CHAPTER XXI

I came into a filthy hell. In a hollow between mountains which were covered with stumps of felled trees, buildings arose on the earth, from the roofs of which tongues of flame shot forth. Tall chimney-stacks rose toward the sky, from which smoke and steam poured out, staining the earth with soot. There was a deafening noise of hammers, and a roar and a wild squeaking and creaking of saws shot through the smoke-laden air. Everywhere there was iron, wood, coal, smoke, steam, stench; and in this pit, filled with every kind of miscellaneous thing, men worked black as coal.

"Thank you, old man," I said to myself, "you have sent me to a nice place."

It was the first time I had seen a factory near-to. I was deafened by the extraordinary noise, and I breathed with difficulty. I went through the streets seeking for the locksmith, Peter Jagikh. Everyone I asked snarled back at me as if they had all quarreled with each other in the morning and had not yet succeeded in calming themselves. "God-creators!" I cried out to myself.

I came upon a man who looked like a bear; dirty from head to foot. His oily clothes shone with dirt in the sun, and I asked him if he knew the locksmith, Peter Jagikh.

"Who?"

"Peter Jagikh."

"Why?"

"I want to see him."

"Well, I am he."

"How do you do?"

"Well, how do you do? What do you want?"

"I have a note to you."

The man was taller than I, with a large beard, broad shoulders, and heavily set. His face was sooty and his small, gray eyes could hardly be seen from under his thick eyebrows. His cap was set far back on his head and his hair was cut short. He looked like a peasant, yet not entirely so. Evidently he read with great difficulty. His face was all wrinkled and his mustache trembled. Suddenly his face cleared, his white teeth shone, he opened his good, childish eyes and the skin in his checks smoothed out.

"Ah," he cried, "he is alive, God's bird! That's good. Go, my dear, to the end of this street and turn to the left toward the wood. At the foot of the mountain there is a house with green shutters. Ask for the teacher. He is called Mikhail. He is my nephew. Show him the note. I will come soon."

He spoke like a soldier, giving his signal on a bugle. He made the speech, waved his hand and went away.

"He is kind and funny," I thought to myself. At the house an angular boy in a cotton shirt and an apron, met me. His sleeves were rolled up; his hands were white and thin. He read through the note and asked me:

"Is Father Juna well?"

"Yes, thank God."

"Did he tell you when he will come to see us?"

"He didn't say. Is he called Juna?"

The young man looked at me suspiciously and began to read the note again.

"How then?" he asked me.

"He said his name was Jehudiel."

The young fellow smiled. "That is a nickname which I gave him."

"Oh, the devil," I thought.

His hair was straight and long like a deacons', his face pale. His eyes were a watery blue and he looked as if he did not spring from this dirty spot.

He walked up and down the room and measured me with his eyes as if I were a piece of cloth; and I did not like it.

"Have you known Juna a long time?" he asked me.

"Four days."

"Four days," he repeated. "That's good."

"Why good?" I asked.

"Just so," he answered, shrugging his shoulders. "Why do you wear an apron?"

"I am binding books," he said. "Soon my uncle will return and we will have supper. Perhaps you would like to wash yourself after your trip?"

I felt like teasing him. He was much too serious for his age.

"Do people wash here?" I asked.

He frowned. "How then?"

"I have not seen any washed ones yet," I answered.

He half closed his eyes, looked at me and answered calmly:

"People do not idle here. They work; and there is no time to wash often."

I saw that I had struck the wrong man. I wanted to answer, but he turned on his heel and went away. I felt foolish, sat down and looked about me.

The room was large and clean. In the corner there was a table set for supper, and on the walls there were shelves with books. The books were mostly secular, but there was also a Bible, the gospels and an old Slavic psalm-book.

I went out into the court and washed myself. The uncle entered, his cap still farther back on his head, and he swung his arms and held his head forward like a bull.

"Well, I will wash myself," he said. "Pump some water for me."

His voice was like that of a trumpet and both his hands together were as large as a big soup tureen. When he had washed some of the soot off his face, I saw that he had high cheek-bones and a skin like copper.

We sat down to supper. They ate, talked about their own affairs and did not ask me who I was or why I came. Still they offered me things hospitably and looked at me in a friendly way. There was something very solid about them, as if the earth was firm under their feet. I felt like shaking it for them--why were they better than I?

"Are you Old Believers?" I asked.

"We?" the uncle replied. "No."

"Then you are orthodox?"

The nephew frowned and the uncle shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

"Perhaps we have to show him our passports, Mikhail."

I understood that I had acted foolishly, but I did not want to stop.

"I did not want to see your passports," I said. "I wanted to see your thoughts."

