My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [5]
"Are you quite well, Mother?" and they kissed each other three times.
He then drew me from the dense mass of people, and laying his hand on my head, asked:
"And who may you be?"
"I am the Astrakhan boy from the cabin."
"What on earth is he talking about?" Grandfather turned to my mother, but without waiting for an answer, shook me and said: "You are a chip of the old block. Get into the boat."
Having landed, the crowd of people wended its way up the hill by a road paved with rough cobblestones between two steep slopes covered with trampled grass.
Grandfather and mother went in front of us all. He was a head shorter than she was, and walked with little hurried steps; while she, looking down on him from her superior height, appeared literally to float beside him. After them walked dark, sleek-haired Uncle Michael, wizened like grandfather, bright and curly-headed Jaakov, some fat women in brightly colored dresses, and six children, all older than myself and all very quiet. I was with grandmother and little Aunt Natalia. Pale, blue-eyed and stout, she frequently stood still, panting and whispering:
"Oh, I can't go any farther!"
"Why did they trouble you to come?" grumbled grandmother angrily. "They are a silly lot!"
I did not like either the grown-up people nor the children; I felt myself to be a stranger in their midst --even grandmother had somehow become estranged and distant.
Most of all I disliked my uncle; I felt at once that he was my enemy, and I was conscious of a certain feeling of cautious curiosity towards him.
We had now arrived at the end of our journey.
At the very top, perched on the right slope, stood the first building in the street--a squat, one-storied house, decorated with dirty pink paint, with a narrow overhanging roof and bow-windows. Looked at from the street it appeared to be a large house, but the interior, with its gloomy, tiny rooms, was cramped. Everywhere, as on the landing-stage, angry people strove together, and a vile smell pervaded the whole place.
I went out into the yard. That also was unpleasant. It was strewn with large, wet cloths and lumbered with tubs, all containing muddy water, of the same hue, in which other cloths lay soaking. In the corner of a half-tumbled-down shed the logs burned brightly in a stove, upon which something was boiling or baking, and an unseen person uttered these strange words:
"Santaline, fuchsin, vitriol!"
CHAPTER II
THEN began and flowed on with astonishing rapidity an intense, varied, inexpressibly strange life. It reminded me of a crude story, well told by a good-natured but irritatingly truthful genius. Now, in recalling the past, I myself find it difficult to believe, at this distance of time, that things really were as they were, and I have longed to dispute or reject the facts-- )( the cruelty of the drab existence of an unwelcome relation is too painful to contemplate. But truth is stronger than pity, and besides, I am writing not about myself but about that narrow, stifling environment of \ unpleasant impressions in which lived--aye, and to this day lives--the average Russian of this class.
My grandfather's house simply seethed with mutual hostility; all the grown people were infected and even the children were inoculated with it. I had learned, from overhearing grandmother's conversation, that my mother arrived upon the very day when her brothers demanded the distribution of the property from their father. Her unexpected return made their desire for this all the keener and stronger, because they were afraid that my mother would claim the dowry intended for her, but withheld by my grandfather because she had married secretly and against his wish. My uncles considered that this dowry ought to be divided amongst them all. Added to this, they had been quarreling violently for a long time among themselves as to who should open a workshop in the town, or on the Oka in the village of Kunavin.'
One day, very shortly after our arrival, a quarrel broke out suddenly at dinner-time. My uncles started to their feet and, leaning across the