by Maxim Gorky
Phoma said thickly:
“Petr was right to kill that contractor!”
“That was wrong. It can never be right to kill a man. I know that you do not love Grigori, but put that thought away from you. We are none of us rich people. To-day I am master, to-morrow a workman again.”
“I did not mean you, Uncle Osip.”
“It is all the same.”
“You are just—”
“Wait; I am telling you why these books are written,” Osip interrupted Phoma’s angry words. “It is a very cunning idea! Here we have a gentleman without a muzhik; here a muzhik without a gentleman! Look now! Both the gentleman and the muzhik are badly off. The gentleman grows weak, crazy, and the muzhik becomes boastful, drunken, sickly, and offensive. That’s what happens! But in his lord’s castle it was better, they say. The lord hid himself behind the muzhik and the muzhik behind the master, and so they went round and round, well-fed, and peaceful. I don’t deny that it was more peaceful living with the nobles. It was no advantage to the lord if his muzhik was poor, but it was to his good if he was rich and intelligent. He was then a weapon in his hand. I know all about it; you see I lived in a nobleman’s domain for nearly forty years. There’s a lot of my experience written on my hide.”
I remembered that the carter, Petr, who committed suicide, used to talk in the same way about the nobility, and it was very unpleasant to my mind that the ideas of Osip should run on the same lines as those of that evil old man.
Osip touched my leg with his hand, and went on:
“One must understand books and all sorts of writings. No one does anything without a reason, and books are not written for nothing, but to muddle people’s heads. Every one is created with intelligence, without which no one can wield an ax, or sew a shoe.” He spoke for a long time, and lay down. Again he jumped up, throwing gently his well turned, quaint phrases into the darkness and quietness.
“They say that the nobles are quite a different race from the peasants, but it is not true. We are just like the nobles, only we happen to have been born low down in the scale. Of course a noble learns from books, while I learn by my own noddle, and a gentleman has a delicate skin; that is all the difference. No—o, lads, it is time there was a new way of living; all these writings ought to be thrown aside! Let every one ask himself ‘What am I?’ A man! ‘And what is he?’ Also a man! What then? Does God need his superfluous wealth? No-o, we are equal in the sight of God when it comes to gifts.”
At last, in the morning, when the dawn had put out the light of the stars, Osip said to me:
“You see how I could write? I have talked about things that I have never thought about. But you mustn’t place too much faith in what I say. I was talking more because I was sleepless than with any serious intention. You lie down and think of something to amuse you. Once there was a raven which flew from the fields to the hills, from boundary to boundary, and lived beyond her time; the Lord punished her. The raven is dead and dried up. What is the meaning of that? There is no meaning in it, none. Now go to sleep; it will soon be time to get up.”
CHAPTER XVIII
As Yaakov, the stoker, had done in his time, so now Osip grew and grew in my eyes, until he hid all other people from me. There was some resemblance to the stoker in him, but at the same time he reminded me of grandfather, the valuer, Petr Vassiliev, Smouri, and the cook. When I think of all the people who are firmly fixed in my memory, he has left behind a deeper impression than any of them, an impression which has eaten into it, as oxide eats into a brass bell. What was remarkable about him was that he had two sets of ideas. In the daytime, at his work among people, his lively, simple ideas were businesslike and easier to understand than those to which he gave vent when he was off duty, in the evenings, when he went with me into the town to see his cronies, the dealers, or at night when he could not sleep. He had special night thoughts, many-sided like the flame of a lamp. They burned brightly, but where were their real faces? On which side was this or that idea, nearer and dearer to Osip?
He seemed to me to be much cleverer than any one else I had met, and I hovered about him, as I used to do with the stoker, trying to find out about the man, to understand him. But he glided away from me; it was impossible to grasp him. Where was the real man hidden? How far could I believe in him?
I remember how he said to me:
“You must find out for yourself where I am hidden. Look for me!”
My self-love was piqued, but more than that, it had become a matter of life and death to me to understand the old man.
With all his elusiveness he was substantial. He looked as if he could go on living for a hundred years longer and still remain the same, so unchangeably did he preserve his ego amid the instability of the people around him. The valuer had made upon me an equal impression of steadfastness, but it was not so pleasing to me. Osip’s steadfastness was of a different kind; although I cannot explain how, it was more pleasing.
The instability of human creatures is too often brought to one’s notice; their acrobatic leaps from one position to another upset me. I had long ago grown weary of being surprised by these inexplicable somersaults, and they had by degrees extinguished my lively interest in humanity, disturbed my love for it.
One day at the beginning of July, a rackety hackney cab came dashing up to the place where we were working. On the box-seat a drunken driver sat, hiccuping gloomily. He was bearded, hatless, and had a bruised lip. Grigori Shishlin rolled about in the carriage, drunk, while a fat, red-cheeked girl held his arm. She wore a straw hat trimmed with a red ribbon and glass cherries; she had a sunshade in her hand, and goloshes on her bare feet. Waving her sunshade, swaying, she giggled and screamed:
“What the devil! The market-place is not open; there is no market-place, and he brings me to the market-place. Little mother—”
Grigori, dishevelled and limp, crept out of the cab, sat on the ground and declared to us, the spectators of the scene, with tears:
“I am down on my knees; I have sinned greatly! I thought of sin, and I have sinned. Ephimushka says ‘Grisha! Grisha! He speaks truly, but you—forgive me; I can treat you all. He says truly, ‘We live once only, and no more.’”
