by Maxim Gorky
“Well, did you like it?” she asked me when I took back the yellow novel by Meshtcheski.
I found it very hard to answer no; I thought it would make her angry. But she only laughed, and going behind the portière which led into her sleeping-chamber, brought back a little volume in a binding of dark-blue morocco leather.
“You will like this one, only take care not to soil it.”
This was a volume of Pushkin’s poems. I read all of them at once, seizing upon them with a feeling of greed such as I experienced whenever I happened to visit a beautiful place that I had never seen before. I always tried to run all over it at once. It was like roaming over mossy hillocks in a marshy wood, and suddenly seeing spread before one a dry plain covered with flowers and bathed in sun-rays. For a second one gazes upon it enchanted, and then one begins to race about happily, and each contact of one’s feet with the soft growth of the fertile earth sends a thrill of joy through one.
Pushkin had so surprised me with the simplicity and music of poetry that for a long time prose seemed unnatural to me, and it did not come easy to read it. The prologue to “Ruslan” reminded me of grandmother’s best stories, all wonderfully compressed into one, and several lines amazed me by their striking truth.
There, by ways which few observe,
Are the trails of invisible wild creatures.
I repeated these wonderful words in my mind, and I could see those footpaths so familiar to me, yet hardly visible to the average being. I saw the mysterious footprints which had pressed down the grass, which had not had time to shake off the drops of dew, as heavy as mercury. The full, sounding lines of poetry were easily remembered. They adorned everything of which they spoke as if for a festival. They made me happy, my life easy and pleasant. The verses rang out like bells heralding me into a new life. What happiness it was to be educated!
The magnificent stories of Pushkin touched me more closely, and were more intelligible to me than anything I had read. When I had read them a few times I knew them by heart, and when I went to bed I whispered the verses to myself, with my eyes closed, until I fell asleep. Very often I told these stories to the orderlies, who listened and laughed, and abused me jokingly. Sidorov stroked my head and said softly:
“That’s fine, isn’t it? O Lord—”
The awakening which had come to me was noticed by my employers. The old lady scolded me.
“You read too much, and you have not cleaned the samovar for four days, you young monkey! I shall have to take the rolling-pin to you—”
What did I care for the rolling-pin? I took refuge in verses.
Loving black evil with all thy heart,
O old witch that thou art!
The lady rose still higher in my esteem. See what books she read! She was not like the tailor’s porcelain wife.
When I took back the book, and handed it to her with regret, she said in a tone which invited confidence:
“Did you like it? Had you heard of Pushkin before?”
I had read something about the poet in one of the newspapers, but I wanted her to tell me about him, so I said that I had never heard of him.
Then she briefly told me the life and death of Pushkin, and asked, smiling like a spring day:
“Do you see how dangerous it is to love women?”
All the books I had read had shown me it was really dangerous, but also pleasant, so I said:
“It is dangerous, yet every one falls in love. And women suffer for love, too.”
She looked at me, as she looked at every one, through her lashes, and said gravely:
“You think so? You understand that? Then the best thing I can wish you is that you may not forget it.”
And then she asked me what verses I liked best.
I began to repeat some from memory, with gesticulations. She listened silently and gravely, then rose, and, walking up and down the room, said thoughtfully:
“We shall have to have you taught, my little wild animal. I must think about it. Your employers—are they relatives of yours?”
When I answered in the affirmative she exclaimed: “Oh!” as if she blamed me for it.
She gave me “The Songs of Béranger,” a special edition with engravings, gilt edges, and a red leather binding. These songs made me feel giddy, with their strange mixture of bitter grief and boisterous happiness.
With a cold chill at my heart I read the bitter words of “The Old Beggar.”
Homeless worm, have I disturbed you?
Crush me under your feet!
Why be pitiful? Crush me quickly!
Why is it that you have never taught me,
Nor given me an outlet for my energy?
From the grub an ant might have come.
I might have died in the love of my fellows.
But dying as an old tramp,
I shall be avenged on the world!
And directly after this I laughed till I cried over the “Weeping Husband.” I remembered especially the words of Béranger:
A happy science of life
Is not hard for the simple.
Béranger aroused me to moods of joyfulness, to a desire to be saucy, and to say something rude to people,—rude, sharp words. In a very short time I had become proficient in this art. His verses I learned by heart, and recited them with pleasure to the orderlies, running into the kitchen, where they sat for a few minutes at a time.
But I soon had to give this up because the lines,
But such a hat is not becoming
To a young girl of seventeen,
gave rise to an offensive conversation about girls that made me furiously disgusted, and I hit the soldier Ermokhin over the head with a saucepan. Sidorov and the other orderlies tore me away from his clumsy hands, but I made up my mind from that time to go no more to the officers’ kitchen.
