by Maxim Gorky
“You must read Russian books; you must know all about Russian life.”
She taught me, sticking hair-pins into her fragrant hair with rosy fingers. And she enumerated the Russian authors, adding:
“Will you remember them?”
She often said thoughtfully, and with an air of slight vexation:
“We must have you taught, and I am always forgetting. Ach, my God!”
After sitting with her, I ran down-stairs with a new book in my hands, feeling as if I had been washed inside.
I had already read Aksakov’s “Family Chronicle,” the glorious Russian poem “In the Forests,” the amazing “Memoirs of a Hunter,” several volumes of Grebenkov and Solugub, and the poetry of Venevitinov, Odoevski, and Tutchev. These books laved my soul, washing away the husks of barren and bitter reality. I felt that these were good books, and realized that they were indispensable to me. One result of reading them was that I gained a firm conviction that I was not alone in the world, and the fact that I should not be lost took root in my soul.
When grandmother came to see me I used to tell her joyfully about Queen Margot, and she, taking a pinch of snuff with great enjoyment, said heartily:
“Well, well; that is very nice. You see, there are plenty of good people about. You only have to look for them, and then you will find them.”
And one day she suggested:
“How would it be if I went to her and said thank you for what she does for you?”
“No; it is better not.”
“Well, if you don’t want me to——Lord! Lord! how good it all is! I would like to go on living for ever and ever!”
Queen Margot never carried out her project of having me taught, for an unpleasant affair happened on the feast of the Holy Trinity that nearly ruined me.
Not long before the holiday my eyelids became terribly swollen, and my eyes were quite closed up. My employers were afraid that I should go blind, and I also was afraid. They took me to the well-known doctor, Genrikh Rodzevich, who lanced my eyelids and for days I lay with my eyes bandaged, in tormenting, black misery. The day before the feast of the Trinity my bandages were taken off, and I walked about once more, feeling as if I had come back from a grave in which I had been laid alive. Nothing can be more terrible than to lose one’s sight. It is an unspeakable injury which takes away a hundred worlds from a man.
The joyful day of the Holy Trinity arrived, and, as an invalid, I was off duty from noon and went to the kitchen to pay a visit to the orderlies. All of them, even the strict Tuphyaev, were drunk, and toward evening Ermokhin struck Sidorov on the head with a block of wood. The latter fell senseless to the ground, and Ermokhin, terrified, ran out to the causeway.
An alarming rumor that Sidorov had been murdered soon spread over the yard. People gathered on the steps and looked at the soldier stretched motionless across the threshold. There were whispers that the police ought to be sent for, but no one went to fetch them, and no one could be persuaded to touch the soldier.
Then the washerwoman Natalia Kozlovski, in a new, blue frock, with a white neckerchief, appeared on the scene. She pushed the people aside angrily, went into the entrance passage, squatted down, and said loudly:
“Fools! He is alive! Give me some water!”
They began to protest.
“Don’t meddle with what is not your business!”
“Water, I tell you!” she cried, as if there were a fire. She lifted her new frock over her knees in a businesslike manner, spread out her underskirt, and laid the soldier’s bleeding head on her knees.
The crowd dispersed, disapproving and fearful.
In the dim light of the passage I could see the eyes of the washerwoman full of tears, flashing angrily in her white, round face. I took her a pail of water, and she ordered me to throw it over the head and breast of Sidorov with the caution:
“Don’t spill it over me. I am going to pay a visit to some friends.”
The soldier came to himself, opened his dull eyes, and moaned.
“Lift him up,” said Natalia, holding him under the armpits with her hands outstretched lest he should soil her frock. We carried the soldier into the kitchen and laid him on the bed. She wiped his face with a wet cloth, and went away, saying:
“Soak the cloth in water and hold it to his head. I will go and find that fool. Devils! I suppose they won’t be satisfied until they have drunk themselves into prison.”
