by Maxim Gorky
Always preoccupied, he led from day to day a monotonous, measured life: at eight o’clock in the morning he had tea and, reading the newspaper, told the mother the news. Listening to him, the mother saw with astonishing clarity how the heavy machine of life pitilessly ground people down and turned them into money. She sensed in him something he had in common with Andrei. Like the Ukrainian, he spoke about people without malice, considering everyone to be to blame for life’s bad order, but his faith in a new life was not as fervent as Andrei’s, and not as bright. He always spoke calmly, with the voice of an honest, stern judge, and although he smiled a quiet smile of regret, even when talking of something terrible, still his eyes shone coldly and firmly. Seeing their brilliance, the mother understood that this man forgave no one anything, was unable to forgive, and, sensing that this firmness was hard for him, she felt sorry for Nikolai. And she liked him more and more.
At nine o’clock he would leave for work, and she would tidy the rooms, prepare dinner, wash, put on a clean dress and, sitting in her room, look at the pictures in books. She had already learnt to read, but this always demanded an effort of her and, when reading, she quickly became weary and ceased to understand the connections between the words. Whereas looking at the pictures fascinated her like a child, as they opened up before her a comprehensible, almost palpable world that was new and wonderful. Huge cities arose, fine buildings, machines, ships, monuments, the innumerable riches created by men and the mind-boggling diversity of the work of nature. Life broadened endlessly, revealing to her eyes each day the huge, the mysterious, the wonderful, and it aroused ever more strongly the woman’s awakened and hungry soul with the abundance of its riches, the innumerableness of its beauties. She especially enjoyed looking at the folios of the zoological atlas, and although it was printed in a foreign language, still it gave her the most vivid impression of the earth’s beauty, richness and vastness.
“Great is the earth!” she said to Nikolai.
She was touched most of all by the insects, and especially the butterflies, and she looked in astonishment at the drawings depicting them, reasoning:
“What beauty, Nikolai Ivanovich, eh? And there’s so much of this sweet beauty everywhere, yet everything’s hidden from us, and everything flies by, and we don’t see it. People rush around, and they know nothing, they can’t admire anything, they don’t have the time for it, or the desire. How much pleasure they could take if they knew how rich the earth was, how many amazing things lived on it. And everything is for everyone, and each one is for everything, isn’t that so?”
“Precisely!” said Nikolai, smiling. And he brought more books with pictures.
Guests often gathered at his place in the evenings – Alexei Vasilyevich, a handsome man with a pale face and a black beard, solid and taciturn; Roman Petrovich, a pimply, round-headed man who was always smacking his lips regretfully; Ivan Danilovich, small and slim, with a sharp little beard and a thin voice, provocative, loud and sharp as a needle; Yegor, always laughing at himself, his comrades and his illness, which kept on spreading inside him. There were other people, too, who came from various far-off towns. Nikolai had long, quiet talks with them, always about the same thing, about the working people of the earth. They argued and grew heated, waving their arms about, and they drank a lot of tea; sometimes, to the noise of the conversation, Nikolai would silently compose proclamations, then read them to his comrades and rewrite them straight away in block capitals, while the mother would painstakingly collect the little pieces of torn-up drafts and burn them.
She poured the tea and was amazed at the fervour with which they spoke about the life and fate of the working people, about how quicker and better to sow ideas about the truth among them and raise their spirits. They often got angry and disagreed with one another; they would accuse each other of things, take umbrage and then argue again.
The mother felt that she knew the life of the workers better than these people, and it seemed to her that she saw more clearly than they did the immensity of the task they had taken upon themselves, and this allowed her to have for all of them the condescending, slightly sad feeling an adult has for children who are playing husband and wife without understanding the drama of their relationship. She involuntarily compared their speeches with the speeches of her son and Andrei and, in comparing, sensed a difference which she could not at first understand. It seemed to her at times that here they shouted more forcefully than they had sometimes in the settlement, and she explained it to herself thus:
“They know more, so they talk louder…”
But too often did she see that all of these people seemed to be provoking one another deliberately and getting heated for show, as though each of them wanted to prove to his comrades that the truth was nearer and dearer to him than to them, and the others took offence at this and, trying to prove in their turn their nearness to the truth, began arguing sharply and rudely. Each wanted to jump higher than the other, it seemed to her, and this aroused her anxious sorrow. She would twitch an eyebrow and, looking at them all with beseeching eyes, think:
“They’ve forgotten about Pasha and his comrades…”
Always straining to listen closely to the arguments and, of course, not understanding them, she sought the emotion behind the words and saw that, when they had talked about goodness in the settlement, they had taken it in the round, as a whole, while here everything was broken down into pieces and diminished; there they had had deeper and stronger emotions, while here was a place of sharp ideas that dissected everything. And here they spoke more of the destruction of the old, while there they had dreamt of the new, and that had made the speeches of her son and Andrei more accessible and more comprehensible to her…
She noticed that whenever any working people came to see Nikolai, he would become unusually familiar, a sweet sort of expression would appear on his face and he would speak differently to the way he generally did, perhaps more coarsely, perhaps more carelessly.
