My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [102]
"Wait! Wait a moment! . . . How much have you put in?"
Shaking the tea-leaves out on to his palm, he would carefully measure them out, saying:
"Your tea is finer than mine, so I ought to put in less, as mine is a large leaf."
He was very particular that grandmother should pour out his tea and her own both equally strong, and that she should fill her cup only as often as he filled his.
"What about the last one?" she asked, just before she had poured out all the tea.
Grandfather looked into the teapot and said:
"There 's plenty there--for the last one."
Even the oil for the image-lamp he bought separately--and this after fifty years of united labor!
These tricks of grandfather amused and disgusted me at the same time, but to grandmother they were simply funny.
"You be quiet!" she would say pacifyingly to me.
"What of it? He is an old, old man, and he is getting silly; that's all. He must be eighty, or not far off it. Let him play the fool; what harm does it do any one? And I will do a little work for myself and you--never mind!"
I also began to earn a little money; in the holidays, early in the morning, I took a bag and went about the yards and streets collecting bones, rags, paper and nails. Rag-merchants would give two greevin (twenty kopecks) for a pood (forty pounds) of rags and paper, or iron, and ten or eight kopecks for a pood of bones. I did this work on week days after school too, and on Saturdays I sold articles at thirty kopecks or half a rouble each, and sometimes more if I was lucky. Grandmother took the money away from me and put it quickly into the pocket of her skirt, and praised me, looking down:
"There! Thank you, my darling. This will do for our food. . . . You have done very well."
One day I saw her holding five kopecks of mine in her hands, looking at them, and quietly crying; and one muddy tear hung from the tip of her spongy, pumicestone-like nose.
A more profitable game than rag-picking was the theft of logs and planks from the timber-yards on the banks of the Oka, or on the Island of Pesk, where, in fair time, iron was bought and sold in hastily built booths. After the fairs the booths used to be taken down, but the poles and planks were stowed away in the boathouses, and remained there till close on the time of the spring floods. A small houseowner would give ten kopecks for a good plank, and it was possible to steal two a day. But for the success of the undertaking, bad weather was essential, when a snowstorm or heavy rains would drive the watchmen to hide themselves under cover.
I managed to pick up some friendly accomplices-- one ten-year-old son of a Morduan beggar, Sanka Vyakhir, a kind, gentle boy always tranquilly happy; kinless Kostrom, lanky and lean, with tremendous black eyes, who in his thirteenth year was sent to a colony of young criminals for stealing a pair of doves; the little Tartar Khabi, a twelve-year-old "strong man," simple-minded and kind; blunt-nosed Yaz, the son of a graveyard watchman and grave-digger, a boy of eight, taciturn as a fish, and suffering from epilepsy; and the eldest of all was the son of a widowed dressmaker, Grishka Tchurka, a sensible, straightforward boy, who was terribly handy with his fists. We all lived in the same street.
Theft was not counted as a crime in our village; it had become a custom, and was practically the only means the half-starved natives had of getting a livelihood. Fairs lasting a month and a half would not keep them for a whole year, and many respectable householders "did a little work on the river"--catching logs and planks which were borne along by the tide, and carrying them off separately or in small loads at a time; but the chief form this occupation took was that of thefts from barges, or in a general prowling