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

The Little Russian raised his shoulders and dropped them again; then said:

“He was no less noxious than a beast.”

“I know.”

“We kill a mosquito for sucking just a tiny bit of our blood,” the Little Russian added in a low voice.

“Well, yes, I am not saying anything about that. I only mean to say it’s so disgusting.”

“What can you do?” returned Andrey with another shrug of his shoulders.

After a long pause Pavel asked:

“Could you kill a fellow like that?”

The Little Russian regarded him with his round eyes, threw a glance at the mother, and said sadly, but firmly:

“For myself, I wouldn’t touch a living thing. But for comrades, for the cause, I am capable of everything. I’d even kill. I’d kill my own son.”

“Oh, Andriusha!” the mother exclaimed under her breath.

He smiled and said:

“It can’t be helped! Such is our life!”

“Ye-es,” Pavel drawled. “Such is our life.”

With sudden excitation, as if obeying some impulse from within, Andrey arose, waved his hands, and said:

“How can a man help it? It so happens that we sometimes must abhor a certain person in order to hasten the time when it will be possible only to take delight in one another. You must destroy those who hinder the progress of life, who sell human beings for money in order to buy quiet or esteem for themselves. If a Judas stands in the way of honest people, lying in wait to betray them, I should be a Judas myself if I did not destroy him. It’s sinful, you say? And do they, these masters of life, do they have the right to keep soldiers and executioners, public houses and prisons, places of penal servitude, and all that vile abomination by which they hold themselves in quiet security and in comfort? If it happens sometimes that I am compelled to take their stick into my own hands, what am I to do then? Why, I am going to take it, of course. I will not decline. They kill us out by the tens and hundreds. That gives me the right to raise my hand and level it against one of the enemy, against that one of their number who comes closest to me, and makes himself more directly noxious to the work of my life than the others. This is logic; but I go against logic for once. I do not need your logic now. I know that their blood can bring no results, I know that their blood is barren, fruitless! Truth grows well only on the soil irrigated with the copious rain of our own blood, and their putrid blood goes to waste, without a trace left. I know it! But I take the sin upon myself. I’ll kill, if I see a need for it! I speak only for myself, mind you. My crime dies with me. It will not remain a blot upon the future. It will sully no one but myself—no one but myself.”

He walked to and fro in the room, waving his hands in front of him, as if he were cutting something in the air out of his way. The mother looked at him with an expression of melancholy and alarm. She felt as though something had hit him; and that he was pained. The dangerous thoughts about murder left her. If Vyesovshchikov had not killed Isay, none of Pavel’s comrades could have done the deed. Pavel listened to the Little Russian with drooping head, and Andrey stubbornly continued in a forceful tone:

“In your forward march it sometimes chances that you must go against your very own self. You must be able to give up everything—your heart and all. To give your life, to die for the cause—that’s simple. Give more! Give that which is dearer to you than your life! Then you will see that grow with a vigorous growth which is dearest to you—your truth!”

He stopped in the middle of the room, his face grown pale and his eyes half closed. Raising his hand and shaking it, he began slowly in a solemn tone of assurance with faith and with strength:

“There will come a time, I know, when people will take delight in one another, when each will be like a star to the other, and when each will listen to his fellow as to music. The free men will walk upon the earth, men great in their freedom. They will walk with open hearts, and the heart of each will be pure of envy and greed, and therefore all mankind will be without malice, and there will be nothing to divorce the heart from reason. Then life will be one great service to man! His figure will be raised to lofty heights— for to free men all heights are attainable. Then we shall live in truth and freedom and in beauty, and those will be accounted the best who will the more widely embrace the world with their hearts, and whose love of it will be the profoundest; those will be the best who will be the freest; for in them is the greatest beauty. Then will life be great, and the people will be great who live that life.”

He ceased and straightened himself. Then swinging to and fro like the tongue of a bell, he added in a resonant voice that seemed to issue from the depths of his breast:

“So for the sake of this life I am prepared for everything! I will tear my heart out, if necessary, and will trample it with my own feet!”

His face quivered and stiffened with excitement, and great, heavy tears rolled down one after the other.

Pavel raised his head and looked at him with a pale face and wide-open eyes. The mother raised herself a little over the table with a feeling that something great was growing and impending.

“What is the matter with you, Andrey?” Pavel asked softly.

The Little Russian shook his head, stretched himself like a violin string, and said, looking at the mother:

“I struck Isay.”

She rose, and quickly walked up to him, all in a tremble, and seized his hands. He tried to free his right hand, but she held it firmly in her grasp and whispered hotly:

“My dear, my own, hush! It’s nothing—it’s nothing—nothing, Pasha! Andriushenka—oh, what a calamity! You sufferer! My darling heart!”

