by Maxim Gorky
He told me, as if he were telling a dream, the story of his first love for the housemaid of the architect to whom he had been apprenticed. Softly splashed the gray water, washing the corners of the buildings; beyond the cathedral dully gleamed a watery waste; black twigs rose here and there above it. In the icon-painter’s workshop they often sang the Seminarski song:
“O blue sea,
Stormy sea.…”
That blue sea must have been deadly dull.
“I never slept at nights,” went on my master. “Sometimes I got out of bed and stood at her door, shivering like a dog. It was a cold house! The master visited her at night. He might have discovered me, but I was not afraid, not I!”
He spoke thoughtfully, like a person looking at an old worn-out coat, and wondering if he could wear it once more.
“She noticed me, pitied me, unfastened her door, and called me: ‘Come in, you little fool.’”
I had heard many stories of this kind, and they bored me, although there was one pleasing feature about them—almost every one spoke of their “first love” without boasting, or obscenity, and often so gently and sadly that I understood that the story of their first love was the best in their lives.
Laughing and shaking his head, my master exclaimed wonderingly:
“But that’s the sort of thing you don’t tell your wife; no, no! Well, there’s no harm in it, but you never tell. That’s a story—”
He was telling the story to himself, not to me. If he had been silent, I should have spoken. In that quietness and desolation one had to talk, or sing, or play on the harmonica, or one would fall into a heavy, eternal sleep in the midst of that dead town, drowned in gray, cold water.
“In the first place, don’t marry too soon,” he counseled me. “Marriage, brother, is a matter of the most stupendous importance. You can live where you like and how you like, according to your will. You can live in Persia as a Mahommedan; in Moscow as a man about town. You can arrange your life as you choose. You can give everything a trial. But a wife, brother, is like the weather—you can never rule her! You can’t take a wife and throw her aside like an old boot.”
His face changed. He gazed into the gray water with knitted brows, rubbing his prominent nose with his fingers, and muttered:
“Yes, brother, look before you leap. Let us suppose that you are beset on all sides, and still continue to stand firm; even then there is a special trap laid for each one of us.”
We were now amongst the vegetation in the lake of Meshtcherski, which was fed by the Volga.
“Row softly,” whispered my master, pointing his gun into the bushes. After he had shot a few lean woodcocks, he suggested:
“Let us go to Kunavin Street. I will spend the evening there, and you can go home and say that I am detained by the contractors.”
Setting him down at one of the streets on the outskirts of the town, which was also flooded, I returned to the market-place on the Stravelka, moored the boat, and sitting in it, gazed at the confluence of the two rivers, at the town, the steamboats, the sky, which was just like the gorgeous wing of some gigantic bird, all white feathery clouds. The golden sun peeped through the blue gaps between the clouds, and with one glance at the earth transfigured everything thereon. Brisk, determined movement went on all around me: the swift current of the rivers lightly bore innumerable planks of wood; on these planks bearded peasants stood firmly, wielding long poles and shouting to one another, or to approaching steamers. A little steamer was pulling an empty barge against the stream. The river dragged at it, and shook it. It turned its nose round like a pike and panted, firmly setting its wheels against the water, which was rushing furiously to meet it. On a barge with their legs hanging over the side sat four peasants, shoulder to shoulder. One of them wore a red shirt, and sang a song the words of which I could not hear, but I knew it.
I felt that here on the living river I knew all, was in touch with all, and could understand all; and the town which lay flooded behind me was an evil dream, an imagination of my master’s, as difficult to understand as he was himself.
When I had satiated myself by gazing at all there was to see, I returned home, feeling that I was a grown man, capable of any kind of work. On the way I looked from the hill of the Kreml on to the Volga in the distance. From the hill, the earth appeared enormous, and promised all that one could possibly desire.
I had books at home. In the flat which Queen Margot had occupied there now lived a large family,—five young ladies, each one more beautiful than the others, and two schoolboys—and these people used to give me books. I read Turgenieff with avidity, amazed to find how intelligible, simple, and pellucid as autumn he was; how pure were his characters, and how good everything was about which he succinctly discoursed. I read Pomyalovski’s “Bourse” and was again amazed; it was so strangely like the life in the icon-painting workshop. I was so well acquainted with that desperate tedium which precipitated one into cruel pranks. I enjoyed reading Russian books. I always felt that there was something about them familiar and melancholy, as if there were hidden in their pages the frozen sound of the Lenten bell, which pealed forth softly as soon as one opened a book.
“Dead Souls” I read reluctantly; “Letters from the House of the Dead,” also. “Dead Souls,” “Dead Houses,” “Three Deaths,” “Living Relics”—these books with titles so much alike arrested my attention against my will, and aroused a lethargic repugnance for all such books. “Signs of the Times,” “Step by Step,” “What to Do,” and “Chronicles of the Village of Smourin,” I did not care for, nor any other books of the same kind. But I was delighted with Dickens and Walter Scott. I read these authors with the greatest enjoyment, the same books over and over again. The works of Walter Scott reminded me of a high mass on a great feast day in rich churches—somewhat long and tedious, but always solemn. Dickens still remains to me as the author to whom I respectfully bow; he was a man who had a wonderful apprehension of that most difficult of arts—love of human nature.