She went out, after slipping her soiled underpetticoat to the floor, flinging it into a corner and carefully smoothing out her rustling, crumpled frock.
Sidorov stretched himself, hiccupped, sighed. Warm drops of thick blood fell on my bare feet from his head. This was unpleasant, but I was too frightened to move my feet away from those drops.
It was bitter. The sun shone festively out in the yard; the steps of the houses and the gate were decorated with young birch; to each pedestal were tied freshly cut branches of maple and mountain ash. The whole street was gay with foliage; everything was young, new. Ever since the morning I had felt that the spring holiday had come to stay, and that it had made life cleaner, brighter, and happier.
The soldier was sick. The stifling odor of warm vodka and green onion filled the kitchen. Against the window were pressed dull, misty, broad faces, with flattened noses, and hands held against their cheeks, which made them look hideous.
The soldier muttered as he recollected himself:
“What happened to me? Did I fall, Ermokhin? Go-o-od comrade!” Then he began to cough, wept drunken tears, and groaned, “My little sister! my little sister!”
He stood up, tottering, wet. He staggered, and, falling back heavily upon the bed, said, rolling his eyes strangely:
“They have quite killed me!”
This struck me as funny.
“What the devil are you laughing at?” he asked, looking at me dully. “What is there to laugh at? I am killed forever!”
He began to hit out at me with both hands, muttering:
“The first time was that of Elias the prophet; the second time, St. George on his steed; the third—Don’t come near me! Go away, wolf!”
“Don’t be a fool!” I said.
He became absurdly angry, roared, and stamped his feet.
“I am killed, and you—”
With his heavy, slow, dirty hand he struck me in the eyes. I set up a howl, and blindly made for the yard, where I ran into Natalia leading Ermokhin by the arm, crying: “Come along, horse! What is the matter with you?” she asked, catching hold of me.
“He has come to himself.”
“Come to himself, eh?” she drawled in amazement. And drawing Ermokhin along, she said, “Well, werwolf, you may thank your God for this!”
I washed my eyes with water, and, looking through the door of the passage, saw the soldiers make their peace, embracing each other and crying. Then they both tried to embrace Natalia, but she hit out at them, shouting:
“Take your paws off me, curs! What do you take me for? Make haste and get to sleep before your masters come home, or there will be trouble for you!”
She made them lie down as if they were little children, the one on the floor, the other on the pallet-bed, and when they began to snore, came out into the porch.
“I am in a mess, and I was dressed to go out visiting, too! Did he hit you? What a fool! That’s what it does—vodka! Don’t drink, little fellow, never drink.”
Then I sat on the bench at the gate with her, and asked how it was that she was not afraid of drunken people.
“I am not afraid of sober people, either. If they come near me, this is what they get!” She showed me her tightly clenched, red fist. “My dead husband was also given to drink too much, and once when he was drunk I tied his hands and feet. When he had slept it off, I gave him a birching for his health. ‘Don’t drink; don’t get drunk when you
are married,’ I said. ‘Your wife should be your amusement, and not vodka.’ Yes, I scolded him until I was tired, and after that he was like wax in my hands.”
“You are strong,” I said, remembering the woman Eve, who deceived even God Himself.
Natalia replied, with a sigh:
“A woman needs more strength than a man. She has to have strength enough for two, and God has bestowed it upon her. Man is an unstable creature.”
She spoke calmly, without malice, sitting with her arms folded over her large bosom, resting her back against the fence, her eyes fixed sadly on the dusty gutter full of rubbish. Listening to her clever talk, I forgot all about the time. Suddenly I saw my master coming along arm in arm with the mistress. They were walking slowly, pompously, like a turkey-cock with his hen, and, looking at us attentively, said something to each other.
I ran to open the front door for them, and as she came up the steps the mistress said to me, venomously:
“So you are courting the washerwoman? Are you learning to carry on with ladies of that low class?”
This was so stupid that it did not even annoy me but I felt offended when the master said, laughing:
“What do you expect? It is time.”
