Twenty-six men and a girl. A poemTwenty-six men and a girl. A poem
There were six-and-twenty of us - six-and-twenty living machines
locked up in a damp basement, where from morning till night we kneaded
dough and rolled it into pretzels and cracknels. Opposite the windows of
our basement was a bricked area, green and moldy with moisture. The windows
were protected from outside with a close iron grating, and the light of the
sun could not pierce through the windowpanes, covered as they were with
flour dust.
Our employer had bars placed in front of the windows, so that we
should not be able to give a bit of his bread to passing beggars, or to any
of our fellows who were out of work and hungry. Our employer called us
crooks, and gave us half-rotten tripe to eat for our midday meal, instead
of meat. It was swelteringly close for us cooped up in that stone
underground chamber, under the low, heavy, soot-blackened, cobwebby
ceiling. Dreary and sickening was our life within its thick, dirty, moldy
walls.
Unrefreshed, and with a feeling of not having had our sleep out, we
used to get up at five o'clock in the morning; and at six, we were already
seated, worn out and apathetic, at the table, rolling out the dough which
our mates had already prepared while we slept. The whole day, from early
morning until ten at night, some of us sat round that table, working up in
our hands the unyielding dough, swaying to and fro so as not to grow numb;
while the others mixed flour and water. And the whole day the simmering
water in the kettle, where the pretzels were being cooked, sang low and
sadly; and the baker's shovel scraped harshly over the oven floor, as he
threw the slippery bits of dough out of the kettle on the heated bricks.
From morning till evening wood was burning in the oven, and the red
glow of the fire gleamed and flickered over the walls of the bake-shop, as
if silently mocking us. The giant oven was like the misshapen head of a
monster in a fairy tale; it thrust itself up out of the floor, opened wide
jaws, full of glowing fire, and blew hot breath upon us; it seemed to be
ever watching out of its black air-holes our interminable work. Those two
deep holes were like eyes - the cold, pitiless eyes of a monster. They
watched us always with the same darkened glance, as if they were weary of
seeing before them such slaves, from whom they could expect nothing human,
and therefore scorned them with the cold scorn of wisdom.
In meal dust, in the mud which we brought in from the yard on our
boots, in the hot, sticky atmosphere, day in, day out, we rolled the dough
into pretzels, which we moistened with our own sweat. And we hated our work
with a bitter hatred; we never ate what had passed through our hands, and
preferred black bread to pretzels. Sitting opposite each other, at a long
table - nine facing nine - we moved our hands and fingers mechanically
during endlessly long hours, till we were so accustomed to our monotonous
work that we ceased to pay any attention to our own motions.
We had all stared at each other so long, that each of us knew every
wrinkle of his mates' faces. It was not long also before we had exhausted
almost every topic of conversation; that is why we were most of the time
silent, unless we were chaffing each other; but one cannot always find
something about which to chaff another man, especially when that man is
one's mate. Neither were we much given to finding fault with one another;
how, indeed, could one of us poor devils be in a position to find fault
with another, when we were all of us half dead and, as it were, turned to
stone? For the heavy drudgery seemed to crush all feeling out of us. But
silence is only terrible and fearful for those who have said everything and
have nothing more to say to each other; for men, on the contrary, who have
never begun to communicate with one another, it is easy and simple.
Sometimes, too, we sang; and this is how it happened that we began to
sing: one of us would sigh deeply in the midst of our toil, like an
overdriven horse, and then we would begin one of those songs whose gentle
drawn-out melody seems always to ease the burden on the singer's heart.
At first one sang by himself, and we others sat in silence listening
to his solitary song, which, under the heavy vaulted roof of the basement,
died gradually away and became extinguished, like a little fire in the
steppes, on a wet autumn night, when the gray heaven hangs like a leaden
roof over the earth. Then another would join in with the singer, and now
two soft, sad voices would break into song in our narrow, dull hole of a
basement. Suddenly others would join in, and the song would surge up like a
wave, would grow louder and swell upward, till it would seem as if the
damp, foul walls of our stone prison were widening out and opening. Then,
all six-and-twenty of us would be singing; our loud, harmonious song would
fill the whole shop; the song felt cramped, it was striking, as it were,
against the walls in moaning sobs and sighs, moving our hearts with a soft,
tantalizing ache, tearing open old wounds, and awakening longings.
