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This etext was produced by Jarrod Newton.

MOTHER

by Maxim Gorky

PART I

CHAPTER I

Every day the factory whistle bellowed forth its shrill, roaring,
trembling noises into the smoke-begrimed and greasy atmosphere of
the workingmen's suburb; and obedient to the summons of the power of
steam, people poured out of little gray houses into the street.
With somber faces they hastened forward like frightened roaches,
their muscles stiff from insufficient sleep. In the chill morning
twilight they walked through the narrow, unpaved street to the tall
stone cage that waited for them with cold assurance, illumining
their muddy road with scores of greasy, yellow, square eyes. The
mud plashed under their feet as if in mocking commiseration. Hoarse
exclamations of sleepy voices were heard; irritated, peevish,
abusive language rent the air with malice; and, to welcome the
people, deafening sounds floated about--the heavy whir of machinery,
the dissatisfied snort of steam. Stern and somber, the black
chimneys stretched their huge, thick sticks high above the village.

In the evening, when the sun was setting, and red rays languidly
glimmered upon the windows of the houses, the factory ejected its
people like burned-out ashes, and again they walked through the
streets, with black, smoke-covered faces, radiating the sticky odor
of machine oil, and showing the gleam of hungry teeth. But now
there was animation in their voices, and even gladness. The
servitude of hard toil was over for the day. Supper awaited them
at home, and respite.

The day was swallowed up by the factory; the machine sucked out of
men's muscles as much vigor as it needed. The day was blotted out
from life, not a trace of it left. Man made another imperceptible
step toward his grave; but he saw close before him the delights of
rest, the joys of the odorous tavern, and he was satisfied.

On holidays the workers slept until about ten o'clock. Then the
staid and married people dressed themselves in their best clothes
and, after duly scolding the young folks for their indifference to
church, went to hear mass. When they returned from church, they
ate pirogs, the Russian national pastry, and again lay down to
sleep until the evening. The accumulated exhaustion of years had
robbed them of their appetites, and to be able to eat they drank,
long and deep, goading on their feeble stomachs with the biting,
burning lash of vodka.

In the evening they amused themselves idly on the street; and those
who had overshoes put them on, even if it was dry, and those who had
umbrellas carried them, even if the sun was shining. Not everybody
has overshoes and an umbrella, but everybody desires in some way,
however small, to appear more important than his neighbor.

Meeting one another they spoke about the factory and the machines,
had their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of
matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only
rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent
thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk. Returning
home they quarreled with their wives, and often beat them, unsparing
of their fists. The young people sat in the taverns, or enjoyed
evening parties at one another's houses, played the accordion, sang
vulgar songs devoid of beauty, danced, talked ribaldry, and drank.

Exhausted with toil, men drank swiftly, and in every heart there
awoke and grew an incomprehensible, sickly irritation. It demanded
an outlet. Clutching tenaciously at every pretext for unloading
themselves of this disquieting sensation, they fell on one another
for mere trifles, with the spiteful ferocity of beasts, breaking
into bloody quarrels which sometimes ended in serious injury and on
rare occasions even in murder.

This lurking malice steadily increased, inveterate as the incurable
weariness in their muscles. They were born with this disease of the
soul inherited from their fathers. Like a black shadow it
accompanied them to their graves, spurring on their lives to crime,
hideous in its aimless cruelty and brutality.

On holidays the young people came home late at night, dirty and
dusty, their clothes torn, their faces bruised, boasting maliciously
of the blows they had struck their companions, or the insults they
had inflicted upon them; enraged or in tears over the indignities
they themselves had suffered; drunken and piteous, unfortunate and
repulsive. Sometimes the boys would be brought home by the mother
or the father, who had picked them up in the street or in a tavern,
drunk to insensibility. The parents scolded and swore at them
peevishly, and beat their spongelike bodies, soaked with liquor;
then more or less systematically put them to bed, in order to rouse
them to work early next morning, when the bellow of the whistle
should sullenly course through the air.

They scolded and beat the children soundly, notwithstanding the fact
that drunkenness and brawls among young folk appeared perfectly
legitimate to the old people. When they were young they, too, had
drunk and fought; they, too, had been beaten by their mothers and
fathers. Life had always been like that. It flowed on monotonously
and slowly somewhere down the muddy, turbid stream, year after year;
and it was all bound up in strong ancient customs and habits that
led them to do one and the same thing day in and day out. None of
them, it seemed, had either the time or the desire to attempt to
change this state of life.