The next morning when I went into the shed for the wood I found an empty purse, in the square hole which was made for the hook of the door. As I had seen it many times in the hands of Sidorov I took it to him at once.
“Where is the money gone?” he asked, feeling inside the purse with his fingers. “Thirty rubles there were! Give them here!”
His head was enveloped in a turban formed of a towel. Looking yellow and wasted, he blinked at me angrily with his swollen eyes, and refused to believe that I had found the purse empty.
Ermokhin came in and backed him up, shaking his head at me.
“It is he who has stolen it. Take him to his master. Soldiers do not steal from soldiers.”
These words made me think that he had stolen the money himself and had thrown the purse into my shed. I called out to his face, without hesitation:
“Liar! You stole it yourself!”
I was convinced that I had guessed right when I saw his wooden face drawn crooked with fear and rage. As he writhed, he cried shrilly:
“Prove it!”
How could I prove it? Ermokhin dragged me, with a shout, across the yard. Sidorov followed us, also shouting. Several people put their heads out of the windows. The mother of Queen Margot looked on, smoking calmly. I realized that I had fallen in the esteem of my lady, and I went mad.
I remember the soldiers dragging me by the arms and my employers standing before them, sympathetically agreeing with them, as they listened to the complaint. Also the mistress saying:
“Of course he took it! He was courting the washerwoman at the gate last evening, and he must have had some money. No one gets anything from her without money.”
“That’s true,” cried Ermokhin.
I was swept off my feet, consumed by a wild rage. I began to abuse the mistress, and was soundly beaten.
But it was not so much the beating which tortured me as the thought of what my Queen Margot was now thinking of me. How should I ever set myself right in her eyes? Bitter were my thoughts in that dreadful time. I did not strangle myself only because I had not the time to do so.
Fortunately for me, the soldiers spread the story over the whole yard, the whole street, and in the evening, as I lay in the attic, I heard the loud voice of Natalia Kozlovski below.
“No! Why should I hold my tongue? No, my dear fellow, get away! Get along with you! Go away, I say! If you don’t, I will go to your gentleman, and he will give you something!”
I felt at once that this noise was about me. She was shouting near our steps; her voice rang out loudly and triumphantly.
“How much money did you show me yesterday? Where did you get it from? Tell us!”
Holding my breath with joy, I heard Sidorov drawl sadly:
“Aie! aie! Ermokhin—”
“And the boy has had the blame for it? He has been beaten for it, eh?”
I felt like running down to the yard, dancing there for joy, kissing the washerwoman out of gratitude; but at that moment, apparently from the window, my mistress cried:
“The boy was beaten because he was insolent. No one believed that he was a thief except you, you slut!”
“Slut yourself, madam! You are nothing better than a cow, if you will permit me to say so.”
I listened to this quarrel as if it were music. My heart burned with hot tears of self-pity, and gratitude to Natalia. I held my breath in the effort to keep them back.
Then the master came slowly up to the attic, sat on a projecting beam near me, and said, smoothing his hair:
“Well, brother Pyeshkov, and so you had nothing to do with it?”
I turned my face away without speaking.
“All the same, your language was hideous,” he went on. I announced quietly:
“As soon as I can get up I shall leave you.”
He sat on in silence, smoking a cigarette. Looking fixedly at its end, he said in a low voice:
“What of it? That is your business. You are not a little boy any longer; you must look about and see what is the best thing for yourself.”
Then he went away. As usual, I felt sorry for him.
Four days after this I left that house. I had a passionate desire to say good-by to Queen Margot, but I had not the audacity to go to her, though I confess I thought that she would have sent for me herself.
When I bade good-by to the little girl I said:
“Tell your mother that I thank her very much, will you?”
“Yes, I will,” she promised, and she smiled lovingly and tenderly. “Good-by till to-morrow, eh? Yes?”
I met her again twenty years later, married to an officer in the gendarmerie.
