My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [49]
CHAPTER VIII
GRANDFATHER unexpectedly sold the house over the tavern and bought another in Kanatoroi Street--a ramshackle house overgrown with grass, but clean and quiet; and it seemed to rise up out of the fields, being the last of a row of little houses painted in various colors.
The new house was trim and charming; its fagade was painted in a warm but not gaudy shade of dark raspberry, against which the sky-blue shutters of the three lower windows and the solitary square of the shutter belonging to the attic window appeared very bright. The left side of the roof was picturesquely hidden by thick green elms and lime trees. Both in the yard and in the garden there were many winding paths, so convenient that they seemed to have been placed there on purpose for hide-and-seek.
The garden was particularly good; though not large, it was wooded and pleasantly intricate. In one corner stood a small washhouse, just like a toy building; and in the other was a fair-sized pit, grown over with high grass, from which protruded the thick chimney-stack which was all that remained of the heating apparatus of an earlier washhouse. On the left the garden was bounded by the wall of Colonel Ovsyanikov's stables, and on the right by Betlenga House; the end abutted on the farm belonging to the dairy-woman Petrovna-- a stout, red, noisy female, who reminded me of a bell. Her little house, built in a hollow, was dark and dilapidated, and well covered with moss; its two windows looked out with a benevolent expression upon the field, the deep ravine, and the forest, which apppeared like a heavy blue cloud in the distance. Soldiers moved or ran about the fields all day long, and their bayonets flashed like white lightning in the slanting rays of the autumn sun.
The house was filled with people who seemed to me very wonderful. On the first floor lived a soldier from Tartary with his little, buxom wife, who shouted from morn till night, and laughed, and played on a richly ornamented guitar, and sang in a high flute-like voice. This was the song she sang most often:
"There 's one you love, but her love you will miss,
Seek on! another you must find.
And you will find her--for reward a kiss--
Seven times as beautiful and kind.
Oh, what a glo--or--i--ous reward!"
The soldier, round as a ball, sat at the window and puffed out his blue face, and roguishly turned his reddish eyes from side to side, as he smoked his everlasting pipe, and occasionally coughed, and giggled with a strange, doglike sound:
"Vookh! Voo--kh!"
In the comfortable room which had been built over the cellar and the stables, lodged two draymen--little, gray-haired Uncle Peter and his dumb nephew Stepa-- a smooth, easy-going fellow, whose face reminded me of a copper tray--and a long-limbed, gloomy Tartar, Valei, who was an officer's servant. All these people were to me a complete novelty--magnificent "unknowns." But the one who attracted my attention and held it in a special degree, was the boarder, nicknamed "Good-business." He rented a room at the back of the house, next to the kitchen--a long room with two windows, one looking on the garden, the other on the yard. He was a lean, stooping man with a white face and a black beard, cleft in two, with kind eyes over which he wore spectacles. He was silent and unobtrusive, and when he was called to dinner or tea, his invariable reply was "Good-business!" so grandmother began to call him that both to his face and behind his back. It was: "Lenka! Call 'Good-business' to tea," or " 'Good-business,' you are eating nothing!"
His room was blocked up and encumbered with all sorts of cases and thick books, which looked strange to me, in Russian characters. Here were also bottles containing liquids of different colors, lumps of copper and iron, and bars of lead; and from morning till night, dressed in a reddish leather jacket, with gray check trousers all smeared with different