in a row—she had taught them beforehand—and they pressed their little palms together in front of them all as one, and she herself behind them, with the fifth child in her arms, bowed down to the ground before him in front of all the people: “Dear father, Maxim Ivanovich, have mercy on the orphans, don’t take our last crust of bread, don’t drive us out of our own nest!” And everybody there waxed tearful—she had taught them so well. She thought, “He’ll take pride in front of the people, and forgive us, and give the house back to the orphans,” only it didn’t turn out that way. Maxim Ivanovich stopped: “You’re a young widow,” he said, “you want a husband, it’s not the orphans you’re weeping about. And the deceased man cursed me on his deathbed.” And he walked on and didn’t give them back the house. “Why be indigent” (that is, indulgent) “of their foolishness? I’ll do them a good turn, and they’ll berate me still more; nothing will be accomplished, except that a great rumor will spread.” And there was, in fact, a rumor that he had sent to this widow when she was still a young girl, ten years before, and offered her a large sum (she was very beautiful), forgetting that this sin was the same as desecrating God’s church; but he hadn’t succeeded then. And he did not a few such abominations, in town and even all over the province, and on this occasion even lost all measure.
The mother and her fledglings howled when he drove them orphaned from the house, and not only out of wickedness, but like a man who sometimes doesn’t know himself what makes him stand his ground. Well, people helped her at first, and then she went to look for work. Only what kind of work was there, except for the factory? She’d wash the floors here, weed the vegetable patch there, stoke the stove in a bathhouse, all with the baby in her arms, and start wailing, while the other four ran around outside in nothing but their shirts. When she made them kneel by the church porch, they still had some sort of shoes and some sort of coats, because anyhow they were a merchant’s children; now they ran around barefoot: clothes burn up on children, that’s a known fact. Well, what is that to children? As long as the sun shines, they rejoice, they don’t sense their ruin, they’re like little birds, their voices are like little bells. The widow thinks, “Winter will come, and what am I going to do with you? If only God would take care of you by then!” Only she didn’t have to wait till winter. There’s a children’s disease in our parts, the whooping cough, that goes from one to another. First of all the nursing girl died, after her the rest fell ill, and that same autumn all four girls, one after the other, were carried off. True, one was run over by horses in the street. And what do you think? She buried them and started wailing; she had cursed them before, but once God took them, she was sorry. A mother’s heart!
The only one left alive to her was the oldest boy, and she doted on him, trembled over him. He was weak and delicate, and had a pretty face like a girl’s. And she took him to the factory, to his godfather, who was a manager, and got herself hired in the official’s family as a nanny. One day the boy was running in the yard, and here suddenly Maxim Ivanovich came driving up with a pair, and just then he was tipsy; and the boy ran down the stairs straight at him, slipped accidentally, and bumped straight into him as he was getting out of his droshky, punching him in the belly with both hands. He seized the boy by the hair: “Whose boy is he? The birch! Whip him right now, in front of me!” he yelled. The boy went numb, they started thrashing him, he screamed. “So you scream, too? Whip him till he stops screaming!” Maybe they whipped him a lot, maybe not, but he didn’t stop screaming till he looked quite dead. Then they left off whipping him, they got frightened, the boy wasn’t breathing, he lay there unconscious. Later they said they hadn’t whipped him much, but he was very fearful. Maxim Ivanovich also got frightened. “Whose boy is he?” he asked; they told him. “Really now! Take him to his mother. Why was he loitering around the factory?” For two days afterwards he said nothing and then asked again, “How’s the boy?” And things were bad with the boy: he was sick, lying in his mother’s corner, she left her job at the official’s because of it, and he had an inflammation in his lungs. “Really now!” he said. “And why do you think that is? It’s not that they whipped him painfully: they just gave him a little treatment. I’ve ordered the same kind of beatings for others; it went over without any such nonsense.” He expected the mother to go and make a complaint, and, being proud, said nothing; only how could she, the mother didn’t dare to make a complaint. And then he sent her fifteen roubles and a doctor from himself; not because he was afraid or anything, but just so, from pondering. And soon after that his time came, and he went on a three-week binge.
