The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “Well, you—”

  “What’s the matter with you, you fool?” asked Ephimushka, amazed. “Do you mean to say you are going to lose the chance?”

  “I am a married man,” Grigori reminded him.

  “Well, do you think your wife will know anything about it?”

  “My wife would always know if I lived unchastely. I can’t deceive her, my brother.”

  “How can she know?”

  “That I can’t say, but she is bound to know, while she lives chaste herself; and if I lead a chaste life, and she were to sin, I should know it.”

  “But how?” cried Ephimushka, but Grigori repeated calmly:

  “That I can’t say.”

  The slater waved his hands agitatedly.

  “There, if you please! Chaste, and doesn’t know! Oh, you blockhead!”

  Shishlin’s workmen, numbering seven, treated him as one of themselves and not as their master, and behind his back they nicknamed him “The Calf.”

  When he came to work and saw that they were lazy, he would take a trowel, or a spade, and artistically do the work himself, calling out coaxingly:

  “Set to work, children, set to work!”

  One day, carrying out the task which my master had angrily set me, I said to Grigori:

  “What bad workmen you have.”

  He seemed surprised.

  “Why?”—

  “This work ought to have been finished yesterday, and they won’t finish it even to-day.”

  “That is true;’they won’t have time,” he agreed, and after a silence he added cautiously:

  “Of course, I see that by rights I ought to dismiss them, but you see they are all my own people from my own village. And then again the punishment of God is that every man should eat bread by the sweat of his brow, and the punishment is for all of us—for you and me, too. But you and I labor less than they do, and—well, it would be awkward to dismiss them.”

  He lived in a dream. He would walk along the deserted streets of the market-place, and suddenly halting on one of the bridges over the Obvodni Canal, would stand for a long time at the railings, looking into the water, at the sky, or into the distance beyond the Oka. If one overtook him and asked:

  “What are you doing?”

  “What?” he would reply, waking up and smiling confusedly. “I was just standing, looking about me a bit.”

  “God has arranged everything very well, brother,” he would often say. “The sky, the earth, the flowing rivers, the steamboats running. You can get on a boat and go where you like—to Riazan, or to Ribinsk, to Perm, to Astrakhan. I went to Riazan once. It wasn’t bad—a little town—but very dull, duller than Nijni. Our Nijni is wonderful, gay! And Astrakhan is still duller. There are a lot of Kalmucks there, and I don’t like them. I don’t like any of those Mordovans, or Kalmucks, Persians, or Germans, or any of the other nations.”

  He spoke slowly; his words cautiously felt for sympathy in others, and always found it in the bricklayer, Petr.

  “Those are not nations, but nomads,” said Petr with angry conviction. “They came into the world before Christ and they’ll go out of it before He comes again.”

  Grigori became animated; he beamed.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? But I love a pure race like the Russians, my brother, with a straight look. I don’t like Jews, either, and I cannot understand how they are the people of God. It is wisely arranged, no doubt.”

  The slater added darkly:

  “Wisely—but there is a lot that is superfluous!”

  Osip listened to what they said, and then put in, mockingly and caustically:

  “There is much that is superfluous, and your conversation belongs to that category. Ekh! you babblers; you want a thrashing, all of you!”

  Osip kept himself to himself, and it was impossible to guess with whom he would agree, or with whom he would quarrel. Sometimes he seemed inclined to agree calmly with all men, and with all their ideas; but more often one saw that he was bored by all of them, regarding them as half-witted, and he said to Petr, Grigori, and Ephimushka:

  “Ekh, you sow’s whelps!”

  They laughed, not very cheerfully or willingly, but still they laughed.

  My master gave me five copecks a day for food. This was not enough, and I was rather hungry. Seeing this, the workmen invited me to breakfast and supper with them, and sometimes the contractors would invite me to a tavern to drink tea with them. I willingly accepted the invitations. I loved to sit among them and listen to their slow speeches, their strange stories. I gave them great pleasure by my readings out of church books.

  “You’ve stuck to books till you are fed up with them. Your crop is stuffed with them,” said Osip, regarding me attentively with his cornflower-blue eyes. It was difficult to catch their expression; his pupils always seemed to be floating, melting.

  “Take it a drop at a time—it is better; and when you are grown up, you can be a monk and console the people by your teaching, and in that way you may become a millionaire.”

  “A missioner,” corrected the bricklayer in a voice which for some reason sounded aggrieved.

  “What?” asked Osip.

  “A missioner is what you mean! You are not deaf, are you?”

  “All right, then, a missioner, and dispute with heretics. And even those whom you reckon as heretics have the right to bread. One can live even with a heretic, if one exercises discretion.”

  Grigori laughed in an embarrassed manner, and Petr said in his beard:

  “And wizards don’t have a bad time of it, and other kinds of godless people.”

  But Osip returned quickly:

  “A wizard is not a man of education; education is not usually a possession of the wizard.”

