The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  In the centre of the semi-circle of huts there stood a brick-kiln, and next to it, a high, narrow red chapel which resembled a one-eyed watchman. And as I stood gazing at the scene in general, a crane stooped with a faint and raucous cry, and a woman who had come out to draw water looked as though, as she raised bare arms to stretch herself upwards—cloud-like, and white-robed from head to foot—she were about to float away altogether.

  Also, near the brick-kiln there lay a patch of black mud in the glistening, crumpled-velvet blue substance of which two urchins of five and three were, breechless, and naked from the waist upwards, kneading yellow feet amid a silence as absorbed as though their one desire in life had been to impregnate the mud with the red radiance of the sun. And so much did this laudable task interest me, and engage my sympathy and attention, that I stopped to watch the strapping youngsters, seeing that even in mire the sun has a rightful place, for the reason that the deeper the sunlight’s penetration of the soil, the better does that soil become, and the greater the benefit to the people dwelling on its surface.

  Viewed from above, the scene lay, as it were, in the palm of one’s hand. True, by no manner of means could such lowly farm cots provide me with a job, but at least should I, for that evening, be able to enjoy the luxury of a chat with the cots’ kindly inhabitants. Hence, with, in my mind, a base and mischievous inclination to retail to those inhabitants tales of the marvellous kind of which I knew them to stand wellnigh as much in need as of bread, I resumed my way, and approached the bridge.

  As I did so, there arose from the ground-level an animated clod of earth in the shape of a sturdy individual. Unwashed and unshaven, he had hanging on his frame an open canvas shirt, grey with dust, and baggy blue breeches.

  “Good evening,” I said to the fellow.

  “I wish you the same,” he replied. “Whither are you bound?”

  “First of all, what is the name of this river?”

  “What is its name? Why, it is the Sagaidak, of course.”

  On the man’s large, round head there was a shock of bristling, grizzled curls, while pendent to the moustache below it were ends like those of the moustache of a Chinaman. Also, as his small eyes scanned me with an air of impudent distrust, I could detect that they were engaged in counting the holes and dams in my raiment. Only after a long interval did he draw a deep breath as from his pocket he produced a clay pipe with a cane mouthpiece, and, knitting his brows attentively, fell to peering into the pipe’s black bowl. Then he said:

  “Have you matches?”

  I replied in the affirmative.

  “And some tobacco?”

  For awhile he continued to contemplate the sun where that luminary hung suspended above a cloud-bank before finally declining. Then he remarked:

  “Give me a pinch of the tobacco. As for matches, I have some.”

  So both of us lit up; after which he rested his elbows upon the balustrade of the bridge, leant back against the central stanchions, and for some time continued merely to emit and inhale blue coils of smoke. Then his nose wrinkled, and he expectorated.

  “Muscovite tobacco is it?” he inquired.

  “No—Roman, Italian.”

  “Oh!” And as the wrinkles of his nose straightened themselves again he added: “Then of course it is good tobacco.”

  To enter a dwelling in advance of one’s host is a breach of decorum; wherefore, I found myself forced to remain standing where I was until my interlocutor’s tale of questions as to my precise identity, my exact place of origin, my true destination, and my real reasons for travelling should tardily win its way to a finish. Greatly the process vexed me, for I was eager, rather, to learn what the steppe settlement might have in store for my delectation.

  “Work?” the fellow drawled through his teeth. “Oh no, there is no work to be got here. How could there be at this season of the year?”

  Turning aside, he spat into the rivulet.

  On the further bank of the latter, a goose was strutting importantly at the head of a string of round, fluffy, yellow goslings, whilst driving the brood were two little girls—the one a child but little larger than the goose itself, dressed in a red frock, and armed with a switch; and the other one a youngster absolutely of a size with the bird, pale of feature, plump of body, bowed of leg, and grave of expression.

