The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “I should not have let you go. I should have let you lie in water for three days to wash the foolery out of you,” said the cook.

  Yaakov instantly seized upon his words.

  “True, there is a lot of folly about me, and that is the fact—enough folly for a whole village.”

  Thrusting his fingers into his tight collar, the cook angrily dragged it up, and complained in a tone of vexation:

  “Fiddlesticks! How a villain like you can live, gorge himself, drink, and stroll about the world, beats me. I should like to know what use you are.”

  Munching, the stoker, answered:

  “I don’t know myself. I live, and that is all I can say about it. One man lies down, and another walks about. A chinovnik leads a sedentary life, but every one must eat.”

  The cook was more incensed than ever.

  “You are such a swine that you are absolutely unbearable. Really, pigs’ food—”

  “What are you in such a rage about?” asked Yaakov, surprised. “All men are acorns from the same oak. But don’t you abuse me. It won’t make me any better, you know.”

  This man attracted me and held me at once. I gazed at him with unbounded astonishment, and listened to him with open mouth. I had an idea that he possessed a deep knowledge of life. He said “thou” to every one, looked at every one from under his bushy brows with the same straight and independent glance, and treated every one—the captain, the steward, and the first-class passengers, who were very haughty—as if they were the equals of himself, the sailors, the waiters, and the deck passengers.

  Sometimes he stood before the captain or the chief engineer, with his ape-like hands clasped behind his back, and listened while they scolded him for laziness, or for having unscrupulously won money at cards. He listened, but it was evident that scolding made not the slightest impression upon him, and that the threats to put him off the boat at the first stopping-place did not frighten him. There was something alien about him, as there had been about “Good Business.” Evidently he was aware of his own peculiarities and of the fact that people could not understand him.

  I never once knew this man to be offended, and, when I think of it, do not remember that he was ever silent for long. From his rough mouth and, as it were, despite himself, a stream of words always flowed. When he was being scolded or when he was listening to some interesting story, his lips moved just as if he were repeating what he heard to himself or simply continued speaking quietly to himself. Every day, when he had finished his watch, he climbed out of the stoke-hole, barefooted, sweating, smeared with naphtha, in a wet shirt without a belt, showing his bare chest covered with thick, curly hair, and that very minute his even, monotonous, deep voice could be heard across the deck. His words followed one another like drops of rain.

  “Good morning, Mother! Where are you going? To Chistopol? I know it; I have been there. I lived in the house of a rich Tatar workman; his name was Usan Gubaildulin. The old man had three wives. A robust man he was, with a red face, and one of his wives was young. An amu-u-sing little Tatar girl she was.”

  He had been everywhere, and apparently had committed sin with all the women who had crossed his path. He spoke of every one without malice, calmly, as he had never in his life been hurt or scolded. In a few minutes his voice would be heard in the stern.

  “Good people, who will have a game of cards? Just a little flutter, ei? Cards are a consolation. You can make money sitting down, a profitable undertaking.”

  I noticed that he hardly ever said that anything was good, bad, or abominable, but always that it was amusing, consoling, or curious. A beautiful woman was to him an amusing little female. A fine sunny day was a consoling little day. But more often than anything else he said:

  “I spit upon it!”

  He was looked upon as lazy, but it seemed to me that he performed his laborious task in that infernal, suffocating, and fetid heat as conscientiously as any of the others. I never remember that he complained of weariness or heat, as the other stokers did.

  One day some one stole a purse containing money from one of the old women passengers. It was a clear, quiet evening; every one was amiable and peaceably inclined. The captain gave the old woman five rubles. The passengers also collected a small sum among themselves. When the old woman was given the money, she crossed herself, and bowed low, saying:

  “Kind friends, you have given me three greven too much.”

  Some one cried gayly:

  “Take it all, my good woman,—all that your eyes fall upon. Why do you talk nonsense? No one can have too much.”

