Mother | Page 8

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