My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [91]
This was very painful; I had rather she had struck me. I told her I would never again be rude to the Maximovs--never again, if only she would not cry.
"There, there!" she said softly. "Only you must not be impudent. Very soon we shall be married, and then we shall go to Moscow; afterwards we shall come back and you will live with us. Eugen Vassilivitch is very kind and clever, and you will get on well with him. You will go to a grammar school, and afterwards you shall be a student--like he is now; then you shall be a doctor--whatever you like. You may study whatever you choose. Now run and play."
These "afterwards" and "thens" one after the other seemed to me like a staircase leading to some place deep down and far away from her, into darkness and solitude ^ --a staircase which led to no happiness for me. I had a good mind to say to my mother:
"Please don't get married. I will earn money for your keep."
But somehow the words would not come. Mother always aroused in me many tender thoughts about herself, but I never could make up my mind to tell them to her.
My undertaking in the garden was progressing; I pulled up the long grass, or cut it down with a knife, and I built, with pieces of brick, against the edge of the pit where the earth had fallen away, a broad seat, large enough, in fact, to lie down upon. I took a lot of pieces of colored glass and fragments of broken crockery and stuck them in the chinks between the bricks, and when the sun looked into the pit they all shone with a rainbow effect, like one sees in churches.
"Very well thought out!" said grandfather one day, looking at my work. "Only you have broken off the grass and left the roots. Give me your spade and I will dig them up for you; come, bring it to me!"
I brought him the yellow spade; he spat on his hands, and making a noise like a duck, drove the spade into the earth with his foot.
"Throw away the roots," he said. "Later on I will plant some sunflowers here for you, and some raspberry bushes. That will be nice--very nice!" And then, bending over his spade, he fell into a dead silence.
I looked at him; fine tear-drops were falling fast from his small, intelligent, doglike eyes to the ground.
"What is the matter?"
He shook himself, wiped his face with his palms, and dimly regarded me.
"I was sweating. Look there--what a lot of
Then he began to dig again, and after a time he said abruptly:
"You have done all this for nothing--for nothing, my boy. I am going to sell the house soon. I must sell it before autumn without fail. I want the money for your mother's dowry. That's what it is! I hope she will be happy. God bless her!"
He threw down the spade, and with a gesture of renunciation went behind the washhouse where he had
a forcing-bed, and I began to dig; but almost at once I crushed my toes with the spade.
This prevented me from going to the church with mother when she was married; I could only get as far as the gate, and from there I saw her on Maximov's arm, with her head bowed, carefully setting her feet on the pavement and on the green grass, and stepping over the crevices as if she were walking on sharp nails.
It was a quiet wedding. When they came back from church they drank tea in a depressed manner, and mother changed her dress directly and went to her own room to pack up. My stepfather came and sat beside me, and said:
"I promised to give you some paints, but there are no good ones to be got in this town, and I cannot give my own away; but I will bring you some from Moscow."
"And what shall I do with them?"
"Don't you like drawing?"
"I don't know how to draw."
"Well, I will bring you something else."
Then mother came in.
"We shall soon come back, you know. Your father, there, has to sit for an examination, and when he has finished his studies we shall come back."
I was pleased that they should talk to me like this, as if I were grown-up; but it was very strange to hear that a man with a beard was still