  But Yaakov went to the old woman and said quite seriously:

  “Give me what you don’t want; I will play cards with it.”

  The people around laughed, thinking that the stoker was joking, but he went on urging the confused woman perseveringly:

  “Come, give it to me, woman! What do you want the money for? To-morrow you will be in the churchyard.”

  They drove him away with abuse, but he said to me, shaking his head, and greatly surprised:

  “How funny people are! Why do they interfere in what does not concern them? She said herself that she had more than she wanted. And three greven would have been very consoling to me.”

  The very sight of money evidently pleased him. While he was talking he loved to clean the silver and brass on his breeches, and would polish coins till they shone. Moving his eyebrows up and down, he would gaze at them, holding them in his crooked fingers before his snub-nosed face. But he was not avaricious.

  One day he asked me to play with him, but I could not. “You don’t know how?” he cried. “How is that? And you call yourself educated! You must learn. We will play for lumps of sugar.”

  He won from me half a pound of the best sugar, and hid every lump in his furry cheek. As soon as he found that I knew how to play he said:

  “Now we will play seriously for money. Have you any money?”

  “I have five rubles.”

  “And I have two.”

  As may be imagined, he soon won from me. Desiring to have my revenge, I staked my jacket, worth five rubles, and lost. Then I staked my new boots, and lost again. Yaakov said to me, unwillingly, almost crossly:

  “No, you don’t know how to play yet; you get too hot about it. You must go and stake everything, even your boots. I don’t care for that sort of thing. Come, take back your clothes and your money,—four rubles,—and I will keep a ruble for teaching you. Agreed?”

  I was very grateful to him.

  “It is a thing to spit upon,” he said in answer to my thanks. “A game is a game, just an amusement, you know; but you would turn it into a quarrel. And even in a quarrel it doesn’t do to get too warm. You want to calculate the force of your blows. What have you to get in a stew about? You are young; you must learn to hold yourself in. The first time you don’t succeed; five times you don’t succeed; the seventh time—spit! Go away, get yourself cool, and have another go! That is playing the game.”

  He delighted me more and more, and yet he jarred on me. Sometimes his stories reminded me of grandmother. There was a lot in him which attracted me, but his lifelong habit of dull indifference repelled me violently.

  Once at sunset a drunken second-class passenger, a corpulent merchant of Perm, fell overboard, and was carried away, struggling on the red-gold waterway. The engineers hastily shut off steam, and the boat came to a standstill, sending off a cloud of foam from the wheel, which the red beams of the sun made look like blood. In that blood-red, seething, caldron a dark body struggled, already far away from the stern of the boat. Wild cries were heard from the river; one’s heart shook. The passengers also screamed, and jostled one another, rolling about the deck, crowding into the stern. The friend of the drowning man, also drunk, red, and bald, hit out with his fists and roared:

  “Get out of the way! I will soon get him!�
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  Two sailors had already thrown themselves into the water, and were swimming toward the drowning man. The boats were let down. Amid the shouts of the commander and the shrieks of the women Yaakov’s deep voice rang out calmly and evenly:

  “He will be drowned; he will certainly be drowned, because he has his clothes on. Fully dressed as he is, he must certainly drown. Look at women for example. Why do they always drown sooner than men? Because of their petticoats. A woman, when she falls into the water, goes straight to the bottom, like a pound weight. You will see that he will be drowned. I do not speak at random.”

  As a matter of fact, the merchant was drowned. They sought for him for two hours, and failed to find him. His companion, sobered, sat on the deck, and, panting heavily, muttered plaintively:

  “We are almost there. What will happen when we arrive, eh? What will his family say? He had a family.”

  Yaakov stood in front of him, with his hands behind his back, and began to console him.

  “There is nothing to worry about. No one knows when he is destined to die. One man will eat mushrooms, fall ill and die, while thousands of people can eat mushrooms and be all the better for them. Yet one will die. And what are mushrooms?”

