Mother

by Maxim Gorky

The indifferent pendulum of the clock kept chopping off the seconds of life, calmly and precisely.

“I’ve thought all my life, ‘Lord Christ in heaven! What did I live for?’ Beatings, work! I saw nothing except my husband. I knew nothing but fear! And how Pasha grew I did not see, and I hardly know whether I loved him when my husband was alive. All my concerns, all my thoughts were centered upon one thing—to feed my beast, to propitiate the master of my life with enough food, pleasing to his palate, and served on time, so as not to incur his displeasure, so as to escape the terrors of a beating, to get him to spare me but once! But I do not remember that he ever did spare me. He beat me so—not as a wife is beaten, but as one whom you hate and detest. Twenty years I lived like that, and what was up to the time of my marriage I do not recall. I remember certain things, but I see nothing! I am as a blind person.

And she struck her bosom. “Here the most glorious heavenly sun of human happiness will be kindled, and it will light up the earth forever—the whole of it, and all that live upon it—with the light of love, the love of every man towards all, and towards everything.” The words of forgotten prayers recurred to her mind, inspiring a new faith. She threw them from her heart like sparks. “The children walking along the road of truth and reason carry love to all, and they clothe everything in new skies; they illumine everything with an incorruptible fire issuing from the depths of the soul. Thus, a new life comes into being, born of the children’s love for the entire world; and who will extinguish this love—who? What power is higher than this? Who will subdue it? The earth has brought it forth; and all life desires its victory—all life. Shed rivers of blood, nay, seas of blood, you’ll never extinguish it.”