THE OUTRAGE--A TRUE STORY

THE OUTRAGE--A TRUE STORY
BY ALEKSANDR I. KUPRIN
It was five o'clock on a July afternoon. The heat was terrible. The
whole of the huge stone-built town breathed out heat like a glowing
furnace. The glare of the white-walled house was insufferable. The
asphalt pavements grew soft and burned the feet. The shadows of the
acacias spread over the cobbled road, pitiful and weary. They too
seemed hot. The sea, pale in the sunlight, lay heavy and immobile as
one dead. Over the streets hung a white dust.
In the foyer of one of the private theatres a small committee of local
barristers who had undertaken to conduct the cases of those who had
suffered in the last pogrom against the Jews was reaching the end of
its daily task. There were nineteen of them, all juniors, young,
progressive and conscientious men. The sitting was without formality,
and white suits of duck, flannel and alpaca were in the majority. They
sat anywhere, at little marble tables, and the chairman stood in front
of an empty counter where chocolates were sold in the winter.
The barristers were quite exhausted by the heat which poured in
through the windows, with the dazzling sunlight and the noise of the
streets. The proceedings went lazily and with a certain irritation.
A tall young man with a fair moustache and thin hair was in the chair.
He was dreaming voluptuously how he would be off in an instant on his
new-bought bicycle to the bungalow. He would undress quickly, and
without waiting to cool, still bathed in sweat, would fling himself
into the clear, cold, sweet-smelling sea. His whole body was enervated
and tense, thrilled by the thought. Impatiently moving the papers
before him, he spoke in a drowsy voice.
"So, Joseph Moritzovich will conduct the case of Rubinchik... Perhaps
there is still a statement to be made on the order of the day?"
His youngest colleague, a short, stout Karaite, very black and lively,
said in a whisper so that every one could hear: "On the order of the
day, the best thing would be iced _kvas_..."
The chairman gave him a stern side-glance, but could not restrain a
smile. He sighed and put both his hands on the table to raise himself
and declare the meeting closed, when the doorkeeper, who stood at the
entrance to the theatre, suddenly moved forward and said: "There are
seven people outside, sir. They want to come in."
The chairman looked impatiently round the company.
"What is to be done, gentlemen?"
Voices were heard.
"Next time. _Basta!_"
"Let 'em put it in writing."
"If they'll get it over quickly... Decide it at once."
"Let 'em go to the devil. Phew! It's like boiling pitch."
"Let them in." The chairman gave a sign with his head, annoyed. "Then
bring me a Vichy, please. But it must be cold."
The porter opened the door and called down the corridor: "Come in.
They say you may."
Then seven of the most surprising and unexpected individuals filed
into the foyer. First appeared a full-grown, confident man in a smart
suit, of the colour of dry sea-sand, in a magnificent pink shirt with
white stripes and a crimson rose in his buttonhole. From the front his
head looked like an upright bean, from the side like a horizontal
bean. His face was adorned with a strong, bushy, martial moustache. He
wore dark blue pince-nez on his nose, on his hands straw-coloured
gloves. In his left hand he held a black walking-stick with a silver
mount, in his right a light blue handkerchief.
The other six produced a strange, chaotic, incongruous impression,
exactly as though they had all hastily pooled not merely their
clothes, but their hands, feet and heads as well. There was a man with
the splendid profile of a Roman senator, dressed in rags and tatters.
Another wore an elegant dress waistcoat, from the deep opening of
which a dirty Little-Russian shirt leapt to the eye. Here were the
unbalanced faces of the criminal type, but looking with a confidence
that nothing could shake. All these men, in spite of their apparent
youth, evidently possessed a large experience of life, an easy manner,
a bold approach, and some hidden, suspicious cunning.
The gentleman in the sandy suit bowed just his head, neatly and
easily, and said with a half-question in his voice: "Mr. Chairman?"
"Yes. I am the chairman. What is your business?"
"We--all whom you see before you," the gentleman began in a quiet
voice and turned round to indicate his companions, "we come as
delegates from the United Rostov-Kharkov-and-Odessa-Nikolayev
Association of Thieves."
The barristers began to shift in their seats.
The chairman flung himself back and opened his eyes wide. "Association
of _what_?" he said, perplexed.
"The Association of Thieves," the gentleman in the sandy suit coolly
repeated. "As for myself, my comrades did me the signal honour of
electing me as the spokesman of the deputation."
"Very ... pleased," the chairman said uncertainly.
"Thank you. All seven of us are ordinary thieves--naturally of
different departments. The Association has authorised us to put before
your esteemed Committee"--the gentleman again made an elegant
bow--"our respectful demand for assistance."
"I don't quite understand ... quite frankly ... what is the
connection..." The chairman waved his hands helplessly. "However,
please go on."
"The matter about which we have the courage and the honour to apply to
you, gentlemen, is very clear, very simple, and very brief. It will
take only six or seven minutes. I consider it my duty to warn you of
this beforehand, in view of the late hour and the 115 degrees that
Fahrenheit marks in the shade." The orator expectorated slightly and
glanced at his superb gold watch. "You see, in the reports that have
lately appeared in the local papers of the melancholy and terrible
days of the last pogrom, there have very often been indications that
among the instigators of the pogrom who were paid and organised by the
police--the dregs of society, consisting of drunkards, tramps,
souteneurs, and hooligans from the slums--thieves were also to be
found. At first we were silent, but finally we considered ourselves
under the necessity of protesting against such an unjust and serious
accusation, before the face of the whole of intellectual society. I
know well that in the eye of the law we are offenders and enemies of
society. But imagine only for a moment, gentlemen, the situation of
this enemy of society when he is accused wholesale of an offence which
he not only never committed, but which he is ready to resist with the
whole strength of his soul. It goes without saying that he will feel
the outrage of such an injustice more keenly than a normal, average,
fortunate citizen. Now, we declare that the accusation brought against
us is utterly devoid of all basis, not merely of fact but even of
logic. I intend to prove this in a few words if the honourable
committee will kindly listen."
"Proceed," said the chairman.
"Please do ... Please ..." was heard from the barristers, now
animated.
"I offer you my sincere thanks in the name of all my comrades. Believe
me, you will never repent your attention to the representatives of our
... well, let us say, slippery, but nevertheless difficult,
profession. 'So we begin,' as Giraldoni sings in the prologue to
_Pagliacci_.
"But first I would ask your permission, Mr. Chairman, to quench my
thirst a little... Porter, bring me a lemonade and a glass of English
bitter, there's a good fellow. Gentlemen, I will not speak of the
moral aspect of our profession nor of its social importance. Doubtless
you know better than I the striking and brilliant paradox of Proudhon:
_La propriete c'est le vol_--a paradox if you like, but one that has
never yet been refuted by the sermons of cowardly bourgeois or fat
priests. For instance: a father accumulates a million by energetic and
clever exploitation, and leaves it to his son--a rickety, lazy,
ignorant, degenerate idiot, a brainless maggot, a true parasite.
Potentially a million rubles is a million working days, the absolutely
irrational right to labour, sweat, life, and blood of a terrible
number of men. Why? What is the ground of reason? Utterly unknown.
Then why not agree with the proposition, gentlemen, that our
profession is to some extent as it were a correction of the excessive
accumulation of values in the hands of individuals, and serves as a
protest against all the hardships, abominations, arbitrariness,
violence, and negligence of the human personality, against all the
monstrosities created by the bourgeois capitalistic organisation of
modern society? Sooner or later, this order of things will assuredly
be overturned by the social revolution. Property will pass away into
the limbo of melancholy memories and with it, alas! we will disappear
from the face of the earth, we, _les braves chevaliers d'industrie_."
The orator paused to take the tray from the hands of the porter, and
placed it near to his hand on the table.
"Excuse me, gentlemen... Here, my good man, take this,... and by the
way, when you go out shut the door close behind you."
"Very good, your Excellency!" the porter bawled in jest.
The orator drank off half a glass and continued: "However, let us
leave aside the philosophical, social, and economic aspects of the
question. I do not wish to fatigue your attention. I must nevertheless
point out that our profession very closely approaches the idea of that
which is called art. Into it enter all the elements which go to form
art--vocation, inspiration, fantasy, inventiveness, ambition, and a
long and arduous apprenticeship to the science. From it is absent
virtue alone, concerning which the great Karamzin wrote with such
stupendous and fiery fascination. Gentlemen, nothing is further from
my intention than to trifle with you and waste your precious time with
idle paradoxes; but I cannot avoid expounding my idea briefly. To an
outsider's ear it sounds absurdly wild and ridiculous to speak of the
vocation of a thief. However, I venture to assure you that this
vocation is a reality. There are men who possess a peculiarly strong
visual memory, sharpness and accuracy of eye, presence of mind,
dexterity of hand, and above all a subtle sense of touch, who are as
it were born into God's world for the sole and special purpose of
becoming distinguished card-sharpers. The pickpockets' profession
demands extraordinary nimbleness and agility, a terrific certainty of
movement, not to mention a ready wit, a talent for observation and
strained attention. Some have a positive vocation for breaking open
safes: from their tenderest childhood they are attracted by the
mysteries of every kind of complicated mechanism--bicycles, sewing
machines, clock-work toys and watches. Finally, gentlemen, there are
people with an hereditary animus against private property. You may
call this phenomenon degeneracy. But I tell you that you cannot entice
a true thief, and thief by vocation, into the prose of honest
vegetation by any gingerbread reward, or by the offer of a secure
position, or by the gift of money, or by a woman's love: because there
is here a permanent beauty of risk, a fascinating abyss of danger, the
delightful sinking of the heart, the impetuous pulsation of life, the
ecstasy! You are armed with the protection of the law, by locks,
revolvers, telephones, police and soldiery; but we only by our own
dexterity, cunning and fearlessness. We are the foxes, and society--is
a chicken-run guarded by dogs. Are you aware that the most artistic
and gifted natures in our villages become horse-thieves and poachers?
What would you have? Life is so meagre, so insipid, so intolerably
dull to eager and high-spirited souls!
"I pass on to inspiration. Gentlemen, doubtless you have had to read
of thefts that were supernatural in design and execution. In the
headlines of the newspapers they are called 'An Amazing Robbery,' or
'An Ingenious Swindle,' or again 'A Clever Ruse of the Gangsters.' In
such cases our bourgeois paterfamilias waves his hands and exclaims:
'What a terrible thing! If only their abilities were turned to
good--their inventiveness, their amazing knowledge of human
psychology, their self-possession, their fearlessness, their
incomparable histrionic powers! What extraordinary benefits they would
bring to the country!' But it is well known that the bourgeois
paterfamilias was specially devised by Heaven to utter commonplaces
and trivialities. I myself sometimes--we thieves are sentimental
people, I confess--I myself sometimes admire a beautiful sunset in
Aleksandra Park or by the sea-shore. And I am always certain
beforehand that some one near me will say with infallible _aplomb_:
'Look at it. If it were put into picture no one would ever believe
it!' I turn round and naturally I see a self-satisfied, full-fed
paterfamilias, who delights in repeating some one else's silly
statement as though it were his own. As for our dear country, the
bourgeois paterfamilias looks upon it as though it were a roast
turkey. If you've managed to cut the best part of the bird for
yourself, eat it quietly in a comfortable corner and praise God. But
he's not really the important person. I was led away by my detestation
of vulgarity and I apologise for the digression. The real point is
that genius and inspiration, even when they are not devoted to the
service of the Orthodox Church, remain rare and beautiful things.
Progress is a law--and theft too has its creation.
"Finally, our profession is by no means as easy and pleasant as it
seems to the first glance. It demands long experience, constant
practice, slow and painful apprenticeship. It comprises in itself
hundreds of supple, skilful processes that the cleverest juggler
cannot compass. That I may not give you only empty words, gentlemen, I
will perform a few experiments before you now. I ask you to have every
confidence in the demonstrators. We are all at present in the
enjoyment of legal freedom, and though we are usually watched, and
every one of us is known by face, and our photographs adorn the albums
of all detective departments, for the time being we are not under the
necessity of hiding ourselves from anybody. If any one of you should
recognise any of us in the future under different circumstances, we
ask you earnestly always to act in accordance with your professional
duties and your obligations as citizens. In grateful return for your
kind attention we have decided to declare your property inviolable,
and to invest it with a thieves' taboo. However, I proceed to
business."
The orator turned round and gave an order: "Sesoi the Great, will you
come this way!"
An enormous fellow with a stoop, whose hands reached to his knees,
without a forehead or a neck, like a big, fair Hercules, came forward.
He grinned stupidly and rubbed his left eyebrow in his confusion.
"Can't do nothin' here," he said hoarsely.
The gentleman in the sandy suit spoke for him, turning to the
committee.
"Gentlemen, before you stands a respected member of our association.
His specialty is breaking open safes, iron strong boxes, and other
receptacles for monetary tokens. In his night work he sometimes avails
himself of the electric current of the lighting installation for
fusing metals. Unfortunately he has nothing on which he can
demonstrate the best items of his repertoire. He will open the most
elaborate lock irreproachably... By the way, this door here, it's
locked, is it not?"
Every one turned to look at the door, on which a printed notice hung:
"Stage Door. Strictly Private."
"Yes, the door's locked, evidently," the chairman agreed.
"Admirable. Sesoi the Great, will you be so kind?"
"'Tain't nothin' at all," said the giant leisurely.
He went close to the door, shook it cautiously with his hand, took out
of his pocket a small bright instrument, bent down to the keyhole,
made some almost imperceptible movements with the tool, suddenly
straightened and flung the door wide in silence. The chairman had his
watch in his hands. The whole affair took only ten seconds.
"Thank you, Sesoi the Great," said the gentleman in the sandy suit
politely. "You may go back to your seat."
But the chairman interrupted in some alarm: "Excuse me. This is all
very interesting and instructive, but ... is it included in your
esteemed colleague's profession to be able to lock the door again?"
"Ah, _mille pardons_." The gentleman bowed hurriedly. "It slipped my
mind. Sesoi the Great, would you oblige?"
The door was locked with the same adroitness and the same silence. The
esteemed colleague waddled back to his friends, grinning.
"Now I will have the honour to show you the skill of one of our
comrades who is in the line of picking pockets in theatres and
railway-stations," continued the orator. "He is still very young, but
you may to some extent judge from the delicacy of his present work of
the heights he will attain by diligence. Yasha!" A swarthy youth in a
blue silk blouse and long glace boots, like a gipsy, came forward with
a swagger, fingering the tassels of his belt, and merrily screwing up
his big, impudent black eyes with yellow whites.
