and had long been an eye-sore to the captain, with the empty and dark hollows of its long row of windows, and that spider’s web of wood, which surrounded it, from foundation to roof. Red, as though it were smeared with blood, it resembled some cruel machi
ne, which was not yet in working-order, but which had already opened a row of deep, yawning maws, and was ready to engulf, masticate, and devour. Vavíloff’s gray wooden tavern, with its crooked roof, overgrown with moss, leaned against one of the brick walls of the factory, and looked like some huge parasite, which was driving its suckers into it.
The captain reflected, that they would soon begin to build on the site of the old house also. They would tear down the lodging-house, too. He would be compelled to seek other quarters, and no others, so convenient and so cheap, could be found. It was a pity, it was rather sad, to move away from a place where he had been so long. But move he must, merely because a certain merchant had taken it into his head to manufacture candles and soap. And the captain felt, that if any opportunity should present itself to him, of ruining the life of that enemy, even temporarily—oh! with what delight would he ruin it!
On the previous evening, merchant Iván Andréevitch Petúnnikoff had been in the courtyard of the night lodging-house with the architect and his son. They had measured the courtyard, and had stuck little sticks everywhere in the ground, which, after Petúnnikoff had departed, the captain ordered The Meteor to pull out of the ground and throw away.
Before the captain’s eyes stood that merchant—small, gaunt, in a long garment which simultaneously resembled both an overcoat and an undercoat, in a velvet cap, and tall, brilliantly-polished boots. His bony face, with high cheek-bones, with its gray, wedge-shaped beard, with a lofty brow furrowed with wrinkles, from beneath which sparkled small, narrow, gray eyes, which always appeared to be on the watch for something.… A pointed, cartilaginous nose, a small mouth, with thin lips.… Altogether, the merchant’s aspect was piously-rapacious, and respectably-evil.
“A damned mixture of fox and hog!”—swore the captain to himself, and recalled to mind Petúnnikoff’s first phrase with regard to himself. The merchant had come with a member of the town court to purchase the house, and, catching sight of the captain, he had asked of his guide, in alert Kostromá dialect:
“Isn’t he a candle-end himself…that lodger of yours?”
And from that day forth—now eighteen months gone by—they had vied with one another in their cleverness at insulting man.
And on the preceding evening, a little “drill in vituperation,” as the captain designated his conversation with the merchant, had taken place between them. After he had seen the architect off, the merchant had stepped up to the captain.
“You’re sitting?”—he asked, tugging with his hand at the visor of his cap so that it was not possible to understand whether he was adjusting it or intended to express a salutation.
“You’re trotting about?”—said the captain, imitating his tone, and made a movement with his lower jaw, which caused his beard to waggle, and which a person who was not exacting might take for a bow, or for a desire on the part of the captain to shift his pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other.
“I have a great deal of money—so I trot about. Money demands that it shall be put out in life, so I’m giving it circulation.…” the merchant mocked the captain a little, cunningly narrowing his little eyes.
“The ruble doesn’t serve you, that is to say, but you serve the ruble,”—commented Kuválda, contending with a desire to give the merchant a kick in the belly.
“Isn’t it all the same thing? With it, with money, everything is agreeable.… But if you haven’t any.…”
And the merchant eyed the captain over, with shamelessly-counterfeit compassion. The captain’s upper lip twitched, disclosing his large, wolfish teeth.
“A man who has brains and conscience can get along without it…It generally makes its appearance precisely at the time when a man’s conscience begins to dry up.… The less conscience, the more money.…
“That’s true.…? But, on the other hand, there are people who have neither money, nor conscience.…”
“Were you just the same when you were young?”—inquired Kuválda innocently. It was now the turn of Petúnnikoff’s nose to twitch. Iván Andréevitch sighed, screwed up his little eyes, and said:
“In my youth, o-okh! I was forced to raise great weights!”
“I think.…”
“I worked, okh, how I worked!”
“And you worked up a good many people!”
“Such as you? Noblemen? Never mind…they learned plenty of prayers to Christ from me.…”
“You didn’t murder, you merely stole?”—said the captain sharply. Petúnnikoff turned green, and found it expedient to change the subject.
“You’re a bad host, you sit, while your guest stands.”
“Let him sit down, too,” Kuválda gave permission.
“But there’s nothing to sit on, you see.…”
“Sit on the earth…the earth accepts all sorts of rubbish.…”
“I see that, from you.… But I shall leave you, you scold,” said Petúnnikoff, in a calm, equable voice, but his eyes poured forth cold poison on the captain.
