by Maxim Gorky
The harness-maker sang again, with his head back, gazing up at the ceiling:
“On the road from the flourishing village
A young girl came over the dewy fields.”
“He can sing,” muttered my master, shaking his head and smiling.
And Kleshtchkov poured forth his song, clear as the music of a reed:
“And the beautiful maiden answered him:
‘An orphan am I, no one wants me.’”
“Good!” whispered my master, blinking his reddening eyes. “Phew! it is devilish good!”
I looked at him and rejoiced, and the sobbing words of the song conquered the noise of the tavern, sounded more powerful, more beautiful, more touching every moment.
I live solitary in our village.
A young girl am I; they never ask me out.
Oie, poor am I, my dress it is not fine;
I am not fit, I know, for a brave young man.
A widower would marry me to do his work;
I do not wish to bow myself to such a fate.
My master wept undisguisedly; he sat with his head bent; his prominent nose twitched, and tears splashed on his knees. After the third song, agitated and dishevelled, he said:
“I can’t sit here any longer; I shall be stifled with these odors. Let us go home.”
But when we were in the street he said:
“Come along, Pyeshkov, let us go to a restaurant and have something to eat. I don’t want to go home!”
He hailed a sledge, without haggling about the charge, and said nothing while we were on the way, but in the restaurant, after taking a table in a corner, he began at once in an undertone, looking about him the while, to complain angrily.
“He has thoroughly upset me, that goat; to such a state of melancholy he has driven me! Here you are—you read and think about things—just tell me now, what the devil is the use of it all? One lives; forty years pass by; one has a wife and children, and no one to talk to! There are times when I want to unburden my soul, to talk to some one about all sorts of things, but there is no one I can talk to. I can’t talk to my wife; I have nothing in common with her. What is she, after all? She has her children and the house; that’s her business. She is a stranger to my soul. A wife is your friend till the first child comes. In fact, she is—on the whole—Well, you can see for yourself she does not dance to my piping. Flesh without spirit, the devil take you! It is a grief to me, Brother.”
He drank the cold, bitter beer feverishly, was silent for a time, ruffling his long hair, and then he went on:
“Human creatures are riff-raff for the most part, Brother! There you are, for instance, talking to the workmen. Oh yes, I understand there is a lot of trickery, and baseness; it is true, Brother; they are thieves all of them! But do you think that what you say makes any difference to them! Not an atom! No! They are all—Petr, Osip as well—rogues! They speak about me, and you speak for me, and all—what is the use of it, Brother?”
I was dumb from sheer amazement.
“That’s it!” said my master, smiling. “You were right to think of going to Persia. There you would understand nothing; it is a foreign language they speak there! But in your own language you’ll hear nothing but baseness!”
“Has Osip been telling you about me?” I asked.
“Well, yes! But what did you expect? He talks more than any of them; he is a gossip. He is a sly creature, Brother! No, Pyeshkov, words don’t touch them. Am I not right? And what the devil is the use of it? And what the devil difference does it make? None! It is like snow in the autumn, falling in the mud and melting. It only makes more mud. You had far better hold your tongue.”
He drank glass after glass of beer. He did not get drunk, but he talked more and more quickly and fiercely.
“The proverb says, ‘Speech is silver, silence is golden.’ Ekh, Brother, it is all sorrow, sorrow! He sang truly, ‘Solitary I live in our village.’ Human life is all loneliness.”
