My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [28]
After a long silence, during which he sat huddled up, he rose and snuffed the candle, as he asked me:
"Were you frightened?"
"No."
"Quite right! There was nothing to be frightened about."
Irritably dragging his shirt from his shoulder, he went to the washstand in the corner, and I could hear him in the darkness stamping his feet as he exclaimed:
"A fire is a silly business. The person who causes a fire ought to be beaten in the market-place. He must be either a fool or a thief. If that was done there would be no more fires. Go away now, and go to bed! What are you sitting there for?"
I did as he told me, but sleep was denied to me that night. I had no sooner laid myself down when an unearthly howl greeted me, which seemed to come from the bed. I rushed back to the kitchen, in the middle of which stood grandfather, shirtless, holding a candle which flickered violently as he stamped his feet on the floor, crying:
"Mother! Jaakov! What is that?"
I jumped on the stove and hid myself in a corner, and the household was once more in a state of wild commotion; a heartrending howl beat against the ceiling and walls, increasing in sound every moment.
It was all just the same as it had been during the fire. Grandfather and uncle ran about aimlessly; grandmother shouted as she drove them away from one place to another; Gregory made a great noise as he thrust logs into the stove and filled the iron kettle with water. He went about the kitchen bobbing his head just like an Astrakhan camel.
"Heat the stove first," said grandmother in a tone of authority.
He rushed to do her bidding, and fell over my legs.
"Who is there?" he cried, greatly flustered. "Phew! How you frightened me! You are always where you ought not to be."
"What has happened?"
"Aunt Natalia has had a little baby born to her," he replied calmly, jumping down to the floor.
I remembered that my mother had not screamed like that when her little baby was born.
Having placed the kettle over the fire, Gregory climbed up to me on the stove, and drawing a long pipe from his pocket, showed it to me.
"I am taking to a pipe for the good of my eyes," he explained. "Grandmother advised me to take snuff, but I think smoking will do me more good."
He sat on the edge of the stove with his legs crossed, looking down at the feeble light of the candle; his ears and cheeks were smothered in soot, one side of his shirt was torn, and I could see his ribs--as broad as the ribs of a cask. One of his eyeglasses was broken; almost half of the glass had come out of the frame, and from the empty space peered a red, moist eye, which had the appearance of a wound.
Filling his pipe with coarse-cut tobacco, he listened to the groans of the travailing woman, and murmured disjointedly, like a drunken man:
"That grandmother of yours has burned herself so badly that I am sure I don't know how she can attend to the poor creature. Just hear how your aunt is groaning. You know, they forgot all about her. She was taken bad when the fire first broke out. It was fright that did it. You see what pain it costs to bring children into the world, and yet women are thought nothing of! But, mark my words--women ought to be thought a lot of, for they are the mothers--"
Here I dozed, and was awakened by a tumult: a banging of doors, and the drunken cries of Uncle Michael; these strange words floated to my ears:
"The royal doors must be opened--!"
"Give her holy oil with rum, half a glass of oil, half a glass of rum, and a tablespoonful of soot--"
Then Uncle Michael kept asking like a tiresome "Let me have a look at her!"
He sat on the floor with his legs sprawling, and kept spitting straight in front of him, and banging his hands on the floor.
I began to find the stove unbearably hot, so I slid down, but when I got on a level with uncle he seized and held me by the legs, and I fell on the back of my head.
"Fool!" I exclaimed.
He jumped to his