Максим Горький
Mother
Next to Vlasova sat a little old woman with a wrinkled face, but youthful eyes. She kept her thin neck turned to listen to the conversation, and looked about on all sides with a strange expression of eagerness in her face.
"Whom have you here?" Vlasova asked softly.
"A son, a student," answered the old woman in a loud, brusque voice. "And you?"
"A son, also. A workingman."
"What's the name?"
"Vlasov."
"Never heard of him. How long has he been in prison?"
"Seven weeks."
"And mine has been in for ten months," said the old woman, with a strange note of pride in her voice which did not escape the notice of the mother.
A tall lady dressed in black, with a thin, pale face, said lingeringly:
"They'll soon put all the decent people in prison. They can't endure them, they loathe them!"
"Yes, yes!" said the little old bald man, speaking rapidly. "All patience is disappearing. Everybody is excited; everybody is clamoring, and prices are mounting higher and higher. As a consequence the value of men is depreciating. And there is not a single, conciliatory voice heard, not one!"
"Perfectly true!" said the retired military man. "It's monstrous! What's wanted is a voice, a firm voice to cry, 'Silence!' Yes, that's what we want – a firm voice!"
The conversation became more general and animated. Everybody was in a hurry to give his opinion about life; but all spoke in a half-subdued voice, and the mother noticed a tone of hostility in all, which was new to her. At home they spoke differently, more intelligibly, more simply, and more loudly.
The fat warden with a square red beard called out her name, looked her over from head to foot, and telling her to follow him, walked off limping. She followed him, and felt like pushing him to make him go faster. Pavel stood in a small room, and on seeing his mother smiled and put out his hand to her. She grasped it, laughed, blinked swiftly, and at a loss for words merely asked softly:
"How are you? How are you?"
"Compose yourself, mother." Pavel pressed her hand.
"It's all right! It's all right!"
"Mother," said the warden, fetching a sigh, "suppose you move away from each other a bit. Let there be some distance between you." He yawned aloud.
Pavel asked the mother about her health and about home. She waited for some other questions, sought them in her son's eyes, but could not find them. He was calm as usual, although his face had grown paler, and his eyes seemed larger.
"Sasha sends you her regards," she said. Pavel's eyelids quivered and fell. His face became softer and brightened with a clear, open smile. A poignant bitterness smote the mother's heart.
"Will they let you out soon?" she inquired in a tone of sudden injury and agitation. "Why have they put you in prison? Those papers and pamphlets have appeared in the factory again, anyway."
Pavel's eyes flashed with delight.
"Have they? When? Many of them?"
"It is forbidden to talk about this subject!" the warden lazily announced. "You may talk only of family matters."
"And isn't this a family matter?" retorted the mother.
"I don't know. I only know it's forbidden. You may talk about his wash and underwear and food, but nothing else!" insisted the warden, his voice, however, expressing utter indifference.
"All right," said Pavel. "Keep to domestic affairs, mother. What are you doing?"
She answered boldly, seized with youthful ardor:
"I carry all this to the factory." She paused with a smile and continued: "Sour soup, gruel, all Marya's cookery, and other stuff."
Pavel understood. The muscles of his face quivered with restrained laughter. He ran his fingers through his hair and said in a tender tone, such as she had never heard him use:
"My own dear mother! That's good! It's good you've found something to do, so it isn't tedious for you. You don't feel lonesome, do you, mother?"
"When the leaflets appeared, they searched me, too," she said, not without a certain pride.
"Again on this subject!" said the warden in an offended tone. "I tell you it's forbidden, it's not allowed. They have deprived him of liberty so that he shouldn't know anything about it; and here you are with your news. You ought to know it's forbidden!"
"Well, leave it, mother," said Pavel. "Matvey Ivanovich is a good man. You mustn't do anything to provoke him. We get along together very well. It's by chance he's here to-day with us. Usually, it's the assistant superintendent who is present on such occasions. That's why Matvey Ivanovich is afraid you will say something you oughtn't to."
"Time's up!" announced the warden looking at his watch. "Take your leave!"
"Well, thank you," said Pavel. "Thank you, my darling mother! Don't worry now. They'll let me out soon."
He embraced her, pressed her warmly to his bosom, and kissed her. Touched by his endearments, and happy, she burst into tears.
"Now separate!" said the warden, and as he walked off with the mother he mumbled:
"Don't cry! They'll let him out; they'll let everybody out. It's too crowded here."
At home the mother told the Little Russian of her conversation with Pavel, and her face wore a broad smile.