He glanced round, lowered his voice, and continued:
“And I had found a friend after my own heart. There was a woman who happened to be alone, as good as a widow; her husband had been condemned to Siberia for coining money, and was in prison there. I became acquainted with her; she was penniless; it was that, you know, which led to our acquaintance. I looked at her and thought, ‘What a nice little person!’ Pretty, you know, young, simply wonderful. I saw her once or twice, and then I said to her: ‘Your husband is a rogue. You are not living honestly yourself. Why do you want to go to Siberia after him?’ But she would follow him into exile. She said to me: ‘Whatever he is, I love him; he is good to me! It may be that it was for me he sinned. I have sinned with you. For’ his sake,’ she said, ‘I had to have money; he is a gentleman and accustomed to live well. If I had been single,’ she said, ‘I should have lived honorably. You are a good man, too,’ she said, ‘and I like you very much, but don’t talk to me about this again.’ The devil! I gave her all I had—eighty rubles or thereabouts—and I said: ‘You must pardon me, but I cannot see you any more. I cannot!’ And I left her—and that’s how—”
He was silent, and then he suddenly became drunk. He sank into a huddled-up heap and muttered:
“Six times I went to see her. You can’t understand what it was like! I might have gone to her flat six more times, but I could not make up my mind to it. I could not! Now she has gone away.”
He laid his hands on the table, and in a whisper, moving his fingers, said:
“God grant I never meet her again! God grant it! Then it would be going to the devil! Let us go home. Come!”
We went. He staggered along, muttering:
“That’s how it is, Brother.”
I was not surprised by the story he had told me; I had long ago guessed that something unusual had happened to him. But I was greatly depressed by what he had said about life, and more by what he had said about Osip.
CHAPTER XX
I lived three years as overseer in that dead town, amid empty buildings, watching the workmen pull down clumsy stone shops in the autumn, and rebuild them in the same way in the spring.
The master took great care that I should earn his five rubles. If the floor of a shop had to be laid again, I had to remove earth from the whole area to the depth of one arshin. The dock laborers were paid a ruble for this work, but I received nothing; and while I was thus occupied, I had no time to look after the carpenters, who unscrewed the locks and handles from the doors and committed petty thefts of all kinds.
Both the workmen and the contractors tried in every way to cheat me, to steal something, and they did it almost openly, as if they were performing an unpleasant duty; were not in the least indignant when I accused them, but were merely amazed.
“You make as much fuss over five rubles as you would over twenty. It is funny to hear you!”
I pointed out to my master that, while he saved one ruble by my labor, he lost ten times more in this way, but he merely blinked at me and said:
“That will do! You are making that up!”
I understood that he suspected me of conniving at the thefts, which aroused in me a feeling of repulsion towards him, but I was not offended. In that class of life they all steal, and even the master liked to take what did not belong to him.
When, after the fair, he looked into one of the shops which he was to rebuild, and saw a forgotten samovar, a piece of crockery, a carpet, or a pair of scissors which had been forgotten, even sometimes a case, or some merchandise, my master would say, smiling:
“Make a list of the things and take them all to the store-room.”
And he would take them home with him from the store-room, telling me sometimes to cross them off the list.
I did not love “things”; I had no desire to possess them; even books were an embarrassment to me. I had none of my own, save the little vol
umes of Béranger and the songs of Heine. I should have liked to obtain Pushkin, but the book-dealer in the town was an evil old man, who asked a great deal too much for Pushkin’s works. The furniture, carpets, and mirrors, which bulked so largely in my master’s house, gave me no pleasure, irritated me by their melancholy clumsiness and smell of paint and lacquer. Most of all I disliked the mistress’s room, which reminded me of a trunk packed with all kinds of useless, superfluous objects. And I was disgusted with my master for bringing home other people’s things from the storehouse. Queen Margot’s rooms had been cramped too, but they were beautiful in spite of it.
Life, on the whole, seemed to me to be a disconnected, absurd affair; there was too much of the obviously stupid about it. Here we were building shops which the floods inundated in the spring, soaking through the floors, making the outer doors hang crooked. When the waters subsided the joists had begun to rot. Annually the water had overflowed the market-place for the last ten years, spoiling the buildings and the bridges. These yearly floods did enormous damage, and yet they all knew that the waters would not be diverted of themselves.