Once in a long while a stranger would come to the village. At first
he attracted attention merely because he was a stranger. Then he
aroused a light, superficial interest by the stories of the places
where he had worked. Afterwards the novelty wore off, the people
got used to him, and he remained unnoticed. From his stories it was
clear that the life of the workingmen was the same everywhere. And
if so, then what was there to talk about?

Occasionally, however, some stranger spoke curious things never
heard of in the suburb. The men did not argue with him, but
listened to his odd speeches with incredulity. His words aroused
blind irritation in some, perplexed alarm in others, while still
others were disturbed by a feeble, shadowy glimmer of the hope of
something, they knew not what. And they all began to drink more in
order to drive away the unnecessary, meddlesome excitement.

Noticing in the stranger something unusual, the villagers cherished
it long against him and treated the man who was not like them with
unaccountable apprehension. It was as if they feared he would throw
something into their life which would disturb its straight, dismal
course. Sad and difficult, it was yet even in its tenor. People
were accustomed to the fact that life always oppressed them with the
same power. Unhopeful of any turn for the better, they regarded
every change as capable only of increasing their burden.

And the workingmen of the suburb tacitly avoided people who spoke
unusual things to them. Then these people disappeared again, going
off elsewhere, and those who remained in the factory lived apart, if
they could not blend and make one whole with the monotonous mass in
the village.

Living a life like that for some fifty years, a workman died.

Thus also lived Michael Vlasov, a gloomy, sullen man, with little
eyes which looked at everybody from under his thick eyebrows
suspiciously, with a mistrustful, evil smile. He was the best
locksmith in the factory, and the strongest man in the village. But
he was insolent and disrespectful toward the foreman and the
superintendent, and therefore earned little; every holiday he beat
somebody, and everyone disliked and feared him.

More than one attempt was made to beat him in turn, but without
success. When Vlasov found himself threatened with attack, he
caught a stone in his hand, or a piece of wood or iron, and
spreading out his legs stood waiting in silence for the enemy. His
face overgrown with a dark beard from his eyes to his neck, and his
hands thickly covered with woolly hair, inspired everybody with
fear. People were especially afraid of his eyes. Small and keen,
they seemed to bore through a man like steel gimlets, and everyone
who met their gaze felt he was confronting a beast, a savage power,
inaccessible to fear, ready to strike unmercifully.

"Well, pack off, dirty vermin!" he said gruffly. His coarse, yellow
teeth glistened terribly through the thick hair on his face. The
men walked off uttering coward abuse.

"Dirty vermin!" he snapped at them, and his eyes gleamed with a smile
sharp as an awl. Then holding his head in an attitude of direct
challenge, with a short, thick pipe between his teeth, he walked
behind them, and now and then called out: "Well, who wants death?"

No one wanted it.

He spoke little, and "dirty vermin" was his favorite expression.
It was the name he used for the authorities of the factory, and
the police, and it was the epithet with which he addressed his wife:
"Look, you dirty vermin, don't you see my clothes are torn?"

When Pavel, his son, was a boy of fourteen, Vlasov was one day
seized with the desire to pull him by the hair once more. But Pavel
grasped a heavy hammer, and said curtly:

"Don't touch me!"

"What!" demanded his father, bending over the tall, slender figure
of his son like a shadow on a birch tree.

"Enough!" said Pavel. "I am not going to give myself up any more."

And opening his dark eyes wide, he waved the hammer in the air.

His father looked at him, folded his shaggy hands on his back, and,
smiling, said:

"All right." Then he drew a heavy breath and added: "Ah, you
dirty vermin!"

Shortly after this he said to his wife:

"Don't ask me for money any more. Pasha will feed you now."

"And you will drink up everything?" she ventured to ask.

"None of your business, dirty vermin!" From that time, for three
years, until his death, he did not notice, and did not speak to his son.

