Marck

ONE AUTUMN NIGHT BY MAXIM GORKY
|Once in the autumn I happened to be in a very unpleasant and inconvenient position. In the town where I had just arrived and |
|where I knew not a soul, I found myself without a farthing in my pocket and without a night's lodging. |
|Having sold during the first few days every part of my costume without which it was still possible to goabout, I passed from|
|the town into the quarter called "Yste," where were the steamship wharves--a quarter which during the navigation season |
|fermented with boisterous, laborious life, but now was silent and deserted, for we were in the last days of October. |
|Dragging my feet along the moist sand, and obstinately scrutinising it with the desire to discover in it any sort offragment|
|of food, I wandered alone among the deserted buildings and warehouses, and thought how good it would be to get a full meal. |
|In our present state of culture hunger of the mind is more quickly satisfied than hunger of the body. You wander about the |
|streets, you are surrounded by buildings not bad-looking from the outside and--you may safely say it--not so badly furnished ||inside, and the sight of them may excite within you stimulating ideas about architecture, hygiene, and many other wise and |
|high-flying subjects. You may meet warmly and neatly dressed folks--all very polite, and turning away from you tactfully, not|
|wishing offensively to notice the lamentable fact of your existence. Well, well, the mind of a hungry man is always better |
|nourished andhealthier than the mind of the well-fed man; and there you have a situation from which you may draw a very |
|ingenious conclusion in favour of the ill fed. |
|The evening was approaching, the rain was falling, and the wind blew violently from the north. It whistled in the empty |
|booths and shops, blewinto the plastered window-panes of the taverns, and whipped into foam the wavelets of the river which |
|splashed noisily on the sandy shore, casting high their white crests, racing one after another into the dim distance, and |
|leaping impetuously over one another's shoulders. It seemed as if the river felt the proximity of winter, and was running at |
|random away from the fetters of icewhich the north wind might well have flung upon her that very night. The sky was heavy |
|and dark; down from it swept incessantly scarcely visible drops of rain, and the melancholy elegy in nature all around me was|
|emphasised by a couple of battered and misshapen willow-trees and a boat, bottom upwards, that was fastened to their roots. |
|The overturned canoe with its battered keel andthe miserable old trees rifled by the cold wind--everything around me was |
|bankrupt, barren, and dead, and the sky flowed with undryable tears... Everything around was waste and gloomy ... it seemed |
|as if everything were dead, leaving me alone among the living, and for me also a cold death waited. |
|I was then eighteen years old--a good time!|
|I walked and walked along the cold wet sand, making my chattering teeth warble in honour of cold and hunger, when suddenly, |
|as I was carefully searching for something to eat behind one of the empty crates, I perceived behind it, crouching on the |
|ground, a figure in woman's clothes dank with the rain and clinging fastto her stooping shoulders. Standing over her, I |
|watched to see what she was doing. It appeared that she was digging a trench in the sand with her hands--digging away under |
|one of the crates. |
|"Why are you doing that?" I asked, crouching down on my heels quite close to her....