THE CONFESSION

A NOVEL

BY

MAXIM GORKY

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY

ROSE STRUNSKY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE TRANSLATOR

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

1916

INTRODUCTION

To me Gorky has never suffered from that change it has become so fashionable for young Russia to mourn.

"Since he has begun to give us doctrines, he has lost all his art," they say and shake their heads, "We can get all the doctrines we want from the platform of the Social Democratic party or from the theorists of the Social Revolutionaries—why go to Gorky? Or if it is a philosophy of life that we seek, have we not always Tolstoi, who is greater, truer and has more consummate art? Why does he not write again a Foma Gordyeeff, or an Orloff and His Wife, or a Konovaloff!"

I re-read Foma Gordyeeff, Orloff and His Wife, Konovaloff and so on, and read also Mother, The Spy, In Prison, and the little fables with a purpose so sadly decried, and I see nothing there but the old Gorky writing as usual from the by-ways of life as he passes along on the road. The road has lengthened and widened in the twenty-five years of his wandering, that is all. Russia has changed and grown and passed through deepstirring experiences from the year 1890, when Gorky first published his immortal story of Makar Chudra, to her present moment of titanic struggle in the World War—the beginning of the year 1916.

Russia's changes were Gorky's changes. He first flung his type of hero, the people from the lowest of the low—water-rats, tramps, petty thieves—into a discouraged, disappointed and hopeless Russia. It was a Russia that had almost decided that there were no more people, that they were without courage, that the misery and degradation in which they lived was there because of their own inefficiency, their lack of idealism, their incapacity to grasp an idea and to strike and fight for it.

The Russia that thought this and the Russia that Gorky awakened from its torpor by introducing to it again the people it had almost learned to scorn, showing them with a capacity of understanding ideas, with deep emotions and great courage, was the Russia that had settled back in bitter disappointment after the sad failure of the Revolutionary movement of the eighties.

Like an eddying pool, the generations in Russia have risen to the surface, made their protest against the anachronism of autocracy and despotism, and then subsided back again into the still and inert waters of the nation. But each rising generation has made a wider and wider eddy, coming ever from a greater depth. Thus in 1825 it was merely a small group of military officers, who having learned from the Napoleonic campaigns that there were such things as constitutional law and order, that liberty and freedom were truths to fight for, broke out in revolt in Petrograd in December of that year only to be immediately crushed. Five of the leaders were hanged, and the rest, intellectuals and writers among them, were sent to Siberia.

The loss of the élite of Russia, despite the names of Pushkin and Lermontoff which graced that period, made great inroads in the intellectual life of the country. But in the fifties and sixties the seeming quiet was broken into by a new restlessness. This time the student youth, the young sons and daughters of the landlords and the nobles, became inspired by a passion for learning, for new conceptions of education, for new liberties of the people, for the abolition of serfdom and for a Pan-Slavism that would be democratic. It was then that the women left their homes to seek higher education and to enter new fields of work. They had to break with family tyranny which was fostered by tradition and the State, their men comrades standing valiantly by, helping them to make escapes, going through the forms of mock marriage, and conducting them safely to that Mecca of learning for the Russian youth—the medical school of Geneva. It was in this way that Sonya Kovalevsky, who later became the famous mathematician in the University of Stockholm, made her escape into the world, and the untold other heroines of Russia who were soon to return educated, free, and fired with a zeal to spread their new-found freedom to the people.

The abolition of serfdom in '61 brought with it great discontent, for the peasants had been led to believe that they would be liberated together with the land, since Russian serfdom, unlike the Western, was based on the theory that the peasant was attached to the land and that the landlord's hold on it came through his ownership of the serf. Consequently it was argued, when the Russian serf was liberated and the ancient communal village form maintained, that all the land the serfs had owned would go to them. Of course, that was very far from what really happened. It is true that the serfs were liberated and the ancient communal form kept, but the land allotted to the village was poor and meager, the plots were scattered, and the tax on them for repayment to the landlords was so great that it took over fifty years to pay.

The peasants foresaw exactly the future that awaited them; the dearth in land, none too much to begin with, and the consequential lessening at each redistribution as the village increased in "souls," the needed "renting" from the landlord at exorbitant rates, the inability to pay and the resultant "paying in his own labor," and the eventual reestablishment of a virtual serfdom. Insurrections took place all over the country, the peasants believing firmly that the Government had treated them more kindly but that the landlords were deceiving them. However, the Government came only too gladly to the aid of the landlords, having got used to blood-baths in its drastic quenching of the Polish insurrection of '63.

The general disappointment among the youth in the Government's attitude towards both Polish liberty and peasant rights led to a stronger and more revolutionary stand on their part. Unlike the reaction that set in during the long and tyrannical reign of Nicholas I, after the outburst of the Decembrists, or the reaction that was to follow those thirty years of effort when the notes of Gorky were to sound like a clarion call to a renewed faith, the decade of the seventies rose to one of extreme and intense idealism. The generation which had gone out of Russia to gain for itself new liberties had now returned and was spread throughout the length and breadth of the vast land, making converts by the thousands where formerly there were but few. The "fathers" and "sons" though not understanding each other very fully, were nevertheless following a pretty equal tendency. Where the former had sought for new general liberties in politics and social life through education, the latter, feeling that a great deal had already been won, had decided upon propaganda of action. The movement changed from a freeing of one's self to a freeing of the people. "To the people" became the watchword of the hour. The youth of the better classes went to live among the peasants, taught them, organized them into secret revolutionary groups for "land and liberty," made several abortive attempts at peasant revolution, and finally, the Government growing more and more reactionary, ended in the wielding of a personal "terror" against the Government representatives, which culminated in the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II, in 1882.

The reprisals that set in, the wholesale exiling of the youth to Siberia, the internment for life in the fortresses of Peter and Paul and in Schlüsselberg for participation in the Party of the Will of the People, and the general opinion that however reactionary Alexander II was he was still much more ready for reforms than his successor Alexander III, gave rise to a fundamental disillusionment. The sacrifices of the youth had been too much. They had led themselves to be hanged and tortured only to bring in an era of still greater darkness. The people were not ready for reforms, they did not wish them. They would not have understood what to do with liberties could they have had them. There was nothing to do but sit back on one's estate, exploit the peasants as did the grandfathers and say, "We are powerless and the peasants unworthy."

This period was the more painful because it came fast upon one which was full of idealism and hope. The men who lived on in inertia, drinking tea and discussing vacuously the futility of life, had known a time when they had hoped and thought and planned otherwise. They had almost cynically to repudiate their former selves.

The writer who brought out most acutely the great anguish of this period was Anton Chekhov. He is now being recognized as the greatest artist of his time, who followed naturally the trend of the years he lived in. His humor, at first gentle and sorrowful, became later coarse and gross as the darkness around him deepened. His characters are inert, some eaten up by unfulfilled desires, others incapable even of recalling the faint echo of a former hope. A "Chekhov Sorrow" became a well-known definite phrase in Russian life.

It was before this Russia that Gorky made his appearance. Himself one of the people, he showed them again the face of the people. It had beauty and courage, it had qualities of strength long since forgotten. The effect was electrical. Gorky was hailed as one upon whom the cloak of Tolstoi was to fall, for better than Tolstoi, he did not appear as a leader of the people, but as one who disclosed the people en masse.

