by Maxim Gorky
“You go about worse than a beggar. You put me to shame,” grumbled grandfather.
“What does it matter to you? I am not your daughter. I am not looking for a husband.”
Their quarrels had become more frequent.
“I am not more sinful than others,” cried grandfather in injured tones, “but my punishment is greater.”
Grandmother used to tease him.
“The devils know what every one is worth.” And she would say to me privately: “My old man is frightened of devils. See how quickly he is aging! It is all from fear; eh, poor man!”
I had become very hardy during the summer, and quite savage through living in the forest, and I had lost all interest in the life of my contemporaries, such as Ludmilla. She seemed to me to be tiresomely sensible.
One day grandfather returned from the town very wet. It was autumn, and the rains were falling. Shaking himself on the threshold like a sparrow, he said triumphantly:
“Well, young rascal, you are going to a new situation to-morrow.”
“Where now?” asked grandmother, angrily.
“To your sister Matrena, to her son.”
“O Father, you have done very wrong.”
“Hold your tongue, fool! They will make a man of him.”
Grandmother let her head droop and said nothing more.
In the evening I told Ludmilla that I was going to live in the town.
“They are going to take me there soon,” she informed me, thoughtfully. “Papa wants my leg to be taken off altogether. Without it I should get well.”
She had grown very thin during the summer; the skin of her face had assumed a bluish tint, and her eyes had grown larger.
“Are you afraid?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she replied, and wept silently.
I had no means of consoling her, for I was frightened myself at the prospect of life in town. We sat for a long time in painful silence, pressed close against each other. If it had been summer, I should have asked grandmother to come begging with me, as she had done when she was a girl. We might have taken Ludmilla with us; I could have drawn her along in a little cart. But it was autumn. A damp wind blew up the streets, the sky was heavy with rain-clouds, the earth frowned. It had begun to look dirty and unhappy.
CHAPTER IV
Once more I was in the town, in a two-storied white house which reminded me of a coffin meant to hold a lot of people. It was a new house, but it looked as if were in ill health, and was bloated like a beggar who has suddenly become rich and has overeaten. It stood sidewise to the street, and had eight windows to each floor, but where the face of the house ought to have been there were only four windows. The lower windows looked on a narrow passage and on the yard, and the upper windows on the laundress’s little house and the causeway.
No street, as I understood the term, existed. In front of the house a dirty causeway ran in two directions, cut in two by a narrow dike. To the left, it extended to the House of Detention, and was heaped with rubbish and logs, and at the bottom stood a thick pool of dark-green filth. On the right, at the end of the causeway, the slimy Xvyexdin Pond stagnated. The middle of the causeway was exactly opposite the house, and half of it was strewn with filth and overgrown with nettles and horse sorrel, while in the other half the priest Doriedont Pokrovski had planted a garden in which was a summer-house of thin lathes painted red. If one threw stones at it, the lathes split with a crackling sound.
The place was intolerably depressing and shamelessly dirty. The autumn had ruthlessly broken up the filthy, rotten earth, changing it into a sort of red resin which clung to one’s feet tenaciously. I had never seen so much dirt in so small a space before, and after being accustomed to the cleanliness of the fields and forests, this corner of the town aroused my disgust.
Beyond the causeway stretched gray, broken-down fences, and in the distance I recognized the little house in which I had lived when I was shop-boy. The nearness of that house depressed me still more. I had known my master before; he and his brother used to be among mother’s visitors. His brother it was who had sung so comically:
“Andrei—papa, Andrei—papa—”
They were not changed. The elder, with a hook nose and long hair, was pleasant in manner and seemed to be kind; the younger, Victor, had the same horse-like face and the same freckles. Their mother, grandmother’s sister, was very cross and fault-finding. The elder son was married. His wife was a splendid creature, white like bread made from Indian corn, with very large, dark eyes. She said to me twice during the first day:
“I gave your mother a silk cloak trimmed with jet.”
Somehow I did not want to believe that she had given, and that my mother had accepted, a present. When she reminded me of it again, I said:
“You gave it to her, and that is the end of the matter; there is nothing to boast about.”
She started away from me.
“Wh-a-at? To whom are you speaking?”
Her face came out in red blotches, her eyes rolled, and she called her husband.
He came into the kitchen, with his compasses in his hand and a pencil behind his ear, listened to what his wife had to say, and then said to me:
“You must speak properly to her and to us all. There must be no insolence.” Then he said to his wife, impatiently, “Don’t disturb me with your nonsense!”
“What do you mean—nonsense? If your relatives—”
“The devil take my relatives!” cried the master, rushing away.
I myself was not pleased to think that they were relatives of grandmother. Experience had taught me that relatives behave worse to one another than do strangers. Their gossip is more spiteful, since they know more of the bad and ridiculous sides of one another than strangers, and they fall out and fight more often.
I liked my master. He used to shake back his hair with a graceful movement, and tuck it behind his ears, and he reminded me somehow of “Good Business.” He often laughed merrily; his gray eyes looked kindly upon me, and funny wrinkles played divertingly about his aquiline nose.