Vlasov had a dog as big and shaggy as himself. She accompanied him
to the factory every morning, and every evening she waited for him
at the gate. On holidays Vlasov started off on his round of the
taverns. He walked in silence, and stared into people's faces as if
looking for somebody. His dog trotted after him the whole day long.
Returning home drunk he sat down to supper, and gave his dog to eat
from his own bowl. He never beat her, never scolded, and never
petted her. After supper he flung the dishes from the table--if his
wife was not quick enough to remove them in time--put a bottle of
whisky before him, and leaning his back against the wall, began in a
hoarse voice that spread anguish about him to bawl a song, his mouth
wide open and his eyes closed. The doleful sounds got entangled in
his mustache, knocking off the crumbs of bread. He smoothed down
the hair of his beard and mustache with his thick fingers and sang--
sang unintelligible words, long drawn out. The melody recalled the
wintry howl of wolves. He sang as long as there was whisky in the
bottle, then he dropped on his side upon the bench, or let his head
sink on the table, and slept in this way until the whistle began to
blow. The dog lay at his side.

When he died, he died hard. For five days, turned all black, he
rolled in his bed, gnashing his teeth, his eyes tightly closed.
Sometimes he would say to his wife: "Give me arsenic. Poison me."

She called a physician. He ordered hot poultices, but said an
operation was necessary and the patient must be taken at once to
the hospital.

"Go to the devil! I will die by myself, dirty vermin!" said Michael.

And when the physician had left, and his wife with tears in her
eyes began to insist on an operation, he clenched his fists and
announced threateningly:

"Don't you dare! It will be worse for you if I get well."

He died in the morning at the moment when the whistle called the
men to work. He lay in the coffin with open mouth, his eyebrows
knit as if in a scowl. He was buried by his wife, his son, the dog,
an old drunkard and thief, Daniel Vyesovshchikov, a discharged
smelter, and a few beggars of the suburb. His wife wept a little
and quietly; Pavel did not weep at all. The villagers who met the
funeral in the street stopped, crossed themselves, and said to one
another: "Guess Pelagueya is glad he died!" And some corrected:
"He didn't die; he rotted away like a beast."

When the body was put in the ground, the people went away, but the
dog remained for a long time, and sitting silently on the fresh
soil, she sniffed at the grave.

CHAPTER II

Two weeks after the death of his father, on a Sunday, Pavel came
home very drunk. Staggering he crawled to a corner in the front
of the room, and striking his fist on the table as his father used
to do, shouted to his mother:

"Supper!"

The mother walked up to him, sat down at his side, and with her
arm around her son, drew his head upon her breast. With his hand
on her shoulder he pushed her away and shouted:

"Mother, quick!"

"You foolish boy!" said the mother in a sad and affectionate voice,
trying to overcome his resistance.

"I am going to smoke, too. Give me father's pipe," mumbled Pavel
indistinctly, wagging his tongue heavily.

It was the first time he had been drunk. The alcohol weakened his
body, but it did not quench his consciousness, and the question
knocked at his brain: "Drunk? Drunk?"

The fondling of his mother troubled him, and he was touched by the
sadness in her eyes. He wanted to weep, and in order to overcome
this desire he endeavored to appear more drunk than he actually was.

The mother stroked his tangled hair, and said in a low voice:

"Why did you do it? You oughtn't to have done it."

He began to feel sick, and after a violent attack of nausea the
mother put him to bed, and laid a wet towel over his pale forehead.
He sobered a little, but under and around him everything seemed to
be rocking; his eyelids grew heavy; he felt a bad, sour taste in his
mouth; he looked through his eyelashes on his mother's large face,
and thought disjointedly:

"It seems it's too early for me. Others drink and nothing happens--
and I feel sick."

Somewhere from a distance came the mother's soft voice:

"What sort of a breadgiver will you be to me if you begin to drink?"

He shut his eyes tightly and answered:

"Everybody drinks."

The mother sighed. He was right. She herself knew that besides
the tavern there was no place where people could enjoy themselves;
besides the taste of whisky there was no other gratification.
Nevertheless she said:

"But don't you drink. Your father drank for both of you. And he made
enough misery for me. Take pity on your mother, then, will you not?"

Listening to the soft, pitiful words of his mother, Pavel remembered
that in his father's lifetime she had remained unnoticed in the
house. She had been silent and had always lived in anxious
expectation of blows. Desiring to avoid his father, he had been
home very little of late; he had become almost unaccustomed to his
mother, and now, as he gradually sobered up, he looked at her fixedly.

