by Maxim Gorky
As Konev says this his dark, pointed eyebrows will go shooting up his forehead, and his eyes come protruding out of their sockets, as though he himself cannot believe what he has just related.
Again, should a Cossack pass him without returning his salute, he will mutter as he follows the man with his eyes:
“An overfed fellow, that—a fellow who can’t even look at a human being! The souls of these folk, I tell you, are withered.”
On the present occasion he has arrived on the scene in company with two women. One of them, aged about twenty, is gentle-looking, plump, and glassy of eye, with a mouth perpetually half-open, so that the face looks like that of an imbecile, and though the exposed teeth of its lower portion may seem to be set in a smile, you will perceive, should you peer into the motionless eyes under the overhanging brows, that she has recently been weeping in the terrified, hysterical fashion of a person of weak intellect.
I have come here with that man and other strangers thus I heard her narrate in low, querulous tones as with a stumpy finger she rearranged the faded hair under her yellow and green scarf.
A fat-faced youth with high cheek-bones and the small eyes of a Mongol here nudged her, and said carelessly:
“You mean, rather, that your own man has cast you off. Probably he was the only man you ever saw.”
“Aye,” Konev drawled thoughtfully as he felt in his wallet. “Nowadays folk need think little of deserting a woman, since in this year of grace women are no good at all.”
Upon this the woman frowned—then blinked her eyes timidly, and would have opened her lips to reply, but that her companion interrupted her by saying in a brisk, incisive tone:
“Do not listen to those rascals!”
* * * *
The woman’s companion, some five or six years her senior, has a face exceptional in the constant change and movement of its great dark eyes as at one moment they withdraw themselves from the street of the Cossack hamlet, to gaze fixedly and gravely towards the steppe where it lies scoured with the scudding breeze, and at another moment fall to scanning the faces of the persons around her, and, at another, frown anxiously, or send a smile flitting across her comely lips as she bends her head, until her features are concealed. Next, the head is raised again, for the eyes have taken on another phase, and become dilated with interest, while a sharp furrow is forming between the slender eyebrows, and the finely moulded lips and trim mouth have compressed themselves together, and the thin nostrils of the straight nose are snuffing the air like those of a horse.
In fact, in the woman there is something non-peasant in its origin. For instance, let one but watch her sharply clicking feet as, in walking, they peep from under her blue skirt, and one will perceive that they are not the splayed feet of a villager, but, rather, feet arched of instep, and at one time accustomed to the wearing of boots. Or, as the woman sits engaged in embroidering a blue bodice with a pattern of white peas, one will perceive that she has long been accustomed to plying the needle so dexterously; swiftly do the small, sunburnt hands fly in and out under the tumbled material, eagerly though the wind may strive to wrest it from her. Again, as she sits bending over her work, one will descry through a rent in her bodice a small, firm bosom which might almost have been that of a virgin, were it not for the fact that a projecting teat proclaims that she is a woman preparing to suckle an infant. In short, as she sits among her companions she looks like a fragment of copper flung into the midst of some rusty old scrap-iron.
Most of the people in whose society I wander neither rise to great heights nor sink to great depths, but are as colourless as dust, and wearisomely insignificant. Hence is it that whenever I chance upon a person whose soul I can probe and explore for thoughts unfamiliar to me and words not hitherto heard I congratulate myself, seeing that though it is my desire to see life grow more fair and exalted, and I yearn to bring about that end, there constantly reveals itself to me merely a vista of sharp angles and dark spaces and poor crushed, defrauded people. Yes, never do I seek to project a spark of my own fire into the darkness of my neighbour’s soul but I see that spark disappear, become lost, in a chaos of dumb vacuity.