The singers would sigh deeply and heavily; suddenly one would become
silent and listen to the others singing, then let his voice flow once more
in the common tide. Another would exclaim in a stifled voice, "Ah!" and
would shut his eyes, while the deep, full sound waves would show him, as it
were, a road, in front of him - a sunlit, broad road in the distance, which
he himself, in thought, wandered along.
But the flame flickers once more in the huge oven, the baker scrapes
incessantly with his shovel, the water simmers in the kettle, and the
flicker of the fire on the wall dances as before in silent mockery. While
in other men's words we sing out our dumb grief, the weary burden of live
men robbed of the sunlight, the heartache of slaves.
So we lived, we six-and-twenty, in the vault-like basement of a great
stone house, and we suffered each one of us, as if we had to bear on our
shoulders the whole three storys of that house.
But we had something else good, besides the singing - something we
loved, that perhaps took the place of the sunshine.
In the second story of our house there was established a
gold-embroiderer's shop, and there, living among the other embroidery
girls, was Tanya, a little maid-servant of sixteen. Every morning there
peeped in through the glass door a rosy little face, with merry blue eyes;
while a ringing, tender voice called out to us:
"Little prisoners! Have you any pretzels, please, for me?"
At that clear sound we knew so well, we all used to turn round, gazing
with good-natured joy at the pure girlish face which smiled at us so
sweetly. The sight of the little nose pressed against the windowpane, and
of the small white teeth gleaming between the half-open lips, had become
for us a daily pleasure. Tumbling over each other we used to jump up to
open the door, and she would step in, bright and cheerful, holding out her
apron, with her head bent to one side, and a smile on her lips. Her thick,
long chestnut braid fell over her shoulder and across her breast. We, ugly,
dirty and misshapen as we were, looked up at her - the door was four steps
above the floor - looked up at her with heads thrown back, wishing her good
morning, and speaking strange, unaccustomed words, which we kept for her
only. Our voices became softer when we spoke to her, our jests were
lighter. For her - everything was different with us. The baker took from
his oven a shovelful of the best and the brownest pretzels, and threw them
deftly into Tanya's apron.
"Be off with you now, or the boss will catch you!" we warned her each
time. She laughed roguishly, called out cheerfully: "Good-by, poor
prisoners!" and slipped away as quick as a mouse.
That was all. But long after she had gone we talked about her to one
another with pleasure. It was always the same thing as we had said
yesterday and the day before, because everything about us, including
ourselves and her, remained the same - as yesterday - and as always.
Painful and terrible it is when a man goes on living, while nothing
changes around him; and when such an existence does not finally kill his
soul, then the monotony becomes with time, even more and more painful.
Generally we spoke about women in such a way that sometimes it was
loathsome to us ourselves to hear our rude, shameless talk. The women whom
we knew deserved perhaps nothing better. But about Tanya we never let fall
an evil word; none of us ever ventured so much as to lay a hand on her,
even too free a jest she never heard from us. Maybe this was so because she
never remained with us for long; she flashed on our eyes like a star
falling from the sky, and vanished; and maybe because she was little and
very beautiful, and everything beautiful calls forth respect, even in
coarse people. And besides - though our life of drudgery had made us dull
beasts, oxen, we were still men, and, like all men, could not live without
worshiping something or other. Better than her we had none, and none but
her took any notice of us, living in the basement - no one, though there
were dozens of people in the house. And then, too - most likely, this was
the chief thing - we all regarded her as something of our own, something
existing as it were only by virtue of our pretzels. We took on ourselves in
turns the duty of providing her with hot pretzels, and this became for us
like a daily sacrifice to our idol, it became almost a sacred rite, and
every day it bound us more closely to her. Besides pretzels, we gave Tanya
a great deal of advice - to wear warmer clothes, not to run upstairs too
quickly, not to carry heavy bundles of wood. She listened to all our
counsels with a smile, answered them by a laugh, and never took our advice,
but we were not offended at that; all we wanted was to show how concerned
we were for her welfare.
Often she would apply to us with different requests, she asked us, for
instance, to open the heavy door into the cellar, to chop wood: with
delight and a sort of pride, we did this for her, and everything else she
wanted.
But when one of us asked her to mend his solitary shirt for him, she
said, with a laugh of contempt:
"What next! A likely idea!"
