Short Ghost and Horror Collection 009

The Devil

By Maxim Gorky

Life is a burden in the Fall, — the sad season of decay and death!

The grey days, the weeping, sunless sky, the dark nights, the growling, whining wind, the
heavy, black autumn shadows — all that drives clouds of gloomy thoughts over the human soul,
and fills it with a mysterious fear of life where nothing is permanent, all is in an eternal flux;
things are bom, decay, die . . . why? ... for what purpose? . . .

Sometimes the strength fails us to battle against the tenebrous thoughts that enfold the soul late
in the autumn, therefore those who want to assuage their bitterness ought to meet them half way.
This is the only way by which they will escape from the chaos of despair and doubt, and will
enter on the terra firma of self-confidence.

But it is a laborious path, it leads through thorny brambles that lacerate the living heart, and on
that path the devil always lies in ambush. It is that best of all the devils, with whom the great
Goethe has made us acquainted. . . .

My story is about that devil.

* * *

The devil suffered from ennui.
He is too wise to ridicule everything.

He knows that there are phenomena of life which the devil himself is not able to rail at; for
example, he has never applied the sharp scalpel of his irony to the majestic fact of his existence.
To tell the truth, our favourite devil is more bold than clever, and if we were to look more closely
at him, we might discover that, like ourselves, he wastes most of his time on trifles. But we had
better leave that alone; we are not children that break their best toys in order to discover what is
in them.

The devil once wandered over the cemetery in the darkness of an autumn night: he felt lonely
and whistled softly as he looked around himself in search of a distraction. He whistled an old
song — my father's favourite song, —

"When, in autumnal days,
A leaf from its branch is torn
And on high by the wind is borne."

And the wind sang with him, soughing over the graves and anong the black crosses, and heavy
autumnal clouds slowly crawled over the heaven and with their cold tears watered the narrow
dwellings of the dead. The mournful trees in the cemetery timidly creaked under the strokes of
the wind and stretched their bare branches to the speechless clouds. The branches were now and
then caught by the crosses, and then a dull, shuffling, awful sound passed over the churchyard. . .

The devil was whistling, and he thought:

"I wonder how the dead feel in such weather! No doubt, the dampness goes down to them, and
although they are secure against rheumatism ever since the day of their death, yet, I suppose,
they do not feel comfortable. How, if I called one of them up and had a talk with him? It would

be a little distraction for me, and, very likely, for him also. I will call him! Somewhere around

here they have buried an old friend of mine, an author I used to visit him when he was alive

. . . why not renew our acquaintance? People of his kind are dreadfully exacting. I shall find out
whether the grave satisfies him completely. But where is his grave?"

And the devil who, as is well known, knows everything, wandered for a long time about the
cemetery, before he found the author's grave. . . .

"Oh there!" he called out as he knocked with his claws at the heavy stone under which his
acquaintance was put away.

"Get up!"

"What for?" came the dull answer from below.
"I need you."
"I won't get up.
"Why?"

"Who are you, anyway?"

"You know me.

"The censor?"

"Ha, ha, ha! No!"

"Maybe a secret policeman?"

"No, no!"

"Not a critic, either?"

"I am the devil."

"Well, I'll be out in a minute."

The stone lifted itself from the grave, the earth burst open, and a skeleton came out of it. It was
a very common skeleton, just the kind that students study anatomy by: only it was dirty, had no
wire connections, and in the empty sockets there shone a blue phosphoric light instead of eyes. It
crawled out of the ground, shook its bones in order to throw off the earth that stuck t> them,
making a dry, rattling noise with them, and raising up its skull, looked with its cold, blue eyes at
the murky, cloud-covered sky. "I hope you are well!" said the devil.

"How can I be?" curtly answered the author. He spoke in a strange, low voice, as if two bones
were grating against each other.

"Oh, excuse my greeting!" the devil said pleasantly.

"Never mind! . . . But why have you raised me?"