"Gentlemen," said the gentleman in the sandy suit persuasively, "I
must ask if one of you would be kind enough to submit himself to a
little experiment. I assure you this will be an exhibition only, just
a game."
He looked round over the seated company.
The short plump Karaite, black as a beetle, came forward from his
table.
"At your service," he said amusedly.
"Yasha!" The orator signed with his head.
Yasha came close to the solicitor. On his left arm, which was bent,
hung a bright-coloured, figured scarf.
"Suppose yer in church or at the bar in one of the halls,--or watchin'
a circus," he began in a sugary, fluent voice. "I see straight
off--there's a toff... Excuse me, sir. Suppose you're the toff.
There's no offence--just means a rich gent, decent enough, but don't
know his way about. First--what's he likely to have about 'im? All
sorts. Mostly, a ticker and a chain. Whereabouts does he keep 'em?
Somewhere in his top vest pocket--here. Others have 'em in the bottom
pocket. Just here. Purse--most always in the trousers, except when a
greeny keeps it in his jacket. Cigar-case. Have a look first what it
is--gold, silver--with a monogram. Leather--what decent man'd soil his
hands? Cigar-case. Seven pockets: here, here, here, up there, there,
here and here again. That's right, ain't it? That's how you go to
work."
As he spoke the young man smiled. His eyes shone straight into the
barrister's. With a quick, dexterous movement of his right hand he
pointed to various portions of his clothes.
"Then again you might see a pin here in the tie. However we do not
appropriate. Such _gents_ nowadays--they hardly ever wear a real
stone. Then I comes up to him. I begin straight off to talk to him
like a gent: 'Sir, would you be so kind as to give me a light from
your cigarette'--or something of the sort. At any rate, I enter into
conversation. What's next? I look him straight in the peepers, just
like this. Only two of me fingers are at it--just this and this."
Yasha lifted two fingers of his right hand on a level with the
solicitor's face, the forefinger and the middle finger and moved them
about.
"D' you see? With these two fingers I run over the whole pianner.
Nothin' wonderful in it: one, two, three--ready. Any man who wasn't
stupid could learn easily. That's all it is. Most ordinary business. I
thank you."
The pickpocket swung on his heel as if to return to his seat.
"Yasha!" The gentleman in the sandy suit said with meaning weight.
"Yasha!" he repeated sternly.
Yasha stopped. His back was turned to the barrister, but be evidently
gave his representative an imploring look, because the latter frowned
and shook his head.
"Yasha!" he said for the third time, in a threatening tone.
"Huh!" The young thief grunted in vexation and turned to face the
solicitor. "Where's your little watch, sir?" he said in a piping
voice.
"Oh!" the Karaite brought himself up sharp.
"You see--now you say 'Oh!'" Yasha continued reproachfully. "All the
while you were admiring me right hand, I was operatin' yer watch with
my left. Just with these two little fingers, under the scarf. That's
why we carry a scarf. Since your chain's not worth anything--a present
from some _mamselle_ and the watch is a gold one, I've left you the
chain as a keepsake. Take it," he added with a sigh, holding out the
watch.
"But ... That is clever," the barrister said in confusion. "I didn't
notice it at all."
"That's our business," Yasha said with pride.
He swaggered back to his comrades. Meantime the orator took a drink
from his glass and continued.
"Now, gentlemen, our next collaborator will give you an exhibition of
some ordinary card tricks, which are worked at fairs, on steamboats
and railways. With three cards, for instance, an ace, a queen, and a
six, he can quite easily... But perhaps you are tired of these
demonstrations, gentlemen."...
"Not at all. It's extremely interesting," the chairman answered
affably. "I should like to ask one question--that is if it is not too
indiscreet--what is your own specialty?"
"Mine... H'm... No, how could it be an indiscretion?... I work the big
diamond shops ... and my other business is banks," answered the orator
with a modest smile. "Don't think this occupation is easier than
others. Enough that I know four European languages, German, French,
English, and Italian, not to mention Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish.
But shall I show you some more experiments, Mr. Chairman?"
The chairman looked at his watch.
"Unfortunately the time is too short," he said. "Wouldn't it be better
to pass on to the substance of your business? Besides, the experiments
we have just seen have amply convinced us of the talent of your
esteemed associates... Am I not right, Isaac Abramovich?"
"Yes, yes ... absolutely," the Karaite barrister readily confirmed.
"Admirable," the gentleman in the sandy suit kindly agreed. "My dear
Count"--he turned to a blond, curly-haired man, with a face like a
billiard-maker on a bank-holiday--"put your instruments away. They
will not be wanted. I have only a few words more to say, gentlemen.
Now that you have convinced yourselves that our art, although it does
not enjoy the patronage of high-placed individuals, is nevertheless an
art; and you have probably come to my opinion that this art is one
which demands many personal qualities besides constant labour, danger,
and unpleasant misunderstandings--you will also, I hope, believe that
it is possible to become attached to its practice and to love and
esteem it, however strange that may appear at first sight. Picture to
yourselves that a famous poet of talent, whose tales and poems adorn
the pages of our best magazines, is suddenly offered the chance of
writing verses at a penny a line, signed into the bargain, as an
advertisement for 'Cigarettes Jasmine'--or that a slander was spread
about one of you distinguished barristers, accusing you of making a
business of concocting evidence for divorce cases, or of writing
petitions from the cabmen to the governor in public-houses! Certainly
your relatives, friends and acquaintances wouldn't believe it. But the
rumour has already done its poisonous work, and you have to live
through minutes of torture. Now picture to yourselves that such a
disgraceful and vexatious slander, started by God knows whom, begins
to threaten not only your good name and your quiet digestion, but your
freedom, your health, and even your life!
"This is the position of us thieves, now being slandered by the
newspapers. I must explain. There is in existence a class of
scum--_passez-moi le mot_--whom we call their 'Mothers' Darlings.'
With these we are unfortunately confused. They have neither shame nor
conscience, a dissipated riff-raff, mothers' useless darlings, idle,
clumsy drones, shop assistants who commit unskilful thefts. He thinks
nothing of living on his mistress, a prostitute, like the male
mackerel, who always swims after the female and lives on her
excrements. He is capable of robbing a child with violence in a dark
alley, in order to get a penny; he will kill a man in his sleep and
torture an old woman. These men are the pests of our profession. For
them the beauties and the traditions of the art have no existence.
They watch us real, talented thieves like a pack of jackals after a
lion. Suppose I've managed to bring off an important job--we won't
mention the fact that I have to leave two-thirds of what I get to the
receivers who sell the goods and discount the notes, or the customary
subsidies to our incorruptible police--I still have to share out
something to each one of these parasites, who have got wind of my job,
by accident, hearsay, or a casual glance.
"So we call them _Motients_, which means 'half,' a corruption of
_moitie_ ... Original etymology. I pay him only because he knows and
may inform against me. And it mostly happens that even when he's got
his share he runs off to the police in order to get another dollar.
We, honest thieves... Yes, you may laugh, gentlemen, but I repeat it:
we honest thieves detest these reptiles. We have another name for
them, a stigma of ignominy; but I dare not utter it here out of
respect for the place and for my audience. Oh, yes, they would gladly
accept an invitation to a pogrom. The thought that we may be confused
with them is a hundred times more insulting to us even than the
accusation of taking part in a pogrom.
"Gentlemen! While I have been speaking I have often noticed smiles on
your faces. I understand you. Our presence here, our application for
your assistance, and above all the unexpectedness of such a phenomenon
as a systematic organisation of thieves, with delegates who are
thieves, and a leader of the deputation, also a thief by
profession--it is all so original that it must inevitably arouse a
smile. But now I will speak from the depth of my heart. Let us be rid
of our outward wrappings, gentlemen, let us speak as men to men.
"Almost all of us are educated, and all love books. We don't only read
the adventures of Roqueambole, as the realistic writers say of us. Do
you think our hearts did not bleed and our cheeks did not burn from
shame, as though we had been slapped in the face, all the time that
this unfortunate, disgraceful, accursed, cowardly war lasted. Do you
really think that our souls do not flame with anger when our country
is lashed with Cossack-whips, and trodden under foot, shot and spit at
by mad, exasperated men? Will you not believe that we thieves meet
every step towards the liberation to come with a thrill of ecstasy?
"We understand, every one of us--perhaps only a little less than you
barristers, gentlemen--the real sense of the pogroms. Every time that
some dastardly event or some ignominious failure has occurred, after
executing a martyr in a dark corner of a fortress, or after deceiving
public confidence, some one who is hidden and unapproachable gets
frightened of the people's anger and diverts its vicious element upon
the heads of innocent Jews. Whose diabolical mind invents these
pogroms--these titanic blood-lettings, these cannibal amusements for
the dark, bestial souls?
"We all see with certain clearness that the last convulsions of the
bureaucracy are at hand. Forgive me if I present it imaginatively.
There was a people that had a chief temple, wherein dwelt a
bloodthirsty deity, behind a curtain, guarded by priests. Once
fearless hands tore the curtain away. Then all the people saw, instead
of a god, a huge, shaggy, voracious spider, like a loathsome
cuttlefish. They beat it and shoot at it: it is dismembered already;
but still in the frenzy of its final agony it stretches over all the
ancient temple its disgusting, clawing tentacles. And the priests,
themselves under sentence of death, push into the monster's grasp all
whom they can seize in their terrified, trembling fingers.
"Forgive me. What I have said is probably wild and incoherent. But I
am somewhat agitated. Forgive me. I continue. We thieves by profession
know better than any one else how these pogroms were organised. We
wander everywhere: into public houses, markets, tea-shops,
doss-houses, public places, the harbour. We can swear before God and
man and posterity that we have seen how the police organise the
massacres, without shame and almost without concealment. We know them
all by face, in uniform or disguise. They invited many of us to take
part; but there was none so vile among us as to give even the outward
consent that fear might have extorted.
"You know, of course, how the various strata of Russian society behave
towards the police? It is not even respected by those who avail
themselves of its dark services. But we despise and hate it three, ten
times more--not because many of us have been tortured in the detective
departments, which are just chambers of horror, beaten almost to
death, beaten with whips of ox-hide and of rubber in order to extort a
confession or to make us betray a comrade. Yes, we hate them for that
too. But we thieves, all of us who have been in prison, have a mad
passion for freedom. Therefore we despise our gaolers with all the
hatred that a human heart can feel. I will speak for myself. I have
been tortured three times by police detectives till I was half dead.
My lungs and liver have been shattered. In the mornings I spit blood
until I can breathe no more. But if I were told that I will be spared
a fourth flogging only by shaking hands with a chief of the detective
police, I would refuse to do it!
"And then the newspapers say that we took from these hands
Judas-money, dripping with human blood. No, gentlemen, it is a slander
which stabs our very soul, and inflicts insufferable pain. Not money,
nor threats, nor promises will suffice to make us mercenary murderers
of our brethren, nor accomplices with them."
"Never ... No ... No ... ," his comrades standing behind him began to
murmur.
"I will say more," the thief continued. "Many of us protected the
victims during this pogrom. Our friend, called Sesoi the Great--you
have just seen him, gentlemen--was then lodging with a Jewish
braid-maker on the Moldavanka. With a poker in his hands he defended
his landlord from a great horde of assassins. It is true, Sesoi the
Great is a man of enormous physical strength, and this is well known
to many of the inhabitants of the Moldavanka. But you must agree,
gentlemen, that in these moments Sesoi the Great looked straight into
the face of death. Our comrade Martin the Miner--this gentleman here"
--the orator pointed to a pale, bearded man with beautiful eyes who
was holding himself in the background--"saved an old Jewess, whom he
had never seen before, who was being pursued by a crowd of these
_canaille_. They broke his head with a crowbar for his pains, smashed
his arm in two places and splintered a rib. He is only just out of
hospital. That is the way our most ardent and determined members
acted. The others trembled for anger and wept for their own impotence.
"None of us will forget the horrors of those bloody days and bloody
nights lit up by the glare of fires, those sobbing women, those little
children's bodies torn to pieces and left lying in the street. But for
all that not one of us thinks that the police and the mob are the real
origin of the evil. These tiny, stupid, loathsome vermin are only a
senseless fist that is governed by a vile, calculating mind, moved by
a diabolical will.
"Yes, gentlemen," the orator continued, "we thieves have nevertheless
merited your legal contempt. But when you, noble gentlemen, need the
help of clever, brave, obedient men at the barricades, men who will be
ready to meet death with a song and a jest on their lips for the most
glorious word in the world--Freedom--will you cast us off then and
order us away because of an inveterate revulsion? Damn it all, the
first victim in the French Revolution was a prostitute. She jumped up
on to a barricade, with her skirt caught elegantly up into her hand
and called out: 'Which of you soldiers will dare to shoot a woman?'
Yes, by God." The orator exclaimed aloud and brought down his fist on
to the marble table top: "They killed her, but her action was
magnificent, and the beauty of her words immortal.
"If you should drive us away on the great day, we will turn to you and
say: 'You spotless Cherubim--if human thoughts had the power to wound,
kill, and rob man of honour and property, then which of you innocent
doves would not deserve the knout and imprisonment for life?' Then we
will go away from you and build our own gay, sporting, desperate
thieves' barricade, and will die with such united songs on our lips
that you will envy us, you who are whiter than snow!
"But I have been once more carried away. Forgive me. I am at the end.
You now see, gentlemen, what feelings the newspaper slanders have
excited in us. Believe in our sincerity and do what you can to remove
the filthy stain which has so unjustly been cast upon us. I have
finished."
He went away from the table and joined his comrades. The barristers
were whispering in an undertone, very much as the magistrates of the
bench at sessions. Then the chairman rose.
"We trust you absolutely, and we will make every effort to clear your
association of this most grievous charge. At the same time my
colleagues have authorised me, gentlemen, to convey to you their deep
respect for your passionate feelings as citizens. And for my own part
I ask the leader of the deputation for permission to shake him by the
hand."
The two men, both tall and serious, held each other's hands in a
strong, masculine grip.
The barristers were leaving the theatre; but four of them hung back a
little beside the clothes rack in the hall. Isaac Abramovich could not
find his new, smart grey hat anywhere. In its place on the wooden peg
hung a cloth cap jauntily flattened in on either side.