Hence the woman of whom I have just spoken particularly excites my fancy, and leads me to attempt divinations of her past, until I find myself evolving a story which is not only of vast complexity, but has got painted into it merely the colours of my own hopes and aspirations. It is a story necessarily illusory, necessarily bound to make life seem even worse than before. Yet it is a grievous thing never to distort actuality, never to envelop actuality in the wrappings of one’s imagination.…
Closing his eyes, and picking his words with difficulty, a tall, fair peasant drawls in thick, gluelike tones:
“‘Very well,’ I said: and off we set. On the way I said again: ‘Gubin, though you may not like to be told so, you are no better than a thief.’”
The o’s uttered by this peasant are uniformly round and firm—they roll forward as a cartwheel trundles along a hot, dusty country road.
The youth with the high cheek-bones fixes the whites of his porcine eyes (eyes the pupils of which are as indeterminate as the eyes of a blind man) upon the woman in the green scarf. Then, having, like a calf, plucked and chewed some stalks of the withered grass, he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt, bends one fist into the crook of the elbow, and says to Konev with a glance at the well-developed muscle:
“Should you care to hit me?”
“No, you can hit yourself. Hit yourself over the head. Then, perhaps, you’ll grow wiser.”
Stolidly the young fellow looks at Konev, and inquires:
“How do you know me to be a fool?”
“Because your personality tells me so.”
“Eh?” cries the young fellow truculently as he raises himself to a kneeling posture. “How know you what I am?”
“I have been told what you are by the Governor of your province.”
The young fellow opens his mouth, and stares at Konev. Then he asks:
“To what province do I belong?”
“If you yourself have forgotten to what province you belong, you had better try and loosen your wits.”
“Look here. If I were to hit you, I—”
The woman who has been sewing drops her work to shrug one rounded shoulder as though she were cold, and ask conciliatorily:
“Well, what province do you belong to?”
“I?” the young fellow re-echoes as he subsides on to his heels. “I belong to Penza. Why do you ask?”
“Oh never mind why.”
Presently, with a strangely youthful laugh, the woman adds in a murmur:
“I ask because I too belong to that province.”
“And to which canton?”
“To that of Penza.” In the woman’s tone is a touch of pride.
The young fellow squats down before her, as before a wood fire, stretches out his hands, and says in an ingratiating voice:
“What a fine place is our cantonal town! What churches and shops and stone houses there are in it! In fact, one shop sells a machine on which you can play anything you like, any sort of a tune!”
“As well as, probably, the fool,” comments Konev in an undertone, though the young fellow is too enthralled with the memory of the amenities of his cantonal capital to notice the remark. Next, smacking his lips, and chewing his words, he continues in a murmur:
“In those stone houses.”
Here the woman drops her sewing a second time to inquire: “Is there a convent there?”
“A convent?”
And the young fellow pauses uncouthly to scratch his neck. Only after a while does he answer:
“A convent? Well, I do not know, for only once, to tell the truth, have I been in the town, and that was when some of us famine folk were set to a job of roadmaking.”
“Well, well!” gasp
s Konev, as he rises and takes his departure.
The vagabonds, huddled against the churchyard wall, look like litter driven thither by the steppe wind, and as liable to be whirled away again whenever the wind shall choose. Three of the party are sleeping, and the remainder either mending their clothing, or killing fleas, or lethargically munching bread collected at the windows of the Cossacks’ huts. I find the sight of them weary me as much as does the young fellows fatuous babble. Also, I find that whenever the elder of the two women lifts her eyes from her work, and half smiles, the faint half-smile in question vexes me intensely. Consequently, I end by departing in Konev’s wake.
Guarding the entrance of the churchyard, four poplar trees stand erect, save when, as the wind harries them, they bow alternately to the arid, dusty earth and towards the dim vista of tow-coloured steppe and snowcapped mountain peaks. Yet, oh how that steppe, bathed in golden sunshine, draws one to itself and its smooth desolation of sweet, dry grasses as the parched, fragrant expanse rustles under the soughing wind!
“You ask about that woman, eh?” queries Konev, whom I find leaning against one of the poplar trunks, and embracing it with an arm.