We made great fun of the queer fellow who could entertain such an
idea, and - never asked her to do anything else. We loved her - all is said
in that. Man always wants to give his love to someone, though sometimes he
crushes, sometimes he sullies, with it. We were bound to love Tanya, for we
had no one else to love.
At times one of us would suddenly begin to reason like this:
"And why do we make so much of the wench? What is there in her, eh?
What a to-do we make about her!"
The man who dared to utter such words we promptly and coarsely cut
short - we wanted something to love: we had found it and loved it, and what
we twenty-six loved must be for each of us unshakable, as a holy thing, and
anyone who acted against us in this was our enemy. We loved, maybe, not
what was really good, but you see there were twenty-six of us, and so we
always wanted to see what was precious to us held sacred by the rest.
Our love is not less burdensome than hate, and maybe that is just why
some proud souls maintain that our hate is more flattering than our love.
But why do they not run away from us, if it is so?
Besides our department, our employer had also a bakery where they made
rolls; it was in the same house, separated from our hole only by a wall;
but the bakers - there were four of them - held aloof from us, considering
their work superior to ours, and therefore themselves better than us; they
never used to come into our workroom, and laughed contemptuously at us when
they met us in the yard. We, too, did not go to see them; this was
forbidden by our employer, for fear that we should steal the fancy rolls.
We did not like the bakers, because we envied them; their work was lighter
than ours, they were paid more, and were better fed; they had a light,
spacious workroom, and they were all so clean and healthy - and that made
them hateful to us. We all looked gray and yellow; three of us had
syphilis, several suffered from skin diseases, one was completely crippled
by rheumatism. On holidays and in their leisure time the bakers wore
pea-jackets and creaking boots, two of them had accordions, and they all
used to go for strolls in the public park - we wore filthy rags and torn
leather shoes or best slippers on our feet, the police would not let us
into the public park - could we possibly like the bakers?
And one day we learned that one of their men had gone on a spree, the
master had sacked him and had already taken on another, and that this other
was an ex-soldier, wore a satin waistcoat and a watch and gold chain. We
were anxious to get a sight of such a dandy, and in the hope of catching a
glimpse of him we kept running one after another out into the yard.
But he came of his own accord into our workroom. Kicking at the door,
he pushed it open, and leaving it ajar, stood in the doorway smiling, and
said to us:
"God help the work! Good morning, mates!"
The frosty air, which streamed in through the open door, curled in
streaks of vapor round his feet. He stood on the threshold, looked down
upon us, and under his fair, twisted mustache gleamed big yellow teeth. His
waistcoat was really something quite out of the common, blue-flowered,
brilliant with shining little red stone buttons. He also wore a watch
chain.
He was a fine fellow, this soldier; tall, healthy, rosy-cheeked, and
his big, clear eyes had a friendly, cheerful glance. He wore on his head a
white starched cap, and from under his spotlessly clean apron peeped the
pointed toes of fashionable, well-blacked boots.
Our baker asked him politely to shut the door. The soldier did so
without hurrying himself, and began to question us about the master. We
explained to him, all speaking together, that our employer was a
thorough-going brute, a crook, a knave, and a slave-driver; in a word, we
repeated to him all that can and must be said about an employer, but cannot
be repeated here. The soldier listened to us, twitched his mustache, and
watched us with a friendly, open-hearted look.
"But haven't you got a lot of girls here?" he asked suddenly.
Some of us began to laugh deferentially, others leered, and one of us
explained to the soldier that there were nine girls here.
"You make the most of them?" asked the soldier, with a wink.
We laughed, but not so loudly, and with some embarrassment. Many of us
would have liked to have shown the soldier that we also were tremendous
fellows with the girls, but not one of us could do so; and one of our
number confessed as much, when he said in a low voice:
"That sort of thing is not in our line."
"Well, no; it wouldn't quite do for you," said the soldier with
conviction, after having looked us over. "There is something wanting about
you all. You don't look the right sort. You've no sort of appearance; and
the women, you see, they like a bold appearance, they will have a
well-set-up body. Everything has to be tip-top for them. That's why they
respect strength. They want an arm like that!"
The soldier drew his right hand, with its turned-up shirt sleeve, out
of his pocket, and showed us his bare arm. It was white and strong, and
covered with shining golden wool.
"Leg and chest, all must be strong. And then a man must be dressed in
the latest fashion, so as to show off his looks to advantage. Yes, all the
women take to me. I don't call to them, I don't beckon them, yet with one
accord, five at a time, they throw themselves at my head."