"Yasha!" The stern voice of the orator was suddenly heard from the
other side of the door. "Yasha! It's the last time I'll speak to you,
curse you! ... Do you hear?" The heavy door opened wide. The gentleman
in the sandy suit entered. In his hands he held Isaac Abramovich's
hat; on his face was a well-bred smile.
"Gentlemen, for Heaven's sake forgive us--an odd little
misunderstanding. One of our comrades exchanged his hat by accident...
Oh, it is yours! A thousand pardons. Doorkeeper! Why don't you keep an
eye on things, my good fellow, eh? Just give me that cap, there. Once
more, I ask you to forgive me, gentlemen."
With a pleasant bow and the same well-bred smile he made his way
quickly into the street.

THE REVOLUTIONIST

THE REVOLUTIONIST
BY MICHAIL P. ARTZYBASHEV
I
Gabriel Andersen, the teacher, walked to the edge of the school
garden, where he paused, undecided what to do. Off in the distance,
two miles away, the woods hung like bluish lace over a field of pure
snow. It was a brilliant day. A hundred tints glistened on the white
ground and the iron bars of the garden railing. There was a lightness
and transparency in the air that only the days of early spring
possess. Gabriel Andersen turned his steps toward the fringe of blue
lace for a tramp in the woods.
"Another spring in my life," he said, breathing deep and peering up at
the heavens through his spectacles. Andersen was rather given to
sentimental poetising. He walked with his hands folded behind him,
dangling his cane.
He had gone but a few paces when he noticed a group of soldiers and
horses on the road beyond the garden rail. Their drab uniforms stood
out dully against the white of the snow, but their swords and horses'
coats tossed back the light. Their bowed cavalry legs moved awkwardly
on the snow. Andersen wondered what they were doing there Suddenly the
nature of their business flashed upon him. It was an ugly errand they
were upon, an instinct rather that his reason told him. Something
unusual and terrible was to happen. And the same instinct told him he
must conceal himself from the soldiers. He turned to the left quickly,
dropped on his knees, and crawled on the soft, thawing, crackling snow
to a low haystack, from behind which, by craning his neck, he could
watch what the soldiers were doing.
There were twelve of them, one a stocky young officer in a grey cloak
caught in prettily at the waist by a silver belt. His face was so red
that even at that distance Andersen caught the odd, whitish gleam of
his light protruding moustache and eyebrows against the vivid colour
of his skin. The broken tones of his raucous voice reached distinctly
to where the teacher, listening intently, lay hidden.
"I know what I am about. I don't need anybody's advice," the officer
cried. He clapped his arms akimbo and looked down at some one among
the group of bustling soldiers. "I'll show you how to be a rebel, you
damned skunk."
Andersen's heart beat fast. "Good heavens!" he thought. "Is it
possible?" His head grew chill as if struck by a cold wave.
"Officer," a quiet, restrained, yet distinct voice came from among the
soldiers, "you have no right--It's for the court to decide--you aren't
a judge--it's plain murder, not--" "Silence!" thundered the officer,
his voice choking with rage. "I'll give you a court. Ivanov, go
ahead."
He put the spurs to his horse and rode away. Gabriel Andersen
mechanically observed how carefully the horse picked its way, placing
its feet daintily as if for the steps of a minuet. Its ears were
pricked to catch every sound. There was momentary bustle and
excitement among the soldiers. Then they dispersed in different
directions, leaving three persons in black behind, two tall men and
one very short and frail. Andersen could see the hair of the short
one's head. It was very light. And he saw his rosy ears sticking out
on each side.
Now he fully understood what was to happen. But it was a thing so out
of the ordinary, so horrible, that he fancied he was dreaming.
"It's so bright, so beautiful--the snow, the field, the woods, the
sky. The breath of spring is upon everything. Yet people are going to
be killed. How can it be? Impossible!" So his thoughts ran in
confusion. He had the sensation of a man suddenly gone insane, who
finds he sees, hears and feels what he is not accustomed to, and ought
not hear, see and feel.
The three men in black stood next to one another hard by the railing,
two quite close together, the short one some distance away.
"Officer!" one of them cried in a desperate voice--Andersen could not
see which it was--"God sees us! Officer!"
Eight soldiers dismounted quickly, their spurs and sabres catching
awkwardly. Evidently they were in a hurry, as if doing a thief's job.
Several seconds passed in silence until the soldiers placed themselves
in a row a few feet from the black figures and levelled their guns. In
doing so one soldier knocked his cap from his head. He picked it up
and put it on again without brushing off the wet snow.
The officer's mount still kept dancing on one spot with his ears
pricked, while the other horses, also with sharp ears erect to catch
every sound, stood motionless looking at the men in black, their long
wise heads inclined to one side.
"Spare the boy at least!" another voice suddenly pierced the air. "Why
kill a child, damn you! What has the child done?"
"Ivanov, do what I told you to do," thundered the officer, drowning
the other voice. His face turned as scarlet as a piece of red flannel.
There followed a scene savage and repulsive in its gruesomeness. The
short figure in black, with the light hair and the rosy ears, uttered
a wild shriek in a shrill child's tones and reeled to one side.
Instantly it was caught up by two or three soldiers. But the boy began
to struggle, and two more soldiers ran up.
"Ow-ow-ow-ow!" the boy cried. "Let me go, let me go! Ow-ow!"
His shrill voice cut the air like the yell of a stuck porkling not
quite done to death. Suddenly he grew quiet. Some one must have struck
him. An unexpected, oppressive silence ensued. The boy was being
pushed forward. Then there came a deafening report. Andersen started
back all in a tremble. He saw distinctly, yet vaguely as in a dream,
the dropping of two dark bodies, the flash of pale sparks, and a light
smoke rising in the clean, bright atmosphere. He saw the soldiers
hastily mounting their horses without even glancing at the bodies. He
saw them galloping along the muddy road, their arms clanking, their
horses' hoofs clattering.
He saw all this, himself now standing in the middle of the road, not
knowing when and why he had jumped from behind the haystack. He was
deathly pale. His face was covered with dank sweat, his body was
aquiver. A physical sadness smote and tortured him. He could not make
out the nature of the feeling. It was akin to extreme sickness, though
far more nauseating and terrible.
After the soldiers had disappeared beyond the bend toward the woods,
people came hurrying to the spot of the shooting, though till then not
a soul had been in sight.
The bodies lay at the roadside on the other side of the railing, where
the snow was clean, brittle and untrampled and glistened cheerfully in
the bright atmosphere. There were three dead bodies, two men and a
boy. The boy lay with his long soft neck stretched on the snow. The
face of the man next to the boy was invisible. He had fallen face
downward in a pool of blood. The third was a big man with a black
beard and huge, muscular arms. He lay stretched out to the full length
of his big body, his arms extended over a large area of blood-stained
snow.
The three men who had been shot lay black against the white snow,
motionless. From afar no one could have told the terror that was in
their immobility as they lay there at the edge of the narrow road
crowded with people.
That night Gabriel Andersen in his little room in the schoolhouse did
not write poems as usual. He stood at the window and looked at the
distant pale disk of the moon in the misty blue sky, and thought. And
his thoughts were confused, gloomy, and heavy as if a cloud had
descended upon his brain.
Indistinctly outlined in the dull moonlight he saw the dark railing,
the trees, the empty garden. It seemed to him that he beheld them--the
three men who had been shot, two grown up, one a child. They were
lying there now at the roadside, in the empty, silent field, looking
at the far-off cold moon with their dead, white eyes as he with his
living eyes.
"The time will come some day," he thought, "when the killing of people
by others will be an utter impossibility The time will come when even
the soldiers and officers who killed these three men will realise what
they have done and will understand that what they killed them for is
just as necessary, important, and dear to them--to the officers and
soldiers--as to those whom they killed.
"Yes," he said aloud and solemnly, his eyes moistening, "that time
will come. They will understand." And the pale disk of the moon was
blotted out by the moisture in his eyes.
A large pity pierced his heart for the three victims whose eyes looked
at the moon, sad and unseeing. A feeling of rage cut him as with a
sharp knife and took possession of him.
But Gabriel Andersen quieted his heart, whispering softly, "They know
not what they do." And this old and ready phrase gave him the strength
to stifle his rage and indignation.
II
The day was as bright and white, but the spring was already advanced.
The wet soil smelt of spring. Clear cold water ran everywhere from
under the loose, thawing snow. The branches of the trees were springy
and elastic. For miles and miles around, the country opened up in
clear azure stretches.
Yet the clearness and the joy of the spring day were not in the
village. They were somewhere outside the village, where there were no
people--in the fields, the woods and the mountains. In the village the
air was stifling, heavy and terrible as in a nightmare.
Gabriel Andersen stood in the road near a crowd of dark, sad,
absent-minded people and craned his neck to see the preparations for
the flogging of seven peasants.
They stood in the thawing snow, and Gabriel Andersen could not
persuade himself that they were people whom he had long known and
understood. By that which was about to happen to them, the shameful,
terrible, ineradicable thing that was to happen to them, they were
separated from all the rest of the world, and so were unable to feel
what he, Gabriel Andersen, felt, just as he was unable to feel what
they felt. Round them were the soldiers, confidently and beautifully
mounted on high upon their large steeds, who tossed their wise heads
and turned their dappled wooden faces slowly from side to side,
looking contemptuously at him, Gabriel Andersen, who was soon to
behold this horror, this disgrace, and would do nothing, would not
dare to do anything. So it seemed to Gabriel Andersen; and a sense of
cold, intolerable shame gripped him as between two clamps of ice
through which he could see everything without being able to move, cry
out or utter a groan.
They took the first peasant. Gabriel Andersen saw his strange,
imploring, hopeless look. His lips moved, but no sound was heard, and
his eyes wandered. There was a bright gleam in them as in the eyes of
a madman. His mind, it was evident, was no longer able to comprehend
what was happening.
And so terrible was that face, at once full of reason and of madness,
that Andersen felt relieved when they put him face downward on the
snow and, instead of the fiery eyes, he saw his bare back
glistening--a senseless, shameful, horrible sight.
The large, red-faced soldier in a red cap pushed toward him, looked
down at his body with seeming delight, and then cried in a clear
voice:
"Well, let her go, with God's blessing!"
Andersen seemed not to see the soldiers, the sky, the horses or the
crowd. He did not feel the cold, the terror or the shame. He did not
hear the swish of the knout in the air or the savage howl of pain and
despair. He only saw the bare back of a man's body swelling up and
covered over evenly with white and purple stripes. Gradually the bare
back lost the semblance of human flesh. The blood oozed and squirted,
forming patches, drops and rivulets, which ran down on the white,
thawing snow.
Terror gripped the soul of Gabriel Andersen as he thought of the
moment when the man would rise and face all the people who had seen
his body bared out in the open and reduced to a bloody pulp. He closed
his eyes. When he opened them, he saw four soldiers in uniform and red
hats forcing another man down on the snow, his back bared just as
shamefully, terribly and absurdly--a ludicrously tragic sight.
Then came the third, the fourth, and so on, to the end.
And Gabriel Andersen stood on the wet, thawing snow, craning his neck,
trembling and stuttering, though he did not say a word. Dank sweat
poured from his body. A sense of shame permeated his whole being. It
was a humiliating feeling, having to escape being noticed so that they
should not catch him and lay him there on the snow and strip him
bare--him, Gabriel Andersen.
The soldiers pressed and crowded, the horses tossed their heads, the
knout swished in the air, and the bare, shamed human flesh swelled up,
tore, ran over with blood, and curled like a snake. Oaths, wild
shrieks rained upon the village through the clean white air of that
spring day.
Andersen now saw five men's faces at the steps of the town hall, the
faces of those men who had already undergone their shame. He quickly
turned his eyes away. After seeing this a man must die, he thought.
III
There were seventeen of them, fifteen soldiers, a subaltern and a
young beardless officer. The officer lay in front of the fire looking
intently into the flames. The soldiers were tinkering with the
firearms in the wagon.
Their grey figures moved about quietly on the black thawing ground,
and occasionally stumbled across the logs sticking out from the
blazing fire.
Gabriel Andersen, wearing an overcoat and carrying his cane behind his
back, approached them. The subaltern, a stout fellow with a moustache,
jumped up, turned from the fire, and looked at him.
"Who are you? What do you want?" he asked excitedly. From his tone it
was evident that the soldiers feared everybody in that district,
through which they went scattering death, destruction and torture.
"Officer," he said, "there is a man here I don't know."
The officer looked at Andersen without speaking.
"Officer," said Andersen in a thin, strained voice, "my name is
Michelson. I am a business man here, and I am going to the village on
business. I was afraid I might be mistaken for some one else--you
know."
"Then what are you nosing about here for?" the officer said angrily,
and turned away.
"A business man," sneered a soldier. "He ought to be searched, this
business man ought, so as not to be knocking about at night. A good
one in the jaw is what he needs."
"He's a suspicious character, officer," said the subaltern. "Don't you
think we'd better arrest him, what?"
"Don't," answered the officer lazily. "I'm sick of them, damn 'em."
Gabriel Andersen stood there without saying anything. His eyes flashed
strangely in the dark by the firelight. And it was strange to see his
short, substantial, clean, neat figure in the field at night among the
soldiers, with his overcoat and cane and glasses glistening in the
firelight.
The soldiers left him and walked away. Gabriel Andersen remained
standing for a while. Then he turned and left, rapidly disappearing in
the darkness.
The night was drawing to a close. The air turned chilly, and the tops
of the bushes defined themselves more clearly in the dark. Gabriel
Andersen went again to the military post. But this time he hid,
crouching low as he made his way under the cover of the bushes. Behind
him people moved about quietly and carefully, bending the bushes,
silent as shadows. Next to Gabriel, on his right, walked a tall man
with a revolver in his hand.
The figure of a soldier on the hill outlined itself strangely,
unexpectedly, not where they had been looking for it. It was faintly
illumined by the gleam from the dying fire. Gabriel Andersen
recognised the soldier. It was the one who had proposed that he should
be searched. Nothing stirred in Andersen's heart. His face was cold
and motionless, as of a man who is asleep. Round the fire the soldiers
lay stretched out sleeping, all except the subaltern, who sat with his
head drooping over his knees.
The tall thin man on Andersen's right raised the revolver and pulled
the trigger. A momentary blinding flash, a deafening report.
Andersen saw the guard lift his hands and then sit down on the ground
clasping his bosom. From all directions short, crackling sparks
flashed up which combined into one riving roar. The subaltern jumped
up and dropped straight into the fire. Grey soldiers' figures moved
about in all directions like apparitions, throwing up their hands and
falling and writhing on the black earth. The young officer ran past
Andersen, fluttering his hands like some strange, frightened bird.