She was tall and somewhat stooping. Her heavy body, broken down
with long years of toil and the beatings of her husband, moved about
noiselessly and inclined to one side, as if she were in constant
fear of knocking up against something. Her broad oval face, wrinkled
and puffy, was lighted up with a pair of dark eyes, troubled and
melancholy as those of most of the women in the village. On her
right eyebrow was a deep scar, which turned the eyebrow upward
a little; her right ear, too, seemed to be higher than the left,
which gave her face the appearance of alarmed listening. Gray locks
glistened in her thick, dark hair, like the imprints of heavy blows.
Altogether she was soft, melancholy, and submissive.

Tears slowly trickled down her cheeks.

"Wait, don't cry!" begged the son in a soft voice. "Give me a drink."

She rose and said:

"I'll give you some ice water."

But when she returned he was already asleep. She stood over him for
a minute, trying to breathe lightly. The cup in her hand trembled,
and the ice knocked against the tin. Then, setting the cup on the
table, she knelt before the sacred image upon the wall, and began
to pray in silence. The sounds of dark, drunken life beat against
the window panes; an accordion screeched in the misty darkness of
the autumn night; some one sang a loud song; some one was swearing
with ugly, vile oaths, and the excited sounds of women's irritated,
weary voices cut the air.

Life in the little house of the Vlasovs flowed on monotonously,
but more calmly and undisturbed than before, and somewhat different
from everywhere else in the suburb.

The house stood at the edge of the village, by a low but steep and
muddy declivity. A third of the house was occupied by the kitchen
and a small room used for the mother's bedroom, separated from the
kitchen by a partition reaching partially to the ceiling. The other
two thirds formed a square room with two windows. In one corner
stood Pavel's bed, in front a table and two benches. Some chairs,
a washstand with a small looking-glass over it, a trunk with clothes,
a clock on the wall, and two ikons--this was the entire outfit of
the household.

Pavel tried to live like the rest. He did all a young lad should
do--bought himself an accordion, a shirt with a starched front, a
loud-colored necktie, overshoes, and a cane. Externally he became
like all the other youths of his age. He went to evening parties
and learned to dance a quadrille and a polka. On holidays he came
home drunk, and always suffered greatly from the effects of liquor.
In the morning his head ached, he was tormented by heartburns,
his face was pale and dull.

Once his mother asked him:

"Well, did you have a good time yesterday?"

He answered dismally and with irritation:

"Oh, dreary as a graveyard! Everybody is like a machine. I'd better
go fishing or buy myself a gun."

He worked faithfully, without intermission and without incurring
fines. He was taciturn, and his eyes, blue and large like his
mother's, looked out discontentedly. He did not buy a gun, nor did
he go a-fishing; but he gradually began to avoid the beaten path
trodden by all. His attendance at parties became less and less
frequent, and although he went out somewhere on holidays, he always
returned home sober. His mother watched him unobtrusively but
closely, and saw the tawny face of her son grow keener and keener,
and his eyes more serious. She noticed that his lips were compressed
in a peculiar manner, imparting an odd expression of austerity to
his face. It seemed as if he were always angry at something or
as if a canker gnawed at him. At first his friends came to visit him,
but never finding him at home, they remained away.

The mother was glad to see her son turning out different from all
the other factory youth; but a feeling of anxiety and apprehension
stirred in her heart when she observed that he was obstinately and
resolutely directing his life into obscure paths leading away from
the routine existence about him--that he turned in his career
neither to the right nor the left.

He began to bring books home with him. At first he tried to escape
attention when reading them; and after he had finished a book, he
hid it. Sometimes he copied a passage on a piece of paper, and
hid that also.

"Aren't you well, Pavlusha?" the mother asked once.

"I'm all right," he answered.

"You are so thin," said the mother with a sigh.

He was silent.

They spoke infrequently, and saw each other very little. In the
morning he drank tea in silence, and went off to work; at noon he
came for dinner, a few insignificant remarks were passed at the
table, and he again disappeared until the evening. And in the
evening, the day's work ended, he washed himself, took supper, and
then fell to his books, and read for a long time. On holidays he
left home in the morning and returned late at night. She knew he
went to the city and the theater; but nobody from the city ever
came to visit him. It seemed to her that with the lapse of time
her son spoke less and less; and at the same time she noticed that
occasionally and with increasing frequency he used new words
unintelligible to her, and that the coarse, rude, and hard expressions
dropped from his speech. In his general conduct, also, certain
traits appeared, forcing themselves upon his mother's attention.
He ceased to affect the dandy, but became more attentive to the
cleanliness of his body and dress, and moved more freely and alertly.
The increasing softness and simplicity of his manner aroused a
disquieting interest in his mother.