  “Ufim!” came at this moment in the strident voice of a woman unseen, but incensed; upon which my companion bestowed upon me a sidelong nod, and muttered with an air of appreciation:

  “There’s lungs for you!”

  Whereafter, he fell to twitching the toes of a chafed and blackened foot, and to gazing at their nails. His next question was:

  “Are you, maybe, a scholar?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because, if you are, you might like to read the Book over a corpse.”

  And so proud, apparently, was he of the proposal that a faint smile crossed his flaccid countenance.

  “You see, it would be work,” he added with his brown eyes veiled, “whilst, in addition, you would be paid ten kopecks for your trouble, and allowed to keep the shroud.”

  “And should also be given some supper, I suppose?”

  “Yes—and should also be given some supper.”

  “Where is the corpse lying?”

  “In my own hut. Shall we go there?”

  Off we set. En route we heard once more a strident shout of:

  “Ufi-i-im!”

  As we proceeded, shadows of trees glided along the soft road to meet us, while behind a clump of bushes on the further bank of the rivulet some children were shouting at their play. Thus, what with the children’s voices, and the purling of the water, and the noise of someone planing a piece of wood, the air seemed full of tremulous, suspended sound. Meanwhile, my host said to me with a drawl:

  “Once we did have a reader here. An old woman she was, a regular old witch who at last had to be removed to the town for amputation of the feet. They might well have cut off her tongue too whilst they were about it, since, though useful enough, she could rail indeed!”

  Presently a black puppy, a creature of about the size of a toad, came ambling, three-legged fashion, under our feet. Upon that it stiffened its tail, growled, and snuffed the air with its tiny pink nose.

  Next there popped up from somewhere or another a barefooted young woman. Clapping her hands, she bawled:

  “Here, you Ufim, how I have been calling for you, and calling for you!”

  “Eh? Well, I never heard you.”

  “Where were you, then?”

  By way of reply, my conductor silently pointed in my direction with the stem of his pipe. Then he led me into the forecourt of the hut next to the one whence the young woman had issued, whilst she proceeded to project fresh volleys of abuse, and fresh expressions of accentuated non-amiability.

  In the little doorway of the dwelling next to hers, we found seated two old women. One of them was as rotund and dishevelled as a battered, leathern ball, and the other one was a woman bony and crooked of back, swarthy of skin, and irritable of feature. At the women’s feet lay, lolling out a rag-like tongue, a shaggy dog which, red and pathetic of eye, could boast of a frame nearly as large as a sheep’s.

  First of all, Ufim related in detail how he had fallen in with myself. Then he stated the purpose for which he conceived it was possible that I might prove useful. And all the time that he was speaking, two pairs of eyes contemplated him in silence; until, on the completion of his recital, one of the old women gave a jerk to a thin, dark neck, and the other old dame invited me to take a seat whilst she prepared some supper.

  Amid the tangled herbage of the forecourt, a spot overgrown with mallow and bramble shoots, there was standing a cart which, lacking wheels, had its axle-points dark with mildew. Presently a herd of cattle was driven past the hut, and over the hamlet there see
med to arise, drift, and float, a perfect wave of sound. Also, as evening descended, I could see an ever-increasing number of grey shadows come creeping forth from the forecourt’s recesses, and overlaying and darkening the turf.

  “One day all of us must die,” remarked Ufim, with empressement as he tapped the bowl of his pipe against a wall.

  The next moment the barefooted, red-cheeked young woman showed herself at the gate, and asked in tones rather less vehement than recently:

  “Are you coming, or are you not?”

  “Presently,” replied Ufim. “One thing at a time.”

  For supper I was given a hunch of bread and a bowl of milk; whereupon the dog rose, laid its aged, slobbering muzzle upon my knee, and gazed into my face with its dim eyes as though it were saying, “May I too have a bite?”

  Next, like an eventide breeze among withered herbage, there floated across the forecourt the hoarse voice of the crook-backed old woman.

