by Maxim Gorky
Once Yakob rose and said:
“Wait a moment, please.” He ran into the shack and brought out wraps. With Ignaty’s help he folded them about the shoulders and feet of the women.
And again Sofya spoke, picturing the day of victory, inspiring people with faith in their power, arousing in them a consciousness of their oneness with all who give away their lives to barren toil for the amusement of the satiated.
At break of dawn, exhausted, she grew silent, and smiling she looked around at the thoughtful, illumined faces.
“It’s time for us to go,” said the mother.
“Yes, it’s time,” said Sofya wearily.
Some one breathed a noisy sigh.
“I am sorry you’re going,” said Rybin in an unusually mild tone. “You speak well. This great cause will unite people. When you know that millions want the same as you do, your heart becomes better, and in goodness there is great power.”
“You offer goodness, and get the stake in return,” said Yefim with a low laugh, and quickly jumped to his feet. “But they ought to go, Uncle Mikhaïl, before anybody sees them. We’ll distribute the books among the people; the authorities will begin to wonder where they came from; then some one will remember having seen the pilgrims here.”
“Well, thank you, mother, for your trouble,” said Rybin, interrupting Yefim. “I always think of Pavel when I look at you, and you’ve gone the right way.”
He stood before the mother, softened, with a broad, good-natured smile on his face. The atmosphere was raw, but he wore only one shirt, his collar was unbuttoned, and his breast was bared low. The mother looked at his large figure, and smiling also, advised:
“You’d better put on something; it’s cold.”
“There’s a fire inside of me.”
The three young men standing at the burning pile conversed in a low voice. At their feet the sick man lay as if dead, covered with the short fur coats. The sky paled, the shadows dissolved, the leaves shivered softly, awaiting the sun.
“Well, then, we must say good-by,” said Rybin, pressing Sofya’s hand. “How are you to be found in the city?”
“You must look for me,” said the mother.
The young men in a close group walked up to Sofya, and silently pressed her hand with awkward kindness. In each of them was evident grateful and friendly satisfaction, though they attempted to conceal the feeling which apparently embarrassed them by its novelty. Smiling with eyes dry with the sleepless night, they looked in silence into Sofya’s eyes, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Won’t you drink some milk before you go?” asked Yakob.
“Is there any?” queried Yefim.
“There’s a little.”
Ignaty, stroking his hair in confusion, announced:
“No, there isn’t; I spilled it.”
All three laughed. They spoke about milk, but the mother and Sofya felt that they were thinking of something else, and without words were wishing them well. This touched Sofya, and produced in her, too, embarrassment and modest reserve, which prevented her from saying anything more than a quiet and warm “Thank you, comrades.”
They exchanged glances, as if the word “comrade” had given them a mild shock. The dull cough of the sick man was heard. The embers of the burning woodpile died out.
“Good-by,” the peasants said in subdued tones; and the sad word rang in the women’s ears a long time.
They walked without haste, in the twilight of the dawn, along the wood path. The mother striding behind Sofya said:
“All this is good, just as in a dream—so good! People want to know the truth, my dear; yes, they want to know the truth. It’s like being in a church on the morning of a great holiday, when the priest has not yet arrived, and it’s dark and quiet; then it’s raw, and the people are already gathering. Here the candles are lighted before the images, and there the lamps are lighted; and little by little, they drive away the darkness, illumining the House of God.”
“True,” answered Sofya. “Only here the House of God is the whole earth.”
“The whole earth,” the mother repeated, shaking her head thoughtfully. “It’s so good that it’s hard to believe.”
They walked and talked about Rybin, about the sick man, about the young peasants who were so attentively silent, and who so awkwardly but eloquently expressed a feeling of grateful friendship by little attentions to the women. They came out into the open field; the sun rose to meet them. As yet invisible, he spread out over the sky a transparent fan of rosy rays, and the dewdrops in the grass glittered with the many-colored gems of brave spring joy. The birds awoke fresh from their slumber, vivifying the morning with their merry, impetuous voices. The crows flew about croaking, and flapping their wings heavily. The black rooks jumped about in the winter wheat, conversing in abrupt accents. Somewhere the orioles whistled mournfully, a note of alarm in their song. The larks sang, soaring up to meet the sun. The distance opened up, the nocturnal shadows lifting from the hills.
“Sometimes a man will speak and speak to you, and you won’t understand him until he succeeds in telling you some simple word; and this one word will suddenly lighten up everything,” the mother said thoughtfully. “There’s that sick man, for instance; I’ve heard and known myself how the workingmen in the factories and everywhere are squeezed; but you get used to it from childhood on, and it doesn’t touch your heart much. But he suddenly tells you such an outrageous, vile thing! O Lord! Can it be that people give their whole lives away to work in order that the masters may permit themselves pleasure? That’s without justification.”
The thoughts of the mother were arrested by this fact. Its dull, impudent gleam threw light upon a series of similar facts, at one time known to her, but now forgotten.
