Creatures That Once Were Men
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Maxim Gorky >> Creatures That Once Were Men
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66 27 'But" But
75 17 listen listen.
75 25 then? then?"
76 1 Fool!' Fool!"
CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN
By MAXIM GORKY
INTRODUCTORY.
By G. K. CHESTERTON.
It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices of what
is called our modern religion have come from countries which are
not only simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like
Norway has a great realistic drama without having ever had either
a great classical drama or a great romantic drama. A nation like
Russia makes us feel its modern fiction when we have never felt
its ancient fiction. It has produced its Gissing without
producing its Scott. Everything that is most sad and scientific,
everything that is most grim and analytical, everything that can
truly be called most modern, everything that can without
unreasonableness be called most morbid, comes from these fresh
and untried and unexhausted nationalities. Out of these infant
peoples come the oldest voices of the earth. This contradiction,
like many other contradictions, is one which ought first of all
to be registered as a mere fact; long before we attempt to
explain why things contradict themselves, we ought, if we are
honest men and good critics, to register the preliminary truth
that things do contradict themselves. In this case, as I say,
there are many possible and suggestive explanations. It may be,
to take an example, that our modern Europe is so exhausted that
even the vigorous expression of that exhaustion is difficult for
every one except the most robust. It may be that all the nations
are tired; and it may be that only the boldest and breeziest are
not too tired to say that they are tired. It may be that a man
like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky in Russia are the only
people left who have so much faith that they can really believe
in scepticism. It may be that they are the only people left who
have so much animal spirits that they can really feast high and
drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism. This is one of
the possible hypotheses or explanations in the matter: that all
Europe feels these things and that they only have strength to
believe them also. Many other explanations might, however, also
be offered. It might be suggested that half-barbaric countries
like Russia or Norway, which have always lain, to say the least
of it, on the extreme edge of the circle of our European
civilisation, have a certain primal melancholy which belongs to
them through all the ages. It is highly probable that this
sadness, which to us is modern, is to them eternal. It is highly
probable that what we have solemnly and suddenly discovered in
scientific text-books and philosophical magazines they absorbed
and experienced thousands of years ago, when they offered human
sacrifice in black and cruel forests and cried to their gods in
the dark. Their agnosticism is perhaps merely paganism; their
paganism, as in old times, is merely devilworship. Certainly,
Schopenhauer could hardly have written his hideous essay on women
except in a country which had once been full of slavery and the
service of fiends. It may be that these moderns are tricking us
altogether, and are hiding in their current scientific jargon
things that they knew before science or civilisation were. They
say that they are determinists; but the truth is, probably, that
they are still worshipping the Norns. They say that they
describe scenes which are sickening and dehumanising in the name
of art or in the name of truth; but it may be that they do it in
the name of some deity indescribable, whom they propitiated with
blood and terror before the beginning of history.
This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it, is
highly disputable, and is at best a suggestion. But there is one
broad truth in the matter which may in any case be considered as
established. A country like Russia has far more inherent
capacity for producing revolution in revolutionists than any
country of the type of England or America. Communities highly
civilised and largely urban tend to a thing which is now called
evolution, the most cautious and the most conservative of all
social influences. The loyal Russian obeys the Czar because he
remembers the Czar and the Czar's importance. The disloyal
Russian frets against the Czar because he also remembers the
Czar, and makes a note of the necessity of knifing him. But the
loyal Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten
that they are there. Their operation has become to him like
daylight, or gravitation, or any of the forces of nature. And
there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are no English
revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of England is
so complete as to be invisible. The thing which can once get
itself forgotten can make itself omnipotent.
Gorky is pre-eminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist;
not because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that
they are not), but because most Russians--indeed, nearly all
Russians--are in that attitude of mind which makes revolution
possible and which makes religion possible, an attitude of
primary and dogmatic assertion. To be a revolutionist it is
first necessary to be a revelationist. It is necessary to
believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the
State. But in countries that have come under the influence of
what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic
righting of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its
hold) there never will be. These countries have no revolution,
they have to put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing
which they call progress.
