by Maxim Gorky
Now, during their walks in the town, he was ready to stand for hours in front of a building in construction, observing how from a small thing it grew huge, rising towards the sky. His nostrils quivered as they took in the smell of the brick dust and lime. His eyes became clouded, as if covered with a film, and he seemed deeply engrossed in thought. When he was told that it was not the proper thing to stand in the street he did not hear.
“Let us go!” His sister would rouse him, taking his arm.
He lowered his head and walked on, but kept looking back over his shoulder.
“You will become an architect, won’t you?” she asked him repeatedly, trying to inculcate this idea in him.
“Yes.”
Once after dinner, while waiting for the coffee in the sitting-room, the father remarked that it was time for him to leave his toys and begin to study in real earnest, but the sister, speaking in a tone which indicated that her authority was recognised, and that her opinion too had to be reckoned with, said:
“I hope, papa, that you will not send him to school.”
The father, who was tall, clean-shaven and adorned with a large number of sparkling precious stones, replied, lighting his cigar:
“Why not?”
“You know why.”
As the conversation turned upon the hunchback he quietly walked out of the room; but he walked slowly and heard his sister say:
“They will jeer at him.”
“Yes, of course,” said the mother, in a low tone, which sounded as cheerless as the autumn wind.
“Boys such as he should be kept in the background,” his sister said fervently.
“Yes, he is nothing to be proud of,” said the mother. “There is not much sense in his little head.”
“Perhaps you are right,” the father agreed.
“No, there’s a lot of sense.”
The hunchback came back, stopped in the doorway and said:
“I am not a fool either.”
“We shall see,” said the father; and his mother remarked:
“No one thinks anything of the sort.”
“You will study at home,” declared his sister, making him sit down by her side.
“You will study everything that it is necessary for an architect to know. Would you like that?”
“Yes, you will see.”
“What shall I see?”
“What I like.”
She was slightly taller than he, about half a head, but she domineered over everybody, even her father and mother. At that time she was fifteen; he resembled a crab, but she was slim and straight and strong and seemed to him a fairy, under whose power the whole house lived—even he, the little hunchback.
Polite, formal people came to him, explaining things and putting questions to him. But he confessed frankly that he did not understand what they were trying to teach him, and would look in an absent-minded way past his instructors, preoccupied with his own thoughts. It was clear to everybody that he took no interest in ordinary things. He spoke little, but sometimes he asked strange questions.
“What happens to those who don’t want to do anything at all?”
The well-trained tutor, in his tightly buttoned black frock-coat—he resembled at once a priest and a soldier—replied: “Everything bad happens to such people, anything that you can imagine. For instance, many of them become socialists.”
“Thank you,” said the hunchback. His attitude towards his teachers was always correct and reserved, like that of an adult. “And what is a socialist?” “At best he is a dreamer and a lazy fellow—a moral freak who is deprived of all idea of God, property and nationality.”
The teachers always replied briefly and to the point. Their answers fixed themselves in one’s memory as tightly as if they were the stones of a pavement.
“Can an old woman also be a moral freak?”
“Of course in their midst——”
“And girls too?”
“Yes, it is an inborn quality.”
The teachers said of him:
“He has little capacity for mathematics, but he shows great interest in moral questions.”
“You speak too much,” said his sister to him on hearing of his talks with the tutors.
“They talk more than I do.”
“You pray very little to God.”
“He won’t set my hump right.”
“Oh, is that how you are beginning to think!” exclaimed his sister in astonishment; and she warned him:
“I will excuse you this time, but don’t entertain such thoughts again. Do you hear?”
“Yes.”
She already wore long dresses; he was then just thirteen.
And now a number of annoyances began to fall to her lot: almost every time she entered her brother’s work-room, boards and tools and blocks of all sorts fell at her feet, grazing her shoulder, her head, or hurting her hands. The hunchback always cautioned her by a cry of:
“Look out!”
But he was always too slow and the damage was done. Once, limping slightly, pale and very angry, she sprang at him, and shouted in his face:
“You do all this purposely, you freak,” and she struck him in the face.
His legs were weak, he fell down, and, as he sat on the floor, quietly, without tears and without complaining, he said to her:
“How can you think that? You love me, don’t you? Do you love me?”
She ran away groaning. Presently she came back.
“You see this never happened formerly,” she explained.
“Nor this,” he quietly remarked, making a wide circle with his long hand: in the corners of the room boards and boxes were heaped up; everything was in confusion; there were piles of wood on the carpenter’s and turner’s benches which stood against the wall.
“Why have you brought in all this rubbish?” she asked, looking doubtfully and squeamishly around.
“You will see.”
He had begun to build, he had made a little rabbit hutch and a dog kennel. He was planning a rat-trap. His sister followed his work with interest and at table spoke proudly to his mother and father about it. His father, nodding his head approvingly, said:
“Everything springs from small beginnings and everything begins like that.”
