My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [100]
Sitting by the window, again pregnant, with a gray face and distraught, weary eyes, she was feeding my brother Sascha, and she stared at me with her mouth open, like a fish.
"You are wrong," she said quietly. "No one could possibly know that you took the rouble."
"Come yourself and ask them."
"You must have chattered about it yourself. Confess now--you told it yourself? Take care, for I shall find out for myself to-morrow who spread that story in school."
I gave her the name of the pupil. Her face wrinkled pitifully and her tears began to fall.
I went away to the kitchen and lay down on my bed, which consisted of a box behind the stove. I lay there and listened to my mother wailing:
"My God! My God!"
Not being able to bear the disgusting smell of greasy cloths being dried any longer, I rose and went out to the yard; but mother called after me:
"Where are you going to? Where are you going? Come here to me!"
Then we sat on the floor; and Sascha lay on mother's knees, and taking hold of the buttons of her dress bobbed his head and said "boovooga," which was his way of saying "poogorka" (button).
I sat pressed to mother's side, and she said, kissing me:
"We ... are poor, and every kopeck . . . every kopeck ..."
But she never finished what she began to say, pressing me with her hot arm.
"What trash--trash!" she exclaimed suddenly, using a word I had heard her use before.
Sascha repeated:
"T'ash!"
He was a queer little boy; clumsily formed, with a large head, he looked around on everything with his beautiful dark blue eyes, smiling quietly, exactly as if he were expecting some one. He began to talk unusually early, and lived in a perpetual state of quiet happiness. He was a weakly child, and could hardly crawl about; and he was always very pleased to see me, and used to ask to be taken up in my arms, and loved to crush my ears in his soft little fingers, which always,
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somehow, smelled of violets. He died unexpectedly, without having been ill at all; in the morning he was quietly happy as usual, and in the evening, when the bells were ringing for vespers, he was laid out upon the table. This happened soon after the birth of the second child, Nikolai. Mother had done as she had promised, and matters were put right for me at school, but I was soon involved in another scrape.
One day, at the time of evening tea, I was coming into the kitchen from the yard when I heard a distressful cry from mother:
"Eugen, I beg you, I beg--!"
"Non--sense!" said my stepfather.
"But you are going to her--I know it!"
"We--ll?"
For some seconds they were both silent; then mother said, coughing:
"What vile trash you are!"
I heard him strike her, and rushing into the room I saw that mother, who had fallen on to her knees, was resting her back and elbows against a chair, with her chest forward and her head thrown back, with a rattling in her throat, and terribly glittering eyes; while he, dressed in his best, with a new overcoat, was striking her in the chest with his long foot. I seized a knife from the table--a knife with a bone handle set in silver, which they used to cut bread with, the only thing belonging to my father which remained to mother --I seized it and struck with all my force at my stepfather's side.
By good-luck mother was in time to push Maximov away, and the knife going sideways tore a wide hole in his overcoat, and only grazed his skin. My stepfather, gasping, rushed from the room holding his side, and mother seized me and lifted me up; then with a groan threw me on the floor. My stepfather took me away from her when he returned from the yard.
Late that evening, when, in spite of everything, he had gone out, mother came to me behind the stove, gently took me in her arms, kissed me, and said, weeping:
"Forgive me; it was my fault! Oh, my dear! How could you? . . . And with a