Gorky's appearance in the cultured and literary world of Russia suffering from the "Chekhov Sorrow" has an analogy in my mind to the sudden appearance of Peter Karpovitch in the fortress of Schlüsselberg. There sat the men and women for almost twenty years, cut off from all outside communication, wondering when and how their work would be carried on. One by one they had died off and only a handful remained to question if the youth would ever awake to strong purposes again. Then suddenly, in the year 1902, the big gates opened, and the student Peter Karpovitch entered. Without connection with any revolutionary group, by an instinctive feeling of the pulse of the time, he made his strike against the increasing reaction, shooting the Minister of Education, Bogolyepov, in February, 1901, for the wholesale exiling of the students into the military on the lines employed by Nicholas I.

This advance guard of the Russian Revolution was tall and handsome, with the traditional heroic, figure of the Little Russian. He came to the men of the past in all his strength and beauty as a symbol of the new era. Upon his footsteps followed fast Bolmashev, the executor of Sipiagin, who this time committed his act under the direction of an organized group, the Social Revolutionaries. In two years Russia was aflame. The Governor General of Finland, Bobrikoff, was shot in June, 1904. This was followed in a few weeks by the assassination of Von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei, by general labor strikes, by the demonstration in Petrograd in front of the Winter Palace which led to the terrible massacre of Bloody Sunday on January 22, 1905, by the mutinies in the Black Sea fleet and in Kronstadt, and by the nation-wide general strike in every branch of industry and life in October, 1905. Finally a Constitution and the Duma were granted to the people. The herald of the new order to the old was the tall handsome youth whose strange footsteps were heard suddenly and unexpectedly one March morning treading the hitherto silent corridors of the fortress.

Thus, as Karpovitch to the prisoners in Schlüsselberg, came Gorky to Russia at large.

He was marvelously fitted to dispel the disappointment that was felt about the people. Himself one of the people, he had merely to disclose himself to prove again their courage and nobility. The life of Gorky has been particularly tragic and particularly Russian. He was born in a dyer's shop in Nizhni-Novgorad in 1869. His real name is Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, and it is significant that when he came to write he signed himself "Maxim Gorky"—"Maxim, the Bitter." His father died when he was four and he was totally orphaned at seven. His childhood was spent in the care of his maternal grandfather, who was extremely religious and a miser. The foundation of the bitterness he was to feel was thus laid early, for the life of the lonely child with the harsh, unsympathetic old man, can be well imagined, though the peculiarly Russian setting can be had only by reading his recent book, My Childhood. At the death of his mother he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and at eleven he decided that he had had enough of home ties and left Nizhni-Novgorad for good. He started tramping and after various vicissitudes found himself a helper to a cook on one of the Volga boats. This man had been at one time a noncommissioned officer and he carried his past culture with him in the form of a trunk full of books. It was a queer assortment, from Gogol to school manuals and popular novels, and Gorky dipped liberally into it. The result was that a craving for real learning arose in him, which would have come no doubt to the imaginative youth at this age even without the aid of that haphazard library. He left the Volga steamer and tramped to the University of Kazan, thinking that learning would be free to any one who wished it. He was bitterly disappointed, for the University demanded fees, and so instead of registering as a student he was forced to take a job as a bakery helper. This work he did for two years and it seems to have made a deep impression upon him, for there is scarcely a story of his where the hero does not spend two years baking bread in some filthy cellar among flour dust and general filth.

He left the bakeshop to wander with those tramps and "ex-men" whose poet he was later to be. The life held suffering which ate deep into the vitals of his being—hunger, privations, nights with the police for vagabondage; and finally so great became this conflict between the beauty and goodness for which his nature craved and the constant evil around him, that in 1889 at the age of twenty-one he sent a bullet through his chest. Like many of the Russian youth, whose passionate natures make impossible the compromise between their inherent idealism and the sordidness and brutality of actual existence, he had decided to be done with the mockery. Fortunately the bullet did not kill and he took up his life of vagabondage again. In 1892 he is once more in Nizhni-Novgorad, actually holding the respectable post of a lawyer's clerk. The lawyer, a man called Lanin, seems to have taken a great interest in the intelligent young man who discussed "cursed" questions and had a "live and energetic soul." He threw opportunities for study in his way, but Gorky's free and untamed youth, coupled with the taste of the "mother earth" he grew to love so, made it impossible for him to lead the well-ordered life of a professional clerk, and in a city, at that. He left Lanin, for he did not "feel at home with these intelligent people," he said, and tramped to the Caucasus, making a detour on the way from the Volga, through the Don district, into Bessarabia and Southern Crimea.

Coming to the Caucasus he found work in a railroad yard in Tiflis. His mind had already begun to digest the types of those tramps, Tartars and gipsies he met in his wanderings, for as early as 1890 his first story Makar Chudra made its appearance in the little paper Kafhas in Tiflis. It is a story of two thieves, written with great simplicity and naturalness. There is no doubt that Gorky had met them and had been true to the incidents related. It showed them strong, sensitive as women, with a subtle capacity of understanding each other's emotions. In a typically Russian scene, one thief unburdens his heart to the other, telling him how he had wanted to kill him and how he had nearly done so. The other listens, sympathetic, understanding fully how that state of mind came to him, and they part in great tenderness! These are no weaklings, they are personalities held by iron chains in a Greek fatalism, and the fatality is life—Russian life. Gorky had not yet come to the point where he could lay his hand on the social enemy and say "here it is." He saw only a great misery and natures torn in anguish, but not ruined as the generation before had supposed. Though this story itself, appearing, as it did, in a provincial paper, made no immediate name for him, his later stories, in which both canvas and treatment are exactly the same, brought him recognition forthwith.

Gorky left Tiflis and wandered back to the Volga and there, by happy chance, met the Little Russian writer, Korolenko, the author of Makar's Dream and The Blind Musician. As editor of The Contemporary, Korolenko introduced him to "great" literature, as he put it, and in a flash he was made known to all of Russia. He continued writing in the same vein he introduced in Makar Chudra, using the strong, outcast, rebel types in Emilian Pibgai and Chalkash, which were published in 1895 under Korolenko's editorship, and in Konovaloff, Malva, Foma Gordyeeff his first long novel, and in the innumerable other works which preceded the supposed "change" in Gorky's manner. He showed his heroes to Russia as one shows a scene by pulling back a curtain: "this is what exists; here are men who do not conform to your laws, not because you have made outcasts of them, but because they despise you and all your smug respectability."

But he did not say so in so many words, he merely showed this canvas. The change in Gorky is the change in Russia, which grew from a silent and brooding mood to one of talk and action. As the Russian people became more self-conscious so did he, changing from a man torn hither and thither by circumstances to one who was able to analyze life and know cause and effect. His very sudden success so early in his life made it impossible for him to keep on writing and re-writing the same themes in the same manner as he had begun. He was too great and dynamic a genius for that. To him as to most Russians the art itself is not the thing, but the self-expression and the truth. Thus when Gorky swung out from the life of tramps and wanderers into the intellectual life of Russia, he found a nation organized into various groups, analyzing the cause of Russian social and political misery, finding an economic and materialistic reason for it, and setting about to remedy it. Gorky joined one of these groups, the Social Democratic Party, was one of the signers of the petition to the Czar which demanded with an amusing Russian naïveté that the Czar grant not only economic justice to the strikers in the steel works of Petrograd, but also a constitutional assembly, universal suffrage, a direct and secret ballot, and free speech, free press and freedom of religion! For these demands and the subsequent demonstration in front of the Winter Palace which resulted in the notorious massacre of Bloody Sunday, Gorky was imprisoned in the fortress of Peter and Paul. His prominence and the fact that he was subject to tuberculosis caused a universal demand for his release. He was freed after a month and was allowed to stay in Finland and even in Petrograd for a while during the so-called days of freedom.

