Twenty-Six and One

BY MAXIME GORKY

There were twenty-six of us—­twenty-six living machines, locked up in a damp cellar, where we patted dough from morning till night, making biscuits and cakes.  The windows of our cellar looked out into a ditch, which was covered with bricks grown green from dampness, the window frames were obstructed from the outside by a dense iron netting, and the light of the sun could not peep in through the panes, which were covered with flour-dust.  Our proprietor stopped up our windows with iron that we might not give his bread to the poor or to those of our companions who, being out of work, were starving; our proprietor called us cheats and gave us for our dinner tainted garbage instead of meat.

It was stifling and narrow in our box of stone under the low, heavy ceiling, covered with smoke-black and spider-webs.  It was close and disgusting within the thick walls, which were spattered with stains of mud and mustiness. . . .  We rose at five o’clock in the morning, without having had enough sleep, and, dull and indifferent, we seated ourselves by the table at six to make biscuits out of the dough, which had been prepared for us by our companions while we were asleep.  And all day long, from morning till ten o’clock at night, some of us sat by the table rolling out the elastic dough with our hands, and shaking ourselves that we might not grow stiff, while the others kneaded the dough with water.  And the boiling water in the kettle, where the cracknels were being boiled, was purring sadly and thoughtfully all day long; the baker’s shovel was scraping quickly and angrily against the oven, throwing off on the hot bricks the slippery pieces of dough.  On one side of the oven, wood was burning from morning till night, and the red reflection of the flame was trembling on the wall of the workshop as though it were silently mocking us.  The huge oven looked like the deformed head of a fairy-tale monster.  It looked as though it thrust itself out from underneath the floor, opened its wide mouth full of fire, and breathed on us with heat and stared at our endless work through the two black air-holes above the forehead.  These two cavities were like eyes—­pitiless and impassible eyes of a monster:  they stared at us with the same dark gaze, as though they had grown tired of looking at slaves, and expecting nothing human from them, despised them with the cold contempt of wisdom.  Day in and day out, amid flour-dust and mud and thick, bad-odored suffocating heat, we rolled out the dough and made biscuits, wetting them with our sweat, and we hated our work with keen hatred; we never ate the biscuit that came out of our hands, preferring black bread to the cracknels.  Sitting by a long table, one opposite the other—­nine opposite nine—­we mechanically moved our hands, and fingers during the long hours, and became so accustomed to our work that we no longer ever followed