  And he told me:

  “Now look at this; just listen. In our district there lived a peasant, Tushek was his name, an emaciated little man, and idle. He lived like a feather, blown about here and there by the wind, neither a worker nor a do-nothing. Well, one day he took to praying, because he had nothing else to do, and after wandering about for two years, he suddenly showed himself in a new character. His hair hung down over his shoulders; he wore a skull-cap, and a brown cassock of leather; he looked on all of us with a baneful eye, and said straight out: ‘Repent, ye cursed!’ And why not repent, especially if you happened to be a woman? And the business ran its course: Tushek overfed, Tushek drunk, Tushek having his way with the women to his heart’s content—”

  The bricklayer interrupted him angrily:

  “What has that got to do with the matter, his overfeeding, or overdrinking?”

  “What else has to do with it, then?”

  “His words are all that matter.”

  “Oh, I took no notice of his words; I am abundantly gifted with words myself.”

  “We know all we want to know about Tushinkov, Dmitri Vassilich,” said Petr indignantly, and Grigori said nothing, but let his head droop, and gazed into his glass.

  “I don’t dispute it,” replied Osip peaceably. “I was just telling our Maximich of the different pathways to the morsel—”

  “Some of the roads lead to prison!”

  “Occasionally,” agreed Osip. “But you will meet with priests on all kinds of paths; one must learn where to turn off.”

  He was always somewhat inclined to make fun of these pious people, the plasterer and the bricklayer; perhaps he did not like them, but he skilfully concealed the fact. His attitude towards people was always elusive.

  He looked upon Ephimushka more indulgently, with more favor than upon the other. The slater did not enter into discussions about God, the truth, sects, the woes of humanity, as his friends did. Setting his chair sidewise to the table, so that its back should not be in the way of his hump, he would calmly drink glass after glass of tea. Then, suddenly alert,
he would glance round the smoky room, listening to the incoherent babel of voices, and darting up, swiftly disappear. That meant that some one had come into the tavern to whom Ephimushka owed money,—he had a good dozen creditors,—so, as some of them used to beat him when they saw him, he just fled from sin.

  “They get angry, the oddities!” he would say in a tone of surprise. “Can’t they understand that if I had the money I would give it to them?”

  “Oh, bitter poverty!” Osip sped after him.

  Sometimes Ephimushka sat deep in thought, hearing and seeing nothing; his high cheek-boned face softened, his pleasant eyes looking pleasanter than usual.

  “What are you thinking about?” they would ask him.

  “I was thinking that if I were rich I would marry a real lady, a noblewoman—by God, I would! A colonel’s daughter, for example, and, Lord! how I would love her! I should be on fire with love of her, because, my brothers, I once roofed the country house of a certain colonel—”

  “And he had a widowed daughter; we’ve heard all that before!” interrupted Petr in an unfriendly tone.

  But Ephimushka, spreading his hands out on his knees, rocked to and fro, his hump looking as if it were chiselling the air, and continued:

  “Sometimes she went into the garden, all in white; glorious she looked. I looked at her from the roof, and I didn’t know what the sun had done to me. But what caused that white light? It was as if a white dove had flown from under her feet! She was just a cornflower in cream! With such a lady as that, one would like all one’s life to be night.”

  “And how would you get anything to eat?” asked Petr gruffly. But this did not disturb Ephimushka.

  “Lord!” he exclaimed. “Should we want much? Besides, she is rich.”

  Osip laughed.

  “And when are you going in for all this dissipation, Ephimushka, you rogue?”

  Ephimushka never talked on any other subject but women, and he was an unreliable workman. At one time he worked excellently and profitably, at another time he did not get on at all; his wooden hammer tapped the ridges lazily, leaving crevices. He always smelt of train-oil, but he had a smell of his own as well, a healthy, pleasant smell like that of a newly cut tree.

  One could discuss everything that was interesting with the carpenter. His words always stirred one’s feelings, but it was hard to tell when he was serious and when joking.

  With Grigori it was better to talk about God; this was a subject which he loved, and on which he was an authority.

  “Grisha,” I asked, “do you know there are people who do not believe in God?”

  He laughed quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They say there is no God.”

  “Oh, that’s what you mean! I know that.”

  And as if he were brushing away invisible flies, he went on:

  “King David said in his time, you remember, ‘The fool hath said in his heart “There is no God.”’ That’s what he said about that kind of fool. We can’t do without God!”

  Osip said, as if agreeing with him:

  “Take away God from Petrukha here, and he will show you!”

  Shishlin’s handsome face became stern. He touched his beard with fingers the nails of which were covered with dried lime, and said mysteriously:

  “God dwells in every incarnate being; the conscience and all the inner life is God-given.”

  “And sin?”

  “Sin comes from the flesh, from Satan! Sin is an external thing, like smallpox, and nothing more! He who thinks too much of sin, sins all the more. If you do not remember sin, you will not sin. Thoughts about sin are from Satan, the lord of the flesh, who suggests.”

  The bricklayer queried this.

  “You are wrong there.”

  “I am not! God is sinless, and man is in His image and likeness. It is the image of God, the flesh, which sins, but His likeness cannot sin; it is a spirit.”

  He smiled triumphantly, but Petr growled:

  “That is wrong.”

  “According to you, I suppose,” Osip asked the bricklayer, “if you don’t sin, you can’t repent, and if you don’t repent, you won’t be saved?”

