The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “Just so,”—said the woman briefly and calmly, and laughed with that very significant and purely feminine smile, which is capable of evoking in a man thoughts of jealousy which pierce his heart.

  Orlóff, who was nervous and quick of apprehension, felt this, but, being loath to betray himself, out of self-love, he flung at his wife the curt remark:

  “Quack and grunt—make up all your speeches.…” and he pricked up his ears, in anticipation of what she would say.

  But she smiled again, with that exasperating smile, and preserved silence.

  “Well, how is it to be?” inquired Grigóry, in a lofty tone.

  “How is what to be?” said Matréna, indifferently wiping the cups.

  “Viper! None of your shiftiness—I’ll damage you!” Orlóff boiled up.—“Perhaps I’m going to my death.”

  “I’m not sending you…don’t go.…” interrupted Matréna.

  “You’d be glad to send me off, I know!” exclaimed Orlóff ironically.

  She made no reply. Her silence enraged him, but he restrained himself from his customary expression of the feelings which such scenes called forth in him. He restrained himself under the influence of a very venomous thought, as it appeared to him, which flashed through his brain. He even gave vent to a malicious smile. “I know you’d like to have me tumble down even to the very depths of hell. Well, we shall see which of us comes off best…yes! I, also, can take such a course—akh, I’ve no patience with you!”

  He sprang up from the table, snatched up his cap from the window-sill, and went off, leaving his wife dissatisfied with her policy, disconcerted by his threats, and with a growing feeling within her of alarm for the future. As she gazed out of the window, she whispered to herself:

  “Oh Lord! Queen of Heaven! All-Holy Birth-Giver of God!”

  Besieged by a throng of disquieting problems, she remained sitting, for a long time, at the table, endeavoring to foresee what Grigóry would do. Before her stood the cleanly-washed table appurtenances; and on the principal wall of the neighboring house opposite her windows, the setting sun cast a reddish spot; reflected from the white wall, it penetrated into the room, and the edge of the glass sugar-bowl which stood in front of Matréna glittered. She stared at this faint reflection, with contracted brow, until her eyes ached. Then, rising from her chair, she cleared away the dishes and lay down on the bed. She felt disgusted.

  Grigóry arrived when it was already entirely dark. From his very footsteps on the stairs she decided that he was in good spirits. He swore at the darkness in the room, called to his wife, approached the bed, and sat down on it. His wife raised herself, and sat beside him.

  “Do you know I have something to tell you?”—asked Orlóff, laughing.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “You are going to take a position also!”

  “Where?” she asked, with trembling voice.

  “In the same barracks with me!” announced Orlóff triumphantly.

  She threw her arms round his neck, and clasping him tightly, kissed him straight on the lips. He had not expected this, and thrust her away. She was pretending…she didn’t want to be with him at all, rogue that she was! The viper was pretending, she regarded her husband as a fool.…

  “What are you delighted about?”—he asked roughly and suspiciously, conscious of a desire to hurl her to the floor.

  “Because I am!” she replied, boldly.

  “Pretence! I know you!”

  “You’re my Eruslán the Brave!”10

  “Stop that, I tell you…or look out for yourself!”

  “You’re my darling little Grísha!”

  “Well, what’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

  When her caresses had tamed him a little, he asked her anxiously:

  “But you’re not afraid?”

  “Why, we shall be together,” she replied simply.

  It pleased him to hear this. He said to her:

  “You brave little creature!”

  And, at the same time, he pinched her side so hard that she shrieked.

  * * * *

  The first day of the Orlóffs’ service in the hospital coincided with a very great influx of patients, and the two novices, accustomed, as they were, to their slowly-moving existence, felt worried and hampered in the midst of this seething activity which had seized them in its grasp. Awkward, unable to comprehend orders, overwhelmed by impressions, they immediately lost their heads, and although they incessantly ran hither and thither, in the effort to work, they hindered others rather than accomplished anything themselves. Several times, Grigóry felt, with all his being, that he merited a stem shout or a scolding for his incompetence, but, to his great amazement, no one shouted at him.