“It’s evident that they are satiated with everything. I know one country officer who compelled the peasants to salute his horse when it was led through the village; and he arrested everyone who failed to salute it. Now, what need had he of that? It’s impossible to understand.” After a pause she sighed: “The poor people are stupid from poverty, and the rich from greed.”
Sofya began to hum a song bold as the morning.
CHAPTER V
The life of Nilovna flowed on with strange placidity. This calmness sometimes astonished her. There was her son immured in prison. She knew that a severe sentence awaited him, yet every time the idea of it came to her mind her thoughts strayed to Andrey, Fedya, and an endless series of other people she had never seen, but only heard of. The figure of her son appeared to her absorbing all the people into his own destiny. The contemplative feeling aroused in her involuntarily and unnoticeably diverted her inward gaze away from him to all sides. Like thin, uneven rays it touched upon everything, tried to throw light everywhere, and make one picture of the whole. Her mind was hindered from dwelling upon some one thing.
Sofya soon went off somewhere, and reappeared in about five days, merry and vivacious. Then, in a few hours, she vanished again, and returned within a couple of weeks. It seemed as if she were borne along in life in wide circles.
Nikolay, always occupied, lived a monotonous, methodical existence. At eight o’clock in the morning he drank tea, read the newspapers, and recounted the news to the mother. He repeated the speeches of the merchants in the Douma without malice, and clearly depicted the life in the city.
Listening to him the mother saw with transparent clearness the mechanism of this life pitilessly grinding the people in the millstones of money. At nine o’clock he went off to the office.
She tidied the rooms, prepared dinner, washed herself, put on a clean dress, and then sat in her room to examine the pictures and the books. She had already learned to read, but the effort of reading quickly exhausted her; and she ceased to understand the meaning of the words. But the pictures were a constant astonishment to her. They opened up before her a clear,
almost tangible world of new and marvelous things. Huge cities arose before her, beautiful structures, machines, ships, monuments, and infinite wealth, created by the people, overwhelming the mind by the variety of nature’s products. Life widened endlessly; each day brought some new, huge wonders. The awakened hungry soul of the woman was more and more strongly aroused to the multitude of riches in the world, its countless beauties. She especially loved to look through the great folios of the zoölogical atlas, and although the text was written in a foreign language, it gave her the clearest conception of the beauty, wealth, and vastness of the earth.
“It’s an immense world,” she said to Nikolay at dinner.
“Yes, and yet the people are crowded for space.”
The insects, particularly the butterflies, astonished her most.
“What beauty, Nikolay Ivanovich,” she observed. “And how much of this fascinating beauty there is everywhere, but all covered up from us; it all flies by without our seeing it. People toss about, they know nothing, they are unable to take delight in anything, they have no inclination for it. How many could take happiness to themselves if they knew how rich the earth is, how many wonderful things live in it!”
Nikolay listened to her raptures, smiled, and brought her new illustrated books.
In the evening visitors often gathered in his house—Alexey Vasilyevich, a handsome man, pale-faced, black-bearded, sedate, and taciturn; Roman Petrovich, a pimply, round-headed individual always smacking his lips regretfully; Ivan Danilovich, a short, lean fellow with a pointed beard and thin hair, impetuous, vociferous, and sharp as an awl, and Yegor, always joking with his comrades about his sickness. Sometimes other people were present who had come from various distant cities. The long conversations always turned on one and the same thing, on the working people of the world. The comrades discussed the workingmen, got into arguments about them, became heated, waved their hands, and drank much tea; while Nikolay, in the noise of the conversation, silently composed proclamations. Then he read them to the comrades, who copied them on the spot in printed letters. The mother carefully collected the pieces of the torn, rough copies, and burned them.
She poured out tea for them, and wondered at the warmth with which they discussed life and the working-people, the means whereby to sow truth among them the sooner and the better, and how to elevate their spirit. These problems were always agitating the comrades; their lives revolved about them. Often they angrily disagreed, blamed one another for something, got offended, and again discussed.
The mother felt that she knew the life of the workingmen better than these people, and saw more clearly than they the enormity of the task they assumed. She could look upon them with the somewhat melancholy indulgence of a grown-up person toward children who play man and wife without understanding the drama of the relation.
Sometimes Sashenka came. She never stayed long, and always spoke in a businesslike way without smiling. She did not once fail to ask on leaving how Pavel Mikhaylovich was.
“Is he well?” she would ask.
“Thank God! So, so. He’s in good spirits.”
“Give him my regards,” the girl would request, and then disappear.
Sometimes the mother complained to Sashenka because Pavel was detained so long and no date was yet set for his trial. Sashenka looked gloomy, and maintained silence, her fingers twitching. Nilovna was tempted to say to her: “My dear girl, why, I know you love him, I know.” But Sashenka’s austere face, her compressed lips, and her dry, businesslike manner, which seemed to betoken a desire for silence as soon as possible, forbade any demonstration of sentiment. With a sigh the mother mutely clasped the hand that the girl extended to her, and thought: “My unhappy girl!”