In the evenings a large company of people used to gather on the roof: the brothers K. and their sisters, grown up; the snub-nosed schoolboy, Vyacheslav Semashko; and sometimes Miss Ptitzin, the daughter of an important official, appeared there, too. They talked of books and poetry. This was something which appealed to me, and which I could understand; I had read more than all of them together. But sometimes they talked about the high school, and complained about the teachers. When I listened to these recitals, I felt that I had more liberty than my friends, and was amazed at their patience. And yet I envied them; they had opportunities of learning!
My comrades were older than I, but I felt that I was the elder. I was keener-witted, more experienced than they. This worried me somewhat; I wanted to feel more in touch with them. I used to get home late in the evening, dusty and dirty, steeped in impressions very different from theirs—in the main very monotonous. They talked a lot about young ladies, and of being in love with this one and that one, and they used to try their hands at writing poetry. They frequently solicited my help in this matter. I willingly applied myself to versification, and it was easy for me to find the rhymes, but for some reason or other my verses always took a humorous turn, and I never could help associating Miss Ptitzin, to whom the poetry was generally dedicated, with fruits and vegetables.
Semashko said to me:
“Do you call that poetry? It is as much like poetry as hobnails would be.”
Not wishing to be behind them in anything, I also fell in love with Miss Ptitzin. I do not remember how I declared my feelings, but I know that the affair ended badly. On the stagnant green water of the Zvyezdin Pond floated a plank, and I proposed to give the young lady a ride on it. She agreed. I brought the log to the bank; it held me alone quite well. But when the gorgeously dressed young lady, all ribbons and lace, graciously stepped on the other end, and I proudly pushed off with a stick, the accursed log rolled away
from under us and my young lady went head over heels into the water.
I threw myself in knightly fashion after her, and swiftly brought her to shore. Fright and the green mire of the pond had quite destroyed her beauty! Shaking her wet fist at me threateningly, she cried:
“You threw me in the water on purpose!”
And refusing to believe in the sincerity of my protestations, from that time she treated me as an enemy.
On the whole, I did not find living in the town very interesting. My old mistress was as hostile as she had ever been; the young one regarded me with contempt; Victorushka more freckled than ever, snorted at every one, and was everlastingly aggrieved about something.
My master had many plans to draw. He could not get through all the work with his brother, and so he engaged my stepfather as assistant.
One day I came home from the market-place early, about five o’clock, and going into the dining-room, saw the man whose existence I had forgotten, at the table beside the master. He held his hand out to me.
“How do you do?”
I drew back at the unexpectedness of it. The fire of the past had been suddenly rekindled, and burned my heart.
My stepfather looked at me with a smile on his terribly emaciated face; his dark eyes were larger than ever. He looked altogether worn out and depressed. I placed my hand in his thin, hot fingers.
“Well, so we’ve met again,” he said, coughing.
I left them, feeling as weak as if I had been beaten.
Our manner to each other was cautious and restrained; he called me by my first name and my patronymic, and spoke to me as an equal.
“When you go to the shops, please buy me a quarter of a pound of Lapherm’s tobacco, a hundred packets of Vitcorson’s, and a pound of boiled sausage.”
The money which he gave me was always unpleasantly heated by his hot hands. It was plain that he was a consumptive, and not long to be an inhabitant of this earth. He knew this, and would say in a calm, deep voice, twisting his pointed black beard:
“My illness is almost incurable. However, if I take plenty of meat I may get better—I may get better.”
He ate an unbelievably large amount; he smoked cigarettes, which were only out of his lips when he was eating. Every day I bought him sausages, ham, sardines, but grandmother’s sister said with an air of certainty, and for some reason maliciously:
“It is no use to feed Death with dainties; you cannot deceive him.”
The mistress regarded my stepfather with an air of injury, reproachfully advised him to try this or that medicine, but made fun of him behind his back.
“A fine gentleman? The crumbs ought to be swept up more often in the dining-room, he says; crumbs cause the flies to multiply, he says.”
The young mistress said this, and the old mistress repeated after her:
“What do you mean—a fine gentleman! With his coat all worn and shiny, and he always scraping it with a clothes-brush. He is so faddy; there must not be a speck of dust on it!”
But the master spoke soothingly to them:
“Be patient, wild fowl, he will soon be dead!” This senseless hostility of the middle class toward a man of good birth somehow drew me and my stepfather closer together. The crimson agaric is an unwholesome fungus, yet it is so beautiful. Suffocated among these people, my stepfather was like a fish which had accidentally fallen into a fowl-run—an absurd comparison, as everything in that life was absurd.
I began to find in him resemblances to “Good Business”—a man whom I could never forget. I adorned him and my Queen with the best that I got out of books. I gave them all that was most pure in me, all the fantasies born of my reading. My stepfather was just such another man, aloof and unloved, as “Good Business.” He behaved alike to every one in the house, never spoke first, and answered questions put to him with a peculiar politeness and brevity. I was delighted when he taught my masters. Standing at the table, bent double, he would tap the thick paper with his dry nails, and suggest calmly:
“Here you will have to have a keystone. That will halve the force of the pressure; otherwise the pillar will crash through the walls.”
