My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [53]
"Write it down by all means, if you like. There 's no harm in that. And I know plenty more of the same kind."
"No, that is the only one I want. It is--so-- dreadfully Russian!" cried the boarder excitedly; and standing stock-still in the middle of the kitchen, he began to talk loudly, clearing the air with his right hand, and holding his glasses in the other. He spoke for some time in a frenzied manner, his voice rising to a squeak, stamping his feet, and often repeating himself: -?s "If we are ordered to do something wrong our duty
is then to be firm and strong. True! True!"
Then suddenly his voice broke, he ceased speaking, looked round on all of us, and quietly left the room, hanging his head with a guilty air.
The other guests laughed, and glanced at each other with expressions of embarrassment. Grandmother moved farther back against the stove, into the shadow, and was heard to sigh heavily.
Rubbing the palm of her hand across her thick red lips, Petrovna observed:
"He seems to be in a temper."
"No," replied Uncle Peter; "that's only his way."
Grandmother left the stove, and in silence began to heat the samovar; and Uncle Peter added, in a slow voice:
"The Lord makes people like that sometimes-- freaks."
"Bachelors always play the fool," Valei threw out gruffly, at which there was a general laugh; but Uncle Peter drawled:
"He was actually in tears. It is a case of the pike nibbling what the roach hardly--"
I began to get tired of all this. I was conscious of a heartache, I was greatly astonished by the behavior of "Good-business," and very sorry for him. I could not get his swimming eyes out of my mind.
That night he did not sleep at home, but he returned the next day, after dinner--quiet, crushed, obviously embarrassed.
"I made a scene last night," he said to grandmother, with the air of a guilty child. "You are not angry?"
"Why should I be angry?"
"Why, because I interrupted . . . and talked . . ."
"You offended no one."
I felt that grandmother was afraid of him. She did not look him in the face, and spoke in a subdued tone, and was quite unlike herself.
He drew near to her and said with amazing simplicity:
"You see, I am so terribly lonely. I have no one belonging to me. I am always silent--silent; and then, all on a sudden, my soul seems to boil over, as if it had been torn open. At such times I could speak to stones and trees--"
Grandmother moved away from him.
"If you were to get married now," she began.
"Eh?" he cried, wrinkling up his face, and ran out, throwing his arms up wildly.
Grandmother looked after him frowning, and took a pinch of snuff; after which she sternly admonished me:
"Don't you hang round him so much. Do you hear? God knows what sort of a man he is!"
But I was attracted to him afresh. I had seen how his face changed and fell when he said "terribly lonely"; there was something in those words which I well understood, and my heart was touched. I went to find him.
I looked, from the yard, into the window of his room; it was empty, and looked like a lumber-room into which had been hurriedly thrown all sorts of unwanted things--as unwanted and as odd as its occupier. I went into the garden, and there I saw him by the pit. He was bending over, with his hands behind his head, his elbows resting on his knees, and was seated uncomfortably on the end of a half-burnt plank. The greater part of this plank was buried in the earth, but the end of it struck out, glistening like coal, above the top of the pit, which was grown over with nettles.
The very fact of his being in such an uncomfortable place made me look upon this man in a still more favorable light. He did not notice me for some time; he was gazing beyond me with his half-blind, owl-like eyes, when he suddenly asked in a tone of vexation:
"Did you want me for anything?"
"No."
"Why are you here then?"
"I could n't say."
He took off his glasses, polished