The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many
other Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact
between a simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old,
and a rebelliousness which we in the West feel to be very new.
We cannot in our graduated and polite civilisation quite make
head or tail of the Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague
way that his tale is the tale of the Missing Link, and that his
head is the head of the superman. We hear his lonely cry of
anger. But we cannot be quite certain whether his protest is the
protest of the first anarchist against government, or whether it
is the protest of the last savage against civilisation. The
cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or necessity has done
much to burden the race of which Gorky writes; but time has left
them one thing which it has not left to the people in Poplar or
West Ham. It has left them, apparently, the clear and childlike
power of seeing the cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is a
tramp, a man of the people, and also a critic and a bitter one.
In the West poor men, when they become articulate in literature,
are always sentimentalists and nearly always optimists.
It is no exaggeration to say that these people of whom Gorky
writes in such a story as this of "Creatures that once were Men"
are to the Western mind children. They have, indeed, been
tortured and broken by experience and sin. But this has only
sufficed to make them sad children or naughty children or
bewildered children. They have absolutely no trace of that
quality upon which secure government rests so largely in Western
Europe, the quality of being soothed by long words as if by an
incantation. They do not call hunger "economic pressure"; they
call it hunger. They do not call rich men "examples of
capitalistic concentration," they call them rich men. And this
note of plainness and of something nobly prosaic is as
characteristic of Gorky, the most recent and in some ways the
most modern and sophisticated of Russian authors, as it is of
Tolstoy or any of the Tolstoyan type of mind. The very title of
this story strikes the note of this sudden and simple vision.
The philanthropist writing long letters to the Daily Telegraph
says, of men living in a slum, that "their degeneration is of
such a kind as almost to pass the limits of the semblance of
humanity," and we read the whole thing with a tepid assent as we
should read phrases about the virtues of Queen Victoria or the
dignity of the House of Commons. The Russian novelist, when he
describes a dosshouse, says, "Creatures that once were Men." And
we are arrested, and regard the facts as a kind of terrible fairy
tale. This story is a test case of the Russian manner, for it is
in itself a study of decay, a study of failure, and a study of
old age. And yet the author is forced to write even of staleness
freshly; and though he is treating of the world as seen by eyes
darkened or blood-shot with evil experience, his own eyes look
out upon the scene with a clarity that is almost babyish.
Through all runs that curious Russian sense that every man is
only a man, which, if the Russians ever are a democracy, will
make them the most democratic democracy that the world has ever
seen. Take this passage, for instance, from the austere
conclusion of "Creatures that once were Men."
Petunikoff smiled the smile of the conqueror and went back into
the dosshouse, but suddenly he stopped and trembled. At the door
facing him stood an old man with a stick in his hand and a large
bag on his back, a horrible odd man in rags and tatters, which
covered his bony figure. He bent under the weight of his burden,
and lowered his head on his breast, as if he wished to attack the
merchant.
"What are you? Who are you?" shouted Petunikoff.
"A man . . ." he answered, in a hoarse voice. This hoarseness
pleased and tranquillised Petunikoff, he even smiled.
"A man! And are there really men like you?" Stepping aside he
let the old man pass. He went, saying slowly:
"Men are of various kinds . . . as God wills . . . There are
worse than me . . . still worse . . . Yes . . ."
Here, in the very act of describing a kind of a fall from
humanity, Gorky expresses a sense of the strangeness and
essential value of the human being which is far too commonly
absent altogether from such complex civilisations as our own. To
no Western, I am afraid, would it occur when asked what he was to
say, "A man." He would be a plasterer who had walked from
Reading, or an iron-puddler who had been thrown out of work in
Lancashire, or a University man who would be really most grateful
for the loan of five shillings, or the son of a
lieutenant-general living in Brighton, who would not have made
such an application if he had not known that he was talking to
another gentleman. With us it is not a question of men being of
various kinds; with us the kinds are almost different animals.