Andersen, as if he were thinking of something else, raised his cane.
With all his strength he hit the officer on the head, each blow
descending with a dull, ugly thud. The officer reeled in a circle,
struck a bush, and sat down after the second blow, covering his head
with both hands, as children do. Some one ran up and discharged a
revolver as if from Andersen's own hand. The officer sank together in
a heap and lunged with great force head foremost on the ground. His
legs twitched for a while, then he curled up quietly.
The shots ceased. Black men with white faces, ghostly grey in the
dark, moved about the dead bodies of the soldiers, taking away their
arms and ammunition.
Andersen watched all this with a cold, attentive stare. When all was
over, he went up, took hold of the burned subaltern's legs, and tried
to remove the body from the fire. But it was too heavy for him, and he
let it go.
IV
Andersen sat motionless on the steps of the town hall, and thought. He
thought of how he, Gabriel Andersen, with his spectacles, cane,
overcoat and poems, had lied and betrayed fifteen men. He thought it
was terrible, yet there was neither pity, shame nor regret in his
heart. Were he to be set free, he knew that he, Gabriel Andersen, with
the spectacles and poems, would go straightway and do it again. He
tried to examine himself, to see what was going on inside his soul.
But his thoughts were heavy and confused. For some reason it was more
painful for him to think of the three men lying on the snow, looking
at the pale disk of the far-off moon with their dead, unseeing eyes,
than of the murdered officer whom he had struck two dry, ugly blows on
the head. Of his own death he did not think. It seemed to him that he
had done with everything long, long ago. Something had died, had gone
out and left him empty, and he must not think about it.
And when they grabbed him by the shoulder and he rose, and they
quickly led him through the garden where the cabbages raised their dry
heads, he could not formulate a single thought.
He was conducted to the road and placed at the railing with his back
to one of the iron bars. He fixed his spectacles, put his hands behind
him, and stood there with his neat, stocky body, his head slightly
inclined to one side.
At the last moment he looked in front of him and saw rifle barrels
pointing at his head, chest and stomach, and pale faces with trembling
lips. He distinctly saw how one barrel levelled at his forehead
suddenly dropped.
Something strange and incomprehensible, as if no longer of this world,
no longer earthly, passed through Andersen's mind. He straightened
himself to the full height of his short body and threw back his head
in simple pride. A strange indistinct sense of cleanness, strength and
pride filled his soul, and everything--the sun and the sky and the
people and the field and death--seemed to him insignificant, remote
and useless.
The bullets hit him in the chest, in the left eye, in the stomach,
went through his clean coat buttoned all the way up. His glasses
shivered into bits. He uttered a shriek, circled round, and fell with
his face against one of the iron bars, his one remaining eye wide
open. He clawed the ground with his outstretched hands as if trying to
support himself.
The officer, who had turned green, rushed toward him, and senselessly
thrust the revolver against his neck, and fired twice. Andersen
stretched out on the ground.
The soldiers left quickly. But Andersen remained pressed flat to the
ground. The index finger of his left hand continued to quiver for
about ten seconds.

THE SERVANT

THE SERVANT
BY S.T. SEMYONOV
I
Gerasim returned to Moscow just at a time when it was hardest to find
work, a short while before Christmas, when a man sticks even to a poor
job in the expectation of a present. For three weeks the peasant lad
had been going about in vain seeking a position.
He stayed with relatives and friends from his village, and although he
had not yet suffered great want, it disheartened him that he, a strong
young man, should go without work.
Gerasim had lived in Moscow from early boyhood. When still a mere
child, he had gone to work in a brewery as bottle-washer, and later as
a lower servant in a house. In the last two years he had been in a
merchant's employ, and would still have held that position, had he not
been summoned back to his village for military duty. However, he had
not been drafted. It seemed dull to him in the village, he was not
used to the country life, so he decided he would rather count the
stones in Moscow than stay there.
Every minute it was getting to be more and more irk-some for him to be
tramping the streets in idleness. Not a stone did he leave unturned in
his efforts to secure any sort of work. He plagued all of his
acquaintances, he even held up people on the street and asked them if
they knew of a situation--all in vain.
Finally Gerasim could no longer bear being a burden on his people.
Some of them were annoyed by his coming to them; and others had
suffered unpleasantness from their masters on his account. He was
altogether at a loss what to do. Sometimes he would go a whole day
without eating.
II
One day Gerasim betook himself to a friend from his village, who lived
at the extreme outer edge of Moscow, near Sokolnik. The man was
coachman to a merchant by the name of Sharov, in whose service he had
been for many years. He had ingratiated himself with his master, so
that Sharov trusted him absolutely and gave every sign of holding him
in high favour. It was the man's glib tongue, chiefly, that had gained
him his master's confidence. He told on all the servants, and Sharov
valued him for it.
Gerasim approached and greeted him. The coachman gave his guest a
proper reception, served him with tea and something to eat, and asked
him how he was doing.
"Very badly, Yegor Danilych," said Gerasim. "I've been without a job
for weeks."
"Didn't you ask your old employer to take you back?"
"I did."
"He wouldn't take you again?"
"The position was filled already."
"That's it. That's the way you young fellows are. You serve your
employers so-so, and when you leave your jobs, you usually have
muddied up the way back to them. You ought to serve your masters so
that they will think a lot of you, and when you come again, they will
not refuse you, but rather dismiss the man who has taken your place."
"How can a man do that? In these days there aren't any employers like
that, and we aren't exactly angels, either."
"What's the use of wasting words? I just want to tell you about
myself. If for some reason or other I should ever have to leave this
place and go home, not only would Mr. Sharov, if I came back, take me
on again without a word, but he would be glad to, too."
Gerasim sat there downcast. He saw his friend was boasting, and it
occurred to him to gratify him.
"I know it," he said. "But it's hard to find men like you, Yegor
Danilych. If you were a poor worker, your master would not have kept
you twelve years."
Yegor smiled. He liked the praise.
"That's it," he said. "If you were to live and serve as I do, you
wouldn't be out of work for months and months."
Gerasim made no reply.
Yegor was summoned to his master.
"Wait a moment," he said to Gerasim. "I'll be right back."
"Very well."
III
Yegor came back and reported that inside of half an hour he would have
to have the horses harnessed, ready to drive his master to town. He
lighted his pipe and took several turns in the room. Then he came to a
halt in front of Gerasim.
"Listen, my boy," he said, "if you want, I'll ask my master to take
you as a servant here."
"Does he need a man?"
"We have one, but he's not much good. He's getting old, and it's very
hard for him to do the work. It's lucky for us that the neighbourhood
isn't a lively one and the police don't make a fuss about things being
kept just so, else the old man couldn't manage to keep the place clean
enough for them."
"Oh, if you can, then please do say a word for me, Yegor Danilych.
I'll pray for you all my life. I can't stand being without work any
longer."
"All right, I'll speak for you. Come again to-morrow, and in the
meantime take this ten-kopek piece. It may come in handy."
"Thanks, Yegor Danilych. Then you _will_ try for me? Please do me the
favour."
"All right. I'll try for you."
Gerasim left, and Yegor harnessed up his horses. Then he put on his
coachman's habit, and drove up to the front door. Mr. Sharov stepped
out of the house, seated himself in the sleigh, and the horses
galloped off. He attended to his business in town and returned home.
Yegor, observing that his master was in a good humour, said to him:
"Yegor Fiodorych, I have a favour to ask of you."
"What is it?"
"There's a young man from my village here, a good boy He's without a
job."
"Well?"
"Wouldn't you take him?"
"What do I want him for?"
"Use him as man of all work round the place."
"How about Polikarpych?"
"What good is he? It's about time you dismissed him."
"That wouldn't be fair. He has been with me so many years. I can't let
him go just so, without any cause."
"Supposing he _has_ worked for you for years. He didn't work for
nothing. He got paid for it. He's certainly saved up a few dollars for
his old age."
"Saved up! How could he? From what? He's not alone in the world. He
has a wife to support, and she has to eat and drink also."
"His wife earns money, too, at day's work as charwoman."
"A lot she could have made! Enough for _kvas_."
"Why should you care about Polikarpych and his wife? To tell you the
truth, he's a very poor servant. Why should you throw your money away
on him? He never shovels the snow away on time, or does anything
right. And when it comes his turn to be night watchman, he slips away
at least ten times a night. It's too cold for him. You'll see, some
day, because of him, you will have trouble with the police. The
quarterly inspector will descend on us, and it won't be so agreeable
for you to be responsible for Polikarpych."
"Still, it's pretty rough. He's been with me fifteen years. And to
treat him that way in his old age--it would be a sin."
"A sin! Why, what harm would you be doing him? He won't starve. He'll
go to the almshouse. It will be better for him, too, to be quiet in
his old age."
Sharov reflected.
"All right," he said finally. "Bring your friend here. I'll see what I
can do."
"Do take him, sir. I'm so sorry for him. He's a good boy, and he's
been without work for such a long time. I know he'll do his work well
and serve you faithfully. On account of having to report for military
duty, he lost his last position. If it hadn't been for that, his
master would never have let him go."
IV
The next evening Gerasim came again and asked:
"Well, could you do anything for me?"
"Something, I believe. First let's have some tea. Then we'll go see my
master."
Even tea had no allurements for Gerasim. He was eager for a decision;
but under the compulsion of politeness to his host, he gulped down two
glasses of tea, and then they betook themselves to Sharov.
Sharov asked Gerasim where he had lived before end what work he could
do. Then he told him he was prepared to engage him as man of all work,
and he should come back the next day ready to take the place.
Gerasim was fairly stunned by the great stroke of fortune. So
overwhelming was his joy that his legs would scarcely carry him. He
went to the coachman's room, and Yegor said to him:
"Well, my lad, see to it that you do your work right, so that I shan't
have to be ashamed of you. You know what masters are like. If you go
wrong once, they'll be at you forever after with their fault-finding,
and never give you peace."
"Don't worry about that, Yegor Danilych."
"Well--well."
Gerasim took leave, crossing the yard to go out by the gate.
Polikarpych's rooms gave on the yard, and a broad beam of light from
the window fell across Gerasim's way. He was curio as to get a glimpse
of his future home, but the panes were all frosted over, and it was
impossible to peep through. However, he could hear what the people
inside were saying.
"What will we do now?" was said in a woman's voice.
"I don't know, I don't know," a man, undoubtedly Polikarpych, replied.
"Go begging, I suppose."
"That's all we can do. There's nothing else left," said the woman.
"Oh, we poor people, what a miserable life we lead. We work and work
from early morning till late at night, day after day, and when we get
old, then it's, 'Away with you!'"
"What can we do? Our master is not one of us. It wouldn't be worth the
while to say much to him about it. He cares only for his own
advantage."
"All the masters are so mean. They don't think of any one but
themselves. It doesn't occur to them that we work for them honestly
and faithfully for years, and use up our best strength in their
service. They're afraid to keep us a year longer, even though we've
got all the strength we need to do their work. If we weren't strong
enough, we'd go of our own accord."
"The master's not so much to blame as his coachman. Yegor Danilych
wants to get a good position for his friend."
"Yes, he's a serpent. He knows how to wag his tongue. You wait, you
foul-mouthed beast, I'll get even with you. I'll go straight to the
master and tell him how the fellow deceives him, how he steals the hay
and fodder. I'll put it down in writing, and he can convince himself
how the fellow lies about us all."
"Don't, old woman. Don't sin."
"Sin? Isn't what I said all true? I know to a dot what I'm saying, and
I mean to tell it straight out to the master. He should see with his
own eyes. Why not? What can we do now anyhow? Where shall we go? He's
ruined us, ruined us."
The old woman burst out sobbing.
Gerasim heard all that, and it stabbed him like a dagger. He realised
what misfortune he would be bringing the old people, and it made him
sick at heart. He stood there a long while, saddened, lost in thought,
then he turned and went back into the coachman's room.
"Ah, you forgot something?"
"No, Yegor Danilych." Gerasim stammered out, "I've come--listen--I
want to thank you ever and ever so much--for the way you received
me--and--and all the trouble you took for me--but--I can't take the
place."
"What! What does that mean?"
"Nothing. I don't want the place. I will look for another one for
myself."
Yegor flew into a rage.
"Did you mean to make a fool of me, did you, you idiot? You come here
so meek--'Try for me, do try for me'--and then you refuse to take the
place. You rascal, you have disgraced me!"
Gerasim found nothing to say in reply. He reddened, and lowered his
eyes. Yegor turned his back scornfully and said nothing more.
Then Gerasim quietly picked up his cap and left the coachman's room.
He crossed the yard rapidly, went out by the gate, and hurried off
down the street. He felt happy and lighthearted.
ONE AUTUMN NIGHT
BY MAXIM GORKY
Once in the autumn I happened to be in a very unpleasant and
inconvenient position. In the town where I had just arrived and where
I knew not a soul, I found myself without a farthing in my pocket and
without a night's lodging.
Having sold during the first few days every part of my costume without
which it was still possible to go about, I passed from the town into
the quarter called "Yste," where were the steamship wharves--a quarter
which during the navigation season fermented with boisterous,
laborious life, but now was silent and deserted, for we were in the
last days of October.
Dragging my feet along the moist sand, and obstinately scrutinising it
with the desire to discover in it any sort of fragment of food, I
wandered alone among the deserted buildings and warehouses, and
thought how good it would be to get a full meal.
In our present state of culture hunger of the mind is more quickly
satisfied than hunger of the body. You wander about the streets, you
are surrounded by buildings not bad-looking from the outside and--you
may safely say it--not so badly furnished inside, and the sight of
them may excite within you stimulating ideas about architecture,
hygiene, and many other wise and high-flying subjects. You may meet
warmly and neatly dressed folks--all very polite, and turning away
from you tactfully, not wishing offensively to notice the lamentable
fact of your existence. Well, well, the mind of a hungry man is always
better nourished and healthier than the mind of the well-fed man; and
there you have a situation from which you may draw a very ingenious
conclusion in favour of the ill fed.