Once he brought a picture and hung it on the wall. It represented
three persons walking lightly and boldly, and conversing.

"This is Christ risen from the dead, and going to Emmaus," explained Pavel.

The mother liked the picture, but she thought:

"You respect Christ, and yet you do not go to church."

Then more pictures appeared on the walls, and the number of books
increased on the shelves neatly made for him by one of his carpenter
friends. The room began to look like a home.

He addressed his mother with the reverential plural "you," and
called her "mother" instead of "mamma." But sometimes he turned
to her suddenly, and briefly used the simple and familiar form of
the singular: "Mamma, please be not thou disturbed if I come home
late to-night."

This pleased her; in such words she felt something serious and strong.

But her uneasiness increased. Since her son's strangeness was not
clarified with time, her heart became more and more sharply troubled
with a foreboding of something unusual. Every now and then she felt
a certain dissatisfaction with him, and she thought: "All people
are like people, and he is like a monk. He is so stern. It's not
according to his years." At other times she thought: "Maybe he
has become interested in some of a girl down there."

But to go about with girls, money is needed, and he gave almost
all his earnings to her.

Thus weeks and months elapsed; and imperceptibly two years slipped
by, two years of a strange, silent life, full of disquieting
thoughts and anxieties that kept continually increasing.

Once, when after supper Pavel drew the curtain over the window,
sat down in a corner, and began to read, his tin lamp hanging on
the wall over his head, the mother, after removing the dishes, came
out from the kitchen and carefully walked up to him. He raised his
head, and without speaking looked at her with a questioning expression.

"Nothing, Pasha, just so!" she said hastily, and walked away, moving
her eyebrows agitatedly. But after standing in the kitchen for a
moment, motionless, thoughtful, deeply preoccupied, she washed her
hands and approached her son again.

"I want to ask you," she said in a low, soft voice, "what you read
all the time."

He put his book aside and said to her: "Sit down, mother."

The mother sat down heavily at his side, and straightening herself
into an attitude of intense, painful expectation waited for
something momentous.

Without looking at her, Pavel spoke, not loudly, but for some reason
very sternly:

"I am reading forbidden books. They are forbidden to be read because
they tell the truth about our--about the workingmen's life. They
are printed in secret, and if I am found with them I will be put in
prison--I will be put in prison because I want to know the truth."

Breathing suddenly became difficult for her. Opening her eyes wide
she looked at her son, and he seemed to her new, as if a stranger.
His voice was different, lower, deeper, more sonorous. He pinched
his thin, downy mustache, and looked oddly askance into the corner.
She grew anxious for her son and pitied him.

"Why do you do this, Pasha?"

He raised his head, looked at her, and said in a low, calm voice:

"I want to know the truth."

His voice sounded placid, but firm; and his eyes flashed resolution.
She understood with her heart that her son had consecrated himself
forever to something mysterious and awful. Everything in life had
always appeared to her inevitable; she was accustomed to submit
without thought, and now, too, she only wept softly, finding no
words, but in her heart she was oppressed with sorrow and distress.

"Don't cry," said Pavel, kindly and softly; and it seemed to her
that he was bidding her farewell.

"Think what kind of a life you are leading. You are forty years
old, and have you lived? Father beat you. I understand now that he
avenged his wretchedness on your body, the wretchedness of his life.
It pressed upon him, and he did not know whence it came. He worked
for thirty years; he began to work when the whole factory occupied
but two buildings; now there are seven of them. The mills grow, and
people die, working for them."

She listened to him eagerly and awestruck. His eyes burned with a
beautiful radiance. Leaning forward on the table he moved nearer to
his mother, and looking straight into her face, wet with tears, he
delivered his first speech to her about the truth which he had now
come to understand. With the naivete of youth, and the ardor of a
young student proud of his knowledge, religiously confiding in its
truth, he spoke about everything that was clear to him, and spoke
not so much for his mother as to verify and strengthen his own
opinions. At times he halted, finding no words, and then he saw
before him a disturbed face, in which dimly shone a pair of kind
eyes clouded with tears. They looked on with awe and perplexity.
He was sorry for his mother, and began to speak again, about herself
and her life.

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