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

that the mother was agitated, unable to find the expression she wanted, she herself took up the conversation.

“A time will come when you’ll understand everything. The chief thing that gives a person power and faith in himself is when he begins to love a certain cause with all his heart, and knows it is a good cause of use to everybody. There IS such a love. There’s everything. There’s no human being too mean to love. But it’s time for me to be getting out of all this magnificence.”

Putting the stump of her cigarette in the saucer, she shook her head. Her golden hair fell back in thick waves. She walked away smiling. The mother followed her with her eyes, sighed, and looked around. Her thoughts came to a halt, and in a half-drowsy, oppressive condition of quiet, she began to get the dishes together.

At four o’clock Nikolay appeared. Then they dined. Sofya, laughing at times, told how she met and concealed the fugitive, how she feared the spies, and saw one in every person she met, and how comically the fugitive conducted himself. Something in her tone reminded the mother of the boasting of a workingman who had completed a difficult piece of work to his own satisfaction. She was now dressed in a flowing, dove-colored robe, which fell from her shoulders to her feet in warm waves. The effect was soft and noiseless. She appeared to be taller in this dress; her eyes seemed darker, and her movements less nervous.

“Now, Sofya,” said Nikolay after dinner, “here’s another job for you. You know we undertook to publish a newspaper for the village. But our connection with the people there was broken, thanks to the latest arrests. No one but Pelagueya Nilovna can show us the man who will undertake the distribution of the newspapers. You go with her. Do it as soon as possible.”

“Very well,” said Sofya. “We’ll go, Pelagueya Nilovna.”

“Yes, we’ll go.”

“Is it far?”

“About fifty miles.”

“Splendid! And now I’m going to play a little. Do you mind listening to music, Pelagueya Nilovna?”

“Don’t bother about me. Act as if I weren’t here,” said the mother, seating herself in the corner of the sofa. She saw that the brother and the sister went on with their affairs without giving heed to her; yet, at the same time, she seemed involuntarily to mix in their conversation, imperceptibly drawn into it by them.

“Listen to this, Nikolay. It’s by Grieg. I brought it to-day. Shut the window.”

She opened the piano, and struck the keys lightly with her left hand. The strings sang out a thick, juicy melody. Another note, breathing a deep, full breath, joined itself to the first, and together they formed a vast fullness of sound that trembled beneath its own weight. Strange, limpid notes rang out from under the fingers of her right hand, and darted off in an alarming flight, swaying and rocking and beating against one another like a swarm of frightened birds. And in the dark background the low notes sang in measured, harmonious cadence like the waves of the sea exhausted by the storm. Some one cried out, a loud, agitated, woeful cry of rebellion, questioned and appealed in impotent anguish, and, losing hope, grew silent; and then again sang his rueful plaints, now resonant and clear, now subdued and dejected. In response to this song came the thick waves of dark sound, broad and resonant, indifferent and hopeless. They drowned by their depth and force the swarm of ringing wails; questions, appeals, groans blended in the alarming song. At times the music seemed to take a desperate upward flight, sobbing and lamenting, and again precipitated itself, crept low, swung hither and thither on the dense, vibratory current of bass notes, foundered, and disappeared in them; and once more breaking through to an even cadence, in a hopeless, calm rumble, it grew in volume, pealed forth, and melted and dissolved in the broad flourish of humid notes—which continued to sigh with equal force and calmness, never wearying.

At first the sounds failed to touch the mother. They were incomprehensible to her, nothing but a ringing chaos. Her ear could not gather a melody from the intricate mass of notes. Half asleep she looked at Nikolay sitting with his feet crossed under him at the other end of the long sofa, and at the severe profile of Sofya with her head enveloped in a mass of golden hair. The sun shone into the room. A single ray, trembling pensively, at first lighted up her hair and shoulder, then settled upon the keys of the piano, and quivered under the pressure of her fingers. The branches of the acacia rocked to and fro outside the window. The room became music-filled, and unawares to her, the mother’s heart was stirred. Three notes of nearly the same pitch, resonant as the voice of Fedya Mazin, sparkled in the stream of sounds, like three silvery fish in a brook. At times another note united with these in a simple song, which enfolded the heart in a kind yet sad caress. She began to watch for them, to await their warble, and she heard only their music, distinguished from the tumultuous chaos of sound, to which her ears gradually became deaf.

And for some reason there rose before her out of the obscure depths of her past, wrongs long forgotten.

Once her husband came home late, extremely intoxicated. He grasped her hand, threw her from the bed to the floor, kicked her in the side with his foot, and said:

“Get out! I’m sick of you! Get out!”

In order to protect herself from his blows, she quickly gathered her two-year-old son into her arms, and kneeling covered herself with his body as with a shield. He cried, struggled in her arms, frightened, naked, and warm.

“Get out!” bellowed her husband.

