My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [94]
This was the quietest and most contemplative period of my whole life, and it was during this summer that the consciousness of my own strength took root and developed in me. I became shy and unsociable, and when I heard the shouts of the Ovsyanikov children I had no desire to go to them; and when my cousins came, I was more than a little annoyed, and the only feeling they aroused in me was the fear lest they should destroy my structure in the garden--the first work I had ever done by myself.
Grandfather's conversation, drier, more querulous, and more doleful every day, had lost all interest for me. He had taken to quarreling with grandmother frequently, and to turn her out of the house, when she would go either to Uncle Jaakov's or to Uncle Michael's. Once she stayed away for several days and grandfather did all the cooking himself, burned his hands, roared with pain, swore, and smashed the crockery, and developed a noticeable greediness. Sometimes he would come to my hut, make himself comfortable on the turfy seat, and after watching me in silence for some time, would ask abruptly:
"Why are you so quiet?"
"Because I feel like it. Why?"
Then he would begin his sermon:
"We are not gentlefolk. No one takes the trouble to teach us. We have got to find everything out for ourselves. For other folk they write books, and build schools; but no time is wasted on us. We have to make our own way."
And he fell into a brooding silence--sitting motionless, oblivious, till his presence became almost oppressive.
He sold the house in the autumn, and not long before the sale he exclaimed abruptly one morning, over his tea:
"Well, Mother, I have fed and clothed you--fed and clothed you--but the time has come for you to earn your own bread."
Grandmother received this announcement quite calmly, as if she had been expecting it a long time. She reached for her snuff-box in a leisurely manner, charged her spongy nose, and said:
"Well, that's all right! If it is to be like that, so let it be."
Grandfather took two dark rooms in the basement of an old house, at the foot of a small hill.
When we went to this lodging, grandmother took an old bast shoe, put it under the stove, and, squatting on her heels, invoked the house-demon:
"House-demon, family-demon, here is your sledge; come to us in our new home, and bring us good luck."
Grandfather looked in at the window from the yard, crying: "I will make you smart for this, you heretic! You are trying to put me to shame."
"Oie! Take care that you don't bring harm to yourself, Father," said grandmother seriously; but he only raged at her, and forbade her to invoke the housedemon.
The furniture and effects were sold by him to a second-hand dealer who was a Tartar, after three days' bargaining and abuse of each other; and grandmother looked out of the window, sometimes crying and sometimes laughing, and exclaiming under her breath:
"That's right! Drag them about. Smash them."
I was ready to weep myself as I mourned for my garden and my little hut.
We journeyed thither in two carts, and the one wherein I was placed, amongst various utensils, jolted alarmingly, as if it were going to throw me out then and there, with a part of the load. And for two years, till close upon the time of my mother's death, I was dominated with the idea that I had been thrown out somewhere. Soon after the move mother made her appearance, just as grandfather had settled down in his basement, very pale and thin, and with her great eyes strangely brilliant. She stared just as if she were seeing her father and mother and me for the first time-- just stared, and said nothing; while my stepfather moved about the room, whistling softly, and clearing his throat, with his hands behind his back and his fingers twitching.
"Lord! how dreadfully you have grown," said mother to me, pressing her hot hands to my cheeks. She was dressed unattractively