by Maxim Gorky
The cavalry captain always spent the day at the door of the night lodging-house, seated in something after the likeness of an arm-chair, which he had put together, with his own hands, out of bricks; or in the eating-house of Egór Vavíloff, which was situated slantwise opposite the Petúnnikoff house; there the captain dined and drank vódka.
Before he hired these quarters, Aristíd Kuválda had had an employment office for servants in the town; if we were to penetrate further back in his past, we should discover that he had had a printing-office, and before the printing-office he had—to use his own language—“simply lived. And I lived magnificently, devil take it! I may say, that I lived like a man who knows how!”
He was a broad-shouldered, tall man, fifty years of age, with a pock-marked face which was bloated with intoxication, framed in a broad, dirty-yellow beard. His eyes were gray, huge, audaciously jolly; he spoke in a bass voice, with a rumbling in his throat, and from his lips a German porcelain pipe, with a curved stem, almost always projected. When he was angry, the nostrils of his huge, hooked, bright-red nose became widely inflated, and his lips quivered, revealing two rows of yellow teeth, as large as those of a wolf. Long-armed, knock-kneed, always clad in a dirty and tattered officer’s cloak, a greasy cap with a red band but without a visor, and in wretched felt boots, which reached to his knees—he was always in a depressed state of drunken headache in the morning, while in the evening he was jolly drunk. Drink as he would, he could not get dead drunk, and he never lost his merry mood.
In the evenings, as he sat in his brick arm-chair, with his pipe in his teeth, he received lodgers.
“Who are you?”—he inquired of the man who approached him, a tattered, downtrodden individual who had been ejected from the town for drunkenness, or who, for some other, no less solid reason, had gone down hill.
The man replied.
“Present the legal document, in confirmation of your lies.”
The document was presented, if there was one.40 The captain thrust it into his breast, rarely interesting himself in its contents, and said:
“Everything is in order. Two kopéks a night, ten kopéks a week, by the month—thirty kopéks. Go and occupy a place, but look out that it doesn’t belong to somebody else, or you’ll get thrashed. The people who live in my house are stern.…”
Novices asked him:
“And you don’t deal in bread, tea or anything eatable?”
“I deal only in a wall and a roof, and for that I pay my rascally landlord, Judas41 Petúnnikoff, merchant of the second Guild, five rubles a month,”—explained Kuválda, in a business-like tone; “the people who come to me are not used to luxury…and if you are accustomed to gobble every day,—there’s the eating-house opposite. But it would be better if you, you wreck, would break yourself of that bad habit. You’re not a nobleman, you know,—so why should you eat? Eat yourself!”
For these and similar speeches, uttered in a tone of mock severity, and always with laughing eyes, and for his courteous behavior to his lodgers, the captain enjoyed wide popularity among the poor people of the town. It often happened that a former patron of the captain presented himself to him in the courtyard, no longer tattered and oppressed, but in a more or less decent guise, and with a brisk countenance.
“Good-day, your Well-Born! How’s your health?”
“I’m well. I’m alive. Speak further.”
“Don’t you recognise me?”
“No.”
“But you remember, I lived about a month with you in the winter…when that police round-up took place, and they gathered in three men!”
“We-ell now, brother, the police are constantly visiting my hospitable roof!”
“Akh, oh Lord! It was the time when you made that insulting gesture at the police-captain!”
“Wait, spit on all memories, and say simply, what do you want?”
“Won’t you accept a little treat from me? When I lived with you that time, you treated me, so.…”
“Gratitude ought to be encouraged, my friend, for it is rarely met with among men. You must be a fine young fellow, and although I don’t remember you in the least, I’ll accompany you to the dram-shop with pleasure, and drink to your success in life with delight.”
“And you’re just the same as ever…always joking?”
“But what else could I do, living among you unfortunates?”
They went. Sometimes the captain’s former patron returned to the lodging-house completely unscrewed and shaken lose by the treat; on the following day, they both treated each other again, and one fine morning, the former patron awoke with the consciousness that he had once more drunk up his last penny.