She jumped to her feet, rushed into the kitchen, threw a jacket over her shoulders, wrapped the baby in a shawl, and silently, without outcries or complaints, barefoot, in nothing but a shirt under her jacket, walked out into the street. It was in the month of May, and the night was fresh. The cold, damp dust of the street stuck to her feet, and got between her toes. The child wept and struggled. She opened her breast, pressed her son to her body, and pursued by fear walked down the street, quietly lulling the baby.

It began to grow light. She was afraid and ashamed lest some one come out on the street and see her half naked. She turned toward the marsh, and sat down on the ground under a thick group of aspens. She sat there for a long time, embraced by the night, motionless, looking into the darkness with wide-open eyes, and timidly wailing a lullaby—a lullaby for her baby, which had fallen asleep, and a lullaby for her outraged heart.

A gray bird darted over her head, and flew far away. It awakened her, and brought her to her feet. Then, shivering with cold, she walked home to confront the horror of blows and new insults.

For the last time a heavy and resonant chord heaved a deep breath, indifferent and cold; it sighed and died away.

Sofya turned around, and asked her brother softly:

“Did you like it?”

“Very much,” he said, nodding his head. “Very much.”

Sofya looked at the mother’s face, but said nothing.

“They say,” said Nikolay thoughtfully, throwing himself deeper back on the sofa, “that you should listen to music without thinking. But I can’t.”

“Nor can I,” said Sofya, striking a melodious chord.

“I listened, and it seemed to me that people were putting their questions to nature, that they grieved and groaned, and protested angrily, and shouted, ‘Why?’ Nature does not answer, but goes on calmly creating, incessantly, forever. In her silence is heard her answer: ‘I do not know.’”

The mother listened to Nikolay’s quiet words without understanding them, and without desiring to understand. Her bosom echoed with her reminiscences, and she wanted more music. Side by side with her memories the thought unfolded itself before her: “Here live people, a brother and sister, in friendship; they live peacefully and calmly —they have music and books—they don’t swear at each other—they don’t drink whisky—they don’t quarrel for a relish—they have no desire to insult each other, the way all the people at the bottom do.”

Sofya quickly lighted a cigarette; she smoked almost without intermission.

“This used to be the favorite piece of Kostya,” she said, as a veil of smoke quickly enveloped her. She again struck a low mournful chord. “How I used to love to play for him! You remember how well he translated music into language?” She paused and smiled. “How sensitive he was! What fine feelings he had—so responsive to everything—so fully a man!”

“She must be recalling memories of her husband,” the mother noted, “and she smiles!”

“How much happiness that man gave me!” said Sofya in a low voice, accompanying her words with light sounds on the keys. “What a capacity he had for living! He was always aglow with joy, buoyant, childlike joy!”

“Childlike,” repeated the mother to herself, and shook her head as if agreeing with something.

“Ye-es,” said Nikolay, pulling his beard, “his soul was always singing.”

“When I played this piece for him the first time, he put it in these words.” Sofya turned her face to her brother, and slowly stretched out her arms. Encircled with blue streaks of smoke, she spoke in a low, rapturous voice. “In a barren sea of the far north, under the gray canopy of the cold heavens, stands a lonely black island, an unpeopled rock, covered with ice; the smoothly polished shore descends abruptly into the gray, foaming billows. The transparently blue blocks of ice inhospitably float on the shaking cold water and press against the dark rock of the island. Their knocking resounds mournfully in the dead stillness of the barren sea. They have been floating a long time on the bottomless depths, and the waves splashing about them have quietly borne them toward the lonely rock in the midst of the sea. The sound is grewsome as they break against the shore and against one another, sadly inquiring: ‘Why?’”

Sofya flung away the cigarette she had begun to smoke, turned to the piano, and again began to play the ringing plaints, the plaints of the lonely blocks of ice by the shore of the barren island in the sea of the far north.

The mother was overcome with unendurable sadness as she listened to the simple sketch. It blended strangely with her past, into which her recollections kept boring deeper and deeper.

“In music one can hear everything,” said Nikolay quietly.

Sofya turned toward the mother, and asked:

“Do you mind my noise?”

The mother was unable to restrain her slight irritation.

“I told you not to pay any attention to me. I sit here and listen and think about myself.”

“No, you ought to understand,” said Sofya. “A woman can’t help understanding music, especially when in grief.”

She struck the keys powerfully, and a loud shout went forth, as if some one had suddenly heard horrible news, which pierced him to the heart, and wrenched from him this troubled sound. Young voices trembled in affright, people rushed about in haste, pellmell. Again a loud, angry voice shouted out, drowning all other sounds. Apparently a catastrophe had occurred, in which the chief source of pain was an affront offered to some one. It evoked not complaints, but wrath. Then some kindly and powerful person appeared, who began to sing, just like Andrey, a simple beautiful song, a song of exhortation and summons to himself. The voices of the bass notes grumbled in a dull, offended tone.

Sofya played a long time. The music disquieted the mother, and