"I just wanted to take a walk with you, though the weather is very bad."

"I suppose you are not afraid of catching a cold?" asked the devil.

"Not at all, I got used to catching colds during my lifetime."

"Yes, I remember, you died pretty cold."

"I should say I did! They had poured enough cold water over me all my life."

They walked beside each other over the narrow path, between graves and crosses. Two blue
beams fell from the author's eyes upon the ground and lit the way for the devil. A drizzling rain
sprinkled over them, and the wind freely passed between the author's bare ribs and through his
breast where there was no longer a heart.

"We are going to town?" he asked the devil.

"What interests you there?"

"Life, my dear sir," the author said impassionately.

"What! It still has a meaning for you?"

"Indeed it has!"

"But why?"

"How am I to say it? A man measures all by the quantity of his effort, and if he carries a
common stone down from the summit of Ararat, that stone becomes a gem to him."
"Poor fellow!" smiled the devil.
"But also happy man!" the author retorted coldly.
The devil shrugged his shoulders.

They left the churchyard, and before them lay a street, — two rows of houses, and between them
was darkness in which the miserable lamps clearly proved the want of light upon earth.
"Tell me," the devil spoke after a pause, "how do you like your grave?"
"Now I am used to it, and it is all right: it is very quiet there."
"Is it not damp down there in the Fall?" asked the devil.

"A little. But you get used to that. The greatest annoyance comes from those various idiots who
ramble over the cemetery and accidentally stumble on my grave. I don't know how long I have
been lying in my grave, for I and everything around me is unchangeable, and the concept of time
does not exist for me."

"You have been in the ground four years, — it will soon be five," said the devil.

"Indeed? Well then, there have been three people at my grave during that time. Those accursed
people make me nervous. One, you see, straight away denied the fact of my existence: he read
my name on the tombstone and said confidently: 'There never was such a man! I have never read
him, though I remember such a name: when I was a boy, there lived a man of that name who had
a broker's shop in our street.' How do you like that? And my articles appeared for sixteen years
in the most popular periodicals, and three times during my lifetime my books came out in
separate editions."

"There were two more editions since your death," the devil informed him.

"Well, you see? Then came two, and one of them said: 'Oh, that's that fellow!' 'Yes, that is
he!' answered the other. 'Yes, they used to read him in the auld lang syne.' 'They read a lot of
them.' 'What was it he preached?' 'Oh, generally, ideas of beauty, goodness, and so forth.' 'Oh,
yes, I remember.' 'He had a heavy tongue.' 'There is a lot of them in the ground: — yes, Russia is
rich in talents' . . . And those asses went away. It is true, warm words do not raise the
temperature of the grave, and I do not care for that, yet it hurts me. And oh, how I wanted to give
them a piece of my mind!"

"You ought to have given them a fine tongue- lashing!" smiled the devil.

"No, that would not have done. On the verge of the twentieth century it would be absurd for
dead people to scold, and, besides, it would be hard on the materialists.
The devil again felt the ennui coming over him.

This author had always wished in his lifetime to be a bridegroom at all weddings and a corpse
at all burials, and now that all is dead in him, his egotism is still alive. Is man of any importance
to life? Of importance is only the human spirit, and only the spirit deserves applause and
recognition. . . . How annoying people are! The devil was on the point of proposing to the author
to return to his grave, when an idea flashed through his evil head. They had just reached a
square, and heavy masses of buildings surrounded them on all sides. The dark, wet sky hung low
over the square; it seemed as though it rested on the roofs and murkily looked at the dirty earth.

"Say," said the devil as he inclined pleasantly towards the author, "don't you want to know
how your wife is getting on?"

"I don't know whether I want to," the author spoke slowly.

"I see, you are a thorough corpse!" called out the devil to annoy him.

"Oh, I don't know?" said the author and jauntily shook his bones. "I don't mind seeing her;
besides, she will not see me, or if she will, she cannot recognize me!"
"Of course!" the devil assured him.