  Broad and strong, he stood like a rock in front of the merchant, and poured his words over him like bran. At first the merchant wept silently, wiping the tears from his beard with his broad palms, but when he had heard him out, he roared:

  “What do you mean by torturing me like this? Fellow-Christians, take him away, or there will be murder!”

  Yaakov went away, calmly saying:

  “How funny people are! You go to them out of kindness, and all they do is to abuse you!”

  Sometimes I thought the stoker a fool, but more often I thought that he purposely pretended to be stupid. I asked him straight out about his youth and his wanderings around the world. The result was not what I meant it to be. Throwing his head back, almost closing his dark, copper-colored eyes, he stroked his mossy face with his hand and drawled:

  “People everywhere, Brother,—everywhere,—are simple as ants! And where there are people, there is always trouble, I tell you! The greater number, of course, are peasants. The earth is absolutely strewn with muzhiks,—like autumn leaves, as we say. I have seen the Bulgars, and Greeks, too, and those—what do you call them?—Serbians; Rumanians also, and all kinds of Gipsies. Are there many different sorts? What sort of people? What do you mean by that? In the towns they are townspeople, and in the country—why, they are just like the country people among us. They resemble them in many ways. Some of them even speak our tongue, though badly, as, for instance, the Tatars and the Mordovans. The Greeks cannot speak our language. They chatter whatever comes into their heads, and it sounds like words; but what they say or about what it is impossible to understand. You have to talk on your fingers to them. But my old man managed to talk so that even the Greeks understood him. He muttered something, and they knew what he meant. An artful old man he was. He knew how to work upon them. Again you want to know what sort of people? You funny fellow! What should people be like? They were black, of course; and the Rumanians, too, were of the same faith. The Bulgars are also black, but they hold the same religion as ourselves. As for the Greeks, they are of the same race as the Turks.”

  It seemed to me that he was not telling me all he knew; that there was something which he did not wish to tell. From illustrations in the magazines I knew that the capital of Greece was Athens, an ancient and most beautiful town. But Yaakov shook his head doubtfully as he rejected the idea.

  “They have been telling you lies, my friend. There is no place called Athens, but there is a place called Athon; only it is not a town, but a hill with a monastery on it, and that is all. It is called the Holy Hill of Athon. There are pictures of it; the old man used to sell them. There is a town called Byelgorod, which stands on the Dounai River, built in the style of Yaroslav or Nijni. Their towns are nothing out of the ordinary, but their villages, that is another matter. Their women, too—well, they are absolutely killingly pleasant. I very nearly stayed there altogether for the sake of one. What the deuce was her name?”

  He rubbed his perspiring face hard with the palms of his hands, and his coarse hair clicked softly. In his throat, somewhere deep down, rumbled his laugh, like the rattle of a drum.

  “How forgetful a man can be! And yet, you know, we were—When she said good-by to me—she cried, and I cried, too. Good—go-o—” Calmly and with an entire absence of reticence, he began to instruct me in the way to behave to women.

  We were sitting on the deck. The warm moonlight night swam to meet us; the meadow-land of the shore was hardly visible beyond the silver water. In the heavens twinkled yellow lights; these were certain stars which had been captivated by the earth. All around there was movement, sleeplessly palpitating, quiet; but real life was going on. Into this pleasant, melancholy silence fell the hoarse words:

  “And so we let go of each other’s hands and parted.”

  Yaakov’s stories were immodest, but not repulsive, for they were neither boastful nor cruel, and there was a ring of artlessness and sorrow in them. The moon in the sky was also shamelessly naked, and moved me in the same way, setting me fretting for I knew not what. I remembered only what was good, the very best thing in my life—Queen Margot and the verses, unforgettable in their truth:

  Only a song has need of beauty,

  While beauty has no need of songs.

  Shaking off this dreamy mood as if it had been a light doze, I again asked the stoker about his life and what he had seen.