But in spite of all Gorky's superficial scepticism and brutality,
it is to him the fall from humanity, or the apparent fall from
humanity, which is not merely great and lamentable, but essential
and even mystical. The line between man and the beasts is one of
the transcendental essentials of every religion; and it is, like
most of the transcendental things of religion, identical with the
main sentiments of the man of common sense. We feel this gulf
when theologies say that it cannot be crossed. But we feel it
quite as much (and that with a primal shudder) when philosophers
or fanciful writers suggest that it might be crossed. And if any
man wishes to discover whether or no he has really learnt to
regard the line between man and brute as merely relative and
evolutionary, let him say again to himself those frightful words,
"Creatures that once were Men."
G. K. CHESTERTON.
Creatures that once were Men.
PART I.
In front of you is the main street, with two rows of miserable
looking huts with shuttered windows and old walls pressing on
each other and leaning forward. The roofs of these time-worn
habitations are full of holes, and have been patched here and
there with laths; from underneath them project mildewed beams,
which are shaded by the dusty-leaved elder-trees and crooked
white willows--pitiable flora of those suburbs inhabited by the
poor.
The dull green time-stained panes of the windows look upon each
other with the cowardly glances of cheats. Through the street and
towards the adjacent mountain, runs the sinuous path, winding
through the deep ditches filled with rain-water. Here and there
are piled heaps of dust and other rubbish--either refuse or else
put there purposely to keep the rain-water from flooding the
houses. On the top of the mountain, among green gardens with
dense foliage, beautiful stone houses lie hidden; the belfries of
the churches rise proudly towards the sky, and their gilded
crosses shine beneath the rays of the sun. During the rainy
weather the neighbouring town pours its water into this main
road, which, at other times, is full of its dust, and all these
miserable houses seem, as it were, thrown by some powerful hand
into that heap of dust, rubbish, and rain-water. They cling to
the ground beneath the high mountain, exposed to the sun,
surrounded by decaying refuse, and their sodden appearance
impresses one with the same feeling as would the half-rotten
trunk of an old tree.
At the end of the main street, as if thrown out of the town,
stood a two-storied house, which had been rented from Petunikoff,
a merchant and resident of the town. It was in comparatively
good order, being further from the mountain, while near it were
the open fields, and about half-a-mile away the river ran its
winding course.
This large old house had the most dismal aspect amidst its
surroundings. The walls bent outwards and there was hardly a
pane of glass in any of the windows, except some of the fragments
which looked like the water of the marshes--dull green. The
spaces of wall between the windows were covered with spots, as if
time were trying to write there in hieroglyphics the history of
the old house, and the tottering roof added still more to its
pitiable condition. It seemed as if the whole building bent
towards the ground, to await the last stroke of that fate which
should transform it into a chaos of rotting remains, and finally
into dust.
The gates were open, one half of them displaced and lying on the
ground at the entrance, while between its bars had grown the
grass, which also covered the large and empty court-yard. In the
depths of this yard stood a low, iron-roofed, smoke-begrimed
building. The house itself was of course unoccupied, but this
shed, formerly a blacksmith's forge, was now turned into a
"dosshouse," kept by a retired Captain named Aristid Fomich
Kuvalda.
In the interior of the dosshouse was a long, wide and grimy
board, measuring some 28 by 70 feet. The room was lighted on one
side by four small square windows, and on the other by a wide
door. The unpainted brick walls were black with smoke, and the
ceiling, which was built of timber, was almost black. In the
middle stood a large stove, the furnace of which served as its
foundation, and around this stove and along the walls were also
long, wide boards, which served as beds for the lodgers. The
walls smelt of smoke, the earthen floor of dampness, and the long
wide board of rotting rags.
The place of the proprietor was on the top of the stove, while
the boards surrounding it were intended for those who were on
good terms with the owner and who were honoured by his
friendship. During the day the captain passed most of his time
sitting on a kind of bench, made by himself by placing bricks
against the wall of the courtyard, or else in the eating house of
Egor Vavilovitch, which was opposite the house, where he took all
his meals and where he also drank vodki.