  When one of the doctors, a tall, black-mustached man, with a hooked nose, and a huge wart over his right eyebrow, ordered Grigóry to assist one of the patients to sit down in the bath-tub, Grigóry gripped the sick man under the arms with so much zeal that the man groaned and frowned.

  “Don’t break him to pieces, my dear fellow, he’ll fit into the bath-tub whole.…” said the doctor seriously.

  Orlóff was abashed; but the sick man, a long, gaunt fellow, laughed with all his might, and said hoarsely: “He’s new to it.… He doesn’t know how.”

  Another doctor, an old man, with a pointed gray beard, and large, brilliant eyes, gave the Orlóffs instructions, when they reached the barracks, how to treat the patients, what to do in this case and that, how to handle the sick people in transferring them. In conclusion, he asked them whether they had been to the bath the day before, and gave them white aprons. This doctor’s voice was soft, he spoke rapidly; he took a great liking to the married pair, but half an hour later they had forgotten all his instructions, overwhelmed with the stormy life of the barracks. All about them flitted people in white, orders were issued, caught on the fly by the orderlies, the sick people rattled in their throats, moaned and groaned, water flowed and splashed; and all these sounds floated on the air, which was so thickly saturated with penetrating odors that tickled the nostrils disagreeably, that it seemed as though every word of the doctors, every sigh of the patients, stunk also, and irritated the nose.…

  At first, it seemed to Orlóff that utterly restless chaos reigned there, wherein he could not possibly find his place, and that he would choke, grow deaf, fall ill.… But a few hours passed, and Grigóry, invaded by the breath of energy everywhere disseminated, pricked up his ears, and became permeated with a mighty desire to adjust himself to his business as speedily as possible, conscious that he would feel calmer and easier if he could turn in company with the rest.

  “Corrosive sublimate!” shouted one doctor.

  “More hot water in this bath-tub!” commanded a scraggy little medical student, with red, inflamed eyelids.

  “Here you…what’s your name? Orlóff…yes! rub his feet.… There, that’s the way…you understand.… So-o, so-o.… More lightly—you’ll take the skin off.… Oï, how tired I am.…”

  Another long-haired and pock-marked student gave Grigóry orders and showed him how to work.

  “They’ve brought another patient!” the news passed from one to another.

  “Orlóff, go and carry him in.”

  Grigóry displayed great zeal—all covered with perspiration, dizzy, with dimmed eves and a heavy darkness in his head. At times, the feeling of personal existence in him completely vanished under the pressure of the mass of impressions which he underwent every moment. The green spots under the clouded eyes on earth-colored faces, bones which seemed to have been sharpened by the disease, the sticky, malodorous skin, the strange convulsions of the hardly living bodies—all this made his heart contract with grief, and caused a nausea which he could, with difficulty, control.

  Several times, in the corridor of the barracks, he caught a fleeting glimpse of his wife;
she had grown thin, and her face was gray and abstracted. He even managed to ask her, with a voice which had grown hoarse:

  “Well, how goes it?”

  She smiled faintly in reply, and silently disappeared.

  A totally unaccustomed thought stung Grigóry: perhaps he had done wrong in forcing his wife to come hither, to such filthy work. She would fall ill of the infection.… And the next time he met her, he shouted at her severely:

  “See to it that you wash your hands often…take care!”

  “And what if I don’t?”—she asked, teasingly, displaying her small, white teeth.

  This enraged him. A pretty place she had chosen for mirth, the fool! And how mean they were, those women! But he did not succeed in saying anything to her; catching his angry glance, Matréna went rapidly away to the women’s section.

  And a minute later he was carrying his acquaintance the policeman to the dead-house. The policeman rocked gently to and fro on the stretcher, with his eyes fixed in a stare, from beneath contorted brows, on the clear, hot sky. Grigóry gazed at him with dull terror in his heart: The day before yesterday he had seen that policeman at his post, and had even sworn at him as he went past—they had some little accounts to settle between them. And now, here was this man, so healthy and malicious, lying dead, all disfigured, drawn up with convulsions.