And his mother, embracing her, said to her son:
“You don’t realise how much you owe to her care of you.”
“Yes, I do,” replied the hunchback.
When he had finished the rat-trap he asked his sister into his room and showed her the clumsy contrivance, saying:
“This is not a toy, mind you, and we can take out a patent for it. See how simple and strong it is; touch it here.”
The girl touched it; something snapped and she screamed wildly; but the hunchback, dancing around her, muttered:
“Oh, not that, not that.”
His mother ran up, and the servants came; they broke the rat-trap, and freed the girl’s finger, which had turned quite blue. They carried her away fainting, and the boy’s mother said to him:
“I will have everything thrown away. I forbid you.”
At night he was asked to go to his sister, who said to him:
“You did it purposely. You hate me. What for?”
Moving his hunch he said quietly and calmly:
“You touched it with the wrong hand.”
“That’s a lie.”
“But why should I hurt your hand? It is not even the hand you hit me with.”
“Look out, you freak, I’ll pay you out.”
“I know.”
There were no signs that he pitied his sister or looked upon himself as being to blame for her misfortune. His angular face was as calm as it always was, the expression of his eyes was serious and steady—it was impossible to believe th
at he could lie or be actuated by malice.
After that she did not go so often to his room. She was visited by her friends, chattering girls in bright coloured dresses, as noisy as so many crickets. They brought a welcome note of colour and gaiety to the large rooms, which were rather cold and gloomy—the pictures, the statues, the flowers, the gilt, everything seemed warmer in their presence. Sometimes his sister took them to his room. They affectedly held out their little pink-nailed fingers, taking his hand gingerly as if they were afraid of breaking it. They talked to him very nicely and pleasantly, looking a little astonished, but showing no particular interest in the little hunchback, busy in the midst of tools, drawings, pieces of wood and shavings. He knew that the girls called him “the inventor.” His sister had impressed this idea upon them and told them that in the future something might be expected of him which would make the name of his father famous. His sister spoke of this with conviction.
“Of course he is ugly, but he is very clever,” she reminded them very often.
She was nineteen years old, and had a sweetheart, when her father and mother both perished at sea. The yacht in which they were taking a pleasure trip was run down and sunk by an American cargo boat in charge of a drunken helmsman. She was to have accompanied them, but a sudden toothache had prevented her going.
When the news came of her father’s and mother’s death she forgot her tooth-ache, and rushed about the room throwing up her arms and crying:
“No, no; it cannot be.”
The hunchback stood at the door and, wrapping the portiere round him, looked at her closely and said, shaking his hunch:
“Father was so round and hollow; I don’t see how he could be drowned.”
“Be quiet; you do not love anybody!” shouted his sister.
“I simply cannot say nice words,” he replied.
The father’s corpse was never found, but the mother had been killed in the moment of the collision. Her body was recovered and laid in a coffin, looking as lean and brittle as the dead branch of an old tree—just as she had looked when she was alive.
“Now you and I are left alone,” the sister said to her brother sternly, but in a mournful voice, after the mother’s funeral; and the cold look in her grey eyes daunted him. “It will be hard for us: we are ignorant of the world and may lose much. What a pity it is that I cannot get married at once.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the hunchback.
“What do you mean by ‘Oh’?”
He said, after thinking a while:
“We are alone.”
“You seem to speak as if you rejoiced at it.”
“I do not rejoice at anything.”
“What a pity it is you are so little like a man.”
In the evenings her lover came—an active little man, with white eyebrows and eyelashes, and a round sunburnt face relieved by a woolly moustache. He laughed continuously the whole evening, and probably could have laughed the whole day long. They were already engaged, and a new house was being built for them in one of the best streets of the town, the cleanest and the quietest. The hunchback had never seen this building and did not like to hear others talk of it. One day the fiancé slapped him on the shoulder with his plump and much beringed little hand, and said, showing a great number of tiny teeth:
“You ought to come and look over it, eh? What do you say?”
He refused for a long time under different pretexts, but at last he gave way and went with him and his sister. The two men climbed to the top storey of the scaffolding and then fell. The fiancé dropped plump to the ground into the lime-pit, but the brother, whose clothes got caught in the scaffolding, hung in mid-air and was rescued by the workmen. He had no worse than a dislocated leg and wrist and a badly bruised face. The fiancé, on the other hand, broke his back and was severely gashed in the side.
The sister fell into convulsions, and tore at the ground with her hands, raising little clouds of white dust. She wept almost continuously for more than a month and then became like her mother. She grew thin and haggard, and began to speak in a cold, expressionless voice.
“You are my misfortune,” she said.