Before renting this house, Aristid Kuvalda had kept a registry
office for servants in the town. If we look further back into
his former life, we shall find that he once owned printing works,
and previous to this, in his own words, he "just lived! And
lived well too, Devil take it, and like one who knew how!"
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of fifty, with a rawlooking
face, swollen with drunkenness, and with a dirty yellowish beard.
His eyes were large and grey, with an insolent expression of
happiness. He spoke in a bass voice and with a sort of grumbling
sound in his throat, and he almost always held between his teeth
a German china pipe with a long bowl. When he was angry the
nostrils of his big crooked red nose swelled, and his lips
trembled, exposing to view two rows of large and wolf-like yellow
teeth. He had long arms, was lame, and always dressed in an old
officer's uniform, with a dirty, greasy cap with a red band, a
hat without a brim, and ragged felt boots which reached almost to
his knees. In the morning, as a rule, he had a heavy drunken
headache, and in the evening he caroused. However much he drank,
he was never drunk, and so was always merry.
In the evenings he received lodgers, sitting on his brickmade
bench with his pipe in his mouth.
"Whom have we here?" he would ask the ragged and tattered object
approaching him, who had probably been chucked out of the town
for drunkenness, or perhaps for some other reason not quite so
simple. And after the man had answered him, he would say, "Let
me see legal papers in confirmation of your lies." And if there
were such papers they were shown. The Captain would then put
them in his bosom, seldom taking any interest in them, and would
say:
"Everything is in order. Two kopecks for the night, ten kopecks
for the week, and thirty kopecks for the month. Go and get a
place for yourself, and see that it is not other people's, or
else they will blow you up. The people that live here are
particular."
"Don't you sell tea, bread, or anything to eat?"
"I trade only in walls and roofs, for which I pay to the
swindling proprietor of this hole--Judas Petunikoff, merchant of
the second guild--five roubles a month," explained Kuvalda in a
business-like tone. "Only those come to me who are not
accustomed to comfort and luxuries . . . . but if you are
accustomed to eat every day, then there is the eating-house
opposite. But it would be better for you if you left off that
habit. You see you are not a gentleman. What do you eat? You
eat yourself!"
For such speeches, delivered in a strictly business-like manner,
and always with smiling eyes, and also for the attention he paid
to his lodgers the Captain was very popular among the poor of the
town. It very often happened that a former client of his would
appear, not in rags, but in something more respectable and with a
slightly happier face.
"Good-day, your honour, and how do you do?"
"Alive, in good health! Go on."
"Don't you know me?"
"I did not know you."
"Do you remember that I lived with you last winter for nearly a
month . . . . when the fight with the police took place, and
three were taken away?"
"My brother, that is so. The police do come even under my
hospitable roof!"
"My God! You gave a piece of your mind to the police inspector
of this district!"
"Wouldn't you accept some small hospitality from me? When I
lived with you, you were . . ."
"Gratitude must be encouraged because it is seldom met with. You
seem to be a good man, and, though I don't remember you, still I
will go with you into the public-house and drink to your success
and future prospects with the greatest pleasure."
"You seem always the same . . . Are you always joking?"
"What else can one do, living among you unfortunate men?"
They went. Sometimes the Captain's former customer, uplifted and
unsettled by the entertainment, returned to the dosshouse, and on
the following morning they would again begin treating each other
till the Captain's companion would wake up to realise that he had
spent all his money in drink.
"Your honour, do you see that I have again fallen into your
hands? What shall we do now?"
"The position, no doubt, is not a very good one, but still you
need not trouble about it," reasoned the Captain. "You must, my
friend, treat everything indifferently, without spoiling yourself
by philosophy, and without asking yourself any question. To
philosophise is always foolish; to philosophise with a drunken
headache, ineffably so. Drunken headaches require vodki and not
the remorse of conscience or gnashing of teeth . . . save your
teeth, or else you will not be able to protect yourself. Here
are twenty kopecks. Go and buy a bottle of vodki for five
kopecks, hot tripe or lungs, one pound of bread and two
cucumbers. When we have lived off our drunken headache we will
think of the condition of affairs . . ."