I was not allowed to walk about the streets. In fact, there was no time for it, since the work had so increased. Now, in addition to my usual duties as housemaid, yardman, and errand-boy, I had to nail calico to wide boards, fasten the plans thereto, and copy calculations for my master’s architectural work. I also had to verify the contractor’s accounts, for my master worked from morning to night, like a machine.
At that time the public buildings of the Yarmarka[1] were private property. Rows of shops were built very rapidly, and my master had the contracts for the reconstruction of old shops and the erection of new ones. He drew up plans for the rebuilding of vaults, the throwing out of a dormer-window, and such changes. I took the plans to an old architect, together with an envelop in which was hidden paper money to the value of twenty-five rubles. The architect took the money, and wrote under the plans: “The plans are correct, and the inspection of the work has been performed by me. Imraik.” As a matter of fact, he had not seen the original of the plans, and he could not inspect the work, as he was always obliged to stay at home by reason of his malady.
[1] Market-place.
I used to take bribes to the inspector of the Yarmarka and to other necessary people, from whom I received what the master called papers, which permitted all kinds of illegalities. For this service I obtained the right to wait for my employers at the door on the front steps when they went out to see their friends in the evenings. This did not often happen, but when it did, they never returned until after midnight. I used to sit at the top of the steps, or on the heap of planks opposite them, for hours, looking into the windows of my lady’s flat, thirstily listening to the gay conversation and the music.
The windows were open. Through the curtains and the screen of flowers I could see the fine figures of officers moving about the room. The rotund major waddled about, and she floated about, dressed with astonishing simplicity, but beautifully.
In my own mind I called her “Queen Margot.”
“This is the gay life that they write about
in French books,” I thought, looking in at the window. And I always felt rather sad about it. A childish jealousy made it painful for me to see “Queen Margot” surrounded by men, who buzzed about her like bees over flowers.
Her least-frequent visitor was a tall, unhappy-looking officer, with a furrowed brow and deep-sunken eyes, who always brought his violin with him and played marvelously—so marvelously that the passers-by used to stop under the window, and all the dwellers in the street used to gather round. Even my employers, if they happened to be at home, would open the window, listen, and praise. I never remember their praising any one else except the subdeacon of the cathedral, and I knew that a fish-pie was more pleasing to them than any kind of music.
Sometimes this officer sang, or recited verses in a muffled voice, sighing strangely and pressing his hand to his brow. Once when I was playing under the window with the little girl and “Queen Margot” asked him to sing, he refused for a long time. Then he said clearly:
“Only a song has need of beauty,
While beauty has no need of songs.”
I thought these lines were lovely, and for some reason I felt sorry for the officer.
What I liked best was to look at my lady when she sat at the piano, alone in the room, and played. Music intoxicated me, and I could see nothing but the window, and beyond that, in the yellow light of the lamp, the finely formed figure of the woman, with her haughty profile and her white hands hovering like birds over the keys. I gazed at her, listened to the plaintive music, and dreamed. If I could find some treasure, I would give it all to her, so that she should be rich. If I had been Skobelev, I would have declared war on the Turks again. I would have taken money for ransoms, and built a house for her on the Otkossa, the best site in the whole town, and made her a present of it. If only she would leave this street, where every one talked offensively about her. The neighbors, the servants belonging to our yard, and my employers more than all spoke about “Queen Margot” as evilly and spitefully as they had talked about the tailor’s wife, though more cautiously, with lowered voices, and looking about them as they spoke.
They were afraid of her, probably because she was the widow of a very distinguished man. The writings on the walls of her rooms, too, were privileges bestowed on her husband’s ancestors by the old Russian emperors Goudonov, Alexei, and Peter the Great. This was told me by the soldier Tuphyaev, a man of education, who was always reading the gospels. Or it may have been that people were afraid lest she should thrash them with her whip with the lilac-colored stone in the handle. It was said that she had once struck a person of position with it.
But words uttered under the breath are no better than words uttered aloud. My lady lived in a cloud of enmity—an enmity which I could not understand and which tormented me.
Now that I knew there was another life; that there were different people, feelings, and ideas, this house and all its tenants aroused in me a feeling of disgust that oppressed me more and more. It was entangled in the meshes of a dirty net of disgraceful tittle-tattle, there was not a single person in it of whom evil was not spoken. The regimental chaplain, though he was ill and miserable, had a reputation for being a drunkard and a rake; the officers and their wives were living, according to my employers, in a state of sin; the soldiers’ conversation about women, which ran on the same lines, had become repulsive to me. But my employers disgusted me most of all. I knew too well the real value of their favorite amusement, namely, the merciless judgment of other people. Watching and commenting on the crimes of others was the only amusement in which they could indulge without paying for it. They amused themselves by putting those about them verbally on the rack, and, as it were, revenged themselves on others because they lived so piously, laboriously, and uninterestingly themselves.
