The Maxim Gorky

by Maxim Gorky

  “Oh, you are tickling me!”

  “That is—because—you are so sensitive,” the assistant explained hastily, with warmth.

  It was comical to watch him fawning upon the customers, and I had to turn and look through the glass of the door to keep myself from laughing. But something used to draw me back to watch the sale. The proceedings of the assistant were very interesting, and while I looked at him I was thinking that I should never be able to make my fingers move so delicately, or so deftly put boots on other people’s feet.

  It often happened that the master went away from the shop into a little room behind it, and he would call Sascha to him, leaving the assistant alone with the customer. Once, lingering over the foot of a red-haired woman, he took it between his fingers and kissed it.

  “Oh,” breathed the woman, “what a bold man you are!”

  He puffed out his cheeks and emitted a long-drawn-out sound:

  “O—o—h!”

  At this I laughed so much that, to keep my feet, I had to hang on to the handle of the door. It flew open, and my head knocked against one of the panes of glass and broke it. The assistant stamped his foot at me, my master hit me on the head with his heavy gold ring, and Sascha tried to pull my ears. In the evening, when we were on our way home, he said to me, sternly:

  “You will lose your place for doing things like that. I’d like to know where the joke comes in.” And then he explained: “If ladies take a fancy to the assistant, it is good for trade. A lady may not be in need of boots, but she comes in and buys what she does not want just to have a look at the assistant, who pleases her. But you—you can’t understand! One puts oneself out for you, and—”

  This incensed me. No one put himself out for me, and he least of all.

  In the morning the cook, a sickly, disagreeable woman, used to call me before him. I had to clean the boots and brush the clothes of the master, the assistant, and Sascha, get the samovar ready, bring in wood for all the stoves, and wash up. When I got to the shop I had to sweep the floor, dust, get the tea ready, carry goods to the customers, and go home to fetch the dinner, my duty at the door being taken in the meantime by Sascha, who, finding it lowering to his dignity, rated me.

  “Lazy young wretch! I have to do all your work for you.”

  This was a wearisome, dull life for me. I was accustomed to live independently in the sandy streets of Kunavin, on the banks of the turbid Oka, in the fields or woods, from morning to night. I was parted from grandmother and from my comrades. I had no one to speak to, and life was showing me her seamy, false side. There were occasions on which a customer went away without making a purchase, when all three would feel themselves affronted. The master would put his sweet smile away in his pocket as he said:

  “Kashirin, put these things away.” Then he would grumble:

  “There’s a pig of a woman The fool found it dull sitting at home, so she must come and turn our shop upside down! If you were my wife, I’d give you something!”

  His wife, a dried-up woman with black eyes and a large nose, simply made a door-mat of him. She used to scold him as if he were a servant.

  Often, after he had shown out a frequent customer with polite bows and pleasant words, they would all begin to talk about her in a vile and shameless manner, arousing in me a desire to run into the street after her and tell her what they said. I knew, of course, that people generally speak evil of one another behind one another’s backs, but these spoke of every one in a particularly revolting manner, as if they were in the front rank of good people and had been appointed to judge the rest of the world. Envious of many of them, they were never known to praise any one, and knew something bad about everybody.

  One day there came to the shop a young woman with bright, rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes, attired in a velvet cloak with a collar of black fur. Her face rose out of the fur like a wonderful flower. When she had thrown the cloak off her shoulders and handed it to Sascha, she looked still more beautiful. Her fine figure was fitted tightly with a blue-gray silk robe; diamonds sparkled in her ears. She reminded me of “Vassilissa the Beautiful,” and I could have believed that she was in truth the governor’s wife. They received her with particular respect, bending before her as if she were a bright light, and almost choking themselves in their hurry to get out polite words. All three rushed about the shop like wild things: their reflections bobbed up and down in the glass of the cupboard. But when she left, after having bought some expensive boots in a great hurry, the master, smacking his lips, whistled and said:

  “Hussy!”

  “An actress—that sums her up,” said the assistant, contemptuously. They began to talk of the lovers of the lady and the luxury in which she lived.

  After dinner the master went to sleep in the room behind the shop, and I, opening his gold watch, poured vinegar into the works. It was a moment of supreme joy to me when he awoke and came into the shop, with his watch in his hand, muttering wildly:

  “What can have happened? My watch is all wet. I never remember such a thing happening before. It is all wet; it will be ruined.”

  In addition to the burden of my duties in the shop and the housework, I was weighed down by depression. I often thought it would be a good idea to behave so badly that I should get my dismissal. Snow-covered people passed the door of the shop without making a sound. They looked as if on their way to somebody’s funeral. Having meant to accompany the body to the grave, they had been delayed, and, being late for the funeral procession, were hurrying to the grave-side. The horses quivered with the effort of making their way through the snow-drifts. From the belfry of the church behind the shop the bells rang out with a melancholy sound every day. It was Lent, and every stroke of the bell fell upon my brain as if it had been a pillow, not hurting, but stupefying and deafening, me. One day when I was in the yard unpacking a case of new goods just received, at the door of the shop, the watchman of the church, a crooked old man, as soft as if he were made of rags and as ragged as if he had been torn to pieces by dogs, approached me.