“Your Well-Born! A misfortune has befallen me! I’ve got into your squad again. What am I to do now?”
“A situation on which you are not to be congratulated, but, since you are in it, it’s not proper to be stingy,”—argued the captain.—“You must bear yourself with indifference toward everything, not spoiling your life with philosophy, and not putting questions. It is always stupid to philosophize, and to philosophize when one has a drunken headache—is inexpressibly stupid. A drunken headache demands vódka, and not gnawings of conscience and gnashing of teeth.?. spare your teeth, or there won’t be anything to beat you on. Here now, are twenty kopéks for you,—go and bring a measure of vódka, five kopék’s worth of hot tripe or lights, a pound of bread, and two cucumbers. When we get rid of our headache, we’ll consider the situation of affairs.”
The situation of affairs was defined with entire clearness, a couple of days later, when the captain had not a kopék left out of the three-ruble or five-ruble bank-note which he had had in his pocket on the day when his grateful patron had made his appearance.
“We’ve arrived! Enough!”—said the cavalry captain. “Now that you and I, you fool, have ruined ourselves with drink, let us try to enter again upon the path of sobriety and virtue. How just is the saying: If you don’t sin, you don’t repent, and if you don’t repent, you won’t be saved. We have performed the first, but repentance is useless, so let’s save ourselves at once. Take yourself off to the river and work. If you can’t trust yourself, tell the contractor to retain your money, or give it to me. When we have amassed a capital, I’ll buy you some trousers and the other things that are necessary to enable you to appear again as a respectable and quiet toiler, persecuted by fate. In new trousers you can go a long way! March!”
The patron took himself off to act as porter at the riverside, laughing at the captain’s long and wise speeches. He only dimly understood their poignant wit, but he beheld before him the merry eyes, felt the courageous spirit, and knew, that in the eloquent cavalry-captain he had a hand which could uphold him in case of need.
And, as a matter of fact, after a month or two of hard labor the patron, thanks to stem supervision of his conduct on the part of the captain, was in possession of the material possibility of rising again a step higher than the place to which he had descended through the benevolent sympathy of that same captain.
“We-ell, my friend,” said Kuválda, as he took a critical survey of his restored patron,—“you have trousers and a pea-jacket. These articles are of vast importance—trust my experience. As long as I had decent trousers, I lived in the town, in the character of a respectable man, but, devil take it, as soon as my trousers dropped off, I fell in people’s estimation, and was obliged to drop down here myself, from the town. People, my very fine blockhead, judge of everything by its form, but the essence of things is inaccessible to them, because of men’s inborn stupidity. Carve that on your nose, and when you have paid me even one half of your debt, go in peace, and seek, and thou shalt find!”
“How much do I owe you, Aristíd Fómitch?” inquired the patron in confusion.
“One ruble and seventy kopéks…Now give me a ruble or seventy kopéks, and I’ll wait for the rest until you have s
tolen or earned more than you have now.”
“Thank you most sincerely for your kindness!” said the patron, much affected. “What a good sort of fellow you are, really! Ekh, life did wrong in treating you hardly.… I think you must have been a regular eagle in your own place?!”
The captain could not exist without speeches of declamatory eloquence.
“What signifies ‘in my own place?’ No one knows his own place in life, and everyone of us gets his head into someone else’s harness. The place for merchant Judas Petúnnikoff is among the hard-labor exiles, but he walks about in broad day through the streets, and even wants to build some sort of a factory. The place for our teacher is by the side of a good wife, and in the midst of half a dozen children, but he is lying around at Vavíloff’s, in the dram-shop. And here are you—you’re going off to seek a place as a footman or a corridor-waiter,42 but I see that your place is among the soldiers, for you are stupid, you have endurance, and you understand discipline. You see what sort of affair it is? Life shuffles us like cards, and only accidentally—and that not for long—do we fall into our own places!”