By this time Gorky had thrown himself entirely into the cause of the Majority Faction of the Social Democratic Party, an organization not strictly Marxian, in the sense that they did not wait for an economic development to bring about the cooperative commonwealth but believed that by mass action and general strike Russia could bring about a revolution on socialistic lines without the necessity of intermediary steps. In 1905 he left Russia and came to America, hoping to collect money for the Revolutionary cause, but his work failed entirely because of the fact that the charming and brilliant lady who came with him to America and registered as his wife was not legally so. The men of prominence, Mark Twain among them, who formed committees to help raise the funds, resigned, and Gorky's plans failed entirely. Not only was no money for the "cause" raised, but he was received nowhere, the very hotel he stayed in asking him to leave at midnight. It was supposed that agents of the Russian Government, fearing Gorky's too great success in America, sprung the trap and thus discredited him. At any rate, Gorky naturally left the shores of America in great disgust, and the dark days of Russian reaction having already set in, went to live in practical exile on the island of Capri, in Italy. Leonid Andreyeff, the Russian writer, and many revolutionary refugees generally stayed with him. It was from Capri that the longer novels, The Spy and this work, The Confession, were written. He was by this time living entirely in the cultured world, thinking earnestly and scientifically to the best of his ability about the political and social conditions around him.

The great light, the great inspiring motive power of the Russian has ever been the people. The only ray of happiness in the works of Gorky is the joy that comes to his characters when they begin to work for the people. Life is depressing, life is a quagmire, a bog wherein great and noble souls are forced to wallow, when suddenly light appears. It is in the organization for the creation of a better life. One feels just for one little instant the happiness that life can bring when this vision of the new order appears. In the novel called Three of Them, the pages lighten with relief when the little Social Democratic agitator appears, giving hope and courage, but she is swept out of the life of the unhappy men that fill the pages of that book as suddenly as she appeared and there is nothing for the hero to do but throw himself under a passing train and die for disappointment and impotence.

This was in the beginning when he himself first saw the meaning of the "Cause," before it had become fully part of his life. Later his works changed their scene, following the exact manner in which the Russian people themselves changed their mental attitude. The background of the same Russian people, the same giants with the same courage and the same ability, was no longer a quagmire, but a battlefield. They were struggling to win their rights. Interwoven in the pages of his later work rises the new Russia of the last decade, the self-conscious, fighting Russia. In The Spy, which was written in 1908, we see the Russian not yet come into his own, still living in ignorance and disorder, but his activity is different. He is in a fight. The same change is in Mother and in the work In Prison. A new pæan is sung, it is the song of the people marching en masse. Perhaps Walt Whitman came the nearest to this same feeling of democracy, but unlike Whitman it is not of the people that Gorky sings, but it is the people themselves that are the song-makers. They are the "creators." "In them dwells God."

The Russian who finds Gorky's later works too doctrinaire, too purposeful, never quarrels with him because he finds his theme at fault or the conclusions wrong, but because he thinks his art has failed. They say they have revised their opinion that Gorky would mean to them what Tolstoi has meant, for they still consider the latter to be more universal and truer philosopher and artist. They find it inartistic for Gorky to talk to them of what they already know. They want to hear again about the strange and beautiful types they did not know of before and to read again his beautiful lines with their exquisite descriptions of nature, which they consider unsurpassed by the greatest. However, to me Gorky's aestheticism is too one-sided. It is the aestheticism of the primitive whom only the grandiose impresses. The soft, subtle shadings leave him untouched. There is no doubt that he loves passionately his "mother earth" with the vast, undulating steppes, the tall mountains of the Caucasus, the great dome of the sky, and the living sweep of the sea. His descriptions of these scenes glow as does a Western writer over the charms of his beloved, but we miss the charms of the beloved.

In reading Russian literature, it must always be remembered that one is reading of a people whose civilization is intrinsically different from that of the West. It is the difference between action and passivity. Professor Milvoukoff would have us believe that it is the autocratic form of government which has made the Russian live so long in inactivity, that both his reasoning powers and imaginative faculties have developed far in excess of the rest of Europe's. It is true that the Russian is never afraid to go to the end of a thought, to fight for freedom far in excess of that already attained in the Western world, and to ask continually the fundamental questions of "Why," and "Wherefore," and "Where am I going," and "Where does this lead me to?" The knife of Russian literature discloses as surely a cross-section of Russian civilization as does that of Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola and other realists of the French school disclose the French. And yet this cross-section of Russian civilization is difficult to grasp without a more intimate knowledge of both the history and the people. It is difficult for me now to remember my conceptions of Russian life as I got them from the Russian writers before my visit to Russia ten years ago. America, California, all the activities of our Western life made the characters and problems in Turgeneff, Dostoyeffsky and Gogol seem vague and unreal, made them move about in a nebulous society where one asked embarrassing personal questions and were always answered with a truth that had rudeness in it.

I had a coward's entry into Russia. There were rumors of riots and disorders, for it was in the year of general strikes and barricades, and as the train moved farther into the interior, the guards who shoveled the snow off the track seemed to me soldiers under arms, standing there to protect us from some infuriated mob. My heart beat with fear at that great and uncouth stranger to me, the Russian people. But as my stay in Russia was prolonged, my kinship with the people grew. The common man appeared to me as a gentle protector and friend. The drivers of the droshkies, the peasants, the workingmen, the conductors on the trains, all became kindly elder brothers, who set one on one's right path or made a friendly remark as one passed along. Every one talked to every one, and although the great interest of the time was the Duma and the political situation, there lurked always a personal understanding and a personal relation behind each discussion. All classes had this attitude, and though the educated had more facts at their resources, for they knew history and the outside world, they had the same outlook and the same manner as the others. I became so much at one with the people around me, that when I left Russia eighteen months later, I felt this time fearful at going away, as if now truly I were going from home into a strange land. As the train came into the Western world, as I found myself in Poland and out again into Austria, I was again alone, a solitary and detached individual who was to stand on guard against the ill-turn which would be given me if I were not watchful. Outside of Russia, the people, "the God-creators," as Gorky calls them, fell apart into millions of various atoms, each struggling for his own life. It was in Russia that I left them still unspoiled, unadventitious, united in a great simplicity of faith and love. It is therefore that the last chapter of this book is distinct and real to me, and I can almost see with my own eyes that vast, surging procession of the people, showing their loving strength and giving of their strength to the weak.

To-day, when all ideals and hopes have gone smash in the hurly-burly of this World War, Gorky has taken his side with his country and is again living in Russia. In the interim, before he can pick up the gauntlet to fight on for a new and better order, he has gone back to his former theme, writing as before of the tramps and "ex-men" and gipsies he knew in his youth, and Russia is pleased with him once more.

ROSE STRUNSKY.

New York, February, 1916.

THE CONFESSION

CHAPTER I

Let me tell you my life; it won't take much of your time—you ought to know it.

I am a weed, a foundling, an illegitimate being. It isn't known to whom I was born, but I was abandoned on the estate of Mr. Loseff in the village of Sokal, in the district of Krasnoglinsk. My mother left me—or perhaps it was some one else—in the landlord's park, on the steps of the little shrine under which the old landlady Loseff lay buried and where I was found by Danil Vialoff, the gardener. He was walking in the park early in the morning, when he saw a child wrapped in rags lie moving on the steps, of the shrine. A smoke-colored cat was walking stealthfully around it.

I lived with Danil until I was four years old, but as he himself had a large family, I fed myself wherever I happened to be, and when I found nothing I whined and whined, then fell asleep hungry.