"I told him! Yes, indeed! And cleverly, too. He understood!" and, heaving a melancholy sigh: "Oh, yes, he understood; otherwise he wouldn't have been so tender and affectionate. He has never been that way before."
"Oh, mother!" the Little Russian laughed. "No matter what other people may want, a mother always wants affection. You certainly have a heart plenty big enough for one man!"
"But those people! Just think, Andriusha!" she suddenly exclaimed, amazement in her tone. "How used they get to all this! Their children are taken away from them, are thrown into dungeons, and, mind you, it's as nothing to them! They come, sit about, wait, and talk. What do you think of that? If intelligent people are that way, if they can so easily get accustomed to a thing like that, then what's to be said about the common people?"
"That's natural," said the Little Russian with his usual smile. "The law after all is not so harsh toward them as toward us. And they need the law more than we do. So that when the law hits them on the head, although they cry out they do not cry very loud. Your own stick does not fall upon you so heavily. For them the laws are to some extent a protection, but for us they are only chains to keep us bound so we can't kick."
Three days afterwards in the evening, when the mother sat at the table knitting stockings and the Little Russian was reading to her from a book about the revolt of the Roman slaves, a loud knock was heard at the door. The Little Russian went to open it and admitted Vyesovshchikov with a bundle under his arm, his hat pushed back on his head, and mud up to his knees.
"I was passing by, and seeing a light in your house, I dropped in to ask you how you are. I've come straight from the prison."
He spoke in a strange voice. He seized Vlasov's hand and wrung it violently as he added: "Pavel sends you his regards." Irresolutely seating himself in a chair he scanned the room with his gloomy, suspicious look.
The mother was not fond of him. There was something in his angular, close-cropped head and in his small eyes that always scared her; but now she was glad to see him, and with a broad smile lighting her face she said in a tender, animated voice:
"How thin you've become! Say, Andriusha, let's dose him with tea."
"I'm putting up the samovar already!" the Little Russian called from the kitchen.
"How is Pavel? Have they let anybody else out besides yourself?"
Nikolay bent his head and answered:
"I'm the only one they've let go." He raised his eyes to the mother's face and said slowly, speaking through his teeth with ponderous emphasis: "I told them: 'Enough! Let me go! Else I'll kill some one here, and myself, too!' So they let me go!"
"Hm, hm – ye-es," said the mother, recoiling from him and involuntarily blinking when her gaze met his sharp, narrow eyes.
"And how is Fedya Mazin?" shouted the Little Russian from the kitchen. "Writing poetry, is he?"
"Yes! I don't understand it," said Nikolay, shaking his head. "They've put him in a cage and he sings. There's only one thing I'm sure about, and that is I have no desire to go home."
"Why should you want to go home? What's there to attract you?" said the mother pensively. "It's empty, there's no fire burning, and it's chilly all over."
Vyesovshchikov sat silent, his eyes screwed up. Taking a box of cigarettes from his pocket he leisurely lit one of them, and looking at the gray curl of smoke dissolve before him he grinned like a big, surly dog.
"Yes, I guess it's cold. And the floor is filled with frozen cockroaches, and even the mice are frozen, too, I suppose. Pelagueya Nilovna, will you let me sleep here to-night, please?" he asked hoarsely without looking at her.
"Why, of course, Nikolay! You needn't even ask it!" the mother quickly replied. She felt embarrassed and ill at ease in Nikolay's presence, and did not know what to speak to him about. But he himself went on to talk in a strangely broken voice.
"We live in a time when children are ashamed of their own parents."
"What!" exclaimed the mother, starting.
He glanced up at her and closed his eyes. His pockmarked face looked like that of a blind man.
"I say that children have to be ashamed of their parents," he repeated, sighing aloud. "Now, don't you be afraid. It's not meant for you. Pavel will never be ashamed of you. But I am ashamed of my father, and shall never enter his house again. I have no father, no home! They have put me under the surveillance of the police, else I'd go to Siberia. I think a man who won't spare himself could do a great deal in Siberia. I would free convicts there and arrange for their escape."
The mother understood, with her ready feelings, what agony this man must be undergoing, but his pain awoke no sympathetic response in her.
"Well, of course, if that's the case, then it's better for you to go," she said, in order not to offend him by silence.
Andrey came in from the kitchen, and said, smiling:
"Well, are you sermonizing, eh?"
The mother rose and walked away, saying:
"I'm going to get something to eat."
Vyesovshchikov looked at the Little Russian fixedly and suddenly declared:
"I think that some people ought to be killed off!"