Sometimes such conversations at parting served as prefaces to a continuation of the acquaintance, which again began with a good drinking-bout, and again reached the point where the patron had drunk up his all, and was amazed; the captain gave him his revenge, and…both drank up their last penny.
Such repetitions of what had gone before, did not, in the least, interfere with the kindly relations between the parties. The teacher mentioned by the captain was precisely one of those patrons who had reformed only to ruin himself again immediately. By his intellect, he was a man who stood closer to the captain than all the rest, and, possibly, it was precisely to this cause that he was indebted for the fact that, after having descended to the night-lodging-house, he could no longer raise himself.
With him alone could Aristíd Kuválda philosophize with the certainty of being understood. He prized this, and when the reformed teacher prepared to leave the lodging-house, after having earned a little money, and with the intention of hiring a nook for himself in the town,—Aristíd Kuválda escorted him with so much sorrow, spouted so many melancholy tirades, that they both infallibly set out on a spree, and drank up all they owned. In all probability, Kuválda deliberately arranged the matter so that the teacher, despite all his desires, could not get away from his lodging-house. Was it possible for Aristíd Kuválda, a member of the gentry, with education, the remnants of which even now glittered in his speech, from time to time, with a habit of thinking developed by the vicissitudes of fate,—was it possible for him not to desire and to try to behold always by his side a man of the same sort as himself? We know how to have compassion on ourselves.
This teacher had once taught some branch in the Teachers’ Institute of some town on the Vólga, but, in consequence of several scrapes, had been discharged from the institute. Then he had been a counting-house clerk at a tanning factory, and had been obliged to quit that also. He had been a librarian in some private library, he had tried a few more professions, and, finally, after passing an examination as attorney-at-law, he took to drinking like a fish, and hit upon the cavalry captain. He was tall, round-shouldered, with a long, sharp nose, and a perfectly bald head. In his bony, yellow face, with its small, pointed beard, shone large, restlessly-melancholy eyes, deeply sunk in their orbits, and the corners of his mouth drooped dolefully downward. He earned his means of livelihood, or rather of drink, by acting as reporter to the local newspapers. It did happen that he earned as much as fifteen rubles a week. Then he gave the money to the captain, and said:
“Enough! I’m going to return to the lap of culture. One week more of work,—and I shall dress myself decently, and addio, mio caro!”
“Very laudable!… As I, from my soul, sympathize with your resolution, Philip, I shall not give you a single glass during that entire week,”—the captain gave him friendly warning.
“I shall be grateful!—You won’t give even a single drop?”
The captain detected in his words something approaching a timid entreaty for relaxation, and said, still more sternly:
“Even if you roar for it—I won’t give it!”
“Well, that settles it”—sighed the teacher, and set off about his reporting. A day later, or, at most, two days, defeated, weary and thirsty he was staring at the captain from some nook, with mournful, beseeching eyes, and waiting in trepidation, for the heart of his friend to soften. The captain assumed a surly aspect, and uttered speeches impregnated with deadly irony, on the theme of the disgrace of having a weak character, about the beastly delight of drunkenness, and on all other themes appropriate to the occasion. To do him justice—he was sincerely carried away with his rôle as mentor and moralist; but his steady customers at the night-lodging-house, being of a sceptical cast of mind, said one to another, winking in the direction of the captain, as they watched him and listened to his croaking speeches.
“The sly dog! He puts him off cleverly! ‘I told you so,’ says he, ‘and you wouldn’t listen to me—now you may thank yourself!’”
But the teacher caught his friend somewhere in a dark corner, and tightly clutching his dirty cloak, trembling all over, licking his dry lips, he gazed in his face with a deeply-tragic glance inexpressible in words.
“You can’t?”—inquired the captain morosely.
The teacher nodded, in silent assent, and then dropped his head dejectedly on his breast, trembling all over his long, gaunt body.
“Hold out one day more…perhaps you’ll reform?” suggested Kuválda.