When I was four I was taken by the sexton Larion, a very strange and lonely man; he took me because of his loneliness. He was short of stature, round like a toy balloon and had a round face. His hair was red, his voice thin like a woman's, and his heart was also like a woman's, gentle to everybody. He liked to drink wine and drank much of it; when sober he was silent, his eyes always half-closed, and he had an air of being guilty before all, but when drunk, he sang psalms and hymns in a loud voice, held his head high and smiled at every one.

He remained apart from people, living in poverty, for he had given away his share to the priest, while he himself fished both summer and winter. And for fun he caught singing birds, teaching me to do the same. He loved birds and they were not afraid of him; it is touching to recall how even the most timid of little birds would run over his red head and get mixed up in his fiery hair. Or the bird would settle on his shoulder and look into his mouth, bending its wise little head to the side. Then again Larion would lie on a bench and sprinkle hempseed in his head and beard, and canaries, goldfinches, tomtits and bullfinches would collect around him, hunting through his hair, creeping over his cheeks, picking his ears, settling on his nose while he lay there roaring with laughter, squinting his eyes and conversing tenderly with them. I envied him for this—of me, the birds were afraid.

Larion was a man of tender soul and all animals recognized it; I can't say the same for men, though I don't mean to blame them for I know man isn't fed by caresses.

It used to be rather difficult for him in winter; he had no wood and he had nothing to buy it with, having drunk up the money. His little hut was as cold as a cellar, except that the birds chirped and sang, and the two of us would lie on the cold stove, wrapped in everything possible, listening to the singing of the birds. Larion would whistle to them—he could whistle well—looking like a grossbeak, with his large nose, his hooked bill and his red head. Often he would say to me: "Well, listen, Motka" (I was baptized Matvei). "Listen!"

He would lie on his back, his hands under his head, squinting his eyes and singing something from the funeral Liturgy in his thin voice. The birds would then become quiet, stopping to listen, then they themselves would begin to sing one after the other. Larion would try to sing louder than they and they would exert themselves, especially the canaries and goldfinches, or the thrushes and starlings. He would often sing himself up to such a point that the tears from his eyes would trickle from out his lids, wetting his cheeks and washing his face gray.

This singing sometimes frightened me, and once I said to him in a whisper:

"Uncle, why do you always sing about death?" He stopped, looked at me and said, smiling,

"Don't get frightened, silly. It doesn't matter if it is about death; it is pretty. Of the whole church service the funeral mass is the most beautiful. It offers tenderness to man and pity for him. Among us, no one has pity except for the dead." These words I remember very well, as I do all his words, but of course at that time I could not understand them. The things of childhood are only understood on the eve of old age, for these are the wisest years of man.

I remember also that I asked him once, "Why does God help man so little?"

"It's none of His business," he explained to me. "Help yourself, that's why reason was given to you. God is here so that it won't be so terrible to die, but just how to live, that is your affair."

I soon forgot these words of his, and recalled them too late, and that is why I have suffered much vain sorrow.

He was a remarkable man! When angling most people never shout and never speak so as not to frighten the fish, but Larion sang unceasingly, or recounted the lives of the saints to me, or spoke to me about God, and yet the fish always flocked to him. Birds must also be caught with care, but he whistled all the time, teased them and talked to them and it never mattered—the birds walked into his traps and nets. The same thing as to bees; when setting a hive or doing anything else, which old bee-keepers do with prayers, and even then don't always succeed, the sexton, when called for the job, would strike the bees, crush them, swear profanely, and yet everything went in the best way possible. He didn't like bees—they blinded a daughter of his once. She found herself in a bee-hive—she was only three at the time—and a bee stung her eye. This eye grew diseased, and then blind, and soon the other eye followed. Later the little girl died from headache, and her mother became insane.

Yes, he never did anything the way other people did, and he was as tender to me as if he were my own mother. They did not treat me with much mercy in the village. Life was hard, and I was a stranger, and a superfluous one.... Suddenly and illegally to be eating the morsel that belonged to some one else!

Larion taught me the church service, and I became his helper and sang with him in the choir, lit the censer, and did all that was needed. I helped the watchman Vlassi keep order in the church and I liked doing all this, especially in winter. The church was of brick, they heated it well, and it was warm inside it.

I liked vespers better than morning mass. In the evening the people were purified by work and were freed of their worries, and they stood quietly and majestically, and their souls shone like wax candles with little flames. It was plain then, that though people had different faces their misery was the same.

Larion liked the church service; he would close his eyes, throw back his red head, stick out his Adam's apple and burst forth into song, losing himself so that he would even start off on some uncalled for hymn and the priest would make signs to him from the altar: "Where is it taking you?" He also read beautifully. His voice was singsong and sonorous, and had tenderness in it, and emotion and joy. The priest did not like him, nor did he like the priest. More than once he said to me:

"That, a priest! He is no priest, he is a drum upon whom need and force of habit beat their sticks. If I were a priest, I would read the service in such a way that not only would I make the people cry, but even the holy images!"

It was true—the priest did not suit his post. He was short-nosed and dark as if he had been singed by gun-powder. His mouth was large and toothless, his beard straggly, his hair thin and bald on top, his arms long. He had a hoarse voice and he panted as if carrying a load that was too much for his strength. He was greedy and always in a bad humor—for his family was large and the village was poor, the land of the peasants bad and there was no business.

In summer, even when the mosquitoes were thick, Larion and I spent our days and our nights in the woods to hunt for birds or on the river to catch fish. It happened that he would be needed unexpectedly for some religious ceremony and he would not be there, nor would any one know where to find him. All the little boys in the village would scatter to hunt for him, running like hares and crying, "Sexton! Larion! Come home!" He would hardly ever be found. The priest would scold and threaten to complain, and the peasants would laugh.

CHAPTER II

Larion had a friend, Savelko Migun, a notorious thief, and a habitual drunkard. He was beaten more than once for his thieving and even sat in jail for it, but for all that he was a remarkable person. He sang songs and told stories in such a way that it is impossible to remember them without wonder.

I heard him many times, and now he stands before me as if alive; he was dry, lively, had a sparse beard, was all in tatters; with a small phiz and a wedge-shaped, large forehead underneath which often twinkled his thievish, merry eyes like two dark stars.

Often he would bring a bottle of vodka, or Larion would insist on buying one, and they would sit opposite each other at the table, Savelko saying:

"Well, sexton, roll out the litany."

Then they drank ... Larion, a bit abashed, would nevertheless begin to sing, and Savelko sat as if glued to the spot, trembling, his little beard twitching, his eyes full of tears, smoothing his forehead with his hand and smiling or wiping the tears from his cheek with his fingers.

Then he would bounce up like a ball, crying:

"Most superb, Laria! Well, I envy the Lord God—beautiful songs are made for Him! But for man, Laria? What's man anyway, no matter how good he be or how rich his soul? It isn't hard for him to go before the Lord. But He, what does He do? Thou givest me nothing, Lord, and I give Thee my whole soul!"

"Don't blaspheme!" Larion would say.

"I blaspheme?" Savelko would cry; "I never even thought of such a thing! How am I blaspheming? In no way at all! I am rejoicing for the Lord, that's all. And now I am going to sing you something."

He would stand up, stretch out his arm, and begin to chant. He sang quietly and mysteriously, opening his eyes wide and moving his dry finger continually on his outstretched arm, as if it were hunting for something in space. Larion would lean up against the wall, rest his hands on the bench, and look on in open-mouthed wonder. I lay on the stove with my heart melting within me with sweet sadness. Savelko would grow black before me, only his little white teeth would glisten and his dry tongue would move like a serpent's while the sweat would rise on his forehead in thick drops. His voice seemed endless, and it flowed out and shone like a stream in a meadow. He would finish, stagger a bit, wipe his face with the back of his hand, then both would take a drink and remain silent a long time. Later Savelko would ask—

"And now Laria, 'The Ocean Waves.'"