The evening was approaching, the rain was falling, and the wind blew
violently from the north. It whistled in the empty booths and shops,
blew into the plastered window-panes of the taverns, and whipped into
foam the wavelets of the river which splashed noisily on the sandy
shore, casting high their white crests, racing one after another into
the dim distance, and leaping impetuously over one another's
shoulders. It seemed as if the river felt the proximity of winter, and
was running at random away from the fetters of ice which the north
wind might well have flung upon her that very night. The sky was heavy
and dark; down from it swept incessantly scarcely visible drops of
rain, and the melancholy elegy in nature all around me was emphasised
by a couple of battered and misshapen willow-trees and a boat, bottom
upwards, that was fastened to their roots.
The overturned canoe with its battered keel and the miserable old
trees rifled by the cold wind--everything around me was bankrupt,
barren, and dead, and the sky flowed with undryable tears...
Everything around was waste and gloomy ... it seemed as if everything
were dead, leaving me alone among the living, and for me also a cold
death waited.
I was then eighteen years old--a good time!
I walked and walked along the cold wet sand, making my chattering
teeth warble in honour of cold and hunger, when suddenly, as I was
carefully searching for something to eat behind one of the empty
crates, I perceived behind it, crouching on the ground, a figure in
woman's clothes dank with the rain and clinging fast to her stooping
shoulders. Standing over her, I watched to see what she was doing. It
appeared that she was digging a trench in the sand with her
hands--digging away under one of the crates.
"Why are you doing that?" I asked, crouching down on my heels quite
close to her.
She gave a little scream and was quickly on her legs again. Now that
she stood there staring at me, with her wide-open grey eyes full of
terror, I perceived that it was a girl of my own age, with a very
pleasant face embellished unfortunately by three large blue marks.
This spoilt her, although these blue marks had been distributed with a
remarkable sense of proportion, one at a time, and all were of equal
size--two under the eyes, and one a little bigger on the forehead just
over the bridge of the nose. This symmetry was evidently the work of
an artist well inured to the business of spoiling the human
physiognomy.
The girl looked at me, and the terror in her eyes gradually died
out... She shook the sand from her hands, adjusted her cotton
head-gear, cowered down, and said:
"I suppose you too want something to eat? Dig away then! My hands are
tired. Over there"--she nodded her head in the direction of a
booth--"there is bread for certain ... and sausages too... That booth
is still carrying on business."
I began to dig. She, after waiting a little and looking at me, sat
down beside me and began to help me.
We worked in silence. I cannot say now whether I thought at that
moment of the criminal code, of morality, of proprietorship, and all
the other things about which, in the opinion of many experienced
persons, one ought to think every moment of one's life. Wishing to
keep as close to the truth as possible, I must confess that apparently
I was so deeply engaged in digging under the crate that I completely
forgot about everything else except this one thing: What could be
inside that crate?
The evening drew on. The grey, mouldy, cold fog grew thicker and
thicker around us. The waves roared with a hollower sound than before,
and the rain pattered down on the boards of that crate more loudly and
more frequently. Somewhere or other the night-watchman began springing
his rattle.
"Has it got a bottom or not?" softly inquired my assistant. I did not
understand what she was talking about, and I kept silence.
"I say, has the crate got a bottom? If it has we shall try in vain to
break into it. Here we are digging a trench, and we may, after all,
come upon nothing but solid boards. How shall we take them off? Better
smash the lock; it is a wretched lock."
Good ideas rarely visit the heads of women, but, as you see, they do
visit them sometimes. I have always valued good ideas, and have always
tried to utilise them as far as possible.
Having found the lock, I tugged at it and wrenched off the whole
thing. My accomplice immediately stooped down and wriggled like a
serpent into the gaping-open, four cornered cover of the crate whence
she called to me approvingly, in a low tone:
"You're a brick!"
Nowadays a little crumb of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a
whole dithyramb from a man, even though he be more eloquent than all
the ancient and modern orators put together. Then, however, I was less
amiably disposed than I am now, and, paying no attention to the
compliment of my comrade, I asked her curtly and anxiously:
"Is there anything?"
In a monotonous tone she set about calculating our discoveries.
"A basketful of bottles--thick furs--a sunshade--an iron pail."
All this was uneatable. I felt that my hopes had vanished... But
suddenly she exclaimed vivaciously:
"Aha! here it is!"
"What?"
"Bread ... a loaf ... it's only wet ... take it!"
A loaf flew to my feet and after it herself, my valiant comrade. I had
already bitten off a morsel, stuffed it in my mouth, and was chewing
it...
"Come, give me some too!... And we mustn't stay here... Where shall we
go?" she looked inquiringly about on all sides... It was dark, wet,
and boisterous.
"Look! there's an upset canoe yonder ... let us go there."
"Let us go then!" And off we set, demolishing our booty as we went,
and filling our mouths with large portions of it... The rain grew more
violent, the river roared; from somewhere or other resounded a
prolonged mocking whistle--just as if Someone great who feared nobody
was whistling down all earthly institutions and along with them this
horrid autumnal wind and us its heroes. This whistling made my heart
throb painfully, in spite of which I greedily went on eating, and in
this respect the girl, walking on my left hand, kept even pace with
me.
"What do they call you?" I asked her--why I know not.
"Natasha," she answered shortly, munching loudly.
I stared at her. My heart ached within me; and then I stared into the
mist before me, and it seemed to me as if the inimical countenance of
my Destiny was smiling at me enigmatically and coldly.
* * * * *
The rain scourged the timbers of the skiff incessantly, and its soft
patter induced melancholy thoughts, and the wind whistled as it flew
down into the boat's battered bottom through a rift, where some loose
splinters of wood were rattling together--a disquieting and depressing
sound. The waves of the river were splashing on the shore, and sounded
so monotonous and hopeless, just as if they were telling something
unbearably dull and heavy, which was boring them into utter disgust,
something from which they wanted to run away and yet were obliged to
talk about all the same. The sound of the rain blended with their
splashing, and a long-drawn sigh seemed to be floating above the
overturned skiff--the endless, labouring sigh of the earth, injured
and exhausted by the eternal changes from the bright and warm summer
to the cold misty and damp autumn. The wind blew continually over the
desolate shore and the foaming river--blew and sang its melancholy
songs...
Our position beneath the shelter of the skiff was utterly devoid of
comfort; it was narrow and damp, tiny cold drops of rain dribbled
through the damaged bottom; gusts of wind penetrated it. We sat in
silence and shivered with cold. I remembered that I wanted to go to
sleep. Natasha leaned her back against the hull of the boat and curled
herself up into a tiny ball. Embracing her knees with her hands, and
resting her chin upon them, she stared doggedly at the river with
wide-open eyes; on the pale patch of her face they seemed immense,
because of the blue marks below them. She never moved, and this
immobility and silence--I felt it--gradually produced within me a
terror of my neighbour. I wanted to talk to her, but I knew not how to
begin.
It was she herself who spoke.
"What a cursed thing life is!" she exclaimed plainly, abstractedly,
and in a tone of deep conviction.
But this was no complaint. In these words there was too much of
indifference for a complaint. This simple soul thought according to
her understanding--thought and proceeded to form a certain conclusion
which she expressed aloud, and which I could not confute for fear of
contradicting myself. Therefore I was silent, and she, as if she had
not noticed me, continued to sit there immovable.
"Even if we croaked ... what then...?" Natasha began again, this time
quietly and reflectively, and still there was not one note of
complaint in her words. It was plain that this person, in the course
of her reflections on life, was regarding her own case, and had
arrived at the conviction that in order to preserve herself from the
mockeries of life, she was not in a position to do anything else but
simply "croak"--to use her own expression.
The clearness of this line of thought was inexpressibly sad and
painful to me, and I felt that if I kept silence any longer I was
really bound to weep... And it would have been shameful to have done
this before a woman, especially as she was not weeping herself. I
resolved to speak to her.
"Who was it that knocked you about?" I asked. For the moment I could
not think of anything more sensible or more delicate.
"Pashka did it all," she answered in a dull and level tone.
"And who is he?"
"My lover... He was a baker."
"Did he beat you often?"
"Whenever he was drunk he beat me... Often!"
And suddenly, turning towards me, she began to talk about herself,
Pashka, and their mutual relations. He was a baker with red moustaches
and played very well on the banjo. He came to see her and greatly
pleased her, for he was a merry chap and wore nice clean clothes. He
had a vest which cost fifteen rubles and boots with dress tops. For
these reasons she had fallen in love with him, and he became her
"creditor." And when he became her creditor he made it his business to
take away from her the money which her other friends gave to her for
bonbons, and, getting drunk on this money, he would fall to beating
her; but that would have been nothing if he hadn't also begun to "run
after" other girls before her very eyes.
"Now, wasn't that an insult? I am not worse than the others. Of course
that meant that he was laughing at me, the blackguard. The day before
yesterday I asked leave of my mistress to go out for a bit, went to
him, and there I found Dimka sitting beside him drunk. And he, too,
was half seas over. I said, 'You scoundrel, you!' And he gave me a
thorough hiding. He kicked me and dragged me by the hair. But that was
nothing to what came after. He spoiled everything I had on--left me
just as I am now! How could I appear before my mistress? He spoiled
everything ... my dress and my jacket too--it was quite a new one; I
gave a fiver for it ... and tore my kerchief from my head... Oh, Lord!
What will become of me now?" she suddenly whined in a lamentable
overstrained voice.
The wind howled, and became ever colder and more boisterous... Again
my teeth began to dance up and down, and she, huddled up to avoid the
cold, pressed as closely to me as she could, so that I could see the
gleam of her eyes through the darkness.
"What wretches all you men are! I'd burn you all in an oven; I'd cut
you in pieces. If any one of you was dying I'd spit in his mouth, and
not pity him a bit. Mean skunks! You wheedle and wheedle, you wag your
tails like cringing dogs, and we fools give ourselves up to you, and
it's all up with us! Immediately you trample us underfoot... Miserable
loafers'"
She cursed us up and down, but there was no vigour, no malice, no
hatred of these "miserable loafers" in her cursing that I could hear.
The tone of her language by no means corresponded with its
subject-matter, for it was calm enough, and the gamut of her voice was
terribly poor.
Yet all this made a stronger impression on me than the most eloquent
and convincing pessimistic bocks and speeches, of which I had read a
good many and which I still read to this day. And this, you see, was
because the agony of a dying person is much more natural and violent
than the most minute and picturesque descriptions of death.
I felt really wretched--more from cold than from the words of my
neighbour. I groaned softly and ground my teeth.
Almost at the same moment I felt two little arms about me--one of them
touched my neck and the other lay upon my face--and at the same time
an anxious, gentle, friendly voice uttered the question:
"What ails you?"
I was ready to believe that some one else was asking me this and not
Natasha, who had just declared that all men were scoundrels, and
expressed a wish for their destruction. But she it was, and now she
began speaking quickly, hurriedly.
"What ails you, eh? Are you cold? Are you frozen? Ah, what a one you
are, sitting there so silent like a little owl! Why, you should have
told me long ago that you were cold. Come ... lie on the ground ...
stretch yourself out and I will lie ... there! How's that? Now put
your arms round me?... tighter! How's that? You shall be warm very
soon now... And then we'll lie back to back... The night will pass so
quickly, see if it won't. I say ... have you too been drinking?...
Turned out of your place, eh?... It doesn't matter."
And she comforted me... She encouraged me.
May I be thrice accursed! What a world of irony was in this single
fact for me! Just imagine! Here was I, seriously occupied at this very
time with the destiny of humanity, thinking of the re-organisation of
the social system, of political revolutions, reading all sorts of
devilishly-wise books whose abysmal profundity was certainly
unfathomable by their very authors--at this very time. I say, I was
trying with all my might to make of myself "a potent active social
force." It even seemed to me that I had partially accomplished my
object; anyhow, at this time, in my ideas about myself, I had got so
far as to recognise that I had an exclusive right to exist, that I had
the necessary greatness to deserve to live my life, and that I was
fully competent to play a great historical part therein. And a woman
was now warming me with her body, a wretched, battered, hunted
creature, who had no place and no value in life, and whom I had never
thought of helping till she helped me herself, and whom I really would
not have known how to help in any way even if the thought of it had
occurred to me.
Ah! I was ready to think that all this was happening to me in a
dream--in a disagreeable, an oppressive dream.
But, ugh! it was impossible for me to think that, for cold drops of
rain were dripping down upon me, the woman was pressing close to me,
her warm breath was fanning my face, and--despite a slight odor of
vodka--it did me good. The wind howled and raged, the rain smote upon
the skiff, the waves splashed, and both of us, embracing each other
convulsively, nevertheless shivered with cold. All this was only too
real, and I am certain that nobody ever dreamed such an oppressive and
horrid dream as that reality.
But Natasha was talking all the time of something or other, talking
kindly and sympathetically, as only women can talk. Beneath the
influence of her voice and kindly words a little fire began to burn up
within me, and something inside my heart thawed in consequence.
Then tears poured from my eyes like a hailstorm, washing away from my
heart much that was evil, much that war, stupid, much sorrow and dirt
which had fastened upon it before that night. Natasha comforted me.
"Come, come, that will do, little one! Don't take on! That'll do! God
will give you another chance ... you will right yourself and stand in
your proper place again ... and it will be all right..."
And she kept kissing me ... many kisses did she give me ... burning
kisses ... and all for nothing...
Those were the first kisses from a woman that had ever been bestowed
upon me, and they were the best kisses too, for all the subsequent
kisses cost me frightfully dear, and really gave me nothing at all in
exchange.
"Come, don't take on so, funny one! I'll manage for you to-morrow if
you cannot find a place." Her quiet persuasive whispering sounded in
my ears as if it came through a dream...
There we lay till dawn...
And when the dawn came, we crept from behind the skiff and went into
the town... Then we took friendly leave of each other and never met
again, although for half a year I searched in every hole and corner
for that kind Natasha, with whom I spent the autumn night just
described.
If she be already dead--and well for her if it were so--may she rest
in peace! And if she be alive ... still I say "Peace to her soul!" And
may the consciousness of her fall never enter her soul ... for that
would be a superfluous and fruitless suffering if life is to be
lived...
HER LOVER
BY MAXIM GORKY
An acquaintance of mine once told me the following story.
When I was a student at Moscow I happened to live alongside one of
those ladies whose repute is questionable. She was a Pole, and they
called her Teresa. She was a tallish, powerfully-built brunette, with
black, bushy eyebrows and a large coarse face as if carved out by a
hatchet--the bestial gleam of her dark eyes, her thick bass voice, her
cabman-like gait and her immense muscular vigour, worthy of a
fishwife, inspired me with horror. I lived on the top flight and her
garret was opposite to mine. I never left my door open when I knew her
to be at home. But this, after all, was a very rare occurrence.