Once Natasha came. She showed great delight at seeing the mother, kissed her, and among other things announced to her quietly, as if she had just thought of the thing:
“My mother died. Poor woman, she’s dead!” She wiped her eyes with a rapid gesture of her hands, and continued: “I’m sorry for her. She was not yet fifty. She had a long life before her still. But when you look at it from the other side you can’t help thinking that death is easier than such a life—always alone, a stranger to everybody, needed by no one, scared by the shouts of my father. Can you call that living? People live waiting for something good, and she had nothing to expect except insults.”
“You’re right, Natasha,” said the mother musingly. “People live expecting some good, and if there’s nothing to expect, what sort of a life is it?” Kindly stroking Natasha’s hand, she asked: “So you’re alone now?”
“Alone!” the girl rejoined lightly.
The mother was silent, then suddenly remarked with a smile:
“Never mind! A good person does not live alone. People will always attach themselves to a good person.”
Natasha was now a teacher in a little town where there was a textile mill, and Nilovna occasionally procured illegal books, proclamations, and newspapers for her. The distribution of literature, in fact, became the mother’s occupation. Several times a month, dressed as a nun or as a peddler of laces or small linen articles, as a rich merchant’s wife or a religious pilgrim, she rode or walked about with a sack on her back, or a valise in her hand. Everywhere, in the train, in the steamers, in hotels and inns, she behaved simply and unobtrusively. She was the first to enter into conversations with strangers, fearlessly drawing attention to herself by her kind, sociable talk and the confident manner of an experienced person who has seen and heard much.
She liked to speak to people, liked to listen to their stories of life, their complaints, their perplexities, and lamentations. Her heart was bathed in joy each time she noticed in anybody poignant discontent with life, that discontent which, protesting against the blows of fate, earnestly seeks to find an answer to its questions. Before her the picture of human life unrolled itself ever wider and more varicolored, that restless, anxious life passed in the struggle to fill the stomach. Everywhere she clearly saw the coarse, bare striving, insolent in its openness, deceiving man, robbing him, pressing out of him as much sap as possible, draining him of his very life-blood. She realized that there was plenty of everything upon earth, but that the people were in want, and lived half starved, surrounded by inexhaustible wealth. In the cities stood churches filled with gold and silver, not needed by God, and at the entrance to the churches shivered the beggars vainly awaiting a little copper coin to be thrust into their hands. Formerly she had seen this, too—rich churches, priestly vestments sewed with gold threads, and the hovels of the poor, their ignominious rags. But at that time the thing had seemed natural; now the contrast was irreconcilable and insulting to the poor, to whom, she knew, the churches were both nearer and more necessary than to the rich.
From the pictures and stories of Christ, she knew also that he was a friend of the poor, that he dressed simply. But in the churches, where poverty came to him for consolation, she saw him nailed to the cross with insolent gold, she saw silks and satins flaunting in the face of want. The words of Rybin occurred to her: “They have mutilated even our God for us, they have turned everything in their hands against us. In the churches they set up a scarecrow before us. They have dressed God up in falsehood and calumny; they have distorted His face in order to destroy our souls!”
Without being herself aware of it, she prayed less; yet, at the same time, she meditated more and more upon Christ and the people who, without mentioning his name, as though ignorant of him, lived, it seemed to her, according to his will, and, like him, regarded the earth as the kingdom of the poor, and wanted to divide all the wealth of the earth among the poor. Her reflections grew in her soul, deepening and embracing everything she saw and heard. They grew and assumed the bright aspect of a prayer, suffusing an even glow over the entire dark world, the whole of life, and all people.
And it seemed to her that Christ himself, whom she had always loved with a perplexed lo
ve, with a complicated feeling in which fear was closely bound up with hope, and joyful emotion with melancholy, now came nearer to her, and was different from what he had been. His position was loftier, and he was more clearly visible to her. His aspect turned brighter and more cheerful. Now his eyes smiled on her with assurance, and with a live inward power, as if he had in reality risen to life for mankind, washed and vivified by the hot blood lavishly shed in his name. Yet those who had lost their blood modestly refrained from mentioning the name of the unfortunate friend of the people.
The mother always returned to Nikolay from her travels delightfully exhilarated by what she had seen and heard on the road, bold and satisfied with the work she had accomplished.
“It’s good to go everywhere, and to see much,” she said to Nikolay in the evening. “You understand how life is arranged. They brush the people aside and fling them to the edge. The people, hurt and wounded, keep moving about, even though they don’t want to, and though they keep thinking: ‘What for? Why do they drive us away? Why must we go hungry when there is so much of everything? And how much intellect there is everywhere! Nevertheless, we must remain in stupidity and darkness. And where is He, the merciful God, in whose eyes there are no rich nor poor, but all are children dear to His heart.’ The people are gradually revolting against this life. They feel that untruth will stifle them if they don’t take thought of themselves.”
And in her leisure hours she sat down to the books, and again looked over the pictures, each time finding something new, ever widening the panorama of life before her eyes, unfolding the beauties of nature and the vigorous creative capacity of man. Nikolay often found her poring over the pictures. He would smile and always tell her something wonderful. Struck by man’s daring, she would ask him incredulously, “Is it possible?”