And in this way they cheered each other up all evening as long as they were not yet drunk. When that happened, Migun began to tell obscene stories about priests, landlords, and kings, and my sexton would laugh and I with them. Savelko without tiring produced one story after another, and each one so funny that he almost choked with laughter.

But best of all he sang on holidays in the wineshop. He stood up in front of the people, frowning hard so that the wrinkles lay deep on his temples. To look at him, one would think the songs came to his bosom from the earth itself and that the earth showed him the words and gave strength to his voice. Around him stood or sat the peasants, some with heads bowed chewing a piece of straw, others staring into Savelko's mouth, and all were radiant, while the women even wept as they listened.

When he finished they said:

"Give us another, brother."

And they brought him drinks.

The following story was told about Migun. He stole something in the village, and the peasants caught him. When they caught him, they said:

"Well, that finishes you! Now we are going to hang you, we can't stand you any longer."

And he, the story goes, answered:

"Drop it, peasants, that's a nasty job you've begun. You have already taken from me the things I've stolen, so that you have lost nothing. Anyway, you can always get new things, but where will you get such a fellow as I? Who will cheer you up when I'm gone?"

"All right," they said, "talk on."

They took him to the wood to hang him and he began to sing on the way. When they first started out, they walked fast, then they slowed up. When they came to the wood, though the rope was ready, they waited, until he should finish his last song. Then they said to one another:

"Let him sing another song. It will do for his Last Communion."

He sang another and then another, and then the sun rose. The men looked about them; a clear day was rising from the east. Migun stood smiling among them awaiting his death without fear. The peasants became abashed.

"Well, fellows, let him go to the devil," they said. "If we hang him, we might have all kinds of sins and troubles on our heads for it."

And they decided not to touch Migun.

"We bow to the ground before you for your talent," they said, "but for your thieving we ought to beat you up, all the same."

They gave him a light beating, and then they all went back in a body with him.

All this might have been made up, but it speaks well for human beings, and puts Savelko in a good light. And then think of this: if people can make up such good stories, it follows they are not so bad, and in this lies the whole point.

Not only did they sing songs together, but Savelko and Larion carried on long conversations with each other—often about the devil. They did not give him much honor.

Once I remember the sexton saying:

"The devil is the image of your own wickedness, the reflection of your own dark soul."

"That means, he is my own foolishness?" Savelko asked.

"Just that and nothing else."

"It must be so," Migun said, laughing. "For were he alive, he would have snatched me up long ago!"

Larion didn't believe in devils at all. I remember him discussing in the barn with the Dissenters and he shouting:

"It is not devilish, but brutish! Good and evil are in man. When you want goodness, goodness is there; if you want evil, evil is there, from you and for you. God does not force you by His Will either to good or evil. He created you free-willed, and you are free to do both good and evil. Your devil is misery and darkness! Good is really something human, because it springs from God, while your evil doesn't come from the devil, but from the brute in you."

They shouted at him:

"Red-haired heretic!"

But he kept on.

"That's why," he said, "the devil is painted with horns and feet like a goat's, because he is the brute element in man."

Best of all Larion spoke about Christ. I always wept when I pictured the bitter fate that befell the Holy Son of God. His whole life stood before me, from the discussion in the Temple with the wise men, to Golgotha, and He was like a pure and beautiful child in His ineffable love for the people, with a kind smile for all and a tender word of consolation—always like a child, dazzling in His beauty.

"Even with the wise men of the Temple," Larion said, "Christ conversed like a child, that is why in his simple wisdom He appeared greater than they. You, Motka, remember this, and try to conserve the child-like throughout your whole life, for in it lies truth."

I would ask him:

"Will Christ come again soon?"

"Yes, soon," he would say, "soon, for it is said that people are again looking for Him."

As Larion's words now come back to me, it seems to me that he saw God as the great Creator of the most beautiful things, and man as an incompetent being, who was lost on the by-ways of the world. And he pitied this talentless heir to the great riches left to him on this earth by God.

Both he and Savelko had one faith. I remember that an ikon appeared miraculously in our village. Once, very early on an autumn morning a woman came to the well for water, when suddenly she saw something glow in the darkness at the bottom of the well. She called the people together. The village elder appeared, the priest came, and Larion ran up. They let a man down into the well and he brought up the ikon of the "unburnt bush." They performed mass right on the spot and then they decided to put up a shrine above the well, the priest crying:

"Orthodox, give your offerings."

The village elder lent his authority and gave three rubles himself. The peasants untied their purses and the women earnestly brought pieces of linen and grain of all sorts. There was rejoicing in the village and I, too, was happy, as on the day of Christ's holy Resurrection.

But even during mass I noticed that Larion's face looked sad. He glanced at no one, and Savelko ran about like a mouse through the crowd and giggled. At night I went to look at the apparition. It stood above the well, giving forth an azure glow like a vapor, as if some one unseen was breathing on it tenderly, warming it with his light and heat; it gave me anguish and pleasure.

When I came home I heard Larion say sadly,

"There is no such Holy Virgin."

And Savelko drawled out the following, laughing:

"I know, Moses lived long before Christ. Why! the scoundrels! A miracle, what? Oh, but you peasants are queer!"

"For this the elder and the priest ought to go to jail," Larion said in a very low voice. "Let them not kill the God in man just to slack their own greed."

I felt uneasy at this conversation and I asked from the stove:

"What are you talking about, Uncle Larion?"

They were silent, then they whispered to each other; evidently they were disturbed. Then Savelko cried:

"What is the matter with you? You yourself complained that the people were fools, and now you are shamelessly making a fool of Matveika! Why?"

He jumped over to me and said:

"Look, Motka, here are matches. I rub them between my hands, see? Put out the light, Larion."

They put out the lamp, and I saw Savelko's two hands glow in the darkness with the same blue phosphorescence as the miraculous ikon. It was terrible and offensive to see.

Savelko said something, but I crouched in a corner of the stove, closed my ears with my fingers, and remained silent. Then they crawled in by my side, took vodka along, and for a long time they took turns in telling me about true miracles and of the faith of man sacrilegiously betrayed. And so I fell asleep while they talked.

After two or three days, many priests and officials arrived, arrested the ikon, dismissed the village elder from his post, and the priest, too, was threatened with a law-suit. Then I believed the whole thing had been a fraud, though it was hard for me to admit that it was done for the purpose of getting linen from the women and some pennies from the men.

When I was six years old, Larion began to teach me the abcs in the Church-tongue and when two winters later a school was opened in our village, he sent me there. At first I grew somewhat apart from Larion. I liked to study, and I took to my books zealously, so that when he asked me my lessons, as sometimes happened, he would say, after hearing me,

"Fine, Motka."

Once he said:

"Good blood boils in you. It's plain your father was no fool." And I asked,

"But where is he?"

"Who can know!"

"Is he a peasant?"

"All one can say for sure is that he was a man. His caste is unknown. However, he could hardly have been a peasant. By your face and skin, not to mention your character, he seems to have been from the gentry."

Those casual words of his sank deep into my mind and they didn't do me much good. When they called me a foundling at school, I balked and shouted to my comrades:

"You are peasant children, but my father is a gentleman!"

I became very firm about this. One must protect oneself somehow against insults, and I had no other protection in my mind. They began to dislike me, to call me bad names, and I fought back. I was a strong youngster and could fight easily. Complaints grew about me, and people said to the sexton:

"Quiet that bastard of yours!"

And others without bothering to complain, pulled my ears to their hearts' content.