The teacher sighed, and shook his head negatively, hopelessly. The captain saw that his friend’s gaunt body was all quivering with thirst for the poison, and pulled the money out of his pocket.
“In the majority of cases, it is useless to contend with destiny,”—he remarked as he did so, as though desirous of justifying himself to someone.
But if the teacher did hold out the entire week, a touching scene of the farewell of friends was enacted between him and the captain, and its final act usually took place in Vavíloff’s eating-house.
The teacher did not drink up the whole of his money: he spent at least half of it on the children in Vyézhaya Street. Poor people are always rich in children, and in this street, in its dust and holes, swarms of dirty, tattered and half-starved little brats moved restlessly and noisily about, all day long, from morning till night.
Children are the living flowers of earth, but in Vyézhaya Street they had the appearance of flowers which had withered prematurely; it must have been because they grew on soil which was poor in healthy juices.
So the teacher often collected them about him, and having purchased rolls, eggs, apples and nuts, he walked with them into the fields, to the river. There they disposed themselves on the ground, and, first of all, hungrily devoured everything the teacher offered them, and then began to play, filling the air for a whole verst43 round about with their careless noise and laughter. The long, gaunt figure of the drunkard somehow shrunk together in the midst of these little folks, who treated him with entire familiarity, as one of their own age. They even addressed him simply as Philip, without adding to his name “uncle” or “little uncle.” As they flitted swiftly around him, they jostled him, sprang upon his back, slapped him on his bald head, seized him by the nose. All this must have delighted him, for he did not protest against such liberties. On the whole, he talked very little with them, and if he did speak, he did it as cautiously and even timidly as though his words might spot them, or, in general, do them harm. He passed several hours at a time, in the rôle of their plaything and comrade, surveying their animated little faces with his mournfully-sad eyes, and then, thoughtfully and slowly, he went away from them to Vavíloff’s tavern, and there, quickly and silently, he drank himself into a state of unconsciousness.
* * * *
Almost every day, on his r
eturn from his reportorial work, the teacher brought with him a newspaper, and a general assembly of all the men with pasts formed around him. On catching sight of him, they moved toward him from the various nooks of the courtyard, in an intoxicated condition, or suffering from drunken headaches, diversely dishevelled, but all equally wretched and dirty.
Alexéi Maxímovitch Símtzoff came: he was as fat as a cask, had been a forester in the service of the Crown Estates, but was now a peddler of matches, ink, blacking, and refuse lemons. He was an old man of fifty, clad in a sail-cloth great-coat, and a broad-brimmed hat, which sheltered his fat, red face, with its thick, white beard, from amid which his tiny, crimson nose and his thick lips of the same color, and his tearful, cynical little eyes peered forth upon God’s world. They called him “The Peg-top”; and this nickname accurately described his round figure, and his speech, which resembled the humming of a top.
From somewhere in a corner, “The End” crawled forth,—a gloomy, taciturn and desperate drunkard, formerly prison-superintendent Luká Antónovitch Martyánoff, a man who subsisted by gambling at “Little Belt,” at “Three Little Leaves,” at “Little Bank,” and by other arts, equally witty, and equally disliked by the police. He lowered his heavy body, which had been more than once soundly beaten, heavily upon the grass, alongside the teacher, flashed his black eyes, and stretching out his hand for the bottle, inquired in a hoarse bass voice:
“May I?”
Mechanician Pável Sólntzeff made his appearance, a consumptive man, thirty years of age. His left side had been smashed in a fight, and his yellow, sharp face, like that of a fox, was constantly contorted by a venomous smile. His thin lips disclosed two rows of yellow teeth, which had been ruined by illness, and the rags on his narrow, bony shoulders fluttered as though from a clothes-rack. His nickname was “The Gnawed Bone.” His business consisted in peddling linden-bast brushes, of his own manufacture, and switches made of a certain sort of grass, which were very convenient for cleaning clothes.