Part 9

Volodya felt the tears in her voice. His heart was touched. He glanced at his mother. She was crying. He turned quickly toward her.

“Mamma, mamma,” he kept on repeating, while kissing her hands, “I’ll drop the shadows, really I will.”

XX

Volodya made a strong effort of the will and refrained from the shadows, despite strong temptation. He tried to make amends for his neglected lessons.

But the shadows beckoned to him persistently. In vain he ceased to invite them with his fingers, in vain he ceased to arrange objects that would cast a new shadow on the wall; the shadows themselves surrounded him—they were unavoidable, importunate shadows.

Objects themselves no longer interested Volodya, he almost ceased to see them; all his attention was centred on their shadows.

When he was walking home and the sun happened to peep through the autumn clouds, as through smoky vestments, he was overjoyed because there was everywhere an awakening of the shadows.

The shadows from the lamplight hovered near him in the evening at home.

The shadows were everywhere. There were the sharp shadows from the flames, there were the fainter shadows from diffused daylight. All of them crowded toward Volodya, recrossed each other, and enveloped him in an unbreakable network.

Some of the shadows were incomprehensible, mysterious; others reminded him of something, suggested something. But there were also the beloved, the intimate, the familiar shadows; these Volodya himself, however casually, sought out and caught everywhere from among the confused wavering of the others, the more remote shadows. But they were sad, these beloved, familiar shadows.

Whenever Volodya found himself seeking these shadows his conscience tormented him, and he went to his mother to make a clean breast of it.

Once it happened that Volodya could not conquer his temptation. He stood up close to the wall and made a shadow of the bull. His mother found him.

“Again!” she exclaimed angrily. “I really shall have to ask the director to put you into the small room.”

Volodya flushed violently and answered morosely: “There is a wall there also. The walls are everywhere.”

“Volodya,” exclaimed his mother sorrowfully, “what are you saying!”

But Volodya already repented of his rudeness, and he was crying.

“Mamma, I don’t know myself what’s happening to me!”

XXI

Volodya’s mother had not yet conquered her superstitious dread of shadows. She began very often to think that she, like Volodya, was losing herself in the contemplation of shadows. Then she tried to comfort herself.

“What stupid thoughts!” she said. “Thank God, all will pass happily; he will be like this a little while, then he will stop.”

But her heart trembled with a secret fear, and her thought, frightened of life persistently ran to meet approaching sorrows.

She began in the melancholy moments of waking to examine her soul, and all her life would pass before her; she saw its emptiness, its futility, and its aimlessness. It seemed but a senseless glimmer of shadows, which merged in the denser twilight.

“Why have I lived?” she asked herself. “Was it for my son? But why? That he too shall become a prey to shadows, a maniac with a narrow horizon, chained to his illusions, to restless appearances upon a lifeless wall? And he too will enter upon life, and he will make of life a chain of impressions, phantasmic and futile, like a dream.”

She sat down in the armchair by the window, and she thought and thought. Her thoughts were bitter, oppressive. She began, in her despair, to wring her beautiful white hands.

Then her thoughts wandered. She looked at her outstretched hands, and began to imagine what sort of shapes they would cast on the wall in their present attitude. She suddenly paused and jumped up from her chair in fright.

“My God!” she exclaimed. “This is madness.”

XXII

She watched Volodya at dinner.

“How pale and thin he has grown,” she said to herself, “since the unfortunate little book fell into his hands. He’s changed entirely—in character and in everything else. It is said that character changes before death. What if he dies? But no, no. God forbid!”

The spoon trembled in her hand. She looked up at the ikon with timid eyes.

“Volodya, why don’t you finish your soup?” she asked, looking frightened.

“I don’t feel like it, mamma.”

“Volodya, darling, do as I tell you; it is bad for you not to eat your soup.”

Volodya gave a tired smile and slowly finished his soup. His mother had filled his plate fuller than usual. He leant back in his chair and was on the point of saying that the soup was not good. But his mother’s worried look restrained him, and he merely smiled weakly.

“And now I’ve had enough,” he said.

“Oh no, Volodya, I have all your favourite dishes to-day.”

Volodya sighed sadly. He knew that when his mother spoke of his favourite dishes it meant that she would coax him to eat. He guessed that even after tea his mother would prevail upon him, as she did the day before, to eat meat.