Then Larion said to me:

"You may be a son of a general, Matvei, but that isn't of such great importance. We are all born in the same way and therefore the honor is the same for all."

But it was too late. I was twelve years old at the time and felt insults keenly. Something pulled me away from people and again I found myself close to the sexton. All winter we wandered together in the wood, catching birds, and I became worse in my studies.

I finished school at thirteen, and Larion began to think what he should do with me. I would go rowing with him in a boat, I at the oars and he steering, and he led me in his thoughts over all the paths of human fate, telling me of the various vocations in life.

He saw me a priest, a soldier, an employee, and nowhere was it good for me.

"What should it be then, Motka?" he would ask.

Then he would look at me and say, laughing,

"Never mind, don't get frightened. If you don't fall down, you will crawl out. Only avoid the military. That's a man's finish."

In August, soon after the Day of Assumption, we went together to the lake of Liubushin to catch sheat-fish. Larion was a bit drunk and he had wine along with him. From time to time he sipped from the bottle, cleared his throat and sang so that he could be heard over the whole water.

His boat was bad, it was small and unsteady. He made a sharp turn, the bow dipped, and we both found ourselves in the water. It was not the first time that such a thing happened, and I was not frightened. I rose and saw Larion swimming at my side, shaking his head and saying to me:

"Swim to the bank and I'll push the damned tub there."

It was not far from the bank and the current was weak. I swam tranquilly, when suddenly I felt as if something pulled at my feet, or as if I had struck a cold current, and looking back, I saw that our boat was floating bottom up, and Larion was not there. He was nowhere.

Like a stone striking my head, terror hit my heart. A cramp seized me and I sank to the bottom.

An employee from the estate, Yegor Titoff, who was crossing the field, saw how we capsized. He saw Larion disappear and when I began to drown, Titoff was already on the bank undressing. He pulled me out, but Larion was not found until night.

His dear soul was extinguished, and immediately it became both dark and cold for me. When they buried him, I was sick in bed, and I could not escort the dear man to the cemetery. When I was up, the first thing I did was to go to his grave. I sat there, and could not even weep, so great was my sorrow. His voice rang in my memory, his words lived again, but the man who used to lay his tender hand on my head was no longer on this earth. Everything became strange and distant. I sat with my eyes closed. Suddenly somebody picked me up. He took me by the hand and picked me up. I looked and saw Titoff.

"You have nothing to do here," he said. "Come." And he led me away. I went with him.

He said to me:

"It seems you have a good heart, youngster, it remembers the good."

But this did not make me feel any better. I was silent. Titoff continued:

"Even at the time when you were abandoned, I thought to myself, I shall take the child to me, but I came too late. However, it seems it is God's wish. Here He again puts your life into my hands. That means you will come to live with me."

It was all the same to me then, whether to live, not to live, how to live or with whom.... Thus I passed from one point in my life to another without realizing it myself.

CHAPTER III

After a time I began to take interest in all that surrounded me. Titoff was a silent man, tall in stature, with his head and cheeks shaved like a soldier's, and he wore a long mustache. He spoke slowly and as if he were afraid to say one word too many, or as if he were in doubt himself of what he was saying. He held his hands in his pocket or crossed them behind his back, as if he were ashamed of them. I knew that the peasants of the village and even those of the neighboring district hated him. Two years before, in the village of Mabina, they beat him with a stake. They said that he always carried a revolver with him.

His wife, Nastasia, was handsome, tall and slender. Her face was bloodless, with two feverish, large eyes. She was often sick. Her daughter, Olga, who was three years my junior, was also pale and thin.

A great silence reigned about them. Their floor was covered with thick carpet, and not a footstep could be heard. Even the clock on the wall ticked inaudibly. The lamps, which were never extinguished, burned before their holy images. There were prints stuck on the walls, showing the Last Judgment and the Martyrdom of the Apostles and of Saint Barbara. In one corner, on the low stove, a large cat, the color of smoke, looked out of its green eyes on the surroundings and seemed to guard the silence.

In the midst of this awful stillness it took me a long time to forget the songs of Larion and his birds.

Titoff brought me to the office of the estate and showed me the books. Thus I lived. It seemed to me that Titoff watched me and followed me about in silence as if he expected something from me. I felt depressed and unhappy. I was never gay, but now I became almost morose. I had no one to speak to, and, moreover, I did not wish to speak to any one. When Titoff or his wife asked me about Larion I did not answer, but mumbled something. A feeling of unhappiness and sadness weighed upon me. Titoff displeased me by the suspicious stillness of his life.

I went almost daily to the church to help the watchman, Vlassi, and also the new sexton, a handsome young man, who had been a school teacher. He was not interested in his work, but he was a great friend of the priest, whose hand he always kissed and whom he followed about like a dog. He continually reproved me, for which he was in the wrong, because I knew the holy service better than he did and always did everything according to rule.

It was at this time, when life became difficult for me, that I began to love God. One day when I was placing the tapers in front of the image of the Holy Virgin and her Child, before mass, I saw that they looked at me with a grave and compassionate expression. I began to weep, and, falling on my knees, I prayed for I do not know what—for Larion, no doubt. I do not know how long I remained there, but I arose consoled, my heart warm and animated. Vlassi was at the altar and he mumbled something incomprehensible. I mounted the steps, and when I was near him he looked at me.

"You look very happy," he said. "Have you found a kopeck?"

I knew why he asked that question, for I often found money on the ground. But now these words left an unpleasant impression on me, as if some one had hurt my heart.

"I was praying to God," I said.

"To which one?" he asked me. "We have more than a hundred here. And the living One, the true One, who is not made of wood, where is He? Go and find Him."

I knew the value to attach to his words. Nevertheless, they appeared offensive to me at this time. Vlassi was a decrepit old man, who could hardly walk. His limbs stuck out at the knees and he always tottered as if he were walking on a rope. He had not a tooth in his mouth, and his dark face looked like an old rag, from which two wild eyes stuck out. He had lost his reason and had commenced to rave even some time before Larion's death.

"I don't watch the church," he said. "I watch cattle. I was born a shepherd and shall die a shepherd. Yes, soon I shall leave the church for the fields."

Every one knew that he had never watched cattle.

"The church is a cemetery," he would say. "It is a dead place. I wish to deal with something living. I must go and feed cattle. All my ancestors have been shepherds, and I also up to my forty-second year."

Larion used to make fun of him. One day he said to him laughingly:

"In olden times there was a god of cattle who was called Voloss. Perhaps he was your great-greatgrandfather."

Vlassi questioned him about Voloss; then he said:

"That's right. I have known that I was a god for a long time, only I am afraid of the priest. Wait a little, sexton; don't you tell it to him. When the right time comes I will tell him myself."

It was impossible to get the idea out of his head. I knew that he was crazy, yet he worried me.

"Take care," I said to him. "God will punish you."

And he muttered: "I am a god myself."

Suddenly my foot caught on the carpet and I fell, and I interpreted it as an omen. From that day I began to love passionately all that pertained to the church. The ardor of my childish heart was so great that everything became sacred for me—not only the images and the gospels, but even the chandeliers and the censer, whose very coals became precious in my eyes. I used to touch these objects with joy and with a feeling of great respect. When I went up the steps of the altar my heart would cease beating, and I could have kissed the flagstones. I felt that I was under One who saw everything, directed my steps and surrounded me with a supernatural force; who warmed my heart with a dazzling and blinding light, and I saw only myself. At times I remained alone in the darkness of the temple, but it was light in my heart; for my God was there, and there was no place for childish troubles, nor for the sufferings which surrounded me—that is to say, the human life about me. The nearer one comes to God, the farther one is from man. But, of course, I did not understand that at that time.

