by Maxim Gorky
“I love hounds; they are stupid, but I love them. They are very beautiful. Beautiful women are often stupid, too.”
I thought, not without pride:
“Ah, if he had only known Queen Margot!”
“People who live for a long time in the same house all have the same kind of face,” was one of his sayings which I wrote down in my note-book.
I listened for these sayings of his, as if they had been treats. It was pleasant to hear unusual, literary words used in a house where every one spoke a colorless language, which had hardened into well-worn, undiversified forms. My stepfather never spoke to me of my mother; he never even uttered her name. This pleased me, and aroused in me a feeling of sympathetic consideration for him.
Once I asked him about God—I do not remember what brought up the subject. He looked at me, and said very calmly:
“I don’t know. I don’t believe in God.”
I remembered Sitanov, and told my stepfather about him. Having listened attentively to me, he observed, still calmly:
“He was in doubt; and those who are in doubt must believe in something. As for me, I simply do not believe——”
“But is that possible?”
“Why not? You can see for yourself I don’t believe.”
I saw nothing, except that he was dying. I hardly pitied him; my first feeling was one of keen and genuine interest in the nearness of a dying person, in the mystery of death.
Here was a man sitting close to me, his knee touching mine, warm, sensate, calmly regarding people in the light of their relations to himself; speaking about everything like a person who possessed power to judge and to settle affairs; in whom lay something necessary to me, or something good, blended with something unnecessary to me. This being of incomprehensible complexity was the receptacle of continuous whirlwinds of thought. It was not as if I were merely brought in contact with him, but it seemed as if he were part of myself, that he lived somewhere within me. I thought about him continually, and the shadow of his soul lay across mine. And to-morrow he would disappear entirely, with all that was hidden in his head and his heart, with all that I seemed to read in his beautiful eyes. When he went, another of the living threads which bound me to life would be snapped. His memory would be left, but that would be something finite within me, forever limited, immutable. But that which is alive changes, progresses. But these were thoughts, and behind them lay those inexpressible words which give birth to and nourish them, which strike to the very roots of life, demanding an answer to the question, Why?
“I shall soon have to lie by, it seems to me,” said my stepfather one rainy day. “This stupid weakness! I don’t feel inclined to do anything.”
The next day, at the time of evening tea, he brushed the crumbs of bread from the table and from his knees with peculiar care, and brushed something invisible from his person. The old mistress, looking at him from under her brows, whispered to her daughter-in-law:
“Look at the way he is plucking at himself, and brushing himself.”
He did not come to work for two days, and then the old mistress put a large white envelope in my hand, saying:
“Here you are! A woman brought this yesterday about noon, and I forgot to give it to you. A pretty little woman she was, but what she wants with you I can’t imagine, and that’s the truth!”
On a slip of paper with a hospital stamp, inside the envelope, was written in large characters:
“When you have an hour to spare, come and see me. I am in the Martinovski Hospital. “E. M.”
The next morning I was sitting in a hospital ward on my stepfather’s bed. It was a long bed, and his feet, in gray, worn socks, stuck out through the rails. His beautiful eyes, dully wandering over the yellow walls, rested on my face and on the small hands of a young girl who sat on a bench at the head of the bed. Her hands rested on the pillow, and my stepfather rubbed his cheek against them, his mouth hanging open. She was a plump girl, wearing a shiny, dark frock. The tears flowed slowly over her oval face; her wet blue eyes never moved from my stepfather’s face, with its sharp bones, large, sharp-pointed nose, and dark mouth.
“The priest ought to be here,” she whispered, “but he forbids it—he does not understand.” And taking her hands from the pillow, she pressed them to her breast as if praying.
In a minute my stepfather came to himself, looked at the ceiling and frowned, as if he were trying to remember something. Then he stretched his lank hand toward me.
“You? Thank you. Here I am, you see. I feel to stupid.”
The effort tired him; he closed his eyes. I stroked his long cold fingers with the blue nails. The girl asked softly:
“Evgen Vassilvich, introduce us, please!”
“You must know each other,” he said, indicating her with his eyes. “A dear creature—”
He stopped speaking, his mouth opened wider and wider, and he suddenly shrieked out hoarsely, like a raven. Throwing herself on the bed, clutching at the blanket, waving her bare arms about, the girl also screamed, burying her head in the tossed pillow.
My stepfather died quickly, and as soon as he was dead, he regained some of his good looks. I left the hospital with the girl on my arm. She staggered like a sick person, and cried. Her handkerchief was squeezed into a ball in her hand; she alternately applied it to her eyes, and rolling it tighter, gazed at it as if it were her last and most precious possession.
Suddenly she stood still, pressing close to me, and said:
“I shall not live till the winter. Oh Lord, Lord! What does it mean?”
Then holding out her hand, wet with tears, to me: “Good-by. He thought a lot of you. He will be buried to-morrow.”
“Shall I see you home?”
She looked about her.
“What for? It is daytime, not night.”