“Wait, mother,” the Little Russian muttered hoarsely. “I’ll tell you how it happened.”

“Don’t!” she whispered, looking at him with tears in her eyes. “Don’t, Andriusha! It isn’t our business. It’s God’s affair!”

Pavel came up to him slowly, looking at his comrade with moist eyes. He was pale, and his lips trembled. With a strange smile he said softly and slowly:

“Come, give me your hand, Andrey. I want to shake hands with you. Upon my word, I understand how hard it is for you!”

“Wait!” said the Little Russian without looking at them, shaking his head, and tearing himself away from their grasp. When he succeeded in freeing his right hand from the mother’s, Pavel caught it, pressing it vigorously and wringing it.

“And you mean to tell me you killed that man?” said the mother. “No, YOU didn’t do it! If I saw it with my own eyes I wouldn’t believe it.”

“Stop, Andrey! Mother is right. This thing is beyond our judgment.”

With one hand pressing Andrey’s, Pavel laid the other on his shoulder, as if wishing to stop the tremor in his tall body. The Little Russian bent his head down toward him, and said in a broken, mournful voice:

“I didn’t want to do it, you know, Pavel. It happened when you walked ahead, and I remained behind with Ivan Gusev. Isay came from around a corner and stopped to look at us, and smiled at us. Ivan walked off home, and I went on toward the factory—Isay at my side!” Andrey stopped, heaved a deep sigh, and continued: “No one ever insulted me in such an ugly way as that dog!”

The mother pulled the Little Russian by the hand toward the table, gave him a shove, and finally succeeded in seating him on a chair. She sat down at his side close to him, shoulder to shoulder. Pavel stood in front of them, holding Andrey’s hand in his and pressing it.

“I understand how hard it is for you,” he said.

“He told me that they know us all, that we are all on the gendarme’s record, and that we are going to be dragged in before the first of May. I didn’t answer, I laughed, but my blood boiled. He began to tell me that I was a clever fellow, and that I oughtn’t to go on the way I was going, but that I should rather–-”

The Little Russian stopped, wiped his face with his right hand, shook his head, and a dry gleam flashed in his eyes.

“I understand!” said Pavel.

“Yes,” he said, “I should rather enter the service of the law.” The Little Russian waved his hand, and swung his clenched fist. “The law!—curse his soul!” he hissed between his teeth. “It would have been better if he had struck me in the face. It would have been easier for me, and better for him, perhaps, too! But when he spit his dirty thought into my heart that way, I could not bear it.”

Andrey pulled his hand convulsively from Pavel’s, and said more hoarsely with disgust in his face:

“I dealt him a back-hand blow like that, downward and aslant, and walked away. I didn’t even stop to look at him; I heard him fall. He dropped and was silent. I didn’t dream of anything serious. I walked on peacefully, just as if I had done no more than kick a frog with my foot. And then—what’s all this? I started to work, and I heard them shouting: ‘Isay is killed!’ I didn’t even believe it, but my hand grew numb—and I felt awkward in working with it. It didn’t hurt me, but it seemed to have grown shorter.”

He looked at his hand obliquely and said:

“All my life, I suppose, I won’t be able to wash off that dirty stain from it.”

“If only your heart is pure, my dear boy!” the mother said softly, bursting into tears.

“I don’t regard myself as guilty; no, I don’t!” said the Little Russian firmly. “But it’s disgust. It disgusts me to carry such dirt inside of me. I had no need of it. It wasn’t called for.”

“What do you think of doing?” asked Pavel, giving him a suspicious look.

“What am I going to do?” the Little Russian repeated thoughtfully, drooping his head. Then raising it again he said with a smile: “I am not afraid, of course, to say that it was I who struck him. But I am ashamed to say it. I am ashamed to go to prison, and even to hard labor, maybe, for such a—nothing. If some one else is accused, then I’ll go and confess. But otherwise, go all of my own accord—I cannot!”

He waved his hands, rose, and repeated:

“I cannot! I am ashamed!”

The whistle blew. The Little Russian, bending his head to one side, listened to the powerful roar, and shaking himself, said:

“I am not going to work.”

“Nor I,” said Pavel.

“I’ll go to the bath house,” said the Little Russian, smiling. He got ready in silence and walked off, sullen and low-spirited.

The mother followed him with a compassionate look.

“Say what you please, Pasha, I cannot believe him! And even if I did believe him, I wouldn’t lay any blame on him. No, I would not. I know it’s sinful to kill a man; I believe in God and in the Lord Jesus Christ, but still I don’t think Andrey guilty. I’m sorry