I began to read all the religious works which fell into my hands. Thus my heart became filled with the divine word. My soul drank avidly of its exquisite sweetness, and a fountain of grateful tears opened within me. Often I went to the church before the other faithful ones, and, kneeling before the image of the Trinity, I wept lightly and humbly, without thinking and without praying. I had nothing to ask of God and I worshiped Him with complete self-forgetfulness. I remembered Larion's words:

"When you pray with your lips you pray to the air and not to God. God thinks of the thoughts, not the words, like man."

I did not even have thoughts. I knelt and sang in silence a joyful song, happy in the thought that I was not alone in the world and that God was near me and guarded me. That was a happy time for me, like a calm and joyful holiday. I liked to remain alone in the church, when the noise and the whisperings were over. Then I lost myself in the stillness and rose up to the clouds, and from that height man and all that pertained to man became more and more invisible to me.

But Vlassi bothered me. He dragged his feet on the flagstones, he trembled like the shadows of a tree shaken by the wind, and he muttered with his toothless mouth:

"I have nothing to do here. Is it my business? I am a god, the shepherd of all earthly cattle. To-morrow I am going away into the fields. Why have they exiled me here in these cold shadows? Is this my work?"

He troubled me with his blasphemies, for I imagined that his profanity sullied the purity of the temple and that God was angry at his being in His house.

People began to notice my piety and my religious zeal. When the priest met me he grunted and blessed me in a special way, and I had to kiss his hand, which was always cold and covered with sweat. Although I envied his being initiated into the divine mysteries, I did not love him and was even afraid of him.

Titoff's little, dull eyes, like buttons, followed me with increasing vigilance. Every one treated me carefully, as if I were made of glass. More than once little Olga would ask me, in a low voice:

"Will you be a saint?"

She was timid even when I was kind, when I told her religious stories. On winter nights I read aloud the Prologue and the Minea. Gusts of snow blew over the country, groaning and beating against the walls. In the room silence reigned and no one stirred. Titoff sat with head bowed, so that his face could not be seen. Nastasia, who was sleepy, sat with her eyes fixed on me. When the frost crackled she trembled and glanced about her, smiling gently. When she did not understand the meaning of a Slavic word she would ask me. Her sweet voice resounded for an instant, and then again there was quiet. Only the flying snow sang plaintively, wandering over the fields seeking repose.

The holy martyrs, who fought for the Lord and celebrated His greatness by their life and by their death, were especially dear to my soul. I was touched also by the merciful and pious men who sacrificed everything for love of their neighbors. But I did not understand those who left the world in the name of God and went away to live in a desert or in a cave. I felt that the devil was too powerful for the Anchorites and the Stylites, that he made them flee before him. Larion had denied the devil. Nevertheless, the life of the saints forced me to recognize him. And, besides, the fall of man would be incomprehensible if one did not admit the existence of the devil. Larion saw in God the one and omnipotent Creator, but then from where came evil? According to the life of the saints, the author of all evil is the devil. In this rôle I accepted him. God, then, was the creator of cherries, and the devil the creator of burrs; God the creator of nightingales and the devil the creator of owls. However, although I accepted the devil, I did not believe in him and was not afraid of him. He was useful to me in explaining the existence of evil; but at the same time he bothered me, for he lessened the majesty of God.

I forced myself not to think of this problem, but Titoff continually made me think of sin and of the power of the devil. When I read, he questioned me curtly, without raising his eyes.

"Matvei, what does that last word mean?"

And I explained it.

Then after a second of silence, he would say:

"Where can I hide before Thy countenance? Where can I flee before Thy wrath?"

His wife would sigh deeply and look at him, still more frightened, as if she expected something terrible. Olga blinked her blue eyes and suggested:

"In the forest."

"Where can I flee before Thy wrath?" he repeated.

This time I remember he took his hands from his pockets and twirled his long mustache, and his eyebrows trembled. He hid his hands and said:

"It was King David who asked, 'Where can I flee?' Yes, he was a king and he was afraid. You see that the devil was stronger than he. He was anointed of God and the devil conquered him. 'Where can I flee?' To hell—that is certain. We lesser people, we have nothing to hope for if the kings themselves go there."

He frequently returned to this subject. I did not always understand his words; nevertheless, they produced a disagreeable impression upon me.

People began to speak more and more about my piety. One day Titoff said to me:

"Pray zealously for my whole family, Matvei. I beg of you, pray for us. You will thus repay me for having gathered you to me and treated you like a son."

But what did that mean to me? My prayers were without object, like the song of a bird which he pours out to the sun. Nevertheless, I began to pray for him and for his family, and especially for little Olga, who had become a very pretty young girl, sweet and tender. I borrowed the words of the Psalms of David and all the other prayers which I knew. I liked to repeat the sing-song and cadenced phrases, but from the time when I said in praying for Titoff: "Lord, in Thy grace, have pity on Thy servant, Yegor," my heart closed. The spring of my prayers became dry, the serenity of my joys was disturbed. I was ashamed before God and could not continue. Lowering my eyes before the countenances of the holy saints I arose, overcome with a feeling of anger and embarrassment. It troubled me. Why should I feel like that? I tried to understand it, but could not, and I was sorry for the joy which had been destroyed on account of this man.

[CHAPTER IV]

The people about me began to notice me, and I took notice of them, too.

On holidays when I walked through the streets I was stared at with much curiosity. Some greeted me earnestly while others mocked, but all looked after me.

"Here goes our prayer-book," was heard. "Say, Matvei, are you going to become a saint?"

"Don't laugh at him, friends; he is not a priest and he does not believe in God for the sake of the money."

"Have there not been peasants who became saints?"

"Oh, we have all kinds of men, but that does not help us much."

"Who said he is a peasant? He has got gentleman's blood in him—but that's a secret."

And thus they calked, and some praised and some jeered.

As for myself, I was then in a peculiar state of mind. I wished to be at peace with all and wanted all to love me. However, try as I would to live up to it, their insults prevented me.

Of all who persecuted me, Savelko Migun was the worst. He fell on his knees when he saw me and prostrated himself, declaiming aloud:

"Your Holiness, I bow to the ground before you. Pray for Savelko, I beg of you. God may do the right thing by him then. Teach me how to please the Lord God. Must I stop stealing, or must I steal more and burn him a wax candle?"

The crowds laughed at Savelko's jokes, but they made me feel queer and hurt me.

He would continue:

"Oh, ye Orthodox, prostrate yourself before the Righteous One. He fleeces the peasants in his office and then reads the gospel in church. And God cannot hear how the peasants howl."

I was sixteen and could easily have broken his face for his insults. But instead, I took to avoiding him. When he noticed this he gave me no leeway at all. He composed a song, which he sang in the streets on holidays, accompanying himself with his balalaika.

"Oh, the squires embrace the maidens,
And the maidens all grow big;
From these gentlemanly doings
Come out dirty cheats as children.
They are thrown upon the masters
Who refuse to feed them gratis;
And they put them in their office,
To the peasants' great misfortune."

It was a long song and everybody was mentioned in it, but Titoff and I had the biggest share of all. It got to such a point that when I caught sight of Savelko with his little thin beard, his cap on his ear and his bald head, I trembled all over. I felt like springing on him and breaking him into bits.

Though I was young, I could hold myself in with a strong hand. When he walked behind me, jingling, I did not move a muscle to show that it was hard to bear. I walked slowly and made believe I did not hear.

I began to pray more zealously, for I felt that I had no protection except prayers, which, however, were now filled with complaints and bitter words.

"Wherefore, O Lord, am I to blame that my father and mother abandoned me and threw me like a kitten into the brush?"