From the corner of a side street I looked after her. She walked slowly, like a person who has nothing to hurry for. It was August. The leaves were already beginning to fall from the trees. I had no time to follow my stepfather to the graveyard, and I never saw the girl again.
CHAPTER XVII
Every morning at six o’clock I set out to my work in the market-place. I met interesting people there. There was the carpenter, Osip, a grayhaired man who looked like Saint Nikolai, a clever workman, and witty; there was the humpbacked slater, Ephimushka, the pious bricklayer, Petr, a thoughtful man who also reminded me of a saint; the plasterer, Gregory Shishlin, a flaxen-bearded, blue-eyed, handsome man, beaming with quiet good-nature.
I had come to know these people during the second part of my life at the draughtsman’s house. Every Sunday they used to appear in the kitchen, grave, important-looking, with pleasant speech, and with words which had a new flavor for me. All these solid-looking peasants had seemed to me then to be easy to read, good through and through, all pleasantly different from the spiteful, thieving, drunken inhabitants of the Kunavin and its environs.
The plasterer, Shishlin, pleased me most of all, and I actually asked if I might join his gang of workmen. But scratching his golden brow with a white finger, he gently refused to have me.
“It is too soon for you,” he said. “Our work is not easy; wait another year.”
Then throwing up his handsome head, he asked:
“You don’t like the way you are living? Never mind, have patience; learn to live a life of your own, and then you will be able to bear it!”
I do not know all that I gained from this good advice, but I remember it gratefully.
These people used to come to my master’s house every Sunday morning, sit on benches round th? kitchen-table, and talk of interesting things while they waited for my master. When he came, he greeted them loudly and gayly, shaking-their strong hands, and then sat down in the chief corner. They produced their accounts and bundles of notes, the workmen placed their tattered account-books on the tab
le, and the reckoning up for the week began.
Joking and bantering, the master would try to prove them wrong in their reckoning, and they did the same to him. Sometimes there was a fierce dispute, but more often friendly laughter.
“Eh, you’re a dear man; you were born a rogue!” the workmen would say to the master.
And he answered, laughing in some confusion:
“And what about you, wild fowl? There’s as much roguery about you as about me!”
“How should we be anything else, friend?” agreed Ephimushka, but grave Petr said:
“You live by what you steal; what you earn you give to God and the emperor.”
“Well, then I’ll willingly make a burnt offering of you,” laughed the master.
They led him on good-naturedly:
“Set fire to us, you mean?”
“Burn us in a fiery furnace?”
Gregory Shishl in, pressing his luxuriant beard to his breast with his hands, said in a sing-song voice: “Brothers, let us do our business without cheating. If we will only live honestly, how happy and peaceful we shall be, eh? Shall we not, dear people?”
His blue eyes darkened, grew moist; at that moment he looked wonderfully handsome. His question seemed to have upset them all; they all turned away from him in confusion.
“A peasant does not cheat much,” grumbled good-looking Osip with a sigh, as if he pitied the peasant.
The dark bricklayer, bending his round-shouldered back over the table, said thickly:
“Sin is like a sort of bog; the farther you go, the more swampy it gets!”
And the master said to them, as if he were making a speech:
“What about me? I go into it because something calls me. Though I don’t want to.”
After this philosophising they again tried to get the better of one another, but when they had finished their accounts, perspiring and tired from the effort, they went out to the tavern to drink tea, inviting the master to go with them.
On the market-place it was my duty to watch these people, to see that they did not steal nails, or bricks, or boards. Every one of them, in addition to my master’s work, held contracts of his own, and would try to steal something for his own work under my very nose. They welcomed me kindly, and Shishlin said:
“Do you remember how you wanted to come into my gang? And look at you now; put over me as chief!”
“Well, well,” said Osip banteringly, “keep watch over the river-banks, and may God help you!”
Petr observed in an unfriendly tone:
“They have put a young crane to watch old mice.”
My duties were a cruel trial to me. I felt ashamed in the presence of these people. They all seemed to possess some special knowledge which was hidden from the rest of the world, and I had to watch them as if they had been thieves and tricksters. The first part of the time it was very hard for me, but Osip soon noticed this, and one day he said to me privately:
“Look here, young fellow, you won’t do any good by sulking—understand?”
Of course I did not understand, but I felt that he realized the absurdity of my position, and I soon arrived at a frank understanding with him.
He took me aside in a corner and explained:
“If you want to know, the biggest thief among us is the bricklayer, Petrukha. He is a man with a large family, and he is greedy. You want to watch him well. Nothing is too small for him; everything comes in handy. A pound of nails, a dozen of bricks, a bag of mortar—he’ll take all. He is a good man, God-fearing, of severe ideas, and well educated, but he loves to steal! Ephimushka lives like a woman. He is peaceable, and is harmless as far as you are concerned. He is clever, too—humpbacks are never fools! And there’s Gregory Shishlin. He has a fad—he will neither take from others nor give of his own. He works for nothing; any one can take him in, but he can deceive no one. He is not governed by his reason.”
