My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [99]
Raising his hand and throwing back his sleeve, he made the sign of the Cross over us all with one wide gesture, and blessed us:
"In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I bless you and your labors. Good-by!"
They all cried:
"Good-by, my lord. Come again soon."
Shaking his cowl, he said:
"I shall come again. I shall come again, and bring you some little books."
And he said to the teacher as he sailed out of the classroom:
"Let them go home now."
He led me by the hand to the porch, where he said quietly, bending down to me:
"So you will hold yourself in, won't you? ... Is that settled? ... I understand why you are naughty, you know. . . . Good-by, my boy!"
I was very excited; my heart was seething with strange feelings, and when the teacher, having dismissed the rest of the class, kept me in to tell me that now I ought to be quieter than water and humbler than grass, I listened to him attentively and willingly.
The priest, putting on his fur-coat, chimed in gently:
"And from to-day you will have to assist at my lessons. Yes, you 'll have to. And sit still too. Yes-- sit still."
But while matters were improving at school, an unpleasant incident occurred at home. I stole a rouble from mother. The crime had been committed without forethought. One evening mother went out and left me to keep house and mind the baby; feeling bored, I began to turn over the leaves of a book belonging to my stepfather--"The Memoirs of a Doctor," by Dumas Pere--and between the pages I came across two notes, one for ten roubles and the other for one rouble. I could not understand the book, so I shut it up; then it suddenly dawned upon me that if I had a rouble I could buy not only the Bible, but also the book about Robinson. That such a book existed I had learned at school not long before this. One frosty day in recreation time, I was telling the boys a fairy-story, when one of them observed in a tone of contempt:
"Fairy-tales are bosh! 'Robinson' is what I like. It is a true story."
Finding several other boys who had read "Robinson" and were full of its praises, I felt offended at their not liking grandmother's stories, and made up my mind to read "Robinson" for myself, so that I should be able to tell them it was "bosh!"
The next day I brought the Bible and two torn volumes of Andersen's fairy-tales to school, together with three pounds of white bread and a pound of sausages. In the little dark shop by the wall of Vladinursk Church there had also been a "Robinson"--a thin little book with a yellow cover, and a picture of a bearded man in a fur nightcap, with the skin of a wild beast over his shoulders, on the front page; but I did not like the look of it. Even the exterior of the fairytales was pleasing, in spite of their being torn.
In the long playtime I distributed the bread and sausages amongst the boys, and we began to read that wonderful story "The Nightingale," which took all our hearts by storm.
"In China all the people are Chinese, and even the Emperor is a Chinaman"--I remember how pleasantly this phrase struck me with its simple, joyful, smiling music. There were many other points about the story too which were wonderfully good.
But I was not to be allowed to read "The Nightingale" in school. There was not time enough, for when I returned home mother, who was standing before the fire holding a frying-pan in which she had been cooking some eggs, asked me in a strange, subdued voice:
"Did you take that rouble?"
"Yes, I took it--out of that book there."
She gave me a sound beating with the frying-pan, and took away Andersen's book and hid it somewhere so that I could never find it again, which was a far worse punishment to me than the beating.
I did not go to school for several days, and during that time my stepfather must have told one of his friends about my exploit, who told his children, who carried the story to school, and when I went back I was met with the new cry "Thief!"
It was a brief and clear description, but it did not happen to be a