  “Are you going to be kind and steal some goloshes for me?” he asked.

  I was silent. He sat down on an empty case, yawned, made the sign of the cross over his mouth, and repeated:

  “Will you steal them for me?”

  “It is wrong to steal,” I informed him.

  “But people steal all the same. Old age must have its compensations.”

  He was pleasantly different from the people among whom I lived. I felt that he had a firm belief in my readiness to steal, and I agreed to hand him the goloshes through the window.

  “That’s right,” he said calmly, without enthusiasm. “You are not deceiving me? No, I see that you are not.”

  He was silent for a moment, trampling the dirty, wet snow with the soles of his boots. Then he lit a long pipe, and suddenly startled me.

  “But suppose it is I who deceive you? Suppose I take the goloshes to your master, and tell him that you have sold them to me for half a ruble? What then? Their price is two rubles, and you have sold them for half a ruble. As a present, eh?”

  I gazed at him dumbly, as if he had already done what he said he would do; but he went on talking gently through his nose, looking at his boots, and blowing out blue smoke.

  “Suppose, for example, that your master has said to me, ‘Go and try that youngster, and see if he is a thief? What then?”

  “I shall not give you the goloshes,” I said, angry and frightened.

  “You must give them now that you have promised.”

  He took me by the arm and drew me to him, and, tapping my forehead with his cold fingers, drawled:

  “What are you thinking of, with your ‘take this’ and ‘take that’?”

  “You asked me for them yourself.”

  “I might ask you to do lots of things. I might ask you to come and rob the church. Would you do it? Do you
think you can trust everybody? Ah, you young fool!” He pushed me away from him and stood up.

  “I don’t want stolen goloshes. I am not a gentleman, and I don’t wear goloshes. I was only making fun of you. For your simplicity, when Easter comes, I will let you come up into the belfry and ring the bells and look at the town.”

  “I know the town.”

  “It looks better from the belfry.”

  Dragging his broken boots in the snow, he went slowly round the corner of the church, and I looked after him, wondering dejectedly and fearfully whether the old man had really been making fun of me, or had been sent by my master to try me. I did not want to go back to the shop.

  Sascha came hurriedly into the yard and shouted: “What the devil has become of you?”

  I shook my pincers at him in a sudden access of rage. I knew that both he and the assistant robbed the master. They would hide a pair of boots or slippers in the stovepipe, and when they left the shop, would slip them into the sleeves of their overcoats. I did not like this, and felt alarmed about it, for I remembered the threats of the master.

  “Are you stealing?” I had asked Sascha.

  “Not I, but the assistant,” he would explain crossly. “I am only helping him. He says, ‘Do as I tell you,’ and I have to obey. If I did not, he would do me some mischief. As for master, he was an assistant himself once, and he understands. But you hold your tongue.”

  As he spoke, he looked in the glass and set his tie straight with just such a movement of his naturally spreading fingers as the senior assistant employed. He was unwearying in his demonstrations of his seniority and power over me, scolding me in a bass voice, and ordering me about with threatening gestures. I was taller than he, but bony and clumsy, while he was compact, flexible, and fleshy. In his frock-coat and long trousers he seemed an important and substantial figure in my eyes, and yet there was something ludicrous and unpleasing about him. He hated the cook, a curious woman, of whom it was impossible to decide whether she was good or bad.

  “What I love most in the world is a fight,” she said, opening wide her burning black eyes. “I don’t care what sort of fight it is, cock-fights, dog-fights, or fights between men. It is all the same to me.”

  And if she saw cocks or pigeons fighting in the yard, she would throw aside her work and watch the fight to the end, standing dumb and motionless at the window. In the evenings she would say to me and Sascha:

  “Why do you sit there doing nothing, children? You had far better be fighting.”

  This used to make Sascha angry.

  “I am not a child, you fool; I am junior assistant.”

  “That does not concern me. In my eyes, while you remain unmarried, you are a child.”

  “Fool! Blockhead!”

  “The devil is clever, but God does not love him.”

  Her talk was a special source of irritation to Sascha, and he used to tease her; but she would look at him contemptuously, askance, and say:

  “Ugh, you beetle! One of God’s mistakes!”

  Sometimes he would tell me to rub blacking or soot on her face when she was asleep, stick pins into her pillow, or play other practical jokes on her; but I was afraid of her. Besides, she slept very lightly and used to wake up frequently. Lighting the lamp, she would sit on the side of her bed, gazing fixedly at something in the corner. Sometimes she came over to me, where I slept behind the stove, and woke me up, saying hoarsely:

  “I can’t sleep, Leksyeka. I am not very well. Talk to me a little.”

  Half asleep, I used to tell her some story, and she would sit without speaking, swaying from side to side. I had an idea that her hot body smelt of wax and incense, and that she would soon die. Every moment I expected to see her fall face downward on the floor and die. In terror I would begin to speak loudly, but she would check me.

