Mother by Maxim Gorky (bookstand for reading .TXT) 📖

“Aha!” exclaimed Rybin, turning in his chair like a bear. “There you are! When I reached that thought I was seized with a cold shiver, too.”

“Now what is it? Tell me! Did you find out anything?”

“Deception! Fraud! I feel it. It’s deception. I know nothing, but I feel sure there’s deception in it. Yes! The masters are up to some clever trick, and I want nothing of it. I want the truth. I understand what it is; I understand it. But I will not go hand in hand with the masters. They’ll push me to the front when it suits them, and then walk over my bones as over a bridge to get where they want to.”

At the sound of his morose words, uttered in a stubborn, thick, and forceful voice, the mother’s heart contracted in pain.

“Good Lord!” she exclaimed in anguish. “Where is the truth? Can it be that Pavel does not understand? And all those who come here from the city—is it possible that they don’t understand?” The serious, honest faces of Yegor, Nikolay Ivanovich, and Sashenka passed before her mind, and her heart fluttered.

“No, no!” she said, shaking her head as if to dismiss the thought. “I can’t believe it. They are for truth and honor and conscience; they have no evil designs; oh, no!”

“Whom are you talking about?” asked Rybin thoughtfully.

“About all of them! Every single one I met. They are not the people who will traffic in human blood, oh, no!” Perspiration burst out on her face, and her fingers trembled.

“You are not looking in the right place, mother; look farther back,” said Rybin, drooping his head. “Those who are directly working in the movement may not know anything about it themselves. They think it must be so; they have the truth at heart. But there may be people behind them who are looking out only for their own selfish interests. Men won’t go against themselves.” And with the firm conviction of a peasant fed on centuries of distrust, he added: “No good will ever come from the masters! Take my word for it!”

“What concoction has your brain put together?” the mother asked, again seized with anxious misgiving.

“I?” Rybin looked at her, was silent for a while, then repeated: “Keep away from the masters! That’s what!” He grew morosely silent again, and seemed to shrink within himself.

“I’ll go away, mother,” he said after a pause. “I wanted to join the fellows, to work along with them. I’m fit for the work. I can read and write. I’m persevering and not a fool. And the main thing is, I know what to say to people. But now I will go. I can’t believe, and therefore I must go. I know, mother, that the people’s souls are foul and besmirched. All live on envy, all want to gorge themselves; and since there’s little to eat, each seeks to eat the other up.”

He let his head droop, and remained absorbed in thought for a while. Finally he said:

“I’ll go all by myself through village and hamlet and stir the people up. It’s necessary that the people should take the matter in their own hands and get to work themselves. Let them but understand—they’ll find a way themselves. And so, I’m going to try to make them understand. There is no hope for them except in themselves; there’s no understanding for them except in their own understanding! And that’s the truth!”

“They will seize you!” said the mother in a low voice.

“They will seize me, and let me out again. And then I’ll go ahead again!”

“The peasants themselves will bind you, and you will be thrown into jail.”

“Well, I’ll stay in jail for a time, then be released, and I’ll go on again. As for the peasants, they’ll bind me once, twice, and then they will understand that they ought not to bind me, but listen to me. I’ll tell them: ‘I don’t ask you to believe me; I want you just to listen to me!’ And if they listen, they will believe.”

Both the mother and Rybin spoke slowly, as if testing every word before uttering it.

“There’s little joy for me in this, mother,” said Rybin. “I have lived here of late, and gobbled up a deal of stuff. Yes; I understand some, too! And now I feel as if I were burying a child.”

“You’ll perish, Mikhail Ivanych!” said the mother, shaking her head sadly.

His dark, deep eyes looked at her with a questioning, expectant look. His powerful body bent forward, propped by his hands resting on the seat of the chair, and his swarthy face seemed pale in the black frame of his beard.

“Did you hear what Christ said about the seed? ‘Thou shalt not die, but rise to life again in the new ear.’ I don’t regard myself as near death at all. I am shrewd. I follow a straighter course than the others. You can get further that way. Only, you see, I feel sorry—I don’t know why.” He fidgeted on his chair, then slowly rose. “I’ll go to the tavern and be with the people a while. The Little Russian is not coming. Has he gotten busy already?”

“Yes!” The mother smiled. “No sooner out of prison than they rush to their work.”

“That’s the way it should be. Tell him about me.”

They walked together slowly into the kitchen, and without looking at each other exchanged brief remarks:

“I’ll tell him,” she promised.

“Well, good-by!”

“Good-by! When do you quit your job?”

“I have already.”

“When are you going?”

“To-morrow, early in the morning. Good-by!”