He sat down on a flour sack, and told at length all about the way
women loved him, and how bold he was with them. Then he left, and after the
door had creaked to behind him, we sat for a long time silent, and thought
about him and his talk. Then we all suddenly broke silence together, and it
became apparent that we were all equally pleased with him. He was such a
nice, open-hearted fellow; he came to see us without any stand-offishness,
sat down and chatted. No one else had ever come to us like that, and no one
else had talked to us in that friendly sort of way. And we continued to
talk of him and his coming triumph among the embroidery girls, who passed
us by with contemptuous sniffs when they saw us in the yard, or who looked
straight through us as if we had been air. But we admired them always when
we met them outside, or when they walked past our windows; in winter, in
fur jackets and toques to match; in summer, in hats trimmed with flowers,
and carrying colored parasols. Among ourselves, however, we talked about
these girls in a way that would have made them mad with shame and rage, if
they could have heard us.
"If only he does not get hold of little Tanya!" said the baker,
suddenly, in an anxious tone of voice.
We were silent, for these words troubled us. Tanya had quite gone out
of our minds, supplanted, put on one side by the strong, fine figure of the
soldier.
Then began a lively discussion; some of us maintained that Tanya would
never lower herself so; others thought she would not be able to resist him,
and the third group proposed to break his ribs for him if he should try to
annoy Tanya. And, finally, we all decided to watch the soldier and Tanya,
and to warn the girl against him. This brought the discussion to an end.
Four weeks had passed by since then; during this time the soldier
baked white rolls, walked out with the gold-embroidery girls, visited us
often, but did not talk any more about his conquests; only twisted his
mustache and licked his lips lasciviously.
Tanya called in as usual every morning for "little pretzels," and was
as gay and as nice and friendly with us as ever. We certainly tried once or
twice to talk to her about the soldier, but she called him a "goggle-eyed
calf," and made fun of him all round, and that set our minds at rest. We
saw how the gold-embroidery girls carried on with the soldier, and we were
proud of our girl; Tanya's behavior reflected honor on us all; we imitated
her, and began in our talks to treat the soldier with small consideration.
She became dearer to us, and we greeted her with more friendliness and
kindliness every morning.
One day the soldier came to see us, a bit drunk, and sat down and
began to laugh. When we asked him what he was laughing about, he explained
to us:
"Why, two of them - that Lydka girl and Grushka - have been clawing
each other on my account. You should have seen the way they went for each
other! Ha! ha! One got hold of the other one by the hair, threw her down on
the floor of the passage, and sat on her! Ha! ha! ha! They scratched and
tore each others' faces. It was enough to make one die with laughter! Why
is it women can't fight fair? Why do they always scratch one another, eh?"
He sat on the bench, in fine fettle, fresh and jolly; he sat there and
went on laughing. We were silent. This time he made an unpleasant
impression on us.
"Well, it's a funny thing what luck I have with the women-folk! Eh?
One wink, and it's all over with them! It's the d-devil!"
He raised his white arms covered with golden wool, and dropped them
down on his knees. And his eyes seemed to reflect such frank astonishment,
as if he were himself quite surprised at his good luck with women. His fat,
red face glistened with delight and self-satisfaction, and he licked his
lips more than ever.
Our baker scraped the shovel violently and angrily along the oven
floor, and all at once he said sarcastically:
"There's no great strength needed to pull up fir saplings, but try a
real pine-tree."
"Why - what do you mean by saying that to me?" asked the soldier.
"Oh, well..."
"What is it?"
"Nothing - it slipped out!"
"No, wait a minute! What's the point? What pine-tree?"
Our baker did not answer, working rapidly away with the shovel at the
oven; flinging into it the half-cooked pretzels, taking out those that were
done, and noisily throwing them on the floor to the boys who were stringing
them on bast. He seemed to have forgotten the soldier and his conversation
with him. But the soldier had all at once grown uneasy. He got up onto his
feet, and went to the oven, at the risk of knocking against the handle of
the shovel, which was waving spasmodically in the air.
"No, tell me, do - who is it? You've insulted me. I? There's not one
could withstand me, n-no! And you say such insulting things to me?"
He really seemed genuinely hurt. He must have had nothing else to
pride himself on except his gift for seducing women; maybe, except for
that, there was nothing living in him, and it was only that by which he
could feel himself a living man.