I could find no other sin in me. I saw men and women placed on this earth without rhyme or reason; saw each one so accustomed to his business that the custom became law. How was I to know right off why and against whom this strange force is directed?

However, I began to think things over, and I grew more and more troubled as things became insufferable to me.

Our landlord, Constantine Nicolaievitch Loseff, was rich and owned much land, and he hardly ever came to our estate, which was considered unlucky by the family. Somebody had strangled the landlord's mother, his father had fallen from a horse and been killed, and his wife had run away from him here.

I only saw the landlord twice. He was a stout man, tall, wore spectacles and had an officer's cape and cap, lined with red. They said he held a high position under the Czar and that he was very learned and wrote books. The two times he was on the estate he swore at Titoff very thoroughly and even shook his fist in his face.

Titoff was the one absolute power on the estate of Sokolie. There was not much land, and only so much grain was sown as was necessary for the household. The rest of the land was rented to the peasants. Later there came an order that no more land should be rented and that flax should be sown on the whole estate. A factory was being opened nearby.

In addition to myself, there sat in a corner of the office Ivan Makarovitch Judin. His soul was half dead and he was always drunk. He had been a telegraph operator, but he had lost his position on account of his drunkenness. He took care of the books, wrote the letters, made the contracts with the peasants, and was remarkably silent. When he was spoken to, he only nodded his head and coughed a little. At most he answered, "All right." He was short and thin, but his face was round and puffy, and his eyes could hardly be seen. He was entirely bald and he walked on his tip-toes, silently and unsteadily, as the blind. On the Feast of the Virgin of Kazin, the peasants made Judin so drunk with vodka that he died.

I was alone now in the office, did all the work, and received a salary from Titoff of forty rubles a year. He gave me Olga as an assistant.

I had noticed for a long time that the peasants walked around the office as wolves around a trap. They see the trap, but they are hungry, and the bait tempts them, so they begin to eat.

When I was alone in the office and became acquainted with all the books and plans, I realized, even with my poor understanding, that our whole arrangement was nothing more than theft. The peasants were head over ears in debt and worked, not for themselves, but for Titoff. I cannot say that I was either very much surprised or ashamed at this discovery. And even if I did understand now why Savelko swore at me and insulted me, still I did not think it was right of him. Was it then I who had originated this stealing?

I saw that Titoff was not quite straight even with the landlord, and that he stuffed his pockets as much as he dared.

I became bolder toward him, for I realized that in some way I was necessary to him. And now I understood why. I had to hide him, the thief, from the Lord God. He now called me his "dear son," and his wife did so too. They dressed me well, for which, of course, I was grateful.

But my heart did not go out toward them, and my soul was not warmed by their goodness. I became more and more friendly with Olga, however. I liked her wistful smile, her low voice and her love of flowers.

Titoff and his wife walked before God with sunken heads, like a team of horses, and behind their timid glances seemed to be continually hiding something which must have been even greater than theft.

I did not like Titoff's hands. He always hid them in a manner which made me suspicious. Perhaps those hands had strangled some one; perhaps there was blood on them. They kept asking me, he as well as she:

"Pray for our sins, Motia."

One day I could stand it no longer. I asked them:

"Are you then more sinful than others?"

Nastasia sighed and went away, and he turned on his heel and did not answer.

In the house he was thoughtful and spoke very little, and then only on business. He never swore at the peasants, but he was always haughty with them, which was worse than swearing. He never conceded a point and stood his ground as firmly as if he were sunk to the waist in the earth.

"One should give in to them," I said to him once.

"Never," he answered. "Not an iota must you give in, or you are lost."

Another time he ordered me to count false, and I said to him:

"You can't do that."

"Why not?"

"It is a sin."

"It is not you who are forcing me to sin, but I you. Write as I tell you. No one will ask any account of you, you are only my hand. Your piety will not suffer by it; have no fear. For ten rubles a month neither I nor anybody else can live honorably. Do you understand that?"

"Oh, you scoundrel!" I said to myself. But aloud I said to him: "That is quite enough. Things must end right here. If you don't stop this swindling I will tell the village all about your deals."

He pulled his mustache up to his nose, lifted his shoulders to his ears, showed his teeth and stared at me with his round, bulging eyes. We measured each other.

"You will do that, really?" he said to me in a low voice.

"Yes."

Titoff burst out laughing, and it sounded as if some one had thrown silver pieces on the ground.

"All right, my holy one, that is all that I needed. From now on we will manage this affair differently. We won't bother any more with kopecks. We will deal with rubles. If the thief's dress is too tight, he becomes honest."

He went out, slamming the door so that the panes in the windows rattled.

It seemed to me that Titoff was a little more cross after that. Still I was not quite sure of it. But he left me in, peace from then on.

He was a terrible miser, and though he did not deny himself anything, nevertheless he knew how to value a penny. He ate well and was very fond of women, and as he had the power in his hands, there was not a woman in the village who dared to refuse him. He let the young girls alone, and only went to the married women. He made my blood hot once or twice.

"What is the matter, Matvei?" he asked. "Are you timid? To take a woman is like giving charity. In the country every woman yearns for love. But the men are weak and worn out, and what can the women expect from them? You are a strong, handsome young fellow; why not make love to the women? You would get some pleasure out of it yourself."

He followed every villainy, the low rascal. Once he asked me:

"Do you think, Matvei, that a pious man is of much value in the eyes of God?"

I did not like such questions. "I don't know," I answered.

He remained doubtful for a minute and then he said:

"God led Lot out of Sodom and saved Noah; but thousands perished by fire and water. Still it says, 'Thou shalt not kill.' Often it seems to me that these thousands perished because among them there were a few pious and virtuous people. God saw that despite the stringent laws which He gave, there were several who could lead a righteous life. If there had been no pious men in Sodom, God would have seen that it was impossible to observe His commandments and He might have lightened them without putting to death thousands of people. They call Him the All-merciful One. But where is His mercy?"

I did not understand then that this man was only seeking license to sin. Nevertheless, the words angered me.

"You are blaspheming," I said. "You are afraid of God, but you don't love Him."

He drew his hands out of his pockets, threw them behind his back, and his face turned gray. It was plain that he was in great wrath.

"Whether it is so or not, I don't know," he answered, "but it seems to me that you pious ones use God as a ruler by which you mark off the sins of others. Without such as you, God would have a hard time measuring sins."

He took no notice of me for a long time after that. But an insufferable hatred rose in my soul against this man. I avoided him even more than I did Savelko. If at night I mentioned his name in my prayers, an ungovernable anger possessed me. It was at this time that I said my first spontaneous prayer:

"I do not wish to seek grace for a thief, O Lord. I ask that he be punished. May he not rob the poor without being punished."

And I prayed to God so ardently that Titoff be punished that I grew frightened at the terrible fate that awaited him.

Soon after this I bad another encounter with Migun. He came to the office for lime-bast,[1] when I happened to be alone. I asked him:

"Why do you always make fun of me, Savel?"

He showed his teeth and stared at me with his piercing eyes.

"I haven't much business here," he said. "I only came for lime-bast."

My legs trembled beneath me and my hands clenched of themselves. I clutched his throat and shook him lightly.

"What have I done?"

He was not frightened, nor was he angry. He simply took my hand and pushed it from his throat as if it were he, not I, who was the stronger. "When you are choking some one, he cannot speak well," he said. "Let me alone," he continued; "I have received beatings enough, and I don't need yours. Besides, you mustn't strike any one. It is against the commandments."

He spoke quietly and mockingly, in a light tone. I shouted:

"What do you want here?"

"Some lime-bast."