As a rule the consideration of the "condition of affairs" lasted
some two or three days, and only when the Captain had not a
farthing left of the three roubles or five roubles given him by
his grateful customer did he say:
"You came! Do you see? Now that we have drunk everything with
you, you fool, try again to regain the path of virtue and
soberness. It has been truly said that if you do not sin, you
will not repent, and, if you do not repent, you shall not be
saved. We have done the first, and to repent is useless. Let us
make direct for salvation. Go to the river and work, and if you
think you cannot control yourself, tell the contractor, your
employer, to keep your money, or else give it to me. When you
get sufficient capital, I will get you a pair of trousers and
other things necessary to make you seem a respectable and
hard-working man, persecuted by fate. With decent-looking
trousers you can go far. Now then, be off!"
Then the client would go to the river to work as a porter,
smiling the while over the Captain's long and wise speeches. He
did not distinctly understand them, but only saw in front of him
two merry eyes, felt their encouraging influence, and knew that
in the loquacious Captain he had an arm that would assist him in
time of need.
And really it happened very often that, for a month or so, some
ticket-of-leave client, under the strict surveillance of the
Captain, had the opportunity of raising himself to a condition
better than that to which, thanks to the Captain's co-operation,
he had fallen.
"Now, then, my friend!" said the Captain, glancing critically at
the restored client, "we have a coat and jacket. When I had
respectable trousers I lived in town like a respectable man. But
when the trousers wore out, I too fell off in the opinion of my
fellow-men and had to come down here from the town. Men, my fine
mannikin, judge everything by the outward appearance, while,
owing to their foolishness, the actual reality of things is
incomprehensible to them. Make a note of this on your nose, and
pay me at least half your debt. Go in peace; seek, and you may
find."
"How much do I owe you, Aristid Fomich?" asks the client, in
confusion.
"One rouble and 70 kopecks. . . . Now, give me only one rouble,
or, if you like, 70 kopecks, and as for the rest, I shall wait
until you have earned more than you have now by stealing or by
hard work, it does not matter to me."
"I thank you humbly for your kindness!" says the client, touched
to the heart. "Truly you are a kind man. . . . ; Life has
persecuted you in vain. . . . What an eagle you would have been
in your own place!"
The Captain could not live without eloquent speeches.
"What does 'in my own place' mean? No one really knows his own
place in life, and every one of us crawls into his harness. The
place of the merchant Judas Petunikoff ought to be in penal
servitude, but he still walks through the streets in daylight,
and even intends to build a factory. The place of our teacher
ought to be beside a wife and half-a-dozen children, but he is
loitering in the public-house of Vaviloff. And then, there is
yourself. You are going to seek a situation as a hall porter or
waiter, but I can see that you ought to be a soldier in the army,
because you are no fool, are patient and understand discipline.
Life shuffles us like cards, you see, and it is only
accidentally, and only for a time, that we fall into our own
places!"
Such farewell speeches often served as a preface to the
continuation of their acquaintance, which again began with
drinking and went so far that the client would spend his last
farthing. Then the Captain would stand him treat, and they would
drink all they had.
A repetition of similar doings did not affect in the least the
good relations of the parties.
The teacher mentioned by the Captain was another of those
customers who were thus reformed only in order that they should
sin again. Thanks to his intellect, he was the nearest in rank
to the Captain, and this was probably the cause of his falling so
low as dosshouse life, and of his inability to rise again. It
was only with him that Aristid Kuvalda could philosophise with
the certainty of being understood. He valued this, and when the
reformed teacher prepared to leave the dosshouse in order to get
a corner in town for himself, then Aristid Kuvalda accompanied
him so sorrowfully and sadly that it ended, as a rule, in their
both getting drunk and spending all their money. Probably
Kuvalda arranged the matter intentionally so that the teacher
could not leave the dosshouse, though he desired to do so with
all his heart. Was it possible for Aristid Kuvalda, a nobleman
(as was evident from his speeches), one who was accustomed to
think, though the turn of fate may have changed his position, was
it possible for him not to desire to have close to him a man like
himself? We can pity our own faults in others.
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