“He is good, then?”
Osip looked at me as if I were a long way from him, and uttered these memorable words:
“True enough, he is good. To be good is the easiest way for lazy people. To be good, my boy, does not need brains.”
“And what about you?” I asked Osip.
He laughed and answered:
“I? I am like a young girl. When I am a grandmother I will tell you all about myself; till then you will have to wait. In the meanwhile you can set your brains to work to find out where the real ‘I’ is hidden. Find out; that is what you have to do!”
He had upset all my ideas of himself and his friends.
It was difficult for me to doubt the truth of his statement. I saw that Ephimushka, Petr, and Gregory regarded the handsome old man as more clever and more learned in worldly wisdom than themselves. They took counsel with him about everything, listened attentively to his advice, and showed him every sign of respect.
“Will you be so good as to give us your advice,” they would ask him. But after one of these questions, when Osip had gone away, the bricklayer said softly to Grigori:
“Heretic!”
And Grigori burst out laughing and added:
“Clown!”
The plasterer warned me in a friendly way:
“You look out for yourself with the old man, Maximich. You must be careful, or he will twist you round his finger in an hour; he is a bitter old man. God save you from the harm he can do.”
“What harm?”
“That I can’t say!” answered the handsome workman, blinking.
I did not understand him in the least. I thought that the most honest and pious man of them all was the bricklayer, Petr; He spoke of everything briefly, suggestively; his thoughts rested mostly upon God, hell, and death.
“Ekh! my children, my brothers, how can you not be afraid? How can you not look forward, when the grave and the churchyard let no one pass them?”
He always had the stomachache, and there were some days when he could not eat anything at all. Even a morsel of bread brought on the pain to such an extent as to cause convulsions and a dreadful sickness.
Humpbacked Ephimushka also seemed a very good and honest, but always queer fellow. Sometimes he was happy and foolish, like a harmless lunatic. He was everlastingly falling in love with different women, about whom he always used the same words:
“I tell you straight, she is not a woman, but a flower in cream—ei, bo—o!”
When the lively women of Kunavin Street came to wash the floors in the shops, Ephimushka let himself down from the roof, and standing in a corner somewhere, mumbled, blinking his gray, bright eyes, stretching his mouth from ear to ear:
“Such a butterfly as the Lord has sent to me; such a joy has descended upon me! Well, what is she but a flower in cream, and grateful I ought to be for the chance which has brought me such a gift! Such beauty makes me full of life, afire!”
At first the women used to laugh at him, calling out to each other:
“Listen to the humpback running on! Oh Lord!” The slater caused no little laughter. His high cheek-boned face wore a sleepy expression, and he used to talk as if he were raving, his honeyed phrases flowing in an intoxicating stream which obviously went to the women’s heads. At length one of the elder ones said to her friend in a tone of amazement:
“Just listen to how that man is going on! A clean young fellow he is!”
“He sings like a bird.”
“Or like a beggar in the church porch,” said an obstinate girl, refusing to give way.
But Ephimushka was not like a beggar at all. He stood firmly, like a squat tree-trunk; his voice rang out like a challenge; his words became more and more alluring; the women listened to him in silence. In fact, it seemed as if his whole being was flowing away in a tender, narcotic speech.
It ended in his saying to his mates in a tone of astonishment at supper-time, or after t
he Sabbath rest, shaking his heavy, angular head:
“Well, what a sweet little woman, a dear little thing! I have never before come across anything like her!”
When he spoke of his conquests Ephimushka was not boastful, nor jeered at the victim of his charms, as the others always did. He was only joyfully and gratefully touched, his gray eyes wide open with astonishment.
Osip, shaking his head, exclaimed:
“Oh, you incorrigible fellow! How old are you?” “Forty-four years, but that’s nothing! I have grown five years younger to-day, as if I had bathed in the healing water of a river. I feel thoroughly fit, and my heart is at peace! Some women can produce that effect, eh?”
The bricklayer said coarsely:
“You are going on for fifty. You had better be careful, or you will find that your loose way of life will leave a bitter taste.”
“You are shameless, Ephimushka!” sighed Grigori Shishlin.
And it seemed to me that the handsome fellow envied the success of the humpback.
Osip looked round on us all from under his level silver brows, and said jestingly:
“Every Mashka has her fancies. One will love cups and spoons, another buckles and ear-rings, but all Mashkas will be grandmothers in time.”
Shishlin was married, but his wife was living in the country, so he also cast his eyes on the floor-scrubbers. They were all of them easy of approach. All of them “earned a bit” to add to their income, and they regarded this method of earning money in that poverty-stricken area as simply as they would have regarded any other kind of work. But the handsome workman never approached the women. He just gazed at them from afar with a peculiar expression, as if he were pitying some one—himself or them. But when they began to sport with him and tempt him, he laughed bashfully and went away.