  “You’re a funny fellow,” he said. “What am I to tell you? I have seen everything. You ask have I seen a monastery? I have. Traktirs? I have seen them also. I have seen the life of a gentleman and the life of a peasant. I have lived well-fed, and I have lived hungry.”

  Slowly, as if he were crossing a deep stream by a shaky, dangerous bridge, he recalled the past.

  “For instance, I was sitting in the police station after the horse-stealing affair. ‘They will send me to Siberia,’ I was thinking when the constable began to rage because the stove in his new house smoked. I said to him, ‘This is a business which I can set right for you, your Honor,’ He shut me up. ‘It is a thing,’ he grumbled, ‘which the cleverest workman could not manage.’ Then I said to him, ‘Sometimes a shepherd is cleverer than a general.’ I felt very brave toward every one just then. Nothing mattered now, with Siberia before me. ‘All right; try,’ he said, ‘but if it smokes worse afterwards I will break all your bones for you.’ In two days I had finished the work. The constable was astonished. ‘Ach!’ he cried, ‘you fool, you blockhead! Why, you are a skilled workman, and you steal horses! How is it?’ I said to him, ‘That was simply a piece of foolery, your Honor.’ ‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘it was foolery. I am sorry for you.’ ‘Yes, I am sorry,’ he repeated. Do you see? A man in the police force, carrying out his duties without remorse, and yet he was sorry for me.”

  “Well, what happened then?” I asked him.

  “Nothing. He was sorry for me. What else should happen?”

  “What was the use of pitying you? You are like a stone.”

  Yaakov laughed good-naturedly.

  “Funny fellow! A stone, you say? Well, one may feel for stones. A stone also serves in its proper place; streets are paved with stones. One ought to pity all kinds of materials; nothing is in its place by chance. What is soil? Yet little blades of grass grow in it.”

  When the stoker spoke like this, it was quite clear to me that he knew something more than I could grasp.

  “What do you think of the cook?” I asked him.

  “Of Medvyejenok?” said Yaakov, calmly. “What do I think of him? There is nothing to think about him at all.”

  That was true. Ivan Ivanovich was so strictly correct and smooth that one’s thoughts could get no grip on h
im. There was only one interesting thing about him: he loved the stoker, was always scolding him, and yet always invited him to tea.

  One day he said to him:

  “If you had been my serf and I had been your master, I would have flogged you seven times each week, you sluggard!”

  Yaakov replied in a serious tone:

  “Seven times? That’s rather a lot!”

  Although he abused the stoker, the cook for some reason or other fed him with all kinds of things. He would throw a morsel to him roughly and say:

  “There. Gobble it up!”

  Yaakov would devour it without any haste, saying:

  “I am accumulating a reserve of strength through you, Ivan Ivanovich.”

  “And what is the use of strength to you, lazy-bones?”

  “What is the use? Why, I shall live all the longer for it.”

  “Why should you live, useless one?”

  “But useless people go on living. Besides, you know, it is very amusing to be alive, isn’t it? Living, Ivan Ivanovich, is a very comforting business.”

  “What an idiot!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I-di-ot!”

  “There’s a way of speaking!” said Yaakov in amazement, and Medvyejenok said to me:

  “Just think of it! We dry up our blood and roast the marrow out of our bones in that infernal heat at the stoves while he guzzles like a boar!”

  “Every one must work out his own fate,” said the stoker, masticating.

  I knew that to stoke the furnaces was heavier and hotter work than to stand at the stove, for I had tried several times at night to stoke with Yaakov, and it seemed strange to me that he did not enlighten the cook with regard to the heaviness of his labors. Yes, this man certainly had a peculiar knowledge of his own.

  They all scolded him,—the captain, the engineer, the first mate, all of those who must have known he was not lazy. I thought it very strange. Why did they not appraise him rightly? The stokers behaved considerably better to him than the rest although they made fun of his incessant chatter and his love of cards.