“You have abused each other long enough, wild fowl,” he would say to his mother and his wife, showing his small, closely set teeth in a gentle smile.
The mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law abused each other all day. I was surprised to see how swiftly and easily they plunged into a quarrel. The first thing in the morning, with their hair unbrushed and their clothes unfastened, they would rush about the rooms as if the house were on fire, and they fussed about all day, only pausing to take breath in the dining-room at dinner, tea, or supper. They ate and drank till they could eat and drink no more, and at dinner they talked about the food and disputed lethargically, preparing for a big quarrel. No matter what it was that the mother-in-law had prepared, the daughter-in-law was sure to say:
“My mother did not cook it this way.”
“Well, if that is so, she did it badly, that’s all.” “On the contrary, she did it better.”
“Well, you had better go back to your mother.”
“I am mistress here.”
“And who am I?”
Here the master would intervene.
“That will do, wild fowl! What is the matter with you? Are you mad?”
For some inexplicable reason everything about that house was peculiar and mirth-provoking. The way from the kitchen to the dining-room lay through a small closet, the only one in the house, through which they carried the samovar and the food into the dining-room. It was the cause of merry witticisms and often of laughable misunderstandings. I slept in the kitchen, between that door and the one leading to the stairs. My head was hot from the heat of the cooking-stove, but the draft from the stairs blew on my feet. When I retired to bed, I used to take all the mats off the floor and wrap them round my feet.
The large reception-room, with its two pier-glasse
s, its pictures in gilt frames, its pair of card-tables, and its dozen Vienna chairs, was a dreary, depressing place. The small drawing-room was simply packed with a medley of soft furniture, with wedding presents, silver articles, and a tea-service. It was adorned with three lamps, one larger than the other two.
In the dark, windowless bedroom, in addition to the wide bed, there were trunks and cupboards from which came the odors of leaf tobacco and Persian camomile. These three rooms were always unoccupied, while the entire household squeezed itself into the little dining-room. Directly after breakfast, at eight o’clock, the master and his brother moved the table, and, laying sheets of white paper upon it, with cases, pencils, and saucers containing Indian ink, set to work, one at each end of the table. The table was shaky, and took up nearly the whole of the room, and when the mistress and the nurse came out of the nursery they had to brush past the corners.
“Don’t come fussing about here!” Victor would cry.
“Vassia, please tell him not to shout at me,” the mistress would say to her husband in an offended tone.
“All right; but don’t come and shake the table,” her husband would reply peaceably.
“I am stout, and the room is so small.”
“Well, we will go and work in the large drawingroom.”
But at that she cried indignantly:
“Lord! why on earth should you work in the large drawing-room?”
At the door of the closet appeared the angry face of Matrena Ivanovna, flushed with the heat of the stove. She called out:
“You see how it is, Vassia? She knows that you are working, and yet she can’t be satisfied with the other four rooms.”
Victor laughed maliciously, but the master said: “That will do!”
And the daughter-in-law, with a venomously eloquent gesture, sank into a chair and groaned:
“I am dying! I am dying!”
“Don’t hinder my work, the devil take you!” roared the master, turning pale with the exertion. “This is nothing better than a mad-house. Here am I breaking my back to feed you. Oh, you wild fowl!”
At first these quarrels used to alarm me, especially when the mistress, seizing a table knife, rushed into the closet, and, shutting both the doors, began to shriek like a mad thing. For a minute the house was quiet, then the master, having tried to force the door, stooped down, and called out to me:
“Climb up on my back and unfasten the hook.”
I swiftly jumped on his back, and broke the pane of glass over the door; but when I bent down, the mistress hit me over the head with the blade of the knife. However, I succeeded in opening the door, and the master, dragging his wife into the dining-room after a struggle, took the knife away from her. As I sat in the kitchen rubbing my bruised head, I soon came to the conclusion that I had suffered for nothing. The knife was so blunt that it would hardly cut a piece of bread, and it would certainly never have made an incision in any one’s skin. Besides, there had been no need for me to climb on the master’s back. I could have broken the glass by standing on a chair, and in any case it would have been easier for a grown person to have unfastened the hook, since his arms would have been longer. After that episode the quarrels in the house ceased to alarm me.
The brothers used to sing in the church choir; sometimes they used to sing softly over their work. The elder would begin in a baritone:
“The ring, which was the maiden’s heart,
I cast from me into the sea.”
And the younger would join with his tenor:
“And I with that very ring
Her earthly joy did ruin.”
The mistress would murmur from the nursery:
“Have you gone out of your minds? Baby is asleep,” or: “How can you, Vassia, a married man, be singing about girls? Besides, the bell will ring for vespers in a minute.”
“What’s the matter now? We are only singing a church tune.”
But the mistress intimated that it was out of place to sing church tunes here, there, and everywhere. Besides, and she pointed eloquently to the little door.