There are men to whom the most precious and best thing in their lives
appears to be some disease of their soul or body. They fuss over it all
their lives, and only living by it, suffering from it, they feed on it,
they complain of it to others, and so draw the attention of their fellows
to themselves. For that they extract sympathy from people, and apart from
it they have nothing at all. Take from them that disease, cure them, and
they will be miserable, because they have lost their one resource in life -
they are left empty then. Sometimes a man's life is so poor, that he is
driven instinctively to prize his vice and to live by it; one may say for a
fact that often men are vicious out of boredom.
The soldier was offended, he went up to our baker and roared:
"No, tell me, do - who?"
"Tell you?" the baker fumed suddenly to him.
"Well?"
"You know Tanya?"
"Well?"
"Well, there then! Only try."
"I?"
"You!"
"Her? Why, that's nothing to me - pooh!"
"We shall see!"
"You will see! Ha! ha!"
"She'll..."
"Give me a month!"
"What a braggart you are, soldier!"
"A fortnight! I'll prove it! Who is it? Tanya! Pooh!"
"Well, get out. You're in my way!"
"A fortnight - and it's done! Ah, you..."
"Get out, I say!"
Our baker, all at once, flew into a rage and brandished his shovel.
The soldier staggered away from him in amazement, looked at us, paused, and
softly, malignantly said, "Oh, all right, then!" and went away.
During the dispute we had all sat silent, absorbed in it. But when the
soldier had gone, eager, loud talk and noise arose among us.
Someone shouted to the baker: "It's a bad job that you've started,
Pavel!"
"Do your work!" answered the baker savagely.
We felt that the soldier had been touched to the quick, and that
danger threatened Tanya. We felt this, and at the same time we were all
possessed by a burning curiosity, most agreeable to us. What would happen?
Would Tanya hold out against the soldier? And almost all cried confidently:
"Tanya? She'll hold out! You won't catch her with your bare arms!"
We longed terribly to test the strength of our idol; we were forcibly
trying to persuade each other that our divinity was a strong divinity and
would come victorious out of this ordeal. We began at last to fancy that we
had not worked enough on the soldier, that he would forget the dispute, and
that we ought to pique his vanity further. From that day we began to live a
different life, a life of nervous tension, such as we had never known
before. We spent whole days in arguing together; we all grew, as it were,
sharper; and got to talk more and better. It seemed to us that we were
playing some sort of game with the devil, and the stake on our side was
Tanya. And when we learned from the bakers that the soldier had begun
"running after our Tanya," we felt a sort of delighted terror, and life was
so interesting that we did not even notice that our employer had taken
advantage of our preoccupation to increase our work by three hundred pounds
of dough a day. We seemed, indeed, not even tired by our work. Tanya's name
was on our lips all day long. And every day we looked for her with a
certain peculiar impatience. Sometimes we pictured to ourselves that she
would come to us, and it would not be the same Tanya as of old, but somehow
different. We said nothing to her, however, of the dispute regarding her.
We asked her no questions, and behaved as well and affectionately to her as
ever. But even in this a new element crept in, alien to our old feeling for
Tanya - and that new element was keen curiosity, keen and cold as a steel
knife.
"Mates! Today the time's up!" our baker said to us one morning, as he
set to work.
We were well aware of it without his reminder: but still we became
alert.
"Have a good look at her. She'll be here directly," suggested the
baker.
One of us cried out in a troubled voice, "Why! as though one could see
anything! You need more than eyes."
And again an eager, noisy discussion sprang up among us. Today we were
at last to discover how pure and spotless was the vessel into which we had
poured all that was best in us. This morning, for the first time; it became
clear to us that we really were playing for high stakes; that we might,
indeed, through the exaction of this proof of purity, lose our divinity
altogether.
All this time we had been hearing that Tanya was stubbornly and
persistently pursued by the soldier, but not one of us had thought of
asking her what she thought of him. And she came every morning to fetch her
pretzels. and was the same toward us as ever.
This morning, too, we heard her voice outside: "You poor prisoners!
Here I am!"
We opened the door hastily, and when she came in we all remained,
contrary to our usual custom, silent. Our eyes fixed on her, we did not
know what to say to her, what to ask her. And there we stood in front of
her, a gloomy, silent crowd. She seemed to be surprised at this unusual
reception; and suddenly we saw her turn white and become uneasy, then she
asked, in a choking voice:
"Why are you - like this?"