  “Let us pray,” she said. “Oh God, take away from us all sorrow, and receive therefore requitement in twofold measure!”

  As she recited the prayer with a mien as dark as fate, the supplicant rolled her long neck from side to side, and nodded her ophidian-shaped head in accordance with a sort of regular, lethargic rhythm. Next I heard sink to earth, at my feet, some senile words uttered in a sort of singsong.

  “Some folk need work just as much as they wish, and others need do no work at all. Yet our folk have to work beyond their strength, and to work without any recompense for the toil which they undergo.”

  Upon this the smaller of the old crones whispered:

  “But the Mother of God will recompense them. She recompenses everyone.”

  Then a dead silence fell—a weighty silence, a silence seemingly fraught with matters of import, and inspiring in one an assurance that presently there would be brought forth impressive reflections—there would reach the ear words of mark.

  “I may tell you,” at length the crook-backed old woman remarked as she attempted to straighten herself, “that though my husband was not without enemies, he also had a particular friend named Andrei, and that when failing strength was beginning to make life difficult for us in our old home on the Don, and folk took to reviling and girding at my husband, Andrei came to us one day, and said: ‘Yakov, let not your hands fail you, for the earth is large, and in all parts has been given to men for their use. If folk be cruel, they are so through stupidity and prejudice, and must not be judged for being so. Live your own life. Let theirs be theirs, and yours yours, so that, dwelling in peace, while yielding to none, you shall in time overcome them all.’”

  “That is what Vasil too used to say. He used to say: ‘Let theirs be theirs, and ours ours.’”

  “Aye, never a good word dies, but, wheresoever it be uttered, flies thence through the world like a swallow.”

  Ufim corroborated this with a nod.

  “True indeed!” he remarked. “Though also it has been said that a good word is Christ’s, and a bad word the priest’s.”

  One of the old women shook her head vigorously at this, and croaked:

  “The badness lies not in any word of a priest, but in what you yourself have just said. You are greyheaded, Ufim, yet often you speak without thought.”

  Presently Ufim’s wife reappeared, and, waving her hands as though she were brandishing a sieve, began to vent renewed volleys of virulent abuse.

  “My God,” she cried, “what sort of a man is that? Why, a man who neither speaks nor listens, but for ever keeps baying at the moon like a dog!”

  “Now she’s started!” Ufim drawled.

  Westward there were arising, and soaring skyward, clouds of such a similarity to blue smoke and blood-red flame that the steppe seemed almost to be in danger of catching fire thence. Meanwhile a soft evening breeze was caressing the expanse as a whole, and causing the grain to bend drowsily earthward as golden-red ripples skimmed its surface. Only in the eastern quarter whence night’s black, sultry shadow was stealthily creeping in our direction had darkness yet descended.

  At intervals there came vented from the window above my head the hot odour of a dead body; and, whenever that happened, the dog’s grey nostrils and muzzle would quiver, and its eyes would blink pitifully as it gazed aloft. Glancing at the heavens, Ufim remarked with conviction:

  “There will be no rain tonight.”

  “Do you keep such a thing as a Psalter here?” I inquired.

  “Such a thing as a what?”

  “As a Psalter—a book?”

  No answer followed.

  Faster and faster the southern night went on descending, and wiping the land clean of heat, as though that heat had been dust. Upon me there came a feeling that I should like to go and bury myself in some sweet-smelling hay, and sleep there until sunrise.

  “Maybe Panek has one of those things?” hazarded Ufim after a long pause. “At any rate he has dealings with the Molokans.”

  After that, the company held further converse in whispers. Then all save the more rotund of the old women left the forecourt, while its remaining occupant said to me with a sigh:

  “You may come and look at him if you wish.”

  Small and gentle looked the woman’s meekly lowered head as, folding her hands across her breast, she added in a whisper:

  “Oh purest Mother of God! Oh Thou of spotless chastity!”