Sometimes I chanced to meet her on the staircase or in the yard, and
she would smile upon me with a smile which seemed to me to be sly and
cynical. Occasionally, I saw her drunk, with bleary eyes, tousled
hair, and a particularly hideous grin. On such occasions she would
speak to me.
"How d'ye do, Mr. Student!" and her stupid laugh would still further
intensify my loathing of her. I should have liked to have changed my
quarters in order to have avoided such encounters and greetings; but
my little chamber was a nice one, and there was such a wide view from
the window, and it was always so quiet in the street below--so I
endured.
And one morning I was sprawling on my couch, trying to find some sort
of excuse for not attending my class, when the door opened, and the
bass voice of Teresa the loathsome resounded from my threshold:
"Good health to you, Mr. Student!"
"What do you want?" I said. I saw that her face was confused and
supplicatory... It was a very unusual sort of face for her.
"Sir! I want to beg a favour of you. Will you grant it me?"
I lay there silent, and thought to myself:
"Gracious!... Courage, my boy!"
"I want to send a letter home, that's what it is," she said; her voice
was beseeching, soft, timid.
"Deuce take you!" I thought; but up I jumped, sat down at my table,
took a sheet of paper, and said:
"Come here, sit down, and dictate!"
She came, sat down very gingerly on a chair, and looked at me with a
guilty look.
"Well, to whom do you want to write?"
"To Boleslav Kashput, at the town of Svieptziana, on the Warsaw
Road..."
"Well, fire away!"
"My dear Boles ... my darling ... my faithful lover. May the Mother of
God protect thee! Thou heart of gold, why hast thou not written for
such a long time to thy sorrowing little dove, Teresa?"
I very nearly burst out laughing. "A sorrowing little dove!" more than
five feet high, with fists a stone and more in weight, and as black a
face as if the little dove had lived all its life in a chimney, and
had never once washed itself! Restraining myself somehow, I asked:
"Who is this Bolest?"
"Boles, Mr. Student," she said, as if offended with me for blundering
over the name, "he is Boles--my young man."
"Young man!"
"Why are you so surprised, sir? Cannot I, a girl, have a young man?"
She? A girl? Well!
"Oh, why not?" I said. "All things are possible. And has he been your
young man long?"
"Six years."
"Oh, ho!" I thought. "Well, let us write your letter..."
And I tell you plainly that I would willingly have changed places with
this Boles if his fair correspondent had been not Teresa but something
less than she.
"I thank you most heartily, sir, for your kind services," said Teresa
to me, with a curtsey. "Perhaps _I_ can show _you_ some service, eh?"
"No, I most humbly thank you all the same."
"Perhaps, sir, your shirts or your trousers may want a little
mending?"
I felt that this mastodon in petticoats had made me grow quite red
with shame, and I told her pretty sharply that I had no need whatever
of her services.
She departed.
A week or two passed away. It was evening. I was sitting at my window
whistling and thinking of some expedient for enabling me to get away
from myself. I was bored; the weather was dirty. I didn't want to go
out, and out of sheer ennui I began a course of self-analysis and
reflection. This also was dull enough work, but I didn't care about
doing anything else. Then the door opened. Heaven be praised! Some one
came in.
"Oh, Mr. Student, you have no pressing business, I hope?"
It was Teresa. Humph!
"No. What is it?"
"I was going to ask you, sir, to write me another letter."
"Very well! To Boles, eh?"
"No, this time it is from him."
"Wha-at?"
"Stupid that I am! It is not for me, Mr. Student, I beg your pardon.
It is for a friend of mine, that is to say, not a friend but an
acquaintance--a man acquaintance. He has a sweetheart just like me
here, Teresa. That's how it is. Will you, sir, write a letter to this
Teresa?"
I looked at her--her face was troubled, her fingers were trembling. I
was a bit fogged at first--and then I guessed how it was.
"Look here, my lady," I said, "there are no Boleses or Teresas at all,
and you've been telling me a pack of lies. Don't you come sneaking
about me any longer. I have no wish whatever to cultivate your
acquaintance. Do you understand?"
And suddenly she grew strangely terrified and distraught; she began to
shift from foot to foot without moving from the place, and spluttered
comically, as if she wanted to say something and couldn't. I waited to
see what would come of all this, and I saw and felt that, apparently,
I had made a great mistake in suspecting her of wishing to draw me
from the path of righteousness. It was evidently something very
different.
"Mr. Student!" she began, and suddenly, waving her hand, she turned
abruptly towards the door and went out. I remained with a very
unpleasant feeling in my mind. I listened. Her door was flung
violently to--plainly the poor wench was very angry... I thought it
over, and resolved to go to her, and, inviting her to come in here,
write everything she wanted.
I entered her apartment. I looked round. She was sitting at the table,
leaning on her elbows, with her head in her hands.
"Listen to me," I said.
Now, whenever I come to this point in my story, I always feel horribly
awkward and idiotic. Well, well!
"Listen to me," I said.
She leaped from her seat, came towards me with flashing eyes, and
laying her hands on my shoulders, began to whisper, or rather to hum
in her peculiar bass voice:
"Look you, now! It's like this. There's no Boles at all, and there's
no Teresa either. But what's that to you? Is it a hard thing for you
to draw your pen over paper? Eh? Ah, and _you_, too! Still such a
little fair-haired boy! There's nobody at all, neither Boles, nor
Teresa, only me. There you have it, and much good may it do you!"
"Pardon me!" said I, altogether flabbergasted by such a reception,
"what is it all about? There's no Boles, you say?"
"No. So it is."
"And no Teresa either?"
"And no Teresa. I'm Teresa."
I didn't understand it at all. I fixed my eyes upon her, and tried to
make out which of us was taking leave of his or her senses. But she
went again to the table, searched about for something, came back to
me, and said in an offended tone:
"If it was so hard for you to write to Boles, look, there's your
letter, take it! Others will write for me."
I looked. In her hand was my letter to Boles. Phew!
"Listen, Teresa! What is the meaning of all this? Why must you get
others to write for you when I have already written it, and you
haven't sent it?"
"Sent it where?"
"Why, to this--Boles."
"There's no such person."
I absolutely did not understand it. There was nothing for me but to
spit and go. Then she explained.
"What is it?" she said, still offended. "There's no such person, I
tell you," and she extended her arms as if she herself did not
understand why there should be no such person. "But I wanted him to
be... Am I then not a human creature like the rest of them? Yes, yes,
I know, I know, of course... Yet no harm was done to any one by my
writing to him that I can see..."
"Pardon me--to whom?"
"To Boles, of course."
"But he doesn't exist."
"Alas! alas! But what if he doesn't? He doesn't exist, but he _might!_
I write to him, and it looks as if he did exist. And Teresa--that's
me, and he replies to me, and then I write to him again..."
I understood at last. And I felt so sick, so miserable, so ashamed,
somehow. Alongside of me, not three yards away, lived a human creature
who had nobody in the world to treat her kindly, affectionately, and
this human being had invented a friend for herself!
"Look, now! you wrote me a letter to Boles, and I gave it to some one
else to read it to me; and when they read it to me I listened and
fancied that Boles was there. And I asked you to write me a letter
from Boles to Teresa--that is to me. When they write such a letter for
me, and read it to me, I feel quite sure that Boles is there. And life
grows easier for me in consequence."
"Deuce take you for a blockhead!" said I to myself when I heard this.
And from thenceforth, regularly, twice a week, I wrote a letter to
Boles, and an answer from Boles to Teresa. I wrote those answers
well... She, of course, listened to them, and wept like anything,
roared, I should say, with her bass voice. And in return for my thus
moving her to tears by real letters from the imaginary Boles, she
began to mend the holes I had in my socks, shirts, and other articles
of clothing. Subsequently, about three months after this history
began, they put her in prison for something or other. No doubt by this
time she is dead.
My acquaintance shook the ash from his cigarette, looked pensively up
at the sky, and thus concluded:
Well, well, the more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the
more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round
in the rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of
our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do
not understand this.
And the whole thing turns out pretty stupidly--and very cruelly. The
fallen classes, we say. And who are the fallen classes, I should like
to know? They are, first of all, people with the same bones, flesh,
and blood and nerves as ourselves. We have been told this day after
day for ages. And we actually listen--and the devil only knows how
hideous the whole thing is. Or are we completely depraved by the loud
sermonising of humanism? In reality, we also are fallen folks, and, so
far as I can see, very deeply fallen into the abyss of
self-sufficiency and the conviction of our own superiority. But enough
of this. It is all as old as the hills--so old that it is a shame to
speak of it. Very old indeed--yes, that's what it is!
LAZARUS
BY LEONID ANDREYEV
I
When Lazarus rose from the grave, after three days and nights in the
mysterious thraldom of death, and returned alive to his home, it was a
long time before any one noticed the evil peculiarities in him that
were later to make his very name terrible. His friends and relatives
were jubilant that he had come back to life. They surrounded him with
tenderness, they were lavish of their eager attentions, spending the
greatest care upon his food and drink and the new garments they made
for him. They clad him gorgeously in the glowing colours of hope and
laughter, and when, arrayed like a bridegroom, he sat at table with
them again, ate again, and drank again, they wept fondly and summoned
the neighbours to look upon the man miraculously raised from the dead.
The neighbours came and were moved with joy. Strangers arrived from
distant cities and villages to worship the miracle. They burst into
stormy exclamations, and buzzed around the house of Mary and Martha,
like so many bees.
That which was new in Lazarus' face and gestures they explained
naturally, as the traces of his severe illness and the shock he had
passed through. It was evident that the disintegration of the body had
been halted by a miraculous power, but that the restoration had not
been complete; that death had left upon his face and body the effect
of an artist's unfinished sketch seen through a thin glass. On his
temples, under his eyes, and in the hollow of his cheek lay a thick,
earthy blue. His fingers were blue, too, and under his nails, which
had grown long in the grave, the blue had turned livid. Here and there
on his lips and body, the skin, blistered in the grave, had burst open
and left reddish glistening cracks, as if covered with a thin, glassy
slime. And he had grown exceedingly stout. His body was horribly
bloated and suggested the fetid, damp smell of putrefaction. But the
cadaverous, heavy odour that clung to his burial garments and, as it
seemed, to his very body, soon wore off, and after some time the blue
of his hands and face softened, and the reddish cracks of his skin
smoothed out, though they never disappeared completely. Such was the
aspect of Lazarus in his second life. It looked natural only to those
who had seen him buried.
Not merely Lazarus' face, but his very character, it seemed, had
changed; though it astonished no one and did not attract the attention
it deserved. Before his death Lazarus had been cheerful and careless,
a lover of laughter and harmless jest. It was because of his good
humour, pleasant and equable, his freedom from meanness and gloom,
that he had been so beloved by the Master. Now he was grave and
silent; neither he himself jested nor did he laugh at the jests of
others; and the words he spoke occasionally were simple, ordinary and
necessary words--words as much devoid of sense and depth as are the
sounds with which an animal expresses pain and pleasure, thirst and
hunger. Such words a man may speak all his life and no one would ever
know the sorrows and joys that dwelt within him.
Thus it was that Lazarus sat at the festive table among his friends
and relatives--his face the face of a corpse over which, for three
days, death had reigned in darkness, his garments gorgeous and
festive, glittering with gold, bloody-red and purple; his mien heavy
and silent. He was horribly changed and strange, but as yet
undiscovered. In high waves, now mild, now stormy, the festivities
went on around him. Warm glances of love caressed his face, still cold
with the touch of the grave; and a friend's warm hand patted his
bluish, heavy hand. And the music played joyous tunes mingled of the
sounds of the tympanum, the pipe, the zither and the dulcimer. It was
as if bees were humming, locusts buzzing and birds singing over the
happy home of Mary and Martha.
II
Some one recklessly lifted the veil. By one breath of an uttered word
he destroyed the serene charm, and uncovered the truth in its ugly
nakedness. No thought was clearly defined in his mind, when his lips
smilingly asked: "Why do you not tell us, Lazarus, what was There?"
And all became silent, struck with the question. Only now it seemed to
have occurred to them that for three days Lazarus had been dead; and
they looked with curiosity, awaiting an answer. But Lazarus remained
silent.
"You will not tell us?" wondered the inquirer. "Is it so terrible
There?"
Again his thought lagged behind his words. Had it preceded them, he
would not have asked the question, for, at the very moment he uttered
it, his heart sank with a dread fear. All grew restless; they awaited
the words of Lazarus anxiously. But he was silent, cold and severe,
and his eyes were cast down. And now, as if for the first time, they
perceived the horrible bluishness of his face and the loathsome
corpulence of his body. On the table, as if forgotten by Lazarus, lay
his livid blue hand, and all eyes were riveted upon it, as though
expecting the desired answer from that hand. The musicians still
played; then silence fell upon them, too, and the gay sounds died
down, as scattered coals are extinguished by water. The pipe became
mute, and the ringing tympanum and the murmuring dulcimer; and as
though a chord were broken, as though song itself were dying, the
zither echoed a trembling broken sound. Then all was quiet.
"You will not?" repeated the inquirer, unable to restrain his babbling
tongue. Silence reigned, and the livid blue hand lay motionless. It
moved slightly, and the company sighed with relief and raised their
eyes. Lazarus, risen from the dead, was looking straight at them,
embracing all with one glance, heavy and terrible.
This was on the third day after Lazarus had arisen from the grave.
Since then many had felt that his gaze was the gaze of destruction,
but neither those who had been forever crushed by it, nor those who in
the prime of life (mysterious even as death) had found the will to
resist his glance, could ever explain the terror that lay immovable in
the depths of his black pupils. He looked quiet and simple. One felt
that he had no intention to hide anything, but also no intention to
tell anything. His look was cold, as of one who is entirely
indifferent to all that is alive. And many careless people who pressed
around him, and did not notice him, later learned with wonder and fear
the name of this stout, quiet man who brushed against them with his
sumptuous, gaudy garments. The sun did not stop shining when he
looked, neither did the fountain cease playing, and the Eastern sky
remained cloudless and blue as always; but the man who fell under his
inscrutable gaze could no longer feel the sun, nor hear the fountain,
nor recognise his native sky. Sometimes he would cry bitterly,
sometimes tear his hair in despair and madly call for help; but
generally it happened that the men thus stricken by the gaze of
Lazarus began to fade away listlessly and quietly and pass into a slow
death lasting many long years. They died in the presence of everybody,
colourless, haggard and gloomy, like trees withering on rocky ground.