"Thoughts? Right away, Your Excellency. Thoughts, forward!" And he laughed like a stallion.

Mikhail, who was making the tea, said calmly:

"I know why you came. You are not the first one whom Juna has sent us. He knows people and never sends empty men."

The uncle felt my forehead with his palm and laughed:

"Please look more gay. Don't show your trumps right away, or you may lose."

They evidently considered themselves men rich in soul and that I was a beggar compared to them. They did not hurry to quench my hungry heart with their wisdom. I became angry and wanted to quarrel, but I could find no reason; and that angered me still more. I asked at random:

"What do you mean by an empty man?"

The uncle answered: "A man who can fill up with anything you wish."

Suddenly Mikhail went up quietly to me and said, in a soft voice:

"You believe in God?"

"Yes."

But I became confused at my answer. It was not true. Did I really believe?

Mikhail asked again:

"And you respect people?"

"No," I answered.

"Don't you see," he said, "that they are created in the image of God?"

The uncle, the devil take him, smiled like a copper basin in the sun.

"With such people," I thought to myself, "one must argue sincerely and if I should fall asunder in little pieces, they will gather me up again."

"When I look upon people," I said, "I doubt the power of God."

Again it was not right. I doubted God before I ever saw the people.

Mikhail looked at me thoughtfully, with wise eyes, and the uncle walked heavily up and down the room, stroking his beard, and grunting low to himself.

It made me uneasy that I had to lower myself to lie before them. I saw my soul with remarkable clearness and my thoughts raced through me stupidly and alarmed like a frightened bee-hive. I began to drive them out of me, irritated. I wished to empty myself.

I spoke for a long time without connecting my words. I spoke at random on purpose. If they were such wise people, let them gather the sense themselves. I became tired and asked passionately: "How can you heal my sick soul?"

Mikhail answered low, without looking at me:

"I do not consider you sick."

The uncle laughed again, and it pealed out as if a demon had come in through the roof.

"To be sick," Mikhail continued, "is when a man is not conscious of himself, but knows only his pain and lives in it. But you, it is plain, have not lost yourself. You are seeking happiness in life, and only a healthy man does that."

"But why is there such pain in my soul then?" "Because you like it," he answered.

I gnashed my teeth. His calm was unbearable to me.

"Do you know for sure," I asked, "that I like it?"

He looked me straight in the eyes and drove his nails slowly into my breast.

"As an honest man, you ought to recognize," he said, "that your pain is necessary to your soul. It places you above others and you esteem it as something which separates you from others. Is it not so?"

His Lenten face was dry and drawn, his eyes darkened, he stroked his cheek with his hand, while he cleaned me hard, as one cleans copper with sand.

"You are evidently afraid to mingle with people for you unconsciously think to yourself, 'Though they are ulcers, they are my own, and no one has ulcers but I.'"

I wanted to contradict him, but found no words. He was younger than I, and weaker, and I did not believe that of the two I was the more stupid.

The uncle laughed like a priest in a steam-bath.

"But this does not separate you from people. You are mistaken," Mikhail went on. "Every one thinks the same. That is why life is weak and monstrous. Each one tries to go away from life and dig his own hole in the ground and look out upon the earth from it alone. From a hole, life seems low and futile, and it suits the isolated man to see life so. I say it about those people who for some reason or other cannot sit on the backs of their neighbors to drive them where they could eat tastier food."

His speech angered and offended me.

"This vile life," he said, "unworthy of human reason, began on that day when the first individual tore himself away from the miraculous strength of the people, from the masses, from his mother, and frightened by his isolation and his weakness, pitied himself and grew to be a futile and evil master of petty desires, a mass which called himself 'I.' It is this same 415 which is the worst enemy of man. In its business of defending itself and asserting itself on this earth, it has uselessly killed the strength of the soul, and its capacity of creating spiritual welfare."

It seemed to me that his speech was familiar to me and that the words were those which I had waited for.

"Poor in soul, the eye is powerless to create. It is deaf, blind and dumb in life, and its goal is only self-defense, peace and comfort. It creates the new and purely human only under compulsion, after innumerable urgings from without and with great difficulty. It not only does not value its brother 'I,' but hates him and persecutes him. It is hostile because, remembering that it was born from the whole from which it was broken off, the 'I' tries to unite the broken pieces and to create anew a great unit."

I listened, surprised. All this was clear to me; not only clear, but even near and true. It seemed to me that I had long ago thought the same, only without words. And now I had found words, and the thoughts arranged themselves before me like steps on a ladder, which led ever upward.

I remembered Juna's speeches and they lived before my eyes, clear and beautiful. But at the same time I was restless and uncomfortable, as if I were standing on a block of ice in a river in the spring.