  In contrast to her expression, that on the face of the dead man was stem and, as it were, fraught with importance where thick grey eyebrows lay parted over a large nose, and the latter curved downwards towards a moustache which divided introspective, partially closed eyes from a mouth that was set half-open. Indeed, it was as though the man were pondering something of annoyance, so that presently he would make shift to deliver himself of a final and urgent injunction. The blue smoke of a meagre candle quivered meanwhile, over his head, though the wick diffused so feeble a light that the death blurs under the eyes and in the cheek furrows lay uneffaced, and the dark hands and wrists, disposed, lumplike, on the front of the greyish-blue shroud, seemed to have had their fingers twisted in a manner which even death had failed to rectify. And ever and anon, streaming from door to window, came a draught variously fraught with the odours of wormwood, mint, and corruption.

  Presently the old woman’s whispering grew more animated and intelligible, while constantly, amid the wheezed mutterings, sheet lightning cut the black square of the window space with menacing flashes, and seemed, with their blue glare, as it shot through the tomblike hut, to cause the candle’s flickering flame to undergo a temporary extinction, a temporary withdrawal, and the grey bristles on the dead man’s face to gleam like the scales of a fish, and his features to gather themselves into a grim frown. Meanwhile, like a stream of cold, bitter water dripping upon my breast, the old woman’s whispered soliloquy maintained its uninterrupted flow.

  At length there recurred, somehow, to my mind the words which, impressive though they be, never can assuage sorrow—the words:

  “Weep not for me, Martha, nor gaze into the tomb, for, lo, I am risen!”

  Nay, and never would this man rise again.…

  Presently the bony old woman returned with a report that nowhere among the huts could a Psalter be found, but only a book of another kind. Would it do?

  The other book turned out to be a grammar of the Church Slavonic dialect, with the first pages torn out, and beginning with the words, “Drug, drugi, druzhe.” [“A friend, of a friend, O friend.”]

  “What, then, are we to do?” vexedly asked the smaller of the dames when I had explained to her that a grammar could work no benefit to a corpse. As she put the query, her small, childlike face quivered with disappointment, and her eyes swelled and overflowed with tears.

  “My man has lived his life,” she said with a sob, “and now he cannot even be given proper burial!”

 
; And, similarly, when next I offered to recite over her husband each and every prayer and psalm that I could contrive to recall to my recollection, on condition that all present should meanwhile leave the hut (for I felt that, since the task would be one novel to me, the attendance of auditors might hinder me from mustering my entire stock of petitions), she so disbelieved me, or failed to understand me, that for long enough she could only stand tottering in the doorway as, with twitching nose, she drew her sleeve across her worn, diminutive features.

  Nevertheless she did, at last, take her departure.

  * * * *

  Low over the steppe, stray flashes of summer lightning still gleamed against the jet black sky as they flooded the hut with their lurid shimmer; and each time that the darkness of the sultry night swept back into the room, the candle flickered, and the corpse’s prone figure seemed to open its half-closed eyes and glance at the shadows which palpitated on its breast, and danced over the white walls and ceiling.

  Similarly did I glance from time to time at him, yet glance with a guarded eye, and with a feeling in me that when a corpse is present anything may happen; until finally I rallied conscience to my aid, and recited under my breath:

  “Pardon Thou all who have sinned, whether they be men, or whether they, being not men, do yet stand higher than the beasts of the field.”

  However, the only result of the recitation was to bring to my mind a thought directly at variance with the import of the words, the thought that “it is not sin that is hard and bitter to ensue, but righteousness.”

  “Sins wilful and of ignorance,” I continued. “Sins known and unknown. Sins committed through imprudence and evil example. Sins committed through forwardness and sloth.”

  “Though to you, brother,” mentally I added to the corpse, “none of this, of course, applies.”

  Again, glancing at the blue stars, where they hung glittering in the fathomless obscurity of the sky, I reflected:

  “Who in this house is looking at them save myself?”