Each spring the breaking of the ice cut up the barges, and dozens of small vessels. The people groaned and built new ones, which the ice again broke. It was like a ridiculous treadmill whereon one remains always in the same place. I asked Osip about it. He looked amazed, and then laughed.
“Oh, you heron! What a young heron he is! What is it to do with you at all? What is it to you, eh?”
But then he spoke more gravely, although he could not extinguish the light of merriment in his pale blue eyes, which had a clearness not belonging to old age.
“That’s a very intelligent observation! Let us suppose that the affair does not concern you; all the same it may be worth something to you to understand it. Take this case, for example—”
And he related in a dry speech, interspersed lavishly with quaint sayings, unusual comparisons, and all kinds of drollery:
“Here is a case where people are to be pitied; they have only a little land, and in the springtime the Volga overflows its banks, carries away the earth, and lays it upon its own sand-banks. Then others complain that the bed of the Volga is choked up. The springtime streams and summer rains tear up the gulleys, and again earth is carried away to the river.”
He spoke without either pity or malice, but as if he enjoyed his knowledge of the miseries of life, and although his words were in agreement with my own ideas, yet it was unpleasant to listen to them.
“Take another instance; fires.”
I don’t think I can remember a summer when the forests beyond the Volga did not catch fire. Every July the sky was clouded by a muddy yellow smoke; the leaden sun, all its brightness gone, looked down on the earth like a bad eye.
“As for forests, who cares about them?” said Osip. “They all belong to the nobles, or the crown; the peasants don’t own them. And if towns catch fire, that is not a very serious business either. Rich people live in towns; they are not to be pitied. But take the villages. How many villages are burned down every summer? Not less than a hundred, I should think; that’s a serious loss!”
He laughed softly.
“Some people have property and don’t know how to manage it, and between ourselves, a man has to work not so much on his own behalf, or on the land, as against fire and water.”
“Why do you laugh?”
“Why not? You won’t put a fire out with your tears, nor will they make the floods more mighty.”
I knew that this handsome old man was more clever than any one I had met; but what were his real sympathies and antipathies? I was thinking about this all the time he was adding his little dry sayings to my store.
“Look round you, and see how little people preserve their own, or other people’s strength. How your master squanders yours! And how much does water cost in a village? Reflect a little; it is better than any cleverness which comes from learning. If a peasant’s hut is burned, another one can be put up in its place, but when a worthy peasant loses his sight, you can’t set that right! Look at Ardalon, for example, or Grisha; see how a man can break out! A foolish fellow, the first, but Grisha is a man of understanding. He smokes like a hayrick. Women attacked him, as worms attack a murdered man in a wood.”
I asked him without anger, merely out of curiosity:
“Why did you go and tell the master about my ideas?”
He answered calmly, even kindly:
“So that he might know what harmful ideas you have. It was necessary, in order that he may teach you better ones. Who should teach you, if not he? I did not speak to him out of malice, but out of pity for you. You are not a stupid lad, but the devil is racking your brain. If I had caught you stealing, or running after the girls, or drinking, I should have held my tongue. But I shall always repeat all your wild talk to the master; so now you know.”
“I won’t talk to you, then!”
He was silent, scratching the resin off his hands with his nails. Then he looked at me with an expression of affection and said:
“That you will! To whom else will you talk? There is no one else.”
Clean and neat, Osip at times reminded me of the stoker, Yaakov, absolutely indifferent to every one. Sometimes he reminded me of the valuer, Petr Vassiliev, sometimes of the drayman, Petr; occasionally he revealed a trait which was like grandfather. In one way or another he was like all the old men I had known. They were all amazingly interesting old men, but I felt that it was impossible to live with them; it would be oppressive and repulsive. They had corroded their own hearts, as it were; their clever speeches hid hearts red with rust. Was Osip good-hearted? No. Malevolent? Also no. That he was clever was all that was clear to me. But while it astounded me by its pliability, that intelligence of his deadened me, and the end of it was that I felt he was inimical to me in all kinds of ways.