XXIII

In the evening Volodya’s mother said to him: “Volodya dear, you’ll waste your time again; perhaps you’d better keep the door open!”

Volodya began his lessons. But he felt vexed because the door had been left open at his back, and because his mother went past it now and then.

“I cannot go on like this,” he shouted, moving his chair noisily. “I cannot do anything when the door is wide open.”

“Volodya, is there any need to shout so?” his mother reproached him softly.

Volodya already felt repentant, and he began to cry.

“Don’t you see, Volodenka, that I’m worried about you, and that I want to save you from your thoughts.”

“Mamma, sit here with me,” said Volodya.

His mother took a book and sat down at Volodya’s table. For a few minutes Volodya worked calmly. But gradually the presence of his mother began to annoy him.

“I’m being watched just like a sick man,” he thought spitefully.

His thoughts were constantly interrupted, and he was biting his lips. His mother remarked this at last, and she left the room.

But Volodya felt no relief. He was tormented with regret at showing his impatience. He tried to go on with his work but he could not. Then he went to his mother.

“Mamma, why did you leave me?” he asked timidly.

XXIV

It was the eve of a holiday. The little image-lamps burned before the ikons.

It was late and it was quiet. Volodya’s mother was not asleep. In the mysterious dark of her bedroom she fell on her knees, she prayed and she wept, sobbing out now and then like a child.

Her braids of hair trailed upon her white dress; her shoulders trembled. She raised her hands to her breast in a praying posture, and she looked with tearful eyes at the ikon. The image-lamp moved almost imperceptibly on its chains with her passionate breathing. The shadows rocked, they crowded in the corners, they stirred behind the reliquary, and they murmured mysteriously. There was a hopeless yearning in their murmurings and an incomprehensible sadness in their wavering movements.

At last she rose, looking pale, with strange, widely dilated eyes, and she reeled slightly on her benumbed legs.

She went quietly to Volodya. The shadows surrounded her, they rustled softly behind her back, they crept at her feet, and some of them, as fine as the threads of a spider’s web, fell upon her shoulders and, looking into her large eyes, murmured incomprehensibly.

She approached her son’s bed cautiously. His face was pale in the light of the image-lamp. Strange, sharp shadows lay upon him. His breathing was inaudible; he slept so tranquilly that his mother was frightened.

She stood there in the midst of the vague shadows, and she felt upon her the breath of vague fears.

XXV

The high vaults of the church were dark and mysterious. The evening chants rose toward these vaults and resounded there with an exultant sadness. The dark images, lit up by the yellow flickers of wax candles, looked stern and mysterious. The warm breathing of the wax and of the incense filled the air with lofty sorrow.

Eugenia Stepanovna placed a candle before the ikon of the Mother of God. Then she knelt down. But her prayer was distraught.

She looked at her candle. Its flame wavered. The shadows from the candles fell on Eugenia Stepanovna’s black dress and on the floor, and rocked unsteadily. The shadows hovered on the walls of the church and lost themselves in the heights between the dark vaults, where the exultant, sad songs resounded.

XXVI

It was another night.

Volodya awoke suddenly. The darkness enveloped him, and it stirred without sound. He freed his hands, then raised them, and followed their movements with his eyes. He did not see his hands in the darkness, but he imagined that he saw them wanly stirring before him. They were dark and mysterious, and they held in them the affliction and the murmur of lonely yearning.

His mother also did not sleep; her grief tormented her. She lit a candle and went quietly toward her son’s room to see how he slept. She opened the door noiselessly and looked timidly at Volodya’s bed.

A streak of yellow light trembled on the wall and intersected Volodya’s red bed-cover. The lad stretched his arms toward the light and, with a beating heart, followed the shadows. He did not even ask himself where the light came from. He was wholly obsessed by the shadows. His eyes were fixed on the wall, and there was a gleam of madness in them.

The streak of light broadened, the shadows moved in a startled way; they were morose and hunch-backed, like homeless, roaming women who were hurrying to reach somewhere with old burdens that dragged them down.

Volodya’s mother, trembling with fright, approached the bed and quietly aroused her son.

“Volodya!”

Volodya came to himself. For some seconds he glanced at his mother with large eyes, then he shivered from head to foot and, springing out of bed, fell at his mother’s feet, embraced her knees, and wept.