  Orlóff felt that this was not right,—why should a man be born into the world at all, if he must die, in one day, of such a dirty disease? He gazed down upon the policeman from above, and pitied him. What would become of his children…three in all? The dead man had buried his wife a year ago, and had not yet succeeded in marrying for the second time.

  He even ached, somewhere inside, with this pity. But, all at once, the clenched left hand of the corpse slowly moved and straightened itself out. At the same moment, the left side of the distorted mouth, which had been half open up to now, closed.

  “Halt!”—shouted Orlóff hoarsely, setting the stretcher down on the ground.—“Be quick!”—he said in a whisper to the orderly who was carrying the corpse with him. The latter turned round, cast a glance at the dead man, and said angrily to Orlóff:

  “What are you lying for? Don’t you understand that he’s only putting himself in order for the coffin? You see how it has twisted him up? He can’t be put into the coffin like that. Hey there, carry him along!”

  “Yes, but he is moving.…” protested Orlóff.

  “Carry him along, do you hear, you queer man! Don’t you understand words? I tell you: he’s putting himself in order,—well, that means that he’s moving. This ignorance of yours may lead you into sin, if you don’t look out.… Look lively there! Can a man make such speeches about a dead body? That signifies a riot, brother…that’s what it is! Understand? In other words, hold your tongue, and don’t utter a syllable to anyone about his moving,—they’re all like that. Otherwise, the sow will tell it to the boar-pig, and the boar will tell it to the whole town, well, and the result will be a riot— ’they’re burying people alive!’ The populace will come here, and tear us in bits. There’ll be about enough of you left for a breakfast-roll.11 Understand? Shunt him here, on the left.”

  Prónin’s calm voice and leisurely gait had a sobering effect upon Grigóry.

  “Only don’t let your spirits sink, my good fellow-you’ll get used to it. We’re well off here. Victuals, treatment and all the rest—everything is just as it should be. We shall all be corpses, my boy; it’s the commonest thing in life. And, in the meanwhile, brisk up, you know, and only don’t get scared—that’s the chief thing! Do you drink vódka?”

  “Yes,” replied Orlóff.

  “Well then. Yonder in the ditch I have a little bottle, in case of need. Come and let’s swallow a little of it.” They went to the pit, round the corner of the barracks, took a drink, and Prónin, pouring some drops of mint on sugar, gave it to Orlóff, with the words:

  “Eat that, otherwise you’ll smell of vódka. They’re strict here about vódka. For it’s injurious to drink it, they say.”

  “And have you got used to things here?” Grigóry asked him.

  “I should think so! I’ve been here from the start. A lot of folks have died here since I’ve been here—hundreds, to speak plainly. It’s an uneasy life, but a good life here, to tell the truth. It’s a pious work. Like the ambulance-corps in time of war…you’ve heard about the ambulance-corps and the sisters of mercy? I watched them during the Turkish campaign. I was at Adragan and Kars. Well, my boy, they’re purer than we are, we soldiers and people in general. We fight, we have guns, bullets, bayonets; but they—they walk about without any weapons, as though they were in a green garden. They pick up our men, or a Turk, and carry them to the field-hospital. And around them…zh-zhee! ti-in! fi-it! Sometimes the poor ambulance man gets it in the neck—tchik!… and that’s the end of him!…”

  After this conversation, and a good swallow of vódka, Orlóff plucked up a little courage.

  “You’ve put your hand to the rope, don’t say it’s too thick,”—he exhorted himself, as he rubbed a sick man’s legs. Someone behind him entreated piteously, in a moaning voice:

  “A dri-ink! Oï, my dear fellow!”

  And someone gabbled:

  “Oho-ho-ho! Hotter! Mis-mister doctor, it relieves me! Christ reward you,—I can feel! Permit him to pour in some more boiling water!”

  “Give him some wine!” shouted Doctor Váshtchenko.