“That’s true, the devil take it,” muttered the master, and his wife said to him, when my stepfather had gone out:
“It is simply amazing to me that you can allow any one to teach you your business like that!”
For some reason she was always especially irritated when my stepfather cleaned his teeth and gargled after supper, protruding his harshly outlined Adam’s apple.
“In my opinion,” she would say in a sour voice, “it is injurious to you to bend your head back like that, Evgen Vassilvich!”
Smiling politely he asked:
“Why?’
“Because—I am sure it is.”
He began to clean his bluish nails with a tiny bone stick.
“He is cleaning his nails again; well, I never!” exclaimed the mistress. “He is dying—and there he is.”
“Ekh!” sighed the master. “What a lot of stupidity has flourished in you, wild fowl!”
“Why do you say that?” asked his wife, confused. But the old mistress complained passionately to God at night:
“Lord, they have laid that rotten creature on my shoulders, and Victor is again pushed on one side.” Victorushka began to mock the manners of my stepfather,—his leisurely walk, the assured movements of his lordly hands, his skill in tying a cravat, and his dainty way of eating. He would ask coarsely: “Maximov, what’s the French for ‘knee’?”
“I am called Evgen Vassilevich,” my stepfather reminded him calmly.
“All right. Well, what is ‘the chest’?”
Victorushka would say to his mother at supper: “Ma mère, donnez moi encore du pickles!”
“Oh, you Frenchman!” the old woman would say, much affected.
My stepfather, as unmoved as if he were deaf or dumb, chewed his meat without looking at any one. One day the elder brother said to the younger: “Now that you are learning French, Victor, you ought to have a mistress.”
This was the only time I remember seeing my stepfather smile quietly.
But the young mistress let her spoon fall on the table in her agitation, and cried to her husband:
“Aren’t you ashamed to talk so disgustingly before me?”
Sometimes my stepfather came to me in the dark vestibule, where I slept under the stairs which led to the attic, and where, sitting on the stairs by the window, I used to read.
“Reading?” he would say, blowing out smoke. There came a hissing sound from his chest like the hissing of a fire-stick. “What is the book?”
I showed it to him.
“Ah,” he said, glancing at the title, “I think I have read it. Will you smoke?”
We smoked, looking out of the window onto the dirty yard. He said:
“It is a great pity that you cannot study; it seems to me that you have ability.”
“I am studying; I read.”
“That is not enough; you need a school; a system.” I felt inclined to say to him:
“You had the advantages of both school and system, my fine fellow, and what is the result?”
But he added, as if he had read my thoughts: “Given the proper disposition, a school is a good educator. Only very well educated people make any mark in life.”
But once he counseled me:
“You would be far better away from here. I see no sense or advantage to you in staying.”
“I like the work.”
“Ah—what do you find to like?”
“I find it interesting to work with them.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
But one day he said:
“What trash they are in the main, our employers—trash!”
When I remembered how and when my mother had ut
tered that word, I involuntarily drew back from him. He asked, smiling:
“Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, they are; I can see that.”
“But I like the master, anyhow.”
“Yes, you are right; he is a worthy man, but strange.”
I should have liked to talk with him about books, but it was plain that he did not care for them, and one day he advised me:
“Don’t be led away; everything is very much embellished in books, distorted one way or another. Most writers of books are people like our master, small people.”
Such judgments seemed very daring to me, and quite corrupted me.
On the same occasion he asked me:
“Have you read any of Goncharov’s works?”
‘The Frigate Palada.’”
“That’s a dull book. But really, Goncharov is the cleverest writer in Russia. I advise you to read his novel, ‘Oblomov.’ That is by far the truest and most daring book he wrote; in fact, it is the best book in Russian literature.”
Of Dickens’ works he said:
“They are rubbish, I assure you. But there is a most interesting thing running in the ‘Nova Vremya,’—’The Temptation of St. Anthony.’ You read it? Apparently you like all that pertains to the church, and ‘The Temptation’ ought to be a profitable subject for you.”
He brought me a bundle of papers containing the serial, and I read Flaubert’s learned work. It reminded me of the innumerable lives of holy men, scraps of history told by the valuers, but it made no very deep impression on me. I much preferred the “Memoirs of Upilio Faimali, Tamer of Wild Beasts,” which was printed alongside of it.
When I acknowledged this fact to my stepfather, he remarked coolly:
“That means that you are still too young to read such things? However, don’t forget about that book.”
Sometimes he would sit with me for a long time without saying a word, just coughing and puffing out smoke continuously. His beautiful eyes burned painfully, and I looked at him furtively, and forgot that this man, who was dying so honestly and simply, without complaint, had once been so closely related to my mother, and had insulted her. I knew that he lived with some sort of seamstress, and thought of her with wonder and pity. How could she not shrink from embracing those lanky bones, from kissing that mouth which gave forth such an oppressive odor of putrescence? Just like “Good Business,” my stepfather often uttered peculiarly characteristic sayings:
