Mother | Page 8

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,