My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [74]
"What have you done?" he shrieked at length, dragging me towards him by the foot.
I turned head over heels, and grandmother caught me, with grandfather striking her with his fist and screaming:
"I'll kill him!"
At this moment mother appeared, and I took refuge in the corner of the stove, while she, barring his way, caught grandfather's hands, which were being flourished in her face, and pushed him away as she said:
"What is the meaning of this unseemly behavior? Recollect yourself."
Grandfather threw himself on the bench under the window, howling:
"You want to kill me. You are all against me-- every one of you!"
"Are n't you ashamed of yourself?" My mother's voice sounded subdued. "Why all this pretense?"
Grandfather shrieked, and kicked the bench, with his beard sticking out funnily towards the ceiling and his eyes tightly closed; it seemed to me that he really was ashamed before mother, and that he was really pretending--and that was why he kept his eyes shut.
"I 'll gum all these pieces together on some calico, and they will look even better than before," said mother, glancing at the cuttings and the leaves. "Look--they were crumpled and torn; they had been lying about."
She spoke to him just like she used to speak to me in lesson-time when I could not understand something, and he stood up at once, put his shirt and waistcoat straight, in a business-like manner, expectorated and said:
"Do it to-day. I will bring you the other leaves at once."
He went to the door, but he halted on the threshold and pointed a crooked finger at me:
"And he will have to be whipped."
"That goes without saying," agreed mother, bending towards me. "Why did you do it?"
"I did it on purpose. He had better not beat grandmother again, or I 'll cut his beard off."
Grandmother, taking off her torn bodice, said, shaking her head reproachfully:
"Hold your tongue now, as you promised." And she spat on the floor. "May your tongue swell up if you don't keep it still!"
Mother looked at her, and again crossed the kitchen to me.
"When did he beat her?"
"Now, Varvara, you ought to be ashamed to ask him about it. Is it any business of yours?" said grandmother angrily.
Mother went and put her arm round her. "Oh, little mother--my dear little mother!"
"Oh, go away with your 'little mother'! Get away!"
They looked at each other in silence. Grandfather could be heard stamping about in the vestibule.
When she first came home mother had made friends with the merry lady, the soldier's wife, and almost every evening she went up to the front room of the half-house, where she sometimes found people from Betlenga House--beautiful ladies, and officers. Grandfather did not like this at all, and one day, as he was sitting in the kitchen, he shook his spoon at her threateningly and muttered:
"So you are starting your old ways, curse you! We don't get a chance of sleeping till the morning now."
He soon cleared the lodgers out, and when they had gone he brought from somewhere or other two loads of assorted furniture, placed it in the front room, and locked it up with a large padlock.
"We have no need to take lodgers," he said. "I am going to entertain on my own account now."
And so on Sundays and holidays visitors began to appear. There was grandmother's sister, Matrena Sergievna, a shrewish laundress with a large nose, in a striped silk dress and with hair dyed gold; and with her came her sons--Vassili, a long-haired draughtsman, good-natured and gay, who was dressed entirely in gray; and Victor, in all colors of the rainbow, with a head like a horse, and a narrow face covered with freckles, who, even while he was in the vestibule taking off his goloshes, sang in a squeaky voice just like Petrushka's: "Andrei-papa! Andrei-papa!" which occasioned me some surprise and alarm.
Uncle Jaakov used to come too, with his guitar, and accompanied by a bent, bald-headed man--a clock-winder, who wore a long, black frock-coat and had a smooth manner; he reminded me of a monk. He used to sit in a corner with his head on one side, and smiling curiously as he