He answered nothing, but kept his large eyes bent upon the ground. His sister dressed herself in black, made her eyebrows meet in a line, and whenever she met her brother clenched her teeth so that her jaw-bones made sharp angles. He, on his part, tried to avoid meeting her eye and was for ever busy planning and designing, alone in silence. So he lived till he was of age, and then began between them an open struggle to which their whole life was given, a struggle which bound them to each other by the strong links of mutual insults and offences.
On the day of his coming of age he said to her in the tone of an elder brother:
“There are no wise wizards, and no kind fairies. There are only men and women, some of them wicked, others stupid, and everything that is said about goodness is a myth. But I want the myth to become a reality. Do you remember saying, ‘In a rich house everything should be beautiful and smart’? In a rich town also everything should be beautiful. I am buying some land outside the town and am going to build a house there for myself and for freaks like me. I shall take them out of the town, where their life is almost unendurable and where it is unpleasant for people like you to look upon them.”
“No,” she said; “you certainly will not do that. It is a crazy idea.”
“It is your idea.”
They disputed about it in the coldly hostile manner in which two people dispute who hate each other bitterly, and have no need to disguise their hatred.
“It is decided,” he said.
“Not by me,” his sister replied.
He raised his hunch and went off; and soon after his sister discovered that the land had been bought and, what was more, that workmen were already digging trenches for the foundation; that tens of thousands of bricks were being carted, and stones and iron and wood.
“Do you think you are still a boy?” she asked. “Do you think it is a game?”
He made no answer.
Once a week his sister, lean and straight and proud, drove into the town in her little carriage drawn by a white horse. She drove slowly past the spot where the work was proceeding and looked coldly at the red bricks, like little chunks of meat, held in place by a framework of iron girders; yellow wood was being fitted into the ponderous mass like a network of nerves. She saw in the distance her brother’s crab-like figure. He crawled about the scaffolding, stick in hand, a crumpled hat upon his head. He was covered with dust and looked like a grey spider. At home she gazed intently at his excited face and into his dark eyes, which had become softer and clearer.
“No,” he said quietly to himself, “I have hit upon an idea: it should be equally good for all concerned! It is wonderful work to build, and it seems to me that I shall soon consider myself a happy man.”
“Happy?” she asked wonderingly, measuring with her eyes the hunchback’s body.
“Yes, you know people who work are quite unlike us, they awaken new thoughts in one.… How good it must be to be a bricklayer walking through the streets of a town where he has built dozens of houses. There are many socialists among the workers—steady, sober fellows, first of all. Truly they have their own sense of dignity.… Sometimes it seems to me that we don’t understand our people.”
“You are talking strangely,” she said.
The hunchback was becoming animated, getting more and more talkative every day.
“In reality everything is turning out as you wished it: I am becoming a wise wizard who frees the town from freaks. You could be a good fairy if you wished. Why don’t you help me?”
“We will speak about it later,” she said, playing with her gold watch-chain.
Once he spoke out in a language quite unfamiliar to her:
“Maybe I have wronged you more than you have wronged me.”
She was astonished.
“I wronged you?”
“Wait a minute. Upon my word of honour I am not as guilty as you think. I walk badly. I may have pushed him, but there was no malicious intention. No, believe me. I am more guilty of having wanted to injure your hand, the hand you hit me with.”
“Don’t let us speak about that,” she said.
“It seems to me one ought to be kinder,” muttered the hunchback. “I think that goodness is not a myth—it is possible.”
The big building in the town grew rapidly; it had spread over the rich soil and was rising towards the sky, which was always grey, always threatening with rain.
Once a little group of officials came to the place where the work was proceeding. They examined the building and, after talking quietly among themselves, gave orders to stop the work.
“You have done this,” exclaimed the hunchback, rushing at his sister and clutching her throat with his long, nervous hands; but some men ran up and pulled him away from her. The sister said to them:
“You see, gentlemen, he is really abnormal, and must be looked after. This sort of thing began immediately after the death of his father, whom he loved passionately. Ask the servants: they all know of his illness. They kept silence until latterly, these good people; the honour of the house where many of them have lived since their childhood is dear to them. I also tried to hide our misfortune. An insane brother is not a thing to be proud of.”
His face turned purple and his eyes started out of their sockets as he listened to this speech. He was dumbfounded, and silently scratched with his nails the hands of those who held him while she continued:
“This house was a ruinous enterprise. I intend to give it to the town, in the name of my father, as an asylum for insane people.”
He shrieked, lost consciousness and was carried away.
His sister continued the building with the same speed with which he had been conducting it, and when the house was finished, the first patient who went into it was her brother. Seven years he spent there—ample time for him to develop melancholia and become an imbecile. His sister turned old in the meantime. She lost all hope of ever becoming a mother, and when at last she saw that he was vanquished and would not rise against her she took him under her care.