  Orlóff worked away, lending an attentive ear to what went on around him, and found that, as a matter of fact, everything was not so nasty and strange as it had seemed to him a little while before, and that chaos did not reign, but a great and intelligent power was acting regularly. But he shuddered, nevertheless, when he recalled the policeman, and cast a furtive glance through the window of the barracks into the yard. He believed that the policeman was dead, but still there was an element of wavering in this belief. Wouldn’t the man suddenly spring up and shout? And he remembered that he seemed to have heard someone tell: that one day, somewhere or other, people who had died of the cholera leaped out of their coffins and ran away.

  As Orlóff ran to and fro in the barracks, now rubbing one patient, now placing another in the bath-tub, he felt exactly as though gruel were boiling in his brain. He recalled his wife: how was she getting on yonder? Sometimes with this recollection mingled a transitory desire to steal a minute to have a look at Matréna. But after this, Orlóff felt, somehow, disconcerted at his desire, and exclaimed to himself:

  “Come, bustle about, you fatmeated woman! You’ll dry up, never fear.… You’ll get rid of your intentions.…”

  He had always suspected that his wife cherished, in her heart of hearts, intentions very insulting to him as a husband, and now and then, when he rose in his suspicions to a sort of objectiveness, he even admitted that there was some foundation for these intentions. Her life, also, was tinged with yellow, and all sorts of trash creeps into one’s head with such a life. This objectiveness was generally converted into certainty during the period of his suspicions. Then he would ask himself: why had he found it necessary to crawl out of his cellar into this boiling cauldron?—and he wondered at himself. But all these thoughts worked round and round, somewhere deep within him, and were fenced off, as it were, from the direct line of his work by the strained attention which he devoted to the actions of the medical staff. Never, in any sort of labor, had he beheld men wear themselves out, as the men did here, and he reflected, more than once, as he surveyed the exhausted faces of the doctors and students, that all these men really did not get paid for doing nothing!

  When relieved from duty, hardly able to stand on his feet, Orlóff went out into the court-yard of the barracks, and lay down against its wall, under the window of the apothecary’s shop. There was a ringing in his head, there was a pain under his shoulder-blades, and his legs ached with the gnawing pangs of fatigue. He no longer th
ought of anything, or wanted anything, he simply stretched himself out on the sod, stared at the sky, in which hung magnificent clouds, richly adorned with the rays of sunset, and fell into a sleep like death.

  He dreamed that he and his wife were the guests of Doctor Váshtchenko in a huge room, with rows of Vienna chairs ranged around the walls. On the chairs all the patients from the barracks were sitting. The doctor and Matréna were executing the “Russian Dance” in the middle of the hall, while he himself was playing the accordeon and laughing heartily, because the doctor’s long legs would not bend at all, and the doctor, a very grave and pompous man, was stalking about the hall after Matréna exactly as a heron stalks over a marsh.

  All at once the policeman made his appearance in the doorway.

  “Aha!” he exclaimed saturninely and menacingly.—“Did you think, Gríshka, that I was completely dead? You’re playing the accordeon, but you dragged me out to the dead-house! Come along with me, now! Get up!” Seized with a fit of trembling, all bathed in perspiration, Orlóff raised himself quickly and sat on the ground. Opposite, was squatting Doctor Váshtchenko, who said to him reproachfully:

  “What sort of an ambulance nurse are you, my friend, if you go to sleep on the ground, and lie down on it upon your belly, to boot, hey? Now, you’ll take cold in your bowels,—you’ll take to your cot, and the first you know, you’ll die.… It’s not right, my friend,—you have a place in the barracks to sleep. Why didn’t they tell you so? Besides, you are in a perspiration, and have a chill. Come along with me, now, I’ll give you something.”

  “I was so tired…” muttered Orlóff.

  “So much the worse. You must take care of your-self—it is a dangerous time, and you are a valuable man.”

  Orlóff followed the doctor in silence along the corridor of the barracks, in silence drank some sort of medicine out of a wine-glass, drank something more out of another, frowned and spat.