“Yes. From where does she hail?”
“From Riazan, she says. Another story of hers is that her name is Tatiana.”
“Has she been with you long?”
“No. In fact, it was only this morning, some thirty versts from here, that I overtook her and her companion. However, I have seen her before, at Maikop-on-Laba, during the season of hay harvest, when she had with her an elderly, smoothfaced muzhik who might have been a soldier, and certainly was either her lover or an uncle, as well as a bully and a drunkard of the type which, before it has been two days in a place, starts about as many brawls. At present, however, she is tramping with none but this female companion, for, after that the ‘uncle’ had drunk away his very belly-band and reins, he was clapped in gaol. The Cossack, you know, is an awkward person to deal with.”
Although Konev speaks without constraint, his eyes are fixed upon the ground in a manner suggestive of some disturbing thought. And as the breeze ruffles his dishevelled beard and ragged pea-jacket it ends by robbing his head of his cap—of the tattered, peakless clout which, with rents in its lining, so closely resembles a tchepchik [Woman’s mob-cap], as to communicate to the picturesque features of its wearer an appearance comically feminine.
“Ye-es,” expectorating, and drawling the words between his teeth, he continues: “She is a remarkable woman, a regular, so to speak, highstepper. Yet it must have been the Devil himself that blew this young oaf with the bloated jowl on to the scene. Otherwise I should soon have fixed up matters with her. The cur that he is!”
“But once you told me that you had a wife already?”
Darting at me an angry glance, he turns away with a mutter of:
“Am I to carry my wife about with me in my wallet?”
Here there comes limping across the square a moustachioed Cossack. In one hand he is holding a bunch of keys, and in the other hand a battered Cossack cap, peak in front. Behind him, sobbing and applying his knuckles to his eyes, there is creeping a curly-headed urchin of eight, while the rear is brought up by a shaggy dog whose dejected countenance and lowered tail would seem to show that he too is in disgrace. Each time that the boy whimpers more loudly than usual the Cossack halts, awaits the lad’s coming in silence, cuffs him over the head with the peak of the cap, and, resuming his way with the gait of a drunken man, leaves the boy and the dog standing where they are—the boy lamenting, and the dog wagging its tail as its old black muzzle sniffs the air. Somehow I discern in the dog’s mien of holding itself prepared for anything that may turn up, a certain resemblance to Konev’s bearing, save that the dog is older in appearance than is the vagabond.
“You mentioned my wife, I think?” presently he resumes with a sigh. “Yes, I know, but not every malady proves mortal, and I have been married nineteen years!”
The rest is well-known to me, for all too frequently have I heard it and similar tales. Unfortunately, I cannot now take the trouble to stop him; so once more I am forced to let his complaints come oozing tediously into my ears.
“The wench was plump,” says Konev, “and panting for love; so we just got married, and brats began to come tumbling from her like bugs from a bunk.”
Subsiding a little, the breeze takes, as it were, to whispering.
“In fact, I could scarcely turn round for them. Even now seven of them are alive, though originally the stud numbered thirteen. And what was the use of such a gang? For, consider: my wife is forty-two, and I am forty-three. She is elderly, and I am what you behold. True, hitherto I have contrived to keep up my spirits; yet poverty is wearing me down, and when, last winter, my old woman went to pieces I set forth (for what else could I do?) to tour the towns. In fact, folk like you and myself have only one job available—the job of licking one’s chops, and keeping one’s eyes open. Yet, to tell you the truth, I no sooner perceive myself to be growing superfluous in a place than I spit upon that place, and clear out of it.”
Never to this sturdy, inveterate rascal does it seem to occur to insinuate that he has been doing work of any kind, or that he in the least cares to do any; while at the same time all self-pity is eschewed in his narrative, and he relates his experiences much as though they are the experiences of another man, and not of himself.
Presently, as the Cossack and the boy draw level with us, the former, fingering his moustache, inquires thickly:
“Whence are you come?”