The uncle had quietly left us alone. There was no fire in the room, the night was moonlit, and in my soul, too, there was a moonlight mist.

At midnight Mikhail stopped speaking and we went to sleep in a shed in the courtyard, where we lay in the hay. He soon fell asleep, but I went out to the gate, and sat down on some logs and gazed about me.

The moon and two large stars strode carefully across the heavens. Over the mountains against the blue sky the jagged wall of the wood could be plainly seen. On the mountains was the hewn forest, and on the earth black pits. Below, the factory greedily showed its red teeth. It hummed and smoked and tongues of fire rose over the roofs and shot upward, but could not tear themselves away and were drowned in the smoke. The air smelled burnt. It was difficult to breathe.

I thought of the bitter loneliness of man. Mikhail had spoken well. He believed his own words and I saw truth in them. But why did they leave me cold? My soul did not harmonize with the soul of this man. It stood apart, as in a wilderness.

Soon I noticed that I was thinking the thoughts of Juna and Mikhail and that their thoughts lived powerfully within me, though still on the surface, for at bottom I was still hostile and suspicious of them.

"Where am I?" I asked. "And what am I?"

I spun around in my perplexity like a top, and always faster, so that the cloud storm roared in my ears.

The whistle blew in the factory. At first it was thin and plaintive, then it became louder and masterful.

The morning looked out sleepily from the mountain and the night hurried below, taking the thin veil off the trees quietly, folding it up and hiding it in the hollows and the pits. The robbed earth stood out clear to the eye. Everything was eaten out and plundered, as if some bold giant had played in this hollow, tearing out strips of wood and giving severe wounds to the earth.

The factory was sunk in this basin, dirty, oily, covered with smoke and puffing. Dark people dragged themselves to it from all sides and it swallowed them up, one by one. "Creators of God," I thought to myself. "What have they created?"

The uncle came out into the court disheveled, stretching himself, yawning, cracking his joints, and smiling at me.

"Ah," he cried, "you are up!" Then he asked me kindly, "Or perhaps you did not go to bed at all? Well, it does not matter. You will sleep during the day. Come, let us drink tea."

At tea he said to me: "There were nights when I, too, did not sleep, brother. There was a time when I could have beaten every one I met. Even before I was a soldier my soul was troubled, but in the service they made me deaf. An officer gave me a blow on the ear. My right ear is deaf. There was one _feldscher_ who helped me, thanks to--"

It was evident he wanted to say God, but he stopped, stroked his beard and smiled. He seemed to me childish and there was something childish in his eyes. They were so simple and credulous.

"He was a very good man. He looked at me. 'What is the matter?' he asked. 'Is this human life?' I answered. 'True,' he said, 'everything ought to be changed. Peter Vasilief, let me teach you political economy.' And he began. At first I did not understand anything. But suddenly I understood the daily and eternal baseness in which we lived. Then I nearly went out of my head with joy. 'Oh, you villains!' I cried. That is the way science always suddenly unfolds itself. At first you only hear new words and then there comes a moment when everything unites and comes out into the light and that moment is the true birth of man. Marvelous!"

His face became happy and his eyes smiled softly. He nodded his shorn head and said:

"That is going to happen to you, too."

It was pleasant to look at him. The child was strong in him and I envied him.

"Thirty-two years of my life I spent like a horse. It was disgraceful. Well, I will make up for it as best I can. Only my mind is not very quick. The mind is like the hands. It needs exercise. My hands are cleverer than my head."

I looked at him and thought, how is it that these people are not afraid to speak about everything?

"But for that matter," he continued, "Mishka has brains enough for two. He has read very much. You wait till he forgets himself. The factory priest called him 'an arch heretic.' Too bad his head is not clear about God. That comes from his mother. My sister was a very distinguished woman in religious matters. From Orthodox she went over to the Old Believers, but the Old Believers did not admit her."

As he spoke he got ready to go to work. He walked from one corner of the room to the other. Everything about him shook. The chairs fell and the floor bent under him as he walked. He was funny, yet pleasant to look upon.

"What kind of people are they?" I thought. Then I said aloud: "Can I remain with you three days?"

"Go ahead," he said; "three months if you wish. You are a strange fellow. You are not in our way, thank God."

Then he scratched his head and smiled apologetically.

"The word God always comes to my mouth. It is from habit."

Again the factory whistle blew, and the uncle went away. I went to sleep in the shed. Mikhail lay there. He was frowning sternly, and his hands were on his breast, his face was flushed. He was beardless and without mustache, his cheekbones were high; in fact, he was all bones.

"What kind of people are they?"

And with this thought I fell asleep.