Winter passed, and on the bright day of Christ’s resurrection itself, on the great day itself, Maxim Ivanovich asked again, “And how’s that same boy?” And for the whole winter he had said nothing, hadn’t asked. They say to him, “He’s recovered, he’s with his mother, and she still does day labor.” That very day Maxim Ivanovich drove to the widow’s, he didn’t go into the house, but called her out to the gate, sitting in the droshky himself: “Here’s what, honest widow,” he says, “I want to be a true benefactor to your son and do no end of good things for him: from now on I’m taking him to live with me, in my own house. And if he pleases me the least bit, I’ll make over a sufficient capital to him; and if he really pleases me, I may set him up as the heir to my whole fortune at my death, as if he were my own son, on condition, however, that your honor doesn’t visit my house except on great feast days.9 If that’s agreeable to you, bring the boy tomorrow morning, he can’t go on playing knucklebones.” And having said that, he drove off, leaving the mother as if out of her mind. People heard about it and said to her, “The lad will grow up and reproach you that you deprived him of such a destiny.” She spent the night weeping over him and in the morning she brought the child. And the boy was more dead than alive.
Maxim Ivanovich dressed him like a young gentleman and hired a tutor, and from that hour on had him sitting over books; and it reached the point that he wouldn’t let him out of his sight, but always kept him with him. As soon as the boy starts gaping, he shouts, “To your books! Study! I want to make a man of you.” And the boy was sickly, he had been coughing ever since that time, after the beating. “As if it’s not a fine life with me!” Maxim Ivanovich marveled. “With his mother he just ran around barefoot, chewed on crusts, why is he more sickly than ever?” And the tutor says to him, “Every boy needs to romp and play,” he says, “he shouldn’t study all the time, movement is necessary for him,” and he deduced it all for him reasonably. Maxim Ivanovich thought, “It’s true what you say.” And this tutor, Pyotr Stepanovich, God rest his soul, was like a holy fool;10 he drank ver-ry much, so that it was even too much, and for that reason had long been removed from any position, and he lived about town like a beggar, but he had great intelligence and a solid education. “I shouldn’t have been here,” he used to say of himself, “I should have been a professor at the university, and here I sink into the mud and ‘even my garments hate my flesh.’”11 Maxim Ivanovich sits and shouts at the boy, “Romp!”—and the boy can barely breathe before him. It reached the point that the child couldn’t bear his voice—he just started trembling all over. And Maxim Ivanovich was still more surprised: “He’s neither this nor that; I took him up from the dirt, dressed him in
And then the thing happened. Once he went out, and the boy left his book and climbed on a chair. Earlier he had thrown a ball up onto the chiffonier, and he wanted to get his ball, but he caught his sleeve on a china lamp that stood on the chiffonier; the lamp crashed to the floor and broke into smithereens, the clatter was heard all over the house, and it was a costly object—Saxony china. And here suddenly Maxim Ivanovich heard it three rooms away and yelled. The child rushed out and ran in fear wherever his legs would take him, ran out to the terrace, and across the garden, and through the back gate, straight to the riverbank. And there was a boulevard along the bank, old willows, a cheerful spot. He ran down to the water, people saw, clasped his hands, at the very place where the ferry docks, maybe terrified of the water—and stood as if rooted to the spot. And it was a wide place, the river swift, barges going past, on the other side there are shops, a square, the church of God shines with its golden domes. And just then the wife of Colonel Ferzing—an infantry regiment was stationed in town—was hurrying to catch the ferry. Her daughter, also a little child of about eight, walks along in a white dress, looks at the boy and laughs, and she’s carrying a little country basket, and in the basket there’s a hedgehog. “Look, mummy,” she says, “how the boy is looking at my hedgehog.” “No,” says the colonel’s wife, “he’s frightened of something. What are you so afraid of, pretty boy?” (So they told it afterwards.) “And what a pretty boy he is, and how well he’s dressed; whose boy are you?” she says. And he had never seen a hedgehog before, he came closer and looked, and he had already forgotten—childhood! “What’s that you’ve got?” he says. “This,” says the young miss, “is our hedgehog, we