“From Russia.”
“All such folk come from there.”
Thereafter, with a gesture of disdain, this man of the abnormally broad nose, eyes floating in fat, and flaxen head shaped like a flounder’s, resumes his way towards the porch of the church. As for the boy, he wipes his nose and follows him while the dog sniffs at our legs, yawns, and stretches itself by the churchyard wall.
“Did you see?” mutters Konev. “Oh yes, I tell you that the folk here are far less amiable than our own folk in Russia… But hark! What is that?”
To our ears there have come from behind the corner of the churchyard wall a woman’s scream and the sound of dull blows. Rushing thither, we behold the fair-headed peasant seated on the prostrate form of the young fellow from Penza, and methodically, gruntingly delivering blow after blow upon the young fellow’s ears with his ponderous fists, while counting the blows as he does so. Vainly, at the same time, the woman from Riazan is prodding the assailant in the back, whilst her female companion is shrieking, and the crowd at large has leapt to its feet, and, collected into a knot, is shouting gleefully, “That’s the way! That’s the way!”
“Five!” the fair-headed peasant counts.
“Why are you doing this?” the prostrate man protests.
“Six!”
“Oh dear!” ejaculates Konev, dancing with nervousness. “Oh dear, oh dear!”
The smacking, smashing blows fall in regular cadence as, prone on his face, the young fellow kicks, struggles and puffs up the dust. Meanwhile a tall, dour man in a straw hat is rolling up a shirt-sleeve, and alternately bending and stretching a long arm, whilst a lithe, white-headed young stripling is hopping, sparrow-like, from one onlooker to another, and exclaiming in suppressed, cautious tones:
“Stop it, pray stop it, or we shall be arrested for creating a disturbance!”
Presently the tall man strides towards the fair-headed peasant, deals him a single blow which knocks him from the back of the young fellow, and, turning to the crowd, says with an informing air:
“That’s how we do it in Tambov!”
“Brutes! Villains!” screams the woman from Riazan, as she bends over the young fellow. Her cheeks are livid, and as she wipes the flushed face of the beaten youth with the hem of her gown, her dark eyes are flashing with dry wrath, and her lips quivering so painful
ly as to disclose a set of fine, level teeth.
Konev, pecking up to her, says with an air of advice:
“You had better take him away, and give him some water.”
Upon this the fair-headed muzhik, rising to his knees, stretches a fist towards the man from Tambov, and exclaims:
“Why should he have gone and bragged of his strength, pray?”
“Was that a good reason for thrashing him?”
“And who are you?”
“Who am I?”
“Yes, who are you?”
“Never mind. See that I don’t give you another swipe!”
Upon this the onlookers plunge into a heated debate as to who was actually the beginner of the disturbance, while the lithe young fellow continues to wring his hands, and cry imploringly:
“Don’t make so much noise about it! Remember that we are in a strange land, and that the folk hereabouts are strict.”
So queerly do his ears project from his head that he would seem to be able, if he pleased, to fold them right over his eyes.
Suddenly from the roseate heavens comes the vibrant note of a bell; whereupon, the hubbub ceases and at the same moment a young Cossack with a face studded with freckles, and, in his hands, a cudgel, makes his appearance among the crowd.
“What does all this mean?” he inquires not uncivilly.
“They have been beating a man,” the woman from Riazan replies. As she does so she looks comely in spite of her wrath.
The Cossack glances at her—then smiles.
“And where is the party going to sleep?” he inquires of the crowd.
“Here,” someone ventures.
“Then you must not—someone might break into the church. Go, rather, to the Ataman [Cossack headman or mayor], and you will be billeted among the huts.”
“It is a matter of no consequence,” Konev remarks as he paces beside me. “Yet—”
“They seem to be taking us for robbers,” is my interruption.
“As is everywhere the way,” he comments. “It is but one thing more laid to our charge. Caution decides always that a stranger is a thief.”