CHAPTER XI
Once more I became a washer-up on a steamboat, the Perm, a boat as white as a swan, spacious, and swift. This time I was a “black” washer-up, or a “kitchen man.” I received seven rubles a month, and my duties were to help the cook.
The steward, stout and bloated, was as bald as a billiard-ball. He walked heavily up and down the deck all day long with his hands clasped behind his back, like a boar looking for a shady corner on a sultry day. His wife flaunted herself in the buffet. She was a woman of about forty, handsome, but faded, and so thickly powdered that her colored dress was covered with the white, sticky dust that fell from her cheeks.
The kitchen was ruled over by an expensive cook, Ivan Ivanovich, whose surname was Medvyejenok. He was a small, stout man, with an aquiline nose and mocking eyes. He was a coxcomb, wore starched collars, and shaved every day. His cheeks were dark blue, and his dark mustaches curled upward. He spent all his spare moments in the arrangement of these mustaches, pulling at them with fingers stained by his work at the stove, and looking at them in a small handglass.
The most interesting person on the boat was the stoker, Yaakov Shumov, a broad-chested, square man. His snub-nosed face was as smooth as a spade; his coffee-colored eyes were hidden under thick eyebrows; his cheeks were covered with small, bristling hairs, like the moss which is found in marshes; and the same sort of hair, through which he could hardly pass his crooked fingers, formed a close-fitting cap for his head.
He was skilful in games of cards for money, and his greed was amazing. He was always hanging about the kitchen like a hungry dog, asking for pieces of meat and bones. In the evenings he used to take his tea with Medvyejenok and relate amazing stories about himself. In his youth he had been assistant to the town shepherd of Riazin. Then a passing monk lured him into a monastery, where he served for four years.
“And I should have become a monk, a black star of God,” he said in his quick, comical way, “if a pilgrim had not come to o
ur cloister from Penza. She was very entertaining, and she upset me. ‘Eh, you’re a fine strong fellow,’ says she, ‘and I am a respectable widow and lonely. You shall come to me,’ she says. ‘I have my own house, and I deal in eider-down and feathers.’ That suited me, and I went to her. I became her lover, and lived with her as comfortably as warm bread in a oven, for three years.”
“You lie hardily,” Medvyejenok interrupted him, anxiously examining a pimple on his nose. “If lies could make money, you would be worth thousands.”
Yaakov hummed. The blue, bristling hairs moved on his impassive face, and his shaggy mustaches quivered. After he had heard the cook’s remark he continued as calmly and quickly as before:
“She was older than I, and she began to bore me. Then I must go and take up with her niece, and she found it out, and turned me out by the scruff of the neck.”
“And served you right, you did not deserve anything better,” said the cook as easily and smoothly as Yaakov himself.
The stoker went on, with a lump of sugar in his cheek:
“I was at a loose end till I came across an old Volodimerzian peddler. Together we wandered all over the world. We went to the Balkan Hills to Turkey itself, to Rumania, and to Greece, to different parts of Austria. We visited every nation. Wherever there were likely to be buyers, there we went, and sold our goods.”
“And stole others?” asked the cook, gravely.
“‘No? no!’ the old man said to me. ‘You must act honestly in a strange land, for they are so strict here, it is said, that they will cut off your head for a mere nothing.’ It is true that I did try to steal, but the result was not at all consoling. I managed to get a horse away from the yard of a certain merchant, but I had done no more than that when they caught me, knocked me about, and dragged me to the police station. There were two of us. The other was a real horse-stealer, but I did it only for the fun of the thing. But I had been working at the merchant’s house, putting in a new stove for his bath, and the merchant fell ill, and had bad dreams about me, which alarmed him, so that he begged the magistrate, ‘Let him go,’—that was me, you know,—‘let him go; for I have had dreams about him, and if you don’t let him off, you will never be well. It is plain that he is a wizard.’ That was me, if you please—a wizard! However, the merchant was a person of influence, and they let me go.”