“We shall have to change our quarters, or the devil knows what will become of us,” said the master.
He said just as often that he must get another table, and he said it for three years in succession.
When I listened to my employers talking about people, I was always reminded of the boot-shop. They used to talk in the same way there. It was evident to me that my present masters also thought themselves better than any one in the town. They knew the rules of correct conduct to the minutest detail, and, guided by these rules, which were not at all clear to me, they judged others pitilessly and unsparingly. This sitting in judgment aroused in me a ferocious resentment and anger against the laws of my employers, and the breaking of those laws became a source of pleasure to me.
I had a lot of work to do. I fulfilled all the duties of a housemaid, washed the kitchen over on Wednesday, cleaning the samovar and all the copper vessels, and on Saturday cleaned the floor of the rest of the house and both staircases. I had to chop and bring in the wood for the stoves, wash up, prepare vegetables for cooking, and go marketing with the mistress, carrying her basket of purchases after her, besides running errands to the shops and to the chemist.
My real mistress, grandmother’s sister, a noisy, indomitable, implacably fierce old woman, rose early at six o’clock, and after washing herself in a hurry, knelt before the icon with only her chemise on, and complained long to God about her life, her children, and her daughter-in-law.
“Lord,” she would exclaim, with tears in her voice, pressing her two first fingers and her thumbs against her forehead—“Lord, I ask nothing, I want nothing; only give me rest and peace, Lord, by Thy power!”
Her sobs used to wake me up, and, half asleep, I used to peep from under the blanket, and listen with terror to her passionate prayers. The autumn morning looked dimly in at the kitchen window through panes washed by the rain. On the floor in the cold twilight her gray figure swayed from side to side; she waved her arms alarmingly. Her thin, light hair fell from her small head upon her neck and shoulders from under the swathing handkerchief, which kept slipping off. She would replace it angrily with her left hand, muttering “Oh, bother you!”
Striking her forehead with force, beating her breast and her shoulders, she would wail:
“And my daughter-in-law—punish her, O Lord, on my account! Make her pay for all that she has made me suffer! And open the eyes of my son—open his eyes and Victor’s! Lord, help Victor; be merciful to him!”
Victorushka also slept in the kitchen, and, hearing the groans of his mother, would cry in a sleepy voice:
“Mamasha, you are funning down the young wife again. It is really dreadful.”
“All right; go to sleep,” the old woman would whisper guiltily. She would be silent for a minute perhaps, and then she would begin to murmur vindictively, “May their bones be broken, and may there be no shelter for them on earth, Lord!”
Even grandfather had never prayed so terribly.
When she had said her prayers she used to wake me up.
“Wake up! You will never get on if you do not get up early. Get the samovar ready! Bring the wood in! Didn’t you get the sticks ready over night?”
I tried to be quick in order to escape hearing the frothy whisper of the old woman, but it was impossible to please her. She went about the kitchen like a winter snow-storm, hissing:
“Not so much noise, you little devil! Wake Victorushka up, and I will give you something! Now run along to the shop!”
On week-days I used to buy two pounds of wheaten bread and two copecks’ worth of rolls for the young mistress. When I brought it in, the women would look at it suspiciously, and, weighing it in the palms of their hands, would ask;
“Wasn’t there a make-weight? No? Open your mouth!” And then they would cr
y triumphantly: “He has gobbled up the make-weight; here are the crumbs in his teeth! You see, Vassia?”
I worked willingly enough. It pleased me to abolish dirt from the house, to wash the floors, to clean the copper vessels, the warm-holes, and the door-handles. More than once I heard the women remark about me in their peaceful moments:
“He is zealous.”
“And clean.”
“Only he is very impudent.”
“Well, Mother, who has educated him?”
They both tried to educate me to respect them, but I regarded them as half witted. I did not like them; I would not obey them, and I used to answer them back. The young mistress must have noticed what a bad effect their speeches had upon me, for she said with increasing frequency:
“You ought to remember from what a poor family you have been taken. I gave your mother a silk cloak trimmed with jet.”
One day I said to her:
“Do you want me to skin myself to pay for the cloak?”
“Good gracious!” she cried in a tone of alarm, “this boy is capable of setting fire to the place!”
I was extremely surprised. Why did she say that? They both complained to the master about me on this occasion, and he said to me sternly:
“Now, my boy, you had better look out.” But one day he said coolly to his wife and his mother: “You are a nice pair! You ride the boy as if he were a gelding! Any other boy would have run away long ago if you had not worked him to death first.”
This made the women so angry that they wept, and his wife stamped her foot, crying:
“How can you speak like that before him, you longhaired fool? What can I do with him after this? And in my state of health, too!”
The mother cried sadly:
“May God forgive you, Vassia Vassilich! Only, mark my words, you are spoiling that boy.”
When they had gone away raging, the master said to me sternly:
“You see, you little devil, what row’s you cause! I shall take you back to your grandfather, and you can be a rag-picker again.”