"Oho! And pray what for?" asked the Little Russian calmly.
"So they cease to be."
"Ahem! And have you the right to make corpses out of living people?"
"Yes, I have."
"Where did you get it from?"
"The people themselves gave it to me."
The Little Russian stood in the middle of the room, tall and spare, swaying on his legs, with his hands thrust in his pockets, and looked down on Nikolay. Nikolay sat firmly in his chair, enveloped in clouds of smoke, with red spots on his face showing through.
"The people gave it to me!" he repeated clenching his fist. "If they kick me I have the right to strike them and punch their eyes out! Don't touch me, and I won't touch you! Let me live as I please, and I'll live in peace and not touch anybody. Maybe I'd prefer to live in the woods. I'd build myself a cabin in the ravine by the brook and live there. At any rate, I'd live alone."
"Well, go and live that way, if it pleases you," said the Little Russian, shrugging his shoulders.
"Now?" asked Nikolay. He shook his head in negation and replied, striking his fist on his knee:
"Now it's impossible!"
"Who's in your way?"
"The people!" Vyesovshchikov retorted brusquely. "I'm hitched to them even unto death. They've hedged my heart around with hatred and tied me to themselves with evil. That's a strong tie! I hate them, and I will not go away; no, never! I'll be in their way. I'll harass their lives. They are in my way, I'll be in theirs. I'll answer only for myself, only for myself, and for no one else. And if my father is a thief – "
"Oh!" said the Little Russian in a low voice, moving up to Nikolay.
"And as for Isay Gorbov, I'll wring his head off! You shall see!"
"What for?" asked the Little Russian in a quiet, earnest voice.
"He shouldn't be a spy; he shouldn't go about denouncing people. It's through him my father's gone to the dogs, and it's owing to him that he now is aiming to become a spy," said Vyesovshchikov, looking at Andrey with a dark, hostile scowl.
"Oh, that's it!" exclaimed the Little Russian. "And pray, who'd blame you for that? Fools!"
"Both the fools and the wise are smeared with the same oil!" said Nikolay heavily. "Here are you a wise fellow, and Pavel, too. And do you mean to say that I am the same to you as Fedya Mazin or Samoylov, or as you two are to each other? Don't lie! I won't believe you, anyway. You all push me aside to a place apart, all by myself."
"Your heart is aching, Nikolay!" said the Little Russian softly and tenderly sitting down beside him.
"Yes, it's aching, and so is your heart. But your aches seem nobler to you than mine. We are all scoundrels toward one another, that's what I say. And what have you to say to that?"
He fixed his sharp gaze on Andrey, and waited with set teeth. His mottled face remained immobile, and a quiver passed over his thick lips, as if scorched by a flame.
"I have nothing to say!" said the Little Russian, meeting Vyesovshchikov's hostile glance with a bright, warm, yet melancholy look of his blue eyes. "I know that to argue with a man at a time when all the wounds of his heart are bleeding, is only to insult him. I know it, brother."
"It's impossible to argue with me; I can't," mumbled Nikolay, lowering his eyes.
"I think," continued the Little Russian, "that each of us has gone through that, each of us has walked with bare feet over broken glass, each of us in his dark hour has gasped for breath as you are now."
"You have nothing to tell me!" said Vyesovshchikov slowly. "Nothing! My heart is so – it seems to me as if wolves were howling there!"
"And I don't want to say anything to you. Only I know that you'll get over this, perhaps not entirely, but you'll get over it!" He smiled, and added, tapping Nikolay on the back: "Why, man, this is a children's disease, something like measles! We all suffer from it, the strong less, the weak more. It comes upon a man at the period when he has found himself, but does not yet understand life, and his own place in life. And when you do not see your place, and are unable to appraise your own value, it seems that you are the only, the inimitable cucumber on the face of the earth, and that no one can measure, no one can fathom your worth, and that all are eager only to eat you up. After a while you'll find out that the hearts in other people's breasts are no worse than a good part of your own heart, and you'll begin to feel better. And somewhat ashamed, too! Why should you climb up to the belfry tower, when your bell is so small that it can't be heard in the great peal of the holiday bells? Moreover, you'll see that in chorus the sound of your bell will be heard, too, but by itself the old church bells will drown it in their rumble as a fly is drowned in oil. Do you understand what I am saying?"
"Maybe I understand," Nikolay said, nodding his head. "Only I don't believe it."
The Little Russian broke into a laugh, jumped to his feet, and began to run noisily up and down the room.