  “‘S-sh! You will wake the whole place up, and they will think that you are my lover.”

  She always sat near me in the same attitude, doubled up, with her wrists between her knees, squeezing them against the sharp bones of her legs. She had no chest, and even through the thick linen night-dress her ribs were visible, just like the ribs of a broken cask. After sitting a long time in silence, she would suddenly whisper:

  “What if I do die, it is a calamity which happens to all.” Or she would ask some invisible person, “Well, I have lived my life, haven’t I?”

  “Sleep!” she would say, cutting me short in the middle of a word, and, straightening herself, would creep noiselessly across the dark kitchen.

  “Witch!” Sascha used to call her behind her back.

  I put the question to him:

  “Why don’t you call her that to her face?”

  “Do you think that I am afraid to?” But a second later he said, with a frown: “No, I can’t say it to her face. She may really be a witch.”

  Treating every one with the same scornful lack of consideration, she showed no indulgence to me, but would drag me out of bed at six o’clock every morning, crying:

  “Are you going to sleep forever? Bring the wood in! Get the samovar ready! Clean the doorplate!”

  Sascha would wake up and complain:

  “What are you bawling like that for? I will tell the master. You don’t give any one a chance to, sleep.”

  Moving quickly about the kitchen with her lean, withered body, she would flash her blazing, sleepless eyes upon him.

  “Oh, it’s you, God’s mistake? If you were my son, I would give you something!”

  Sascha would abuse her, calling her “accursed one,” and when we were going to the shop he said to me: “We shall have to do something to get her sent away. We’ll put salt in everything when she’s not looking. If everything is cooked with too much salt, they will get rid of her. Or paraffin would do. What are you gaping about?”

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

  He snorted angrily:

  “Coward!”

  The cook died under our very eyes. She bent down to pick up the samovar, and suddenly sank to the floor without uttering a word, just as if some one had given her a blow on the chest. She moved over on her side, stretched out her arms, and blood trickled from her mouth.

  We both understood in a flash that she was dead, but, stupefied by terror, we gazed at her a long time without strength to say a word. At last Sascha rushed headlong out of the kitchen, and I, not knowing what to do, pressed close to the window in the light. The master came in, fussily squatted down beside her, and touched her face with his finger.

  “She is dead; that’s certain,” he said. “What can have caused it?” He went into the corner where hung a small image of Nikolai Chudovortz and crossed himself; and when he had prayed he went to the door and commanded:

  “Kashirin, run quickly and fetch the police!”

  The police came, stamped about, received money for drinks, and went. They returned later, accompanied by a man with a cart, lifted the cook by the legs and the head, and carried her into the street. The mistress stood in the doorway and watched them. Then she said to me:

  “Wash the floor!”

  And the master said:

  “It is a good thing that she died in the evening.”

  I could not understand why it was a good thing. When we went to bed Sascha said to me with unusual gentleness:

  “Don’t put out the lamp!”

  “Are you afraid?”

  He covered his head with the blanket, and lay silent a long time. The night was very quiet, as if it were listening for something, waiting for something. It seemed to me that the next minute a bell rang out, and suddenly the whole town was running and shouting in a great terrified uproar.

  Sascha put his nose out of the blanket and suggested softly:

  “Let’s go and lie on the stove together.”

  “It is hot there.”

&nbs
p; After a silence he said:

  “How suddenly she went off, didn’t she? I am sure she was a witch. I can’t get to sleep.”

  “Nor I, either.”

  He began to tell tales about dead people—how they came out of their graves and wandered till midnight about the town, seeking the place where they had lived and looking for their relations.

  “Dead people can only remember the town,” he said softly; “but they forget the streets and houses at once.”

  It became quieter and quieter and seemed to be getting darker. Sascha raised his head and asked:

  “Would you like to see what I have got in my trunk?”

  I had long wanted to know what he hid in his trunk. He kept it locked with a padlock, and always opened it with peculiar caution. If I tried to peep he would ask harshly:

  “What do you want, eh?”

  When I agreed, he sat up in bed without putting his feet to the floor, and ordered me in a tone of authority to bring the trunk to the bed, and place it at his feet. The key hung round his neck with his baptismal cross. Glancing round at the dark corners of the kitchen, he frowned importantly, unfastened the lock, blew on the lid of the trunk as if it had been hot, and at length, raising it, took out several linen garments.

  The trunk was half-full of chemist’s boxes, packets of variously colored tea-paper, and tins which had contained blacking or sardines.

  “What is it?”

  “You shall see.”

  He put a foot on each side of the trunk and bent over it, singing softly:

  “Czaru nebesnui——”

  I expected to see toys. I had never possessed any myself, and pretended to despise them, but not without a feeling of envy for those who did possess them. I was very pleased to think that Sascha, such a serious character, had toys, although he hid them shamefacedly; but I quite understood his shame.

  Opening the first box, he drew from it the frame of a pair of spectacles, put them on his nose, and, looking at me sternly, said:

  “It does not matter about there not being any glasses. This is a special kind of spectacle.”