Those who screamed in madness sometimes came back to life; but the
others, never.
"So you will not tell us, Lazarus, what you saw There?" the inquirer
repeated for the third time. But now his voice was dull, and a dead,
grey weariness looked stupidly from out his eyes. The faces of all
present were also covered by the same dead grey weariness like a mist.
The guests stared at one another stupidly, not knowing why they had
come together or why they sat around this rich table. They stopped
talking, and vaguely felt it was time to leave; but they could not
overcome the lassitude that spread through their muscles. So they
continued to sit there, each one isolated, like little dim lights
scattered in the darkness of night.
The musicians were paid to play, and they again took up the
instruments, and again played gay or mournful airs. But it was music
made to order, always the same tunes, and the guests listened
wonderingly. Why was this music necessary, they thought, why was it
necessary and what good did it do for people to pull at strings and
blow their cheeks into thin pipes, and produce varied and
strange-sounding noises?
"How badly they play!" said some one.
The musicians were insulted and left. Then the guests departed one by
one, for it was nearing night. And when the quiet darkness enveloped
them, and it became easier to breathe, the image of Lazarus suddenly
arose before each one in stern splendour. There he stood, with the
blue face of a corpse and the raiment of a bridegroom, sumptuous and
resplendent, in his eyes that cold stare in the depths of which lurked
_The Horrible!_ They stood still as if turned into stone. The darkness
surrounded them, and in the midst of this darkness flamed up the
horrible apparition, the supernatural vision, of the one who for three
days had lain under the measureless power of death. Three days he had
been dead. Thrice had the sun risen and set--and he had lain dead. The
children had played, the water had murmured as it streamed over the
rocks, the hot dust had clouded the highway--and he had been dead. And
now he was among men again--touched them--looked at them--_looked at
them!_ And through the black rings of his pupils, as through dark
glasses, the unfathomable _There_ gazed upon humanity.
III
No one took care of Lazarus, and no friends or kindred remained with
him. Only the great desert, enfolding the Holy City, came close to the
threshold of his abode. It entered his home, and lay down on his couch
like a spouse, and put out all the fires. No one cared for Lazarus.
One after the other went away, even his sisters, Mary and Martha. For
a long while Martha did not want to leave him, for she knew not who
would nurse him or take care of him; and she cried and prayed. But one
night, when the wind was roaming about the desert, and the rustling
cypress trees were bending over the roof, she dressed herself quietly,
and quietly went away. Lazarus probably heard how the door was
slammed--it had not shut properly and the wind kept knocking it
continually against the post--but he did not rise, did not go out, did
not try to find out the reason. And the whole night until the morning
the cypress trees hissed over his head, and the door swung to and fro,
allowing the cold, greedily prowling desert to enter his dwelling.
Everybody shunned him as though he were a leper. They wanted to put a
bell on his neck to avoid meeting him. But some one, turning pale,
remarked it would be terrible if at night, under the windows, one
should happen to hear Lazarus' bell, and all grew pale and assented.
Since he did nothing for himself, he would probably have starved had
not his neighbours, in trepidation, saved some food for him. Children
brought it to him. They did not fear him, neither did they laugh at
him in the innocent cruelty in which children often laugh at
unfortunates. They were indifferent to him, and Lazarus showed the
same indifference to them. He showed no desire to thank them for their
services; he did not try to pat the dark hands and look into the
simple shining little eyes. Abandoned to the ravages of time and the
desert, his house was falling to ruins, and his hungry, bleating goats
had long been scattered among his neighbours. His wedding garments had
grown old. He wore them without changing them, as he had donned them
on that happy day when the musicians played. He did not see the
difference between old and new, between torn and whole. The brilliant
colours were burnt and faded; the vicious dogs of the city and the
sharp thorns of the desert had rent the fine clothes to shreds.
During the day, when the sun beat down mercilessly upon all living
things, and even the scorpions hid under the stones, convulsed with a
mad desire to sting, he sat motionless in the burning rays, lifting
high his blue face and shaggy wild beard.
While yet the people were unafraid to speak to him, same one had asked
him: "Poor Lazarus! Do you find it pleasant to sit so, and look at the
sun?" And he answered: "Yes, it is pleasant."
The thought suggested itself to people that the cold of the three days
in the grave had been so intense, its darkness so deep, that there was
not in all the earth enough heat or light to warm Lazarus and lighten
the gloom of his eyes; and inquirers turned away with a sigh.
And when the setting sun, flat and purple-red, descended to earth,
Lazarus went into the desert and walked straight toward it, as though
intending to reach it. Always he walked directly toward the sun, and
those who tried to follow him and find out what he did at night in the
desert had indelibly imprinted upon their mind's vision the black
silhouette of a tall, stout man against the red background of an
immense disk. The horrors of the night drove them away, and so they
never found out what Lazarus did in the desert; but the image of the
black form against the red was burned forever into their brains. Like
an animal with a cinder in its eye which furiously rubs its muzzle
against its paws, they foolishly rubbed their eyes; but the impression
left by Lazarus was ineffaceable, forgotten only in death.
There were people living far away who never saw Lazarus and only heard
of him. With an audacious curiosity which is stronger than fear and
feeds on fear, with a secret sneer in their hearts, some of them came
to him one day as he basked in the sun, and entered into conversation
with him. At that time his appearance had changed for the better and
was not so frightful. At first the visitors snapped their fingers and
thought disapprovingly of the foolish inhabitants of the Holy City.
But when the short talk came to an end and they went home, their
expression was such that the inhabitants of the Holy City at once knew
their errand and said: "Here go some more madmen at whom Lazarus has
looked." The speakers raised their hands in silent pity.
Other visitors came, among them brave warriors in clinking armour, who
knew not fear, and happy youths who made merry with laughter and song.
Busy merchants, jingling their coins, ran in for awhile, and proud
attendants at the Temple placed their staffs at Lazarus' door. But no
one returned the same as he came. A frightful shadow fell upon their
souls, and gave a new appearance to the old familiar world.
Those who felt any desire to speak, after they had been stricken by
the gaze of Lazarus, described the change that had come over them
somewhat like this:
_All objects seen by the eye and palpable to the hand became empty,
light and transparent, as though they were light shadows in the
darkness; and this darkness enveloped the whole universe. It was
dispelled neither by the sun, nor by the moon, nor by the stars, but
embraced the earth like a mother, and clothed it in a boundless black
veil_.
_Into all bodies it penetrated, even into iron and stone; and the
particles of the body lost their unity and became lonely. Even to the
heart of the particles it penetrated, and the particles of the
particles became lonely_.
_The vast emptiness which surrounds the universe, was not filled with
things seen, with sun or moon or stars; it stretched boundless,
penetrating everywhere, disuniting everything, body from body,
particle from particle_.
_In emptiness the trees spread their roots, themselves empty; in
emptiness rose phantom temples, palaces and houses--all empty; and in
the emptiness moved restless Man, himself empty and light, like a
shadow_.
_There was no more a sense of time; the beginning of all things and
their end merged into one. In the very moment when a building was
being erected and one could hear the builders striking with their
hammers, one seemed already to see its ruins, and then emptiness where
the ruins were_.
_A man was just born, and funeral candles were already lighted at his
head, and then were extinguished; and soon there was emptiness where
before had been the man and the candles._
_And surrounded by Darkness and Empty Waste, Man trembled hopelessly
before the dread of the Infinite_.
So spoke those who had a desire to speak. But much more could probably
have been told by those who did not want to talk, and who died in
silence.
IV
At that time there lived in Rome a celebrated sculptor by the name of
Aurelius. Out of clay, marble and bronze he created forms of gods and
men of such beauty that this beauty was proclaimed immortal. But he
himself was not satisfied, and said there was a supreme beauty that he
had never succeeded in expressing in marble or bronze. "I have not yet
gathered the radiance of the moon," he said; "I have not yet caught
the glare of the sun. There is no soul in my marble, there is no life
in my beautiful bronze." And when by moonlight he would slowly wander
along the roads, crossing the black shadows of the cypress-trees, his
white tunic flashing in the moonlight, those he met used to laugh
good-naturedly and say: "Is it moonlight that you are gathering,
Aurelius? Why did you not bring some baskets along?"
And he, too, would laugh and point to his eyes and say: "Here are the
baskets in which I gather the light of the moon and the radiance of
the sun."
And that was the truth. In his eyes shone moon and sun. But he could
not transmit the radiance to marble. Therein lay the greatest tragedy
of his life. He was a descendant of an ancient race of patricians, had
a good wife and children, and except in this one respect, lacked
nothing.
When the dark rumour about Lazarus reached him, he consulted his wife
and friends and decided to make the long voyage to Judea, in order
that he might look upon the man miraculously raised from the dead. He
felt lonely in those days and hoped on the way to renew his jaded
energies. What they told him about Lazarus did not frighten him. He
had meditated much upon death. He did not like it, nor did he like
those who tried to harmonise it with life. On this side, beautiful
life; on the other, mysterious death, he reasoned, and no better lot
could befall a man than to live--to enjoy life and the beauty of
living. And he already had conceived a desire to convince Lazarus of
the truth of this view and to return his soul to life even as his body
had been returned. This task did not appear impossible, for the
reports about Lazarus, fearsome and strange as they were, did not tell
the whole truth about him, but only carried a vague warning against
something awful.
Lazarus was getting up from a stone to follow in the path of the
setting sun, on the evening when the rich Roman, accompanied by an
armed slave, approached him, and in a ringing voice called to him:
"Lazarus!"
Lazarus saw a proud and beautiful face, made radiant by fame, and
white garments and precious jewels shining in the sunlight. The ruddy
rays of the sun lent to the head and face a likeness to dimly shining
bronze--that was what Lazarus saw. He sank back to his seat
obediently, and wearily lowered his eyes.
"It is true you are not beautiful, my poor Lazarus," said the Roman
quietly, playing with his gold chain. "You are even frightful, my poor
friend; and death was not lazy the day when you so carelessly fell
into its arms. But you are as fat as a barrel, and 'Fat people are not
bad,' as the great Caesar said. I do not understand why people are so
afraid of you. You will permit me to stay with you over night? It is
already late, and I have no abode."
Nobody had ever asked Lazarus to be allowed to pass the night with
him.
"I have no bed," said he.
"I am somewhat of a warrior and can sleep sitting," replied the Roman.
"We shall make a light."
"I have no light."
"Then we will converse in the darkness like two friends. I suppose you
have some wine?"
"I have no wine."
The Roman laughed.
"Now I understand why you are so gloomy and why you do not like your
second life. No wine? Well, we shall do without. You know there are
words that go to one's head even as Falernian wine."
With a motion of his head he dismissed the slave, and they were alone.
And again the sculptor spoke, but it seemed as though the sinking sun
had penetrated into his words. They faded, pale and empty, as if
trembling on weak feet, as if slipping and falling, drunk with the
wine of anguish and despair. And black chasms appeared between the two
men--like remote hints of vast emptiness and vast darkness.
"Now I am your guest and you will not ill-treat me, Lazarus!" said the
Roman. "Hospitality is binding even upon those who have been three
days dead. Three days, I am told, you were in the grave. It must have
been cold there... and it is from there that you have brought this bad
habit of doing without light and wine. I like a light. It gets dark so
quickly here. Your eyebrows and forehead have an interesting line:
even as the ruins of castles covered with the ashes of an earthquake.
But why in such strange, ugly clothes? I have seen the bridegrooms of
your country, they wear clothes like that--such ridiculous
clothes--such awful garments... Are you a bridegroom?"
Already the sun had disappeared. A gigantic black shadow was
approaching fast from the west, as if prodigious bare feet were
rustling over the sand. And the chill breezes stole up behind.
"In the darkness you seem even bigger, Lazarus, as though you had
grown stouter in these few minutes. Do you feed on darkness,
perchance?... And I would like a light... just a small light... just a
small light. And I am cold. The nights here are so barbarously cold...
If it were not so dark, I should say you were looking at me, Lazarus.
Yes, it seems, you are looking. You are looking. _You are looking at
me!_... I feel it--now you are smiling."
The night had come, and a heavy blackness filled the air.
"How good it will be when the sun rises again to-morrow... You know I
am a great sculptor... so my friends call me. I create, yes, they say
I create, but for that daylight is necessary. I give life to cold
marble. I melt the ringing bronze in the fire, in a bright, hot fire.
Why did you touch me with your hand?"
"Come," said Lazarus, "you are my guest." And they went into the
house. And the shadows of the long evening fell on the earth...
The slave at last grew tired waiting for his master, and when the sun
stood high he came to the house. And he saw, directly under its
burning rays, Lazarus and his master sitting close together. They
looked straight up and were silent.
The slave wept and cried aloud: "Master, what ails you, Master!"
The same day Aurelius left for Rome. The whole way he was thoughtful
and silent, attentively examining everything, the people, the ship,
and the sea, as though endeavouring to recall something. On the sea a
great storm overtook them, and all the while Aurelius remained on deck
and gazed eagerly at the approaching and falling waves. When he
reached home his family were shocked at the terrible change in his
demeanour, but he calmed them with the words: "I have found it!"
In the dusty clothes which he had worn during the entire journey and
had not changed, he began his work, and the marble ringingly responded
to the resounding blows of the hammer. Long and eagerly he worked,
admitting no one. At last, one morning, he announced that the work was
ready, and gave instructions that all his friends, and the severe
critics and judges of art, be called together. Then he donned gorgeous
garments, shining with gold, glowing with the purple of the byssin.
"Here is what I have created," he said thoughtfully.
His friends looked, and immediately the shadow of deep sorrow covered
their faces. It was a thing monstrous, possessing none of the forms
familiar to the eye, yet not devoid of a hint of some new unknown
form. On a thin tortuous little branch, or rather an ugly likeness of
one, lay crooked, strange, unsightly, shapeless heaps of something
turned outside in, or something turned inside out--wild fragments
which seemed to be feebly trying to get away from themselves. And,
accidentally, under one of the wild projections, they noticed a
wonderfully sculptured butterfly, with transparent wings, trembling as
though with a weak longing to fly.
"Why that wonderful butterfly, Aurelius?" timidly asked some one.
"I do not know," answered the sculptor.
The truth had to be told, and one of his friends, the one who loved
Aurelius best, said: "This is ugly, my poor friend. It must be
destroyed. Give me the hammer." And with two blows he destroyed the
monstrous mass, leaving only the wonderfully sculptured butterfly.