He bent his head and crawled off the porch reluctantly, it seemed, and clumsily. The mother stood for a moment at the door listening to the heavy departing footsteps and to the doubts that stirred in her heart. Then she noiselessly turned away into the room, and drawing the curtain peered through the window. Black darkness stood behind, motionless, waiting, gaping, with its flat, abysmal mouth.

“I live in the night!” she thought. “In the night forever!” She felt a pity for the black-bearded, sedate peasant. He was so broad and strong—and yet there was a certain helplessness about him, as about all the people.

Presently Andrey came in gay and vivacious. When the mother told him about Rybin, he exclaimed:

“Going, is he? Well, let him go through the villages. Let him ring forth the word of truth. Let him arouse the people. It’s hard for him here with us.”

“He was talking about the masters. Is there anything in it?” she inquired circumspectly. “Isn’t it possible that they want to deceive you?”

“It bothers you, mother, doesn’t it?” The Little Russian laughed. “Oh, mother dear—money! If we only had money! We are still living on charity. Take, for instance, Nikolay Ivanych. He earns seventy-five rubles a month, and gives us fifty! And others do the same. And the hungry students send us money sometimes, which they collect penny by penny. And as to the masters, of course there are different kinds among them. Some of them will deceive us, and some will leave us; but the best will stay with us and march with us up to our holiday.” He clapped his hands, and rubbing them vigorously against each other continued: “But not even the flight of an eagle’s wings will enable anyone to reach that holiday, so we’ll make a little one for the first of May. It will be jolly.”

His words and his vivacity dispelled the alarm excited in the mother’s heart by Rybin. The Little Russian walked up and down the room, his feet sounding on the floor. He rubbed his head with one hand and his chest with the other, and spoke looking at the floor:

“You know, sometimes you have a wonderful feeling living in your heart. It seems to you that wherever you go, all men are comrades; all burn with one and the same fire; all are merry; all are good. Without words they all understand one another; and no one wants to hinder or insult the other. No one feels the need of it. All live in unison, but each heart sings its own song. And the songs flow like brooks into one stream, swelling into a huge river of bright joys, rolling free and wide down its course. And when you think that this will be—that it cannot help being if we so wish it—then the wonderstruck heart melts with joy. You feel like weeping—you feel so happy.”

He spoke and looked as if he were searching something within himself. The mother listened and tried not to stir, so as not to disturb him and interrupt his speech. She always listened to him with more attention than to anybody else. He spoke more simply than all the rest, and his words gripped her heart more powerfully. Pavel, too, was probably looking to the future. How could it be otherwise, when one is following such a course of life? But when he looked into the remote future it was always by himself; he never spoke of what he saw. This Little Russian, however, it seemed to her, was always there with a part of his heart; the legend of the future holiday for all upon earth, always sounded in his speech. This legend rendered the meaning of her son’s life, of his work, and that of all of his comrades, clear to the mother.

“And when you wake up,” continued the Little Russian, tossing his head and letting his hands drop alongside his body, “and look around, you see it’s all filthy and cold. All are tired and angry; human life is all churned up like mud on a busy highway, and trodden underfoot!”

He stopped in front of the mother, and with deep sorrow in his eyes, and shaking his head, added in a low, sad voice:

“Yes, it hurts, but you must—you must distrust man; you must fear him, and even hate him! Man is divided, he is cut in two by life. You’d like only to love him; but how is it possible? How can you forgive a man if he goes against you like a wild beast, does not recognize that there is a living soul in you, and kicks your face— a human face! You must not forgive. It’s not for yourself that you mustn’t. I’d stand all the insults as far as I myself am concerned; but I don’t want to show indulgence for insults. I don’t want to let them learn on my back how to beat others!”

His eyes now sparkled with a cold gleam; he inclined his head doggedly, and continued in a more resolute tone:

“I must not forgive anything that is noxious, even though it does not hurt! I’m not alone in the world. If I allow myself to be insulted to-day—maybe I can afford to laugh at the insult, maybe it doesn’t sting me at all—but, having tested his strength on me, the offender will proceed to flay some one else the next day! That’s why one is compelled to discriminate between people, to keep a firm grip on one’s heart, and to classify mankind—these belong to me, those are strangers.”

The mother thought of the officer and Sashenka, and said with a sigh:

“What sort of bread can you expect from unbolted meal?”

“That’s it; that’s the trouble!” the Little Russian exclaimed. “You must look with two kinds of eyes; two hearts throb in your bosom. The one loves all; the other says: ‘Halt! You mustn’t!’”

The figure of her husband, somber and ponderous, like a huge moss-covered stone, now rose in her memory. She made a mental image for herself of the Little Russian as married to Natasha, and her son as the husband of Sashenka.

“And why?” asked the Little