And he took his departure, leaving Kuválda with the pleasing consciousness that the merchant was afraid of him. If he had not been afraid of him, he would long ago have driven him out of the night lodging-house. He would not have refrained from expelling him for those five rubles a month! And the captain found it pleasant to stare at Petúnnikoff’s back, as he slowly left the courtyard. Then the captain watched the merchant walk around his factory, walk over the scaffoldings, upstairs and down. And he longed greatly to have the merchant fall and break his bones. How many clever combinations he had made of the fall, and the injuries, as he gazed at Petúnnikoff climbing over the scaffoldings of his factory, like a spider over his web! On the preceding evening, it had even seemed to him that one plank trembled under the merchant’s feet, and the captain sprang from his seat in excitement.… But nothing happened.
And to-day, as always, before the eyes of Aristíd Kuválda rose aloft that red building, so well-built, and solid, which had laid as firm a hold upon the earth as though it were already sucking the juices out of it. And it seemed to be laughing coldly and gloomily at the captain, with the yawning holes of its walls. The sun poured its autumnal rays upon it as lavishly as upon the wretched hovels of Vyézhaya Street.
“Is it really going to happen!”—exclaimed the captain mentally, as he measured the wall of the factory with his eye.—“Akh, you rascal, devil take you! If …” and all startled and excited by his thought, Aristíd Kuválda sprang up, and went hastily into Vavíloff’s tavern, smiling and muttering something to himself.
Vavíloff met him at the lunch-counter, with the friendly exclamation:
“We wish health to Your Well-Born!”
Of medium height, with a bald head surrounded by a wreath of curly gray hair, with smoothly-shaven cheeks, and a mustache which bristled straight up, clad in a greasy leather jacket, by his every movement he permitted one to discern in him the former non-commissioned officer.
“Egór! Have you the deed of sale and the plan of the house?” inquired Kuválda hastily.
“I have.”
Vavíloff suspiciously narrowed his knavish eyes, and rivetted them intently on the face of the captain, in which he perceived something particular.
“Show them to me!”—cried the captain, banging the counter with his fist, and dropping upon a stool alongside it.
“Why?”—asked Vavíloff, who had made up his mind, on beholding Kuválda’s excitement, that he would be on his guard.
“Bring them here quick, you blockhead!”
Vavíloff wrinkled up his brow, and raised his eyes scrutinizingly to the ceiling.
“Where have I put them, those same papers?”
He found on the ceiling no information on that point; then the non-commissioned officer fixed his eyes on his stomach, and with an aspect of anxious meditation, began to drum on the bar with his fingers.
; “Stop making faces!” shouted the captain at him, for he did not like the man, considering the former soldier to be more adapted for a thief than for a tavern-keeper. “Well, I’ve just called it to mind,’Ristíd Fómitch. It appears that they were left in the district court. When I entered into possession.…
“Drop that, Egórka!48 In view of your own profit, show me immediately the plan, the deed of purchase, and everything there is! Perhaps you’ll make several hundred rubles out of this—do you understand?”
Vavíloff understood nothing, but the captain spoke so impressively, with such a serious mien, that the underofficer’s eyes began to blaze with burning curiosity, and, saying that he would look and see whether he had not the documents packed away in the house, he went out of the door behind the lunch-counter. Two minutes later, he returned with the documents in his hands, and with an expression of extreme amazement on his face.
“On the contrary, the cursed things were in the house!”
“Ekh, you…clown from a show-booth! And yet he used to be a soldier…Kuválda did not let slip the opportunity to reproach him, as he snatched from his hands a calico-covered pasteboard box, with the blue title-deed. Then, unfolding the papers in front of him and still further exciting the curiosity of Vavíloff, the captain began to read, scrutinize, and at the same time to bellow in a very significant manner. At last he rose with decision, and went to the door, leaving the documents on the bar, and nodded to Vavíloff.
“Hold on…don’t put them away.…”
Vavíloff gathered up the documents, laid them in the drawer of the counter, locked it and gave it a jerk with his hand,—to make sure that it was locked. Then, thoughtfully rubbing his bald spot, he emerged on the porch of the tavern. There he beheld the captain, after pacing off the front of the building, snap his fingers and again begin to measure off the same line, anxious but not satisfied.
Vavíloff’s face assumed a rather strained expression, then relaxed, then suddenly beamed with joy.