  “That’s a more hopeful way. Forget the devil and you cease to love God, the fathers said.”

  Shishlin was not intemperate, but two glasses would make him tipsy. His face would be flushed, his eyes childish, and his voice would be raised in song.

  “How good everything is, brothers! Here we live, work a little, and have as much as we want to eat, God be praised! Ah, how good it is!”

  He wept. The tears trickled down his beard and gleamed on the silken hairs like false pearls.

  His laudation of our life and those tears were unpleasant to me. My grandmother had sung the praises of life more convincingly, more sympathetically, and not so crudely.

  All these discussions kept me in a continual tension, and aroused a dull emotion in me. I had already read many books about peasants, and I saw how utterly unlike the peasants in the books were to those in real life. In books they were all unhappy. Good or evil characters, they were all poorer in words and ideas than peasants in real life. In books they spoke less of God, of sects, of churches, and more of government, land, and law. They spoke less about women, too, but quite as coarsely, though more kindly. For the peasants in real life, women were a pastime, but a dangerous one. One had to be artful with women; otherwise they would gain the upper hand and spoil one’s whole life. The muzhik in books may be good or bad, but he is altogether one or the other. The real muzhik is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but he is wonderfully interesting. If the peasant in real life does not blurt out all his thoughts to you, you have a feeling that he is keeping something back which he means to keep for himself alone, and that very unsaid, hidden thing is the most important thing about him.

  Of all the peasants I had read of in books, the one I liked the best was Petr in “The Carpenter’s Gang.” I wanted to read the story to my comrades, and I brought the book to the Yarmaka. I often spent the night in one or another of the workshops; sometimes it was because I was so tired that I lacked the strength to get home.

  When I told them that I had a book about carpenters, my statement aroused a lively interest, especially in Osip. He took the book out of my hands, and turned over the leaves distrustfully, shaking his head.

  “And it is really written about us! Oh, you rascal! Who wrote it? Some gentleman? I thought as much! Gentlemen, and chinovniks especially, are experts at anything. Where God does not even guess, a chinovnik has it all settled in his mind. That’s what they live for.”

  “You speak very irreverently of God, Osip,” observed Petr.

  “That’s all right! My words are less to God than a snowflake or a drop of rain are to me. Don’t you worry; you and I don’t touch God.”

  He suddenly began to play restlessly, throwing off sharp little sayings like sparks from a flint, cutting off with them, as with scissors, whatever was displeasing to him. Several times in the course of the day he asked me:

  “Are we going to read, Maximich? That’s right! A good idea!”

  When the hour for rest arrived we had supper with him in his workshop, and after supper appeared Petr with his assistant Ardalon, and Shishlin with the lad Phoma. In the shed where the gang slept there was a lamp burning, and I began to read. They listened without speaking, but they moved about, and very soon Ardalon said crossly:

  “I’ve had enough of this!”

  And he went out. The first to fall asleep was Grigori, with his mouth open surprisingly; then the carpenters fell asleep; but Petr, Osip, and Phoma drew nearer to me and listened attentively. When I finished reading Osip put out the lamp at once. By the stars it was nearly midnight.

  Petr asked in the darkness:

  “What was that written for? Against whom?”


  “Now for sleep!” said Osip, taking off his boots.

  Petr persisted in his question:

  “I asked, against whom was that written?”

  “I suppose they know!” replied Osip, arranging himself for sleep on a scaffolding.

  “If it is written against stepmothers, it is a waste of time. It won’t make stepmothers any better,” said the bricklayer firmly. “And if it is meant for Petr, it is also futile; his sin in his answer. For murder you go to Siberia, and that’s all there is about it! Books are no good for such sins; no use, eh?”

  Osip did not reply, and the bricklayer added;

  “They can do nothing themselves and so they discuss other people’s work. Like women at a meeting. Good-by, it is bedtime.”

  He stood for a minute in the dark blue square of the open door, and asked:

  “Are you asleep, Osip? What do you think about it?”

  “Eh?” responded the carpenter sleepily.

  “All right; go to sleep.”

  Shishlin had fallen on his side where he had been sitting. Phoma lay on some trampled straw beside me. The whole neighborhood was asleep. In the distance rose the shriek of the railway engines, the heavy rumbling of iron wheels, the clang of buffers. In the shed rose the sound of snoring in different keys. I felt uncomfortable. I had expected some sort of discussion, and there had been nothing of the kind. But suddenly Osip spoke softly and evenly:

  “My child, don’t you believe anything of that. You are young; you have a long while to live; treasure up your thoughts. Your own sense is worth twice some one else’s. Are you asleep, Phoma?”

  “No,” replied Phoma with alacrity.

  “That’s right! You have both received some education, so you go on reading. But don’t believe all you read. They can print anything, you know. That is their business!”

  He lowered his feet from the scaffolding, and resting his hands on the edge of the plank, bent over us, and continued:

  “How ought you to regard books? Denunciation of certain people, that’s what a book is! Look, they say, and see what sort of a man this is—a carpenter, or any one else—and here is a gentleman, a different kind of man! A book is not written without an object, and generally around some one.”