When they spoke vilely about “Queen Margot” I was seized by a convulsion of feeling which was not childish at all. My heart swelled with hatred for the backbiters. I was overcome by an irresistible desire to do harm to every one, to be insolent, and sometimes a flood of tormenting pity for myself and every one else swept over me. That dumb pity was more painful than hatred.
I knew more about my queen than they did, and I was always afraid that they would find out what I knew.
On Sundays, when my employers had gone to the cathedral for high mass, I used to go to her the first thing in the morning. She would call me into her bedroom, and I sat in a small arm-chair, upholstered in gold-colored silk, with the little girl on my knee, and told the mother about the books I had read. She lay in a wide bed, with her cheek resting on her small hands, which were clasped together. Her body was hidden under a counterpane, gold in color, like everything else in the bedroom; her dark hair lay in a plait over her swarthy shoulder and her breast, and sometimes fell over the side of the bed till it touched the floor.
As she listened to me she looked into my face with her soft eyes and a hardly perceptible smile and said:
“That’s right.”
Even her kind smile was, in my eyes, the condescending smile of a queen. She spoke in a deep, tender voice, and it seemed to me that it said always:
“I know that I am immeasurably above all other people; no one of them is necessary to me.”
Sometimes I found her before her mirror, sitting in a low chair and doing her hair, the ends of which lay on her knees, over the arms, and back of the chair, and fell almost to the floor. Her hair was as long and thick as grandmother’s. She put on her stockings in my presence, but her clean nudity aroused in me no feeling of shame. I had only a joyful feeling of pride in her. A flowerlike smell always came from her, protecting her from any evil thoughts concerning her.
I felt sure that the love of the kitchen and the pantry was unknown to Queen Margot. She knew something different, a higher joy, a different kind of love.
But one day, late in the afternoon, on going into her drawing-room, I heard from the bedroom the ringing laugh of the lady of my heart. A masculine voice said:
“Wait a minute! Good Lord! I can’t believe—”
I ought to have gone away. I knew that, but I could not.
“Who is that?” she asked. “You? Come in!”
The bedroom was heavy with the odor of flowers. It was darkened, for the curtains were drawn. Queen Margot lay in bed, with the bedclothes drawn up to her chin, and beside her, against the wall, sat, clad only in his shirt, with his chest bared, the officer violinist. On his breast was a scar which lay like a red streak from the right shoulder to the nipple and was so vivid that even in the half-light I could see it distinctly. The hair of the officer was ruffled comically, and for the first time I saw a smile on his sad, furrowed countenance. He was smiling strangely. His large, feminine eyes looked at the “queen” as if it were the first time he had gazed upon her beauty.
“This is my friend,” said Queen Margot. I did not know whether she were referring to me or to him.
“What are you looking so frightened about?” I heard her voice as if from a distance. “Come here.”
When I went to her she placed her hands on my bare neck and said:
“You will grow up and you will be happy. Go along!”
I put the book on the shelf, took another, and went away as best I could.
Something seemed to grate in my heart. Of course I did not think for a moment that my queen loved as other women nor did the officer give me reason to think so. I saw his face before me, with that smile. He was smiling for joy, like a child who has been pleasantly surprised, and his sad face was wonderfully transfigured. He had to love her. Could any one not love her? And she also had cause to bestow her love upon him generously. He played so wonderfully, and could quote poetry so touchingly.
But the very fact that I had to find these consolations showed me clearly that all was not well with my attitude toward what I had seen or even toward Queen Margot herself. I felt that I had lost something, and I lived for several
days in a state of deep dejection. One day I was turbulently and recklessly insolent, and when I went to my lady for a book, she said to me sternly:
“You seem to be a desperate character from what I have heard. I did not know that.”
I could not endure this, and I began to explain how nauseating I found the life I had to lead, and how hard it was for me to hear people speaking ill of her. Standing in front of me, with her hand on my shoulder, she listened at first attentively and seriously; but soon she was laughing and pushing me away from her gently.
“That will do; I know all about it. Do you understand? I know.”
Then she took both my hands and said to me very tenderly:
“The less attention you pay to all that, the better for you. You wash your hands very badly.”
She need not have said this. If she had had to clean the brasses, and wash the floor and the dirty cloths, her hands would not have been any better than mine, I think.
“When a person knows how to live, he is slandered; they are jealous of him. And if he doesn’t know how to live, they despise him,” she said thoughtfully, drawing me to her, and looking into my eyes with a smile. “Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Very much?”
“Yes.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know.”
“Thank you! You are a good boy. I like people to love me.” She smiled, looked as if she were going to say something more, but remained silent, still keeping me in her arms. “Come oftener to see me; come whenever you can.”
I took advantage of this, and she did me a lot of good. After dinner my employers used to lie down, and I used to run down-stairs. If she was at home, I would stay with her for an hour and sometimes even longer.