“What dreams you do dream, Volodya!” exclaimed his mother sorrowfully.

XXVII

“Volodya,” said his mother to him at breakfast, “you must stop it, darling; you will become a wreck if you spend your nights also with the shadows.”

The pale lad lowered his head in dejection. His lips quivered nervously.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” continued his mother. “Perhaps we had better play a little while together with the shadows each evening, and then we will study your lessons. What do you say?”

Volodya grew somewhat animated.

“Mamma, you’re a darling!” he said shyly.

XXVIII

In the street Volodya felt drowsy and timid. The fog was spreading; it was cold and dismal. The outlines of the houses looked strange in the mist. The morose, human silhouettes moved through the filmy atmosphere like ominous, unkindly shadows. Everything seemed so intensely unreal. The cab-horse, which stood drowsily at the street-crossing, appeared like a huge fabulous beast.

The policeman gave Volodya a hostile look. The crow on the low roof foreboded sorrow in Volodya’s ear. But sorrow was already in his heart; it made him sad to note how everything was hostile to him.

A small dog with an unhealthy coat barked at him from behind a gate and Volodya felt a strange depression. And the urchins of the street seemed ready to laugh at him and to humiliate him.

In the past he would have settled scores with them as they deserved, but now fear lived in his breast; it robbed his arms of their strength and caused them to hang by his sides.

When Volodya returned home Praskovya opened the door to him, and she looked at him with moroseness and hostility. Volodya felt uneasy. He quickly went into the house, and refrained from looking at Praskovya’s depressing face again.

XXIX

His mother was sitting alone. It was twilight, and she felt sad.

A light suddenly glimmered somewhere.

Volodya ran in, animated, cheerful, and with large, somewhat wild eyes.

“Mamma, the lamp has been lit; let’s play a little.”

She smiled and followed Volodya.

“Mamma, I’ve thought of a new figure,” said Volodya excitedly, as he placed the lamp in the desired position. “Look.... Do you see? This is the steppe, covered with snow, and the snow falls—a regular storm.”

Volodya raised his hands and arranged them.

“Now look, here is an old man, a wayfarer. He is up to his knees in snow. It is difficult to walk. He is alone. It is an open field. The village is far away. He is tired, he is cold; it is terrible. He is all bent—he’s such an old man.”

Volodya’s mother helped him with his fingers.

“Oh!” exclaimed Volodya in great joy. “The wind is tearing his cap off, it is blowing his hair loose, it has thrown him in the snow. The drifts are getting higher. Mamma, mamma, do you hear?”

“It’s a blinding storm.”

“And he?”

“The old man?”

“Do you hear, he is moaning?”

“Help!”

Both of them, pale, were looking at the wall. Volodya’s hands shook, the old man fell.

His mother was the first to arouse herself.

“And now it’s time to work,” she said.

XXX

It was morning. Volodya’s mother was alone. Rapt in her confused, dismal thoughts, she was walking from one room to another. Her shadow outlined itself vaguely on the white door in the light of the mist-dimmed sun. She stopped at the door and lifted her arm with a large, curious movement. The shadow on the door wavered and began to murmur something familiar and sad. A strange feeling of comfort came over Eugenia Stepanovna as she stood, a wild smile on her face, before the door and moved both her hands, watching the trembling shadows.

Then she heard Praskovya coming, and she realized that she was doing an absurd thing. Once more she felt afraid and sad.

“We ought to make a change,” she thought, “and go elsewhere, somewhere farther away, to a new atmosphere. We must run away from here, simply run away!”

And suddenly she remembered Volodya’s words: “There is a wall there also. The walls are everywhere.”

“There is nowhere to run!”

In her despair she wrung her pale, beautiful hands.

XXXI

It was evening.

A lighted lamp stood on the floor in Volodya’s room. Just behind it, near the wall, sat Volodya and his mother. They were looking at the wall and were making strange movements with their hands.

Shadows stirred and trembled upon the wall.

Volodya and his mother understood them. Both were smiling sadly and were saying weird and impossible things to each other. Their faces were peaceful and their eyes looked clear; their joyousness was hopelessly sorrowful and their sorrow was wildly joyous.

In their eyes was a glimmer of madness, blessed madness.

The night was descending upon them.

THE GLIMMER OF HUNGER

Sergei Matveyevich Moshkin had dined very well that day—that is comparatively well—when