“He’s making an effort to be understood!” she thought.
But this was no comfort to her, and she could see the visiting worker was shrinking as well, as if bound from within, unable to speak as easily and freely as he did with her, a simple woman. Once, when Nikolai had left the room she remarked to some young man:
“Why are you so shy? You’re not a little boy taking an exam, are you?…”
He gave a broad grin:
“Even lobsters go red out of water… he’s not one of us, after all…”
Sometimes Sashenka would visit, but she never stayed long, was always businesslike in her talk, never laughing, and each time, as she was leaving, she would ask the mother:
“So, is Pavel Mikhailovich well?”
“Thank God!” the mother would say. “He’s all right, he’s cheerful!”
“Give him my greetings!” the girl would request, and then disappear.
At times the mother complained to her that they were holding Pavel for a long time and not setting a date for his trial. Sashenka frowned and was silent, but her fingers would be moving about rapidly.
Nilovna felt a desire to say to her:
“My dear girl, I do know you love him…”
But she could not bring herself to do so – it was as if the girl’s stern face, her tightly pursed lips and dry, businesslike speech repulsed any affection in advance. Sighing, the mother would wordlessly squeeze the hand reached out to her and think:
“My unhappy girl…”
One day Natasha came. She was overjoyed to see the mother, smothered her in kisses and, incidentally, all of a sudden somehow, announced quietly:
“My mummy’s died, died, the poor thing!…”
She gave a toss of the head, wiped her eyes with a quick gesture of her hand and continued:
“I do feel sorry for her – she wasn’t fifty, she might have lived for a long time yet. But if you look at it a different
way, you can’t help thinking death is probably easier than that life. Always alone, a stranger to everyone, not needed by anyone, cowed by my father’s shouting – was that really a life she had? It’s a life when people can expect something good, but she had nothing to wait for other than hurt…”
“It’s true what you say, Natasha!” said the mother after some thought. “It’s a life when people can expect some good, but if there’s nothing to wait for, what sort of life is that?” And gently stroking the girl’s hand, she asked: “Are you left all alone now?”
“All alone!” Natasha replied easily.
The mother paused, and then suddenly remarked with a smile:
“Never mind! Good people don’t live alone: other people always attach themselves to them…”
VIII
Natasha got a job out of town as a teacher at a weaving mill, and Nilovna began delivering forbidden books, proclamations and newspapers to her.
This became her work. Several times a month, disguised as a nun or a trader in lace and handmade linen, a prosperous townswoman or a wandering pilgrim, she would travel or walk about the province with a sack on her back or a suitcase in her hand. In train carriages and on steamboats, in hotels and coaching inns, she would everywhere conduct herself simply and calmly, be the first to enter into conversation with unknown people and fearlessly attract attention to herself with her gentle, sociable speech and the confident manners of a worldly-wise person who has seen a lot of things.
She enjoyed talking to people, enjoyed listening to their stories about life, their complaints and quandaries. Her heart was overflowing with joy every time she noticed acute dissatisfaction in anybody, the dissatisfaction that, protesting against the blows of fate, looks intensively for answers to questions that have already formed in the person’s mind. Ever more broadly and with greater variety did the picture of human life unfold before her, a bustling, anxious life in the struggle for satiety. Clearly visible everywhere was a crudely naked, brazenly unconcealed aspiration to deceive people, to clean them out, to squeeze greater personal benefit from them, to drain them of blood. And she saw that there was a lot of everything on earth, and yet the people were in need and lived half-hungry alongside innumerable riches. In towns there stood churches filled with gold and silver that God did not need, while in the church porches there were shivering beggars, waiting in vain for a little copper coin to be thrust into their hands. She had seen this before, the rich churches and the gold-embroidered chasubles of the priests, the shacks of the destitute people and their shameful rags, but it had seemed natural to her before, while now it seemed irreconcilable and insulting to the poor, to whom, she knew, the church was dearer and more necessary than it was to the rich.
From pictures, from depictions of Christ and stories about Him, she knew that He, the friend of paupers, had dressed simply, yet in the churches, where the poor came to Him for comfort, she saw Him bound in brazen gold and silk that rustled fastidiously at the sight of poverty. And she involuntarily recalled Rybin’s words:
“They’ve deceived us with God too!”
Without noticing it herself, she had begun praying less, yet she was thinking more and more about Christ and the people who, without mentioning His name, as though not even knowing about Him, lived, as it seemed to her, according to His bidding, and who, like Him, considering the earth the kingdom of the poor, wanted to share all the riches of the earth equally among men. She thought about this a lot, and this idea grew in her soul; deepening and embracing all she saw and all she heard, it grew, taking on the bright face of a prayer that shed an even light over the dark world, the whole of life and all people. And it seemed to her that Christ Himself, Whom she had always loved with a confused love, a complex feeling, where fear was closely tied up with hope and tenderness with sorrow, Christ had now become dearer to her and was already different, more exalted and conspicuous for her, more joyous and brighter in face, as if He were, indeed, rising again for life, laved and revived by the hot blood that men had spilt generously in His name, while chastely omitting to proclaim the name of the unfortunate friend of man. She would always return to Nikolai from her journeys, joyfully excited by what she had seen and heard on her way, cheery and content with the work she had done.