In my heart seethed the black thoughts:
“All human creatures are strangers to one another despite their sweet words and smiles. And more; we are all strangers on the earth, too; no one seems to be bound to it by a powerful feeling of love. Grandmother alone loved to be alive, and loved all creatures—grandmother and gracious Queen Margot.
Sometimes these and similar thoughts increased the density of the dark fog around me. Life had become suffocating and oppressive; but how could I live a different life? Whither could I go? I had no one to talk to, even, except Osip, and I talked to him more and more often. He listened to my heated babbling with evident interest, asked me questions, drove home a point, and said calmly:
“The persistent woodpecker is not terrible; no one is afraid of him. But with all my heart I advise you to go into a monastery and live there till you are grown up. You will have edifying conversations with holy men to console you, you will be at peace, and you will be a source of revenue to the monks. That’s my sincere advice to you. It is evident that you are not fit for worldly business.”
I had no desire to enter a monastery, but I felt that I was being entangled and bewildered in the enchanted circle, of the incomprehensible. I was miserable. Life for me was like a forest in autumn. The mushrooms had come and gone, there was nothing to do in the empty forest, and I seemed to know all there was to know in it.
I did not drink vodka, and I had nothing to do with girls; books took the place of these two forms of intoxication for me. But the more I read, the harder it was for me to go on living the empty, unnecessary life that most people lived.
I had only just turned fifteen years of age, but sometimes I felt like an elderly man. I was, as it were, inwardly swollen and heavy with all I had lived through and read, or restlessly pondered. Looking into myself, I discovered that my receptacle for impressions was like a dark lumber-room closely packed with all kinds of things, of which I had neither the strength nor the wit to rid myself.
And although they were so numerous, all these cumberso
me articles were not solidly packed, but floated about, and made me waver as water makes a piece of crockery waver which does not stand firm.
I had a fastidious dislike of unhappiness, illness, and grievances. When I saw cruelty, blood, fights even verbal baiting of a person, it aroused a physical repulsion in me which was swiftly transformed into a cold fury. This made me fight myself, like a wild beast, after which I would be painfully ashamed of myself.
Sometimes I was so passionately desirous of beating a bully that I threw myself blindly into a fight, and even now I remember those attacks of despair, born of my impotence, with shame and grief.
Within me dwelt two persons. One was cognizant of only too many abominations and obscenities, somewhat timid for that reason, was crushed by the knowledge of everyday horrors, and had begun to view life and people distrustfully, contemptuously, with a feeble pity for every one, including himself. This person dreamed of a quiet, solitary life with books, without people, of monasteries, of a forest-keeper’s lodge, a railway signal box, of Persia, and the office of the night watchman somewhere on the outskirts of the town. Only to see fewer people, to be remote from human creatures!
The other person, baptized by the holy spirit of noble and wise books, observing the overwhelming strength of the daily horrors of life, felt how easily that strength might sap one’s brain-power, trample the heart with dirty footprints, and, fighting against it with all his force, with clenched teeth and fists, was always ready for a quarrel or a fight. He loved and pitied actively, and, like the brave hero in French novels, drew his sword from his scabbard on the slightest provocation, and stood in a warlike position.
At that time I had a bitter enemy in the door-keeper of one of the brothels in Little Pokrovski Street. I made his acquaintance one morning as I was going to the market-place; he was dragging from a hackney-carriage, standing at the gate in front of the house, a girl who was dead drunk. He seized her by the legs in their wrinkled stockings, and thus held her shamelessly, bare to the waist, exclaiming and laughing. He spat upon her body, and she came down with a jolt out of the carriage, dishevelled, blind, with open mouth, with her soft arms hanging behind her as if they had no joints. Her spine, the back of her neck, and her livid face struck the seat of the carriage and the step, and at length she fell on the pavement, striking her head on the stones.