"You know, I only said so because she did not like for me to go away long from home,"
explained the author.

And suddenly the wall of a house disappeared or became as transparent as glass. The author
saw the inside of large apartments, and it was so light and cosy in them.

"Elegant appointments!" he grated his bones approvingly: "Very fine appointments! If I had
lived in such rooms, I would be alive now."

"I like it, too," said the devil and smiled. "And it is not expensive — it only costs some three
thousands."

"Hem, that not expensive? I remember my largest work brought me 815 roubles, and I worked
over it a whole year. But who lives here?"
"Your wife," said the devil.
"I declare! That is good ... for her."
"Yes, and here comes her husband."

"She is so pretty now, and how well she is dressed! Her husband, you say? What a fine looking
fellow! Rather a bourgeois phiz, — kind, but somewhat stupid! He looks as if he might be
cunning, — well, just the face to please a woman."

"Do you want me to heave a sigh for you?" the devil proposed and looked maliciously at the
author. But he was taken up with the scene before him.

"What happy, jolly faces both have! They are evidentiy satisfied with life. Tell me, does she
love him?"

"Oh, yes, very much!"

"And who is he?"

"A clerk in a millinery shop."

"A clerk in a millinery shop," the author repeated slowly and did not utter a word for some
time. The devil looked at him and smiled a merry smile.
"Do you like that?" he asked.
The author spoke with an effort:

"I had some children. ... I know they are alive. ... I had some children ... a son and a
daughter. ... I used to think then that my son would turn out in time a good man. . ."

"There are plenty of good men, but what the world needs is perfect men," said the devil coolly
and whistled a jolly march.

"I think the clerk is probably a poor pedagogue . . . and my son ..."

The author's empty skull shook sadly.

"Just look how he is embracing her! They are living an easy life!" exclaimed the devil.

"Yes. Is that clerk a rich man?"

"No, he was poorer than I, but your wife is rich."

"My wife? Where did she get the money from?"

"From the sale of your books!"

"Oh!" said the author and shook his bare and empty skull. "Oh! Then it simply means that I
have worked for a certain clerk?"
"I confess it looks that way," the devil chimed in merrily.
The author looked at the ground and said to the devil:
"Take me back to my grave!"

... It was late. A rain fell, heavy clouds hung in the sky, and the author rattled his bones as he
marched rapidly to his grave. . . . The devil walked behind him and whistled merrily.

* * *

My reader is, of course, dissatisfied. My reader is surfeited with literature, and even the people
that write only to please him, are rarely to his taste. In the present case my reader is also
dissatisfied because I have said nothing about hell. As my reader is justiy convinced that after
death he will find his way there, he would like to know something about hell during his lifetime.
Really, I can't tell anything pleasant to my reader on that score, because there is no hell, no fiery
hell which it is so easy to imagine. Yet, there is something else and infinitely more terrible.

The moment the doctor will have said about you to your friends: "He is dead!" you will enter
an immeasurable, illuminated space, and that is the space of the consciousness of your mistakes.

You he in the grave, in a narrow coffin, and your miserable life rotates about you like a wheel.

It moves painfully slow, and passes before you from your first conscious step to the last
moment of your life.

You will see all that you have hidden from yourself during your lifetime, all the lies and
meanness of your existence: you will think over anew all your past thoughts, and you will see
every wrong step of yours, — all your life will be gone over, to its minutest details! And to
increase your torments, you will know that on that narrow and stupid road which you have
traversed, others are marching, and pushing each other, and hurrying, and lying. . . . And you
understand that they are doing it all only to find out in time how shameful it is to live such a
wretched, soulless life.

And though you see them hastening on towards their destruction, you are in no way able to
warn them: you will not move nor cry, and your helpless desire to aid them will tear your soul to
pieces.

Your life passes before you, and you see it from the start, and there is no end to the work of
your conscience, and there will be no end . . . and to the horror of your torments there will never
be an end . . . never!