After that Aurelius created nothing. He looked with absolute
indifference at marble and at bronze and at his own divine creations,
in which dwelt immortal beauty. In the hope of breathing into him once
again the old flame of inspiration, with the idea of awakening his
dead soul, his friends led him to see the beautiful creations of
others, but he remained indifferent and no smile warmed his closed
lips. And only after they spoke to him much and long of beauty, he
would reply wearily:
"But all this is--a lie."
And in the daytime, when the sun was shining, he would go into his
rich and beautifully laid-out garden, and finding a place where there
was no shadow, would expose his bare head and his dull eyes to the
glitter and burning heat of the sun. Red and white butterflies
fluttered around; down into the marble cistern ran splashing water
from the crooked mouth of a blissfully drunken Satyr; but he sat
motionless, like a pale shadow of that other one who, in a far land,
at the very gates of the stony desert, also sat motionless under the
fiery sun.
V
And it came about finally that Lazarus was summoned to Rome by the
great Augustus.
They dressed him in gorgeous garments as though it had been ordained
that he was to remain a bridegroom to an unknown bride until the very
day of his death. It was as if an old coffin, rotten and falling
apart, were regilded over and over, and gay tassels were hung on it.
And solemnly they conducted him in gala attire, as though in truth it
were a bridal procession, the runners loudly sounding the trumpet that
the way be made for the ambassadors of the Emperor. But the roads
along which he passed were deserted. His entire native land cursed the
execrable name of Lazarus, the man miraculously brought to life, and
the people scattered at the mere report of his horrible approach. The
trumpeters blew lonely blasts, and only the desert answered with a
dying echo.
Then they carried him across the sea on the saddest and most gorgeous
ship that was ever mirrored in the azure waves of the Mediterranean.
There were many people aboard, but the ship was silent and still as a
coffin, and the water seemed to moan as it parted before the short
curved prow. Lazarus sat lonely, baring his head to the sun, and
listening in silence to the splashing of the waters. Further away the
seamen and the ambassadors gathered like a crowd of distressed
shadows. If a thunderstorm had happened to burst upon them at that
time or the wind had overwhelmed the red sails, the ship would
probably have perished, for none of those who were on her had strength
or desire enough to fight for life. With supreme effort some went to
the side of the ship and eagerly gazed at the blue, transparent abyss.
Perhaps they imagined they saw a naiad flashing a pink shoulder
through the waves, or an insanely joyous and drunken centaur galloping
by, splashing up the water with his hoofs. But the sea was deserted
and mute, and so was the watery abyss.
Listlessly Lazarus set foot on the streets of the Eternal City, as
though all its riches, all the majesty of its gigantic edifices, all
the lustre and beauty and music of refined life, were simply the echo
of the wind in the desert, or the misty images of hot running sand.
Chariots whirled by; the crowd of strong, beautiful, haughty men
passed on, builders of the Eternal City and proud partakers of its
life; songs rang out; fountains laughed; pearly laughter of women
filled the air, while the drunkard philosophised and the sober ones
smilingly listened; horseshoes rattled on the pavement. And surrounded
on all sides by glad sounds, a fat, heavy man moved through the centre
of the city like a cold spot of silence, sowing in his path grief,
anger and vague, carking distress. Who dared to be sad in Rome?
indignantly demanded frowning citizens; and in two days the
swift-tongued Rome knew of Lazarus, the man miraculously raised from
the grave, and timidly evaded him.
There were many brave men ready to try their strength, and at their
senseless call Lazarus came obediently. The Emperor was so engrossed
with state affairs that he delayed receiving the visitor, and for
seven days Lazarus moved among the people.
A jovial drunkard met him with a smile on his red lips. "Drink,
Lazarus, drink!" he cried, "Would not Augustus laugh to see you
drink!" And naked, besotted women laughed, and decked the blue hands
of Lazarus with rose-leaves. But the drunkard looked into the eyes of
Lazarus--and his joy ended forever. Thereafter he was always drunk. He
drank no more, but was drunk all the time, shadowed by fearful dreams,
instead of the joyous reveries that wine gives. Fearful dreams became
the food of his broken spirit. Fearful dreams held him day and night
in the mists of monstrous fantasy, and death itself was no more
fearful than the apparition of its fierce precursor.
Lazarus came to a youth and his lass who loved each other and were
beautiful in their love. Proudly and strongly holding in his arms his
beloved one, the youth said, with gentle pity: "Look at us, Lazarus,
and rejoice with us. Is there anything stronger than love?"
And Lazarus looked at them. And their whole life they continued to
love one another, but their love became mournful and gloomy, even as
those cypress trees over the tombs that feed their roots on the
putrescence of the grave, and strive in vain in the quiet evening hour
to touch the sky with their pointed tops. Hurled by fathomless
life-forces into each other's arms, they mingled their kisses with
tears, their joy with pain, and only succeeded in realising the more
vividly a sense of their slavery to the silent Nothing. Forever
united, forever parted, they flashed like sparks, and like sparks went
out in boundless darkness.
Lazarus came to a proud sage, and the sage said to him: "I already
know all the horrors that you may tell me, Lazarus. With what else can
you terrify me?"
Only a few moments passed before the sage realised that the knowledge
of the horrible is not the horrible, and that the sight of death is
not death. And he felt that in the eyes of the Infinite wisdom and
folly are the same, for the Infinite knows them not. And the
boundaries between knowledge and ignorance, between truth and
falsehood, between top and bottom, faded and his shapeless thought was
suspended in emptiness. Then he grasped his grey head in his hands and
cried out insanely: "I cannot think! I cannot think!"
Thus it was that under the cool gaze of Lazarus, the man miraculously
raised from the dead, all that serves to affirm life, its sense and
its joys, perished. And people began to say it was dangerous to allow
him to see the Emperor; that it were better to kill him and bury him
secretly, and swear he had disappeared. Swords were sharpened and
youths devoted to the welfare of the people announced their readiness
to become assassins, when Augustus upset the cruel plans by demanding
that Lazarus appear before him.
Even though Lazarus could not be kept away, it was felt that the heavy
impression conveyed by his face might be somewhat softened. With that
end in view expert painters, barbers and artists were secured who
worked the whole night on Lazarus' head. His beard was trimmed and
curled. The disagreeable and deadly bluishness of his hands and face
was covered up with paint; his hands were whitened, his cheeks rouged.
The disgusting wrinkles of suffering that ridged his old face were
patched up and painted, and on the smooth surface, wrinkles of
good-nature and laughter, and of pleasant, good-humoured cheeriness,
were laid on artistically with fine brushes.
Lazarus submitted indifferently to all they did with him, and soon was
transformed into a stout, nice-looking old man, for all the world a
quiet and good-humoured grandfather of numerous grandchildren. He
looked as though the smile with which he told funny stories had not
left his lips, as though a quiet tenderness still lay hidden in the
corner of his eyes. But the wedding-dress they did not dare to take
off; and they could not change his eyes--the dark, terrible eyes from
out of which stared the incomprehensible _There_.
VI
Lazarus was untouched by the magnificence of the imperial apartments.
He remained stolidly indifferent, as though he saw no contrast between
his ruined house at the edge of the desert and the solid, beautiful
palace of stone. Under his feet the hard marble of the floor took on
the semblance of the moving sands of the desert, and to his eyes the
throngs of gaily dressed, haughty men were as unreal as the emptiness
of the air. They looked not into his face as he passed by, fearing to
come under the awful bane of his eyes; but when the sound of his heavy
steps announced that he had passed, heads were lifted, and eyes
examined with timid curiosity the figure of the corpulent, tall,
slightly stooping old man, as he slowly passed into the heart of the
imperial palace. If death itself had appeared men would not have
feared it so much; for hitherto death had been known to the dead only,
and life to the living only, and between these two there had been no
bridge. But this strange being knew death, and that knowledge of his
was felt to be mysterious and cursed. "He will kill our great, divine
Augustus," men cried with horror, and they hurled curses after him.
Slowly and stolidly he passed them by, penetrating ever deeper into
the palace.
Caesar knew already who Lazarus was, and was prepared to meet him. He
was a courageous man; he felt his power was invincible, and in the
fateful encounter with the man "wonderfully raised from the dead" he
refused to lean on other men's weak help. Man to man, face to face, he
met Lazarus.
"Do not fix your gaze on me, Lazarus," he commanded. "I have heard
that your head is like the head of Medusa, and turns into stone all
upon whom you look. But I should like to have a close look at you, and
to talk to you before I turn into stone," he added in a spirit of
playfulness that concealed his real misgivings.
Approaching him, he examined closely Lazarus' face and his strange
festive clothes. Though his eyes were sharp and keen, he was deceived
by the skilful counterfeit.
"Well, your appearance is not terrible, venerable sir. But all the
worse for men, when the terrible takes on such a venerable and
pleasant appearance. Now let us talk."
Augustus sat down, and as much by glance as by words began the
discussion. "Why did you not salute me when you entered?"
Lazarus answered indifferently: "I did not know it was necessary."
"You are a Christian?"
"No."
Augustus nodded approvingly. "That is good. I do not like the
Christians. They shake the tree of life, forbidding it to bear fruit,
and they scatter to the wind its fragrant blossoms. But who are you?"
With some effort Lazarus answered: "I was dead."
"I heard about that. But who are you now?"
Lazarus' answer came slowly. Finally he said again, listlessly and
indistinctly: "I was dead."
"Listen to me, stranger," said the Emperor sharply, giving expression
to what had been in his mind before. "My empire is an empire of the
living; my people are a people of the living and not of the dead. You
are superfluous here. I do not know who you are, I do not know what
you have seen There, but if you lie, I hate your lies, and if you tell
the truth, I hate your truth. In my heart I feel the pulse of life; in
my hands I feel power, and my proud thoughts, like eagles, fly through
space. Behind my back, under the protection of my authority, under the
shadow of the laws I have created, men live and labour and rejoice. Do
you hear this divine harmony of life? Do you hear the war cry that men
hurl into the face of the future, challenging it to strife?"
Augustus extended his arms reverently and solemnly cried out: "Blessed
art thou, Great Divine Life!"
But Lazarus was silent, and the Emperor continued more severely: "You
are not wanted here. Pitiful remnant, half devoured of death, you fill
men with distress and aversion to life. Like a caterpillar on the
fields, you are gnawing away at the full seed of joy, exuding the
slime of despair and sorrow. Your truth is like a rusted sword in the
hands of a night assassin, and I shall condemn you to death as an
assassin. But first I want to look into your eyes. Mayhap only cowards
fear them, and brave men are spurred on to struggle and victory. Then
will you merit not death but a reward. Look at me, Lazarus."
At first it seemed to divine Augustus as if a friend were looking at
him, so soft, so alluring, so gently fascinating was the gaze of
Lazarus. It promised not horror but quiet rest, and the Infinite dwelt
there as a fond mistress, a compassionate sister, a mother. And ever
stronger grew its gentle embrace, until he felt, as it were, the
breath of a mouth hungry for kisses... Then it seemed as if iron bones
protruded in a ravenous grip, and closed upon him in an iron band; and
cold nails touched his heart, and slowly, slowly sank into it.
"It pains me," said divine Augustus, growing pale; "but look, Lazarus,
look!"
Ponderous gates, shutting off eternity, appeared to be slowly swinging
open, and through the growing aperture poured in, coldly and calmly,
the awful horror of the Infinite. Boundless Emptiness and Boundless
Gloom entered like two shadows, extinguishing the sun, removing the
ground from under the feet, and the cover from over the head. And the
pain in his icy heart ceased.
"Look at me, look at me, Lazarus!" commanded Augustus, staggering...
Time ceased and the beginning of things came perilously near to the
end. The throne of Augustus, so recently erected, fell to pieces, and
emptiness took the place of the throne and of Augustus. Rome fell
silently into ruins. A new city rose in its place, and it too was
erased by emptiness. Like phantom giants, cities, kingdoms, and
countries swiftly fell and disappeared into emptiness--swallowed up in
the black maw of the Infinite...
"Cease," commanded the Emperor. Already the accent of indifference was
in his voice. His arms hung powerless, and his eagle eyes flashed and
were dimmed again, struggling against overwhelming darkness.
"You have killed me, Lazarus," he said drowsily.
These words of despair saved him. He thought of the people, whose
shield he was destined to be, and a sharp, redeeming pang pierced his
dull heart. He thought of them doomed to perish, and he was filled
with anguish. First they seemed bright shadows in the gloom of the
Infinite.--How terrible! Then they appeared as fragile vessels with
life-agitated blood, and hearts that knew both sorrow and great
joy.--And he thought of them with tenderness.
And so thinking and feeling, inclining the scales now to the side of
life, now to the side of death, he slowly returned to life, to find in
its suffering and joy a refuge from the gloom, emptiness and fear of
the Infinite.
"No, you did not kill me, Lazarus," said he firmly. "But I will kill
you. Go!"
Evening came and divine Augustus partook of food and drink with great
joy. But there were moments when his raised arm would remain suspended
in the air, and the light of his shining, eager eyes was dimmed. It
seemed as if an icy wave of horror washed against his feet. He was
vanquished but not killed, and coldly awaited his doom, like a black
shadow. His nights were haunted by horror, but the bright days still
brought him the joys, as well as the sorrows, of life.
Next day, by order of the Emperor, they burned out Lazarus' eyes with
hot irons and sent him home. Even Augustus dared not kill him.
* * * * *
Lazarus returned to the desert and the desert received him with the
breath of the hissing wind and the ardour of the glowing sun. Again he
sat on the stone with matted beard uplifted; and two black holes,
where the eyes had once been, looked dull and horrible at the sky. In
the distance the Holy City surged and roared restlessly, but near him
all was deserted and still. No one approached the place where Lazarus,
miraculously raised from the dead, passed his last days, for his
neighbours had long since abandoned their homes. His cursed knowledge,
driven by the hot irons from his eyes deep into the brain, lay there
in ambush; as if from ambush it might spring out upon men with a
thousand unseen eyes. No one dared to look at Lazarus.
And in the evening, when the sun, swollen crimson and growing larger,
bent its way toward the west, blind Lazarus slowly groped after it. He
stumbled against stones and fell; corpulent and feeble, he rose
heavily and walked on; and against the red curtain of sunset his dark
form and outstretched arms gave him the semblance of a cross.
It happened once that he went and never returned. Thus ended the
second life of Lazarus, who for three days had been in the mysterious
thraldom of death and then was miraculously raised from the dead.