"I didn't believe it either. Ah, you – wagonload!"
"Why a wagonload?" Nikolay asked with a sad smile, looking at the Little Russian.
"Because there's a resemblance!"
Suddenly Nikolay broke into a loud guffaw, his mouth opening wide.
"What is it?" the Little Russian asked in surprise, stopping in front of him.
"It struck me that he'd be a fool who'd want to insult you!" Nikolay declared, shaking his head.
"Why, how can you insult me?" asked the Little Russian, shrugging his shoulders.
"I don't know," said Vyesovshchikov, grinning good-naturedly or perhaps condescendingly. "I only wanted to say that a man must feel mighty ashamed of himself after he'd insulted you."
"There now! See where you got to!" laughed the Little Russian.
"Andriusha!" the mother called from the kitchen. "Come get the samovar. It's ready!"
Andrey walked out of the room, and Vyesovshchikov, left alone, looked about, stretched out his foot sheathed in a coarse, heavy boot, looked at it, bent down, and felt the stout calf of his legs. Then he raised one hand to his face, carefully examined the palm, and turned it around. His short-fingered hand was thick, and covered with yellowish hair. He waved it in the air, and arose.
When Andrey brought in the samovar, Vyesovshchikov was standing before the mirror, and greeted him with these words:
"It's a long time since I've seen my face." Then he laughed and added: "It's an ugly face I have!"
"What's that to you?" asked Andrey, turning a curious look upon him.
"Sashenka says the face is the mirror of the heart!" Nikolay replied, bringing out the words slowly.
"It's not true, though!" the little Russian ejaculated. "She has a nose like a mushroom, cheek bones like a pair of scissors; yet her heart is like a bright little star."
They sat down to drink tea.
Vyesovshchikov took a big potato, heavily salted a slice of bread, and began to chew slowly and deliberately, like an ox.
"And how are matters here?" he asked, with his mouth full.
When Andrey cheerfully recounted to him the growth of the socialist propaganda in the factory, he again grew morose and remarked dully:
"It takes too long! Too long, entirely! It ought to go faster!"
The mother regarded him, and was seized with a feeling of hostility toward this man.
"Life is not a horse; you can't set it galloping with a whip," said Andrey.
But Vyesovshchikov stubbornly shook his head, and proceeded:
"It's slow! I haven't the patience. What am I to do?" He opened his arms in a gesture of helplessness, and waited for a response.
"We all must learn and teach others. That's our business!" said Andrey, bending his head.
Vyesovshchikov asked:
"And when are we going to fight?"
"There'll be more than one butchery of us up to that time, that I know!" answered the Little Russian with a smile. "But when we shall be called on to fight, that I don't know! First, you see, we must equip the head, and then the hand. That's what I think."
"The heart!" said Nikolay laconically.
"And the heart, too."
Nikolay became silent, and began to eat again. From the corner of her eye the mother stealthily regarded his broad, pockmarked face, endeavoring to find something in it to reconcile her to the unwieldy, square figure of Vyesovshchikov. Her eyebrows fluttered whenever she encountered the shooting glance of his little eyes. Andrey held his head in his hands; he became restless – he suddenly laughed, and then abruptly stopped, and began to whistle.
It seemed to the mother that she understood his disquietude. Nikolay sat at the table without saying anything; and when the Little Russian addressed a question to him, he answered briefly, with evident reluctance.
The little room became too narrow and stifling for its two occupants, and they glanced, now the one, now the other, at their guest.
At length Nikolay rose and said: "I'd like to go to bed. I sat and sat in prison – suddenly they let me go; I'm off! – I'm tired!"
He went into the kitchen and stirred about for a while. Then a sudden stillness settled down. The mother listened for a sound, and whispered to Andrey: "He has something terrible in his mind!"
"Yes, he's hard to understand!" the Little Russian assented, shaking his head. "But you go to bed, mother, I am going to stay and read a while."
She went to the corner where the bed was hidden from view by chintz curtains. Andrey, sitting at the table, for a long while listened to the warm murmur of her prayers and sighs. Quickly turning the pages of the book Andrey nervously rubbed his lips, twitched his mustache with his long fingers, and scraped his feet on the floor. Ticktock, ticktock went the pendulum of the clock; and the wind moaned as it swept past the window.
Then the mother's low voice was heard:
"Oh, God! How many people there are in the world, and each one wails in his own way. Where, then, are those who feel rejoiced?"
"Soon there will be such, too, soon!" announced the Little Russian.