The girl burst out laughing, stamped her feet, and lost her goloshes, and the driver called out gruffly:
“Let us get on farther! The horse won’t stand still!”
The horse, an old, worn-out jade, was covered with foam, and stood as still as if it were buried. The whole scene was irresistibly comical.
Grigori’s workmen rolled about with laughter as they looked at their master, his grand lady, and the bemused coachman.
The only one who did not laugh was Phoma, who stood at the door of one of the shops beside me and muttered:
“The devil take the swine. And he has a wife at home—a bee-eautiful woman!”
The driver kept on urging them to start. The girl got out of the cab, lifted Grigori up, set him on his feet, and cried with a wave of her sunshade:
“Go on!”
Laughing good-naturedly at their master, and envying him, the men returned to their work at the call of Phoma. It was plain that it was repugnant to him to see Grigori made ridiculous.
“He calls himself master,” he muttered. “I have not quite a month’s work left to do here. After that I shall go back to the country. I can’t stand this.”
I felt vexed for Grigori; that girl with the cherries looked so annoyingly absurd beside him.
I often wondered why Grigori Shishlin was the master and Phoma Tuchkov the workman. A strong, fair fellow, with curly hair, an aquiline nose, and gray, clever eyes in his round face, Phoma was not like a peasant. If he had been well-dressed, he might have been the son of a merchant of good family. He was gloomy, taciturn, businesslike. Being well educated, he kept the accounts of the contractor, drew up the estimates, and could set his comrades to work succe
ssfully, but he worked unwillingly himself.
“You won’t make work last forever,” he said calmly. He despised books.
“They can print what they like, but I shall go on thinking as I like,” he said. “Books are all nonsense.”
But he listened attentively to every one, and if something interested him, he would ask all the details about it, perseveringly, always thinking of it in his own way, measuring it by his own measure.
Once I told Phoma that he ought to be a contractor. He replied indolently:
“If it were a question of turning over thousands, yes. But to worry myself for the sake of making a few copecks, it is not worth while. No, I am just looking about; then I shall go into a monastery in Oranko. I am good-looking, powerful in muscle; I may take the fancy of some merchant’s widow! Such things do happen. There was a Sergatzki boy who made his fortune in two years, and married a girl from these parts, from the town. He had to take an icon to her house, and she saw him.”
This was an obsession with him; he knew many tales of how taking service in a monastery had led people to an easy life. I did not care for these stories, nor did I like the trend of Phoma’s mind, but I felt sure that he would go to a monastery.
When the market was opened, Phoma, to every one’s surprise, went as waiter to a tavern. I do not say that his mates were surprised, but they all began to treat him mockingly. On holidays they would all go together to drink tea, saying to one another:
“Let us go and see our Phoma.”
And when they arrived at the tavern they would call out:
“Hi, waiter! Curly mop, come here!”
He would come to them and ask, with his head held high:
“What can I get for you?”
“Don’t you recognize acquaintances now?”
“I never recognize any one.”
He felt that his mates despised him and were making fun of him, and he looked at them with dully expectant eyes. His face might have been made of wood, but it seemed to say:
“Well, make haste; laugh and be done with it.”
“Shall we give him a tip?” they would ask, and after purposely fumbling in their purses for a long time, they would give him nothing at all.
I asked Phoma how he could go out as a waiter when he had meant to enter a monastery.
“I never meant to go into a monastery!” he replied, “and I shall not stay long as a waiter.”
Four years later I met him in Tzaritzin, still a waiter in a tavern; and later still I read in a newspaper that Phoma Tuchkov had been arrested for an attempted burglary.
The history of the mason, Ardalon, moved me deeply. He was the eldest and best workman in Petr’s gang. This black-bearded, light-hearted man of forty years also involuntarily evoked the query, “Why was he not the master instead of Petr?” He seldom drank vodka and hardly ever drank too much; he knew his work thoroughly, and worked as if he loved it; the bricks seemed to fly from his hands like red doves. In comparison with him, the sickly, lean Petr seemed an absolutely superfluous member of the gang. He used to speak thus of his work:
“I build stone houses for people, and a wooden coffin for myself.”
But Ardalon laid his bricks with cheerful energy as he cried: “Work, my child, for the glory of God.”
And he told us all that next spring he would go to Tomsk, where his brother-in-law had undertaken a large contract to build a church, and had invited him to go as overseer.
“I have made up my mind to go. Building churches is work that I love!” he said. And he suggested to me: “Come with me! It is very easy, brother, for an educated person to get on in Siberia. There, education is a trump card!”
I agreed to his proposition, and he cried triumphantly:
“There! That is business and not a joke.”
