My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [80]
"That's a good idea too. By the time you are an officer I shall be a robber-chief, and you will have to capture me, and one of us will have to kill the other, or take him prisoner. I shan't kill you."
"Nor I you."
On that point we were agreed.
Then grandmother came in, and climbing on to the stove, glanced up at us and said:
"Well, little mice? E--ekh! Poor orphans! . . . Poor little mites!"
Having pitied us, she began to abuse Sascha's stepmother--fat Aunt Nadejda, daughter of the inn-keeper, going on to abuse stepmothers in general, and, apropos, told us the story of the wise hermit Iona, and how when he was but a lad he was judged, with his stepmother, by an act of God. His father was a fisherman of the White Lake:
"By his young wife his ruin was wrought,
A potent liquor to him she brought,
Made of herbs which bring sleep.
She laid him, slumbering, in a bark
Of oak, like a grave, so close and dark,
And plied the maple oars.
In the lake's center she dug a hole,
For there she had planned, in that dark pool,
To hide her vile witch deed.
Bent double she rocked from side to side,
And the frail craft o'erturned--that witch bride!
And her husband sank deep.
And the witch swam quickly to the shore
And fell to the earth with wailings sore,
And womanly laments.
The good folk all, believing her tale,
Wept with the disconsolate female,
And in bitterness cried:
'Oi! As wife thy life was all too brief!
O'erwhelmed art thou by wifely grief;
But life is God's affair.
Death too He sends when it doth please Him.'
Stepson Ionushka alone looked grim,
Her tears not believing.
With his little hand upon his heart
He swiftly at her these words did dart:
'Oi! Fateful stepmother!
Oi! Artful night-bird, born to deceive!
Those tears of yours I do not believe!
It is joy you feel not pain.
But we 'll ask our Lord, my charge to prove,
And the aid of all the saints above.
Let some one take a knife,
And throw it up to the cloudless sky;
Blameless you, to me the knife will fly.
If I am right, you die!'
* **..**0
The stepmother turned her baleful gaze
On him, and with hate her eyes did blaze
As she rose to her feet.
And with vigor replied to the attack
Of her stepson, nor words did she lack.
'Oh! creature without sense!
Abortion you!--fit for rubbish heap!
By this invention, what do you reap?
Answer you cannot give!'
The good folk looked on, but nothing said;
Of this dark business they were afraid.
Sad and pensive they stood;
Then amongst themselves they held a debate,
And a fisherman old and sedate
Bowing, advanced and said:
'In my right hand, good people, give me
A steel knife, which I will throw, and ye
Shall see on whom it falls.'
A knife to his hand was their reply.
High above his gray head, to the sky,
The sharp blade he did fling.
Like a bird, up in the air it went;
Vainly they waited for its descent,
The crystal height scanning.
Their hats they doffed, and closer pressed they stood,
Silent; yea, Night herself seemed to brood;
But the knife did not fall.
The ruby dawn rose over the lake,
The stepmother, flushed, did courage take
And scornfully did smile.
When like a swallow the knife did dart
To earth, and fixed itself in her heart.
Down on their knees the people did fall
Praising God Who is Ruler of All:
'Thou are just, O God!'
Iona, the fisherman, did take,
And of him a hermit did make.
Far away by the bright River Kerjentza
In a cell almost invisible from the town Kiteja." *
The next day I woke up covered with red spots, and this was the beginning of small-pox.
They put me up in the back attic, and there I lay for a long time, blind, with my hands and feet tightly bandaged, living through horrible nightmares, in one of which I nearly died. No one but grandmother came near me, and she fed me with a spoon as if I were a baby, and