Mother. Максим Горький
worn out," Yegor agreed. "The prison has shaken her health badly. She was stronger before. Besides, she has had a delicate bringing up. It seems to me she has already ruined her lungs. There is something in her face that reminds one of consumption."
"Who is she?"
"The daughter of a landlord. Her father is a rich man and a big scoundrel, according to what she says. I suppose you know, granny, that they want to marry?"
"Who?"
"She and Pavel. Yes, indeed! But so far they have not yet been able. When he is free, she is in prison, and vice versa." Yegor laughed.
"I didn't know it!" the mother replied after a pause. "Pasha never speaks about himself."
Now she felt a still greater pity for the girl, and looking at her guest with involuntary hostility, she said:
"You ought to have seen her home."
"Impossible!" Yegor answered calmly. "I have a heap of work to do here, and the whole day to-morrow, from early morning, I shall have to walk and walk and walk. No easy job, considering my asthma."
"She's a fine girl!" said the mother, vaguely thinking of what Yegor had told her. She felt hurt that the news should have come to her, not from her son, but from a stranger, and she pressed her lips together tightly, and lowered her eyebrows.
"Yes, a fine girl!" Yegor nodded assent. "There's a bit of the noblewoman in her yet, but it's growing less and less all the time. You are sorry for her, I see. What's the use? You won't find heart enough, if you start to grieve for all of us rebels, granny dear. Life is not made very easy for us, I admit. There, for instance, is the case of a friend of mine who returned a short while ago from exile. When he went through Novgorod, his wife and child awaited him in Smolensk, and when he arrived in Smolensk, they were already in prison in Moscow. Now it's the wife's turn to go to Siberia. To be a revolutionary and to be married is a very inconvenient arrangement – inconvenient for the husband, inconvenient for the wife and in the end for the cause also! I, too, had a wife, an excellent woman, but five years of this kind of life landed her in the grave."
He emptied the glass of tea at one gulp, and continued his narrative. He enumerated the years and months he had passed in prison and in exile, told of various accidents and misfortunes, of the slaughters in prisons, and of hunger in Siberia. The mother looked at him, listened with wonderment to the simple way in which he spoke of this life, so full of suffering, of persecution, of wrong, and abuse of men.
"Well, let's get down to business!"
His voice changed, and his face grew more serious. He asked questions about the way in which the mother intended to smuggle the literature into the factory, and she marveled at his clear knowledge of all the details.
Then they returned to reminiscences of their native village. He joked, and her mind roved thoughtfully through her past. It seemed to her strangely like a quagmire uniformly strewn with hillocks, which were covered with poplars trembling in constant fear; with low firs, and with white birches straying between the hillocks. The birches grew slowly, and after standing for five years on the unstable, putrescent soil, they dried up, fell down, and rotted away. She looked at this picture, and a vague feeling of insufferable sadness overcame her. The figure of a girl with a sharp, determined face stood before her. Now the figure walks somewhere in the darkness amid the snowflakes, solitary, weary. And her son sits in a little cell, with iron gratings over the window. Perhaps he is not yet asleep, and is thinking. But he is thinking not of his mother. He has one nearer to him than herself. Heavy, chaotic thoughts, like a tangled mass of clouds, crept over her, and encompassed her and oppressed her bosom.
"You are tired, granny! Let's go to bed!" said Yegor, smiling.
She bade him good night, and sidled carefully into the kitchen, carrying away a bitter, caustic feeling in her heart.
In the morning, after breakfast, Yegor asked her:
"Suppose they catch you and ask you where you got all these heretical books from. What will you say?"
"I'll say, 'It's none of your business!'" she answered, smiling.
"You'll never convince them of that!" Yegor replied confidently. "On the contrary, they are profoundly convinced that this is precisely their business. They will question you very, very diligently, and very, very long!"
"I won't tell, though!"
"They'll put you in prison!"
"Well, what of it? Thank God that I am good at least for that," she said with a sigh. "Thank God! Who needs me? Nobody!"
"H'm!" said Yegor, fixing his look upon her. "A good person ought to take care of himself."
"I couldn't learn that from you, even if I were good," the mother replied, laughing.
Yegor was silent, and paced up and down the room; then he walked up to her and said: "This is hard, countrywoman! I feel it, it's very hard for you!"
"It's hard for everybody," she answered, with a wave of her hand. "Maybe only for those who understand, it's easier. But I understand a little, too. I understand what it is the good people want."
"If you do understand, granny, then it means that everybody needs you, everybody!" said Yegor earnestly and solemnly.
She looked at him and laughed without saying anything.
CHAPTER XI
At noon, calmly and in a businesslike way she put the books around her bosom, and so skillfully and snugly that Yegor announced, smacking his lips with satisfaction:
"Sehr gut! as the German says when he has drunk a keg of beer. Literature has not changed you, granny. You still remain the good, tall, portly, elderly woman. May all the numberless gods grant you their blessings on your enterprise!"
Within half an hour she stood at the factory gate, bent with the weight of her burden, calm and assured. Two guards, irritated by the oaths and raillery of the workingmen, examined all who entered the gate, handling them roughly and swearing at them. A policeman and a thin-legged man with a red face and alert eyes stood at one side. The mother, shifting the rod resting on her shoulders, with a pail suspended from either end of it, watched the man from the corner of her eye. She divined that he was a spy.
A tall, curly-headed fellow with his hat thrown back over his neck, cried to the guardsmen who searched him:
"Search the head and not the pockets, you devils!"
"There is nothing but lice on your head," retorted one of the guardsmen.
"Catching lice is an occupation more suited to you than hunting human game!" rejoined the workman. The spy scanned him with a rapid glance.
"Will you let me in?" asked the mother. "See, I'm bent double with my heavy load. My back is almost breaking."
"Go in! Go in!" cried the guard sullenly. "She comes with arguments, too."
The mother walked to her place, set her pails on the ground, and wiping the perspiration from her face looked around her.
The Gusev brothers, the locksmiths, instantly came up to her, and the older of them, Vasily, asked aloud, knitting his eyebrows:
"Got any pirogs?"
"I'll bring them to-morrow," she answered.
This was the password agreed upon. The faces of the brothers brightened. Ivan, unable to restrain himself, exclaimed:
"Oh, you jewel of a mother!"
Vasily squatted down on his heels, looked into the pot, and a bundle of books disappeared into his bosom.
"Ivan!" he said aloud. "Let's not go home, let's get our dinner here from her!" And he quickly shoved the books into the legs of his boots. "We must give our new peddler a lift, don't you think so?"
"Yes, indeed!" Ivan assented, and laughed aloud.
The mother looked carefully about her, and called out:
"Sour cabbage soup! Hot vermicelli soup! Roast meat!"
Then deftly and secretly taking out one package of books after the other, she shoved them into