"And you?" the baker flung at her grimly, never taking his eyes off
her.
"What about me?"
"N-nothing."
"Well, then, give me the little pretzels quickly."
Never before had she bidden us hurry.
"There's plenty of time," said the baker, not stirring and not
removing his eyes from her face.
Then, suddenly, she turned round and disappeared through the door.
The baker took his shovel and said, calmly turning away toward the
oven:
"Well, that settles it! There's a soldier for you - the low cur!"
Like a flock of sheep we all pressed round the table, sat down
silently, and began listlessly to work. Soon, however, one of us remarked:
"Perhaps, after all..."
"Shut up!" shouted the baker.
We were all convinced that he was a man of judgment, a man who knew
more than we did about things. And at the sound of his voice we were
convinced of the soldier's victory, and our spirits became sad and
downcast.
At twelve o'clock - while we were eating our dinners - the soldier
came in. He was as clean and as smart as ever, and looked at us - as usual
- straight in the eyes. But we were all awkward in looking at him.
"Now then, honored sirs, would you like me to show you a soldier's
prowess?" he said, chuckling proudly.
"Go out into the passage and look through the crack - do you
understand?"
We went into the passage, and stood all pushing against one another,
squeezed up to the cracks of the wooden partition of the passage that
looked into the yard. We had not to wait long. Very soon Tanya, with
hurried footsteps and an anxious face, walked across the yard, jumping over
the puddles of melting snow and mud: she disappeared into the cellar. Then
whistling, and not hurrying himself, the soldier followed in the same
direction. His hands were thrust in his pockets; his mustaches were
quivering.
Rain was falling, and we saw how its drops struck the puddles, and the
puddles were wrinkled by them. The day was damp and gray - a very dreary
day. Snow still lay on the roofs, but on the ground dark patches of mud had
begun to appear. And the snow on the roofs too was covered by a layer of
brownish dirt. The rain fell slowly with a depressing sound. It was cold
and disagreeable for us waiting.
The first to come out of the cellar was the soldier; he walked slowly
across the yard, his mustaches twitching, his hands in his pockets - the
same as always.
Then - Tanya, too, came out. Her eyes - her eyes were radiant with joy
and happiness, and her lips - were smiling. And she walked as though in a
dream, staggering, with unsteady steps.
We could not bear this calmly. All of us at once rushed to the door,
dashed out into the yard and - hissed at her, reviled her viciously,
loudly, wildly.
She started at seeing us, and stood as though rooted in the mud under
her feet. We formed a ring round her, and maliciously, without restraint,
abused her with vile words, said shameful things to her.
We did this quietly, slowly, seeing that she could not get away, that
she was hemmed in by us, and we could rail at her to our hearts' content. I
don't know why, but we did not beat her. She stood in the midst of us, and
turned her head this way and that, as she heard our insults. And we - more
and more violently flung at her the filth and venom of our words.
The color had left her face. Her blue eyes, so happy a moment before,
opened wide, her bosom heaved, and her lips quivered.
We in a ring round her avenged ourselves on her, for she had robbed
us. She belonged to us, we had lavished on her our best, and though that
best was beggar's crumbs, still there were twenty-six of us, she was one,
and so there was no pain we could give her equal to her guilt! How we
insulted her! She was still mute, still gazed at us with wild eyes, and a
shiver ran through her.
We laughed, roared, yelled. Other people ran up from somewhere and
joined us. One of us pulled Tanya by the sleeve of her blouse.
Suddenly her eyes flashed; deliberately she raised her hands to her
head and straightening her hair she said loudly but calmly, straight in our
faces:
"Ah, you miserable prisoners!"
And she walked straight at us, walked as directly as though we had not
been before her, as though we were not blocking her way.
And hence none of us did actually block her way.
Walking out of our circle without turning round, she added loudly,
with pride and indescribable contempt:
"Ah, you scum - brutes."
And - was gone, erect, beautiful, proud.
We were left in the middle of the yard, in the rain, under the gray
sunless sky.
Then we went mutely away to our damp stone basement. As before - the
sun never peeped in at our windows, and Tanya came no more. Never!
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Translate: Emily Jakowleff and Dora B. Montefiore
From: The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorky Ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky and
Baroness Moura Budberg Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1988. 174-191
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1899