“It’s good travelling everywhere and seeing a lot!” she would say to Nikolai in the evenings. “You can understand the way life is set up. The people are pushed aside, cast away to its edge, and there they potter about, hurt, but, whether they want to or not, thinking – why? Why am I driven away? Why is there a lot of everything, yet I’m hungry? And there’s so much wisdom everywhere, yet I’m stupid and ignorant. And where is He, the merciful God, before Whom there is no rich man or poor man, but all are children, dear to His heart? Little by little the people are getting indignant about their life, and they sense that untruth will smother them if they don’t think about themselves!”
And more and more often she felt a pressing desire to speak to people in her own language about the injustices of life; sometimes it was hard for her to suppress this desire…
Catching her looking at pictures, Nikolai, with a smile, would always tell her something wonderful. Struck by the audacity of man’s enterprises, she would ask Nikolai doubtfully:
“Is it really possible?”
And insistently, with unshakable confidence in the truth of his prophecies, gazing through his glasses at her face with kind eyes, he would tell her magical tales about the future:
“There is no measure for man’s desires, and his strength is inexhaustible! But nonetheless, the world is still very slow to grow rich in spirit, because everyone now, wanting to liberate themselves from dependence, is compelled to amass not knowledge, but money. But when people kill greed, when they liberate themselves from the captivity of forced labour…”
She rarely understood the sense of his words, but the feeling of serene faith that animated them was becoming ever more accessible to her.
“There are too few free people on earth, that’s its misfortune!” he said.
This she could understand: she knew people who had freed themselves from greed and spite, and she understood that if there were more such people, the dark and terrible face of life would become friendlier and simpler, kinder and brighter.
“Against his will man has to be cruel!” said Nikolai with sadness.
She nodded her head in agreement, remembering what the Ukrainian had said.
IX
One day, Nikolai, who was always punctual, came back from work a lot later than usual and hurriedly, without taking his things off, rubbing his hands excitedly, said:
“Do you know, Nilovna, one of our comrades has escaped from prison today. But who is it? I wasn’t able to find out…”
Gripped by anxiety, the mother rocked on her feet, sat down on a chair and asked in a whisper:
“Was it, perhaps, Pasha?”
“Perhaps!” Nikolai replied, jerking his shoulders up. “But how can he be helped to hide – where’s he to be found? I’ve just been walking around the streets in case I came across him. It’s silly, but I’ve got to do something! And I’m going to go again…”
“Me too!” cried the mother.
“You go to Yegor’s: maybe he knows something,” Nikolai suggested, disappearing in haste.
She threw a shawl over her head and, gripped by hope, quickly followed him out. There were spots in front of her eyes, and her heart was thumping fast, forcing her almost to run. With her head down, she was going to meet what was possible and did not notice anything around her.
“I’ll get there, and there he’ll be!” the hope kept flashing and pushing her on.
It was hot, she was so tired she was gasping for breath and when she got to the staircase to Yegor’s apartment, she stopped, powerless to go any farther, turned around and, with a quiet cry, closed her eyes for a moment in surprise: it had seemed to her that Ni
kolai Vesovshchikov was standing in the gateway with his hands thrust into his pockets. But when she looked again, there was no one there…
“I imagined it!” she thought to herself, striding up the stairs and listening. Down below in the yard could be heard the muffled tread of slow steps. Stopping at a turn in the staircase, she bent over and looked down, and again she saw a pockmarked face smiling at her.
“Nikolai! Nikolai…” she exclaimed, going down towards him, but her heart began to ache with disappointment.
“You go on! Go on!” he answered in a low voice, waving a hand.
She ran quickly up the stairs, went into Yegor’s room and, seeing him lying on the sofa, whispered, panting:
“Nikolai’s escaped… from prison!…”
“Which Nikolai?” Yegor asked hoarsely, raising his head from a cushion. “There are two of them in there…”
“Vesovshchikov… He’s coming here!…”
“Wonderful!”
He had already come into the room, put the hook down to lock the door and, having taken off his hat, was laughing quietly as he smoothed down the hair on his head. Leaning his elbows on the sofa, Yegor lifted himself up and, nodding his head, let out a croak.
“Welcome…”
Nikolai went up to the mother with a broad smile and took her by the hand:
“If I hadn’t seen you, I might as well have gone back to prison! I don’t know anyone in town, and if I went back to the settlement they’d grab me straight away. I’m walking about thinking – idiot! What did you get away for? Suddenly I see Nilovna running along! So I came after you…”