Toward Petr and Grigori he behaved with good-natured derision, like a grown-up person towards children, and he said to Osip:
“Braggarts! Each shows the other his cleverness, as if they were playing at cards. One says: ‘My cards are all such and such a color,’ and the other says, ‘And mine are trumps!’”
Osip observed hesitatingly:
“How could it be otherwise? Boasting is only human; all the girls walk about with their chests stuck out.”
“All, yes, all. It is God, God all the time. But they hoard up money themselves!” said Ardalon impatiently.
“Well, Grisha does n’t.”
“I am speaking for myself. I would go with this God into the forest, the desert. I am weary of being here. In the spring I shall go to Siberia.”
The workmen, envious of Ardalon, said:
“If we had such a chance in the shape of a brother-in-law, we should not be afraid of Siberia either.”
And suddenly Ardalon disappeared. He went away from the workshop on Sunday, and for three days no one knew where he was.
This made anxious conjectures.
“Perhaps he has been murdered.”
“Or maybe he is drowned.”
But Ephimushka came, and declared in an embarrassed manner:
“He has gone on the drink.”
“Why do you tell such lies?” cried Petr incredulously.
“He has gone on the drink; he is drinking madly. He is just like a corn kiln which burns from the very center. Perhaps his much-loved wife is dead.”
“He is a widower! Where is he?”
Petr angrily set out to save Ardalon, but the latter fought him.
Then Osip, pressing his lips together firmly, thrust his hands in his pockets and said:
“Shall I go have a look at him, and see what it is all about? He is a good fellow.”
I attached myself to him.
“Here’s a man,” said Osip on the way, “who lives for years quite decently, when suddenly he loses control of himself, and is all over the place. Look, Maximich, and learn.”
We went to one of the cheap “houses of pleasure” of Kunavin Village, and we were welcomed by a predatory old woman. Osip whispered to her, and she ushered us into a small empty room, dark and dirty, like a stable. On a small bed slept, in an abandoned attitude, a large, stout woman. The old woman thrust her fist in her side and said:
“Wake up, frog, wake up!”
The woman jumped up in terror, rubbing her face with her hands, and asked:
“Good Lord! who is it? What is it?”
“Detectives are here,” said Osip harshly. With a groan the woman disappeared, and he spat after her and explained to me:
“They are more afraid of detectives than of the devil.”
Taking a small glass from the wall, the old woman raised a piece of the wall-paper.
“Look! Is he the one you want?”
Osip looked through a chink in the partition. “That is he! Get the woman away.”
I also looked through the chink into just such a narrow stable as the one we were in. On the sill of the window, which was closely shuttered, burned a tin lamp, near which stood a squinting, naked, Tatar woman, sewing a chemise. Behind her, on two pillows on the bed, was raised the bloated face of Ardalon, his black, tangled beard projecting.
The Tatar woman shivered, put on her chemise, and came past the bed, suddenly appearing in our room.
Osip looked at her and again spat.
“Ugh! Shameless hussy!”
“And you are an old fool!” she replied, laughing, Osip laughed too, and shook a threatening finger at her.
We went into the Tatar’s stable. The old man sat on the bed at Ardalon’s feet and tried for a long time unsuccessfully to awaken him. He muttered:
“All right, wait a bit. We will go—”
At length he awoke, gazed wildly at Osip and at me, and closing his bloodshot eyes, murmured:
“Well, well!”
“What is the matter
with you?” asked Osip gently, without reproaches, but rather sadly.
“I was driven to it,” explained Ardalon hoarsely, and coughing.
“How?”
“Ah, there were reasons.”
“You were not contented, perhaps?”
“What is the good—”
Ardalon took an open bottle of vodka from the table, and began to drink from it. He then asked Osip:
“Would you like some? There ought to be something to eat here as well.”
The old man poured some of the spirit into his mouth, swallowed it, frowned, and began to chew a small piece of bread carefully, but muddled Ardalon said drowsily:
“So I have thrown in my lot with the Tatar woman. She is a pure Tatar, as Ephimushka says, young, an orphan from Kasimov; she was getting ready for the fair.”
From the other side of the wall some one said in broken Russian:
“Tatars are the best, like young hens. Send him away; he is not your father.”
“That’s she,” muttered Ardalon, gazing stupidly at the wall.
“I have seen her,” said Osip.
Ardalon turned to me:
“That is the sort of man I am, brother.”
I expected Osip to reproach Ardalon, to give him a lecture which would make him repent bitterly. But nothing of the kind happened; they sat side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and uttered calm, brief words. It was melancholy to see them in that dark, dirty stable. The woman called ludicrous words through the chink in the wall, but they did not listen to them. Osip took a walnut off the table, cracked it against his boot, and began to remove the shell neatly, as he asked:
“All your money gone?”
“There is some with Petrucha.”
“I say! Aren’t you going away? If you were to go to Tomsk, now—”
“What should I go to Tomsk for?”
“Have you changed your mind, then?”
“If I had been going to strangers, it would have been different.”
“What do you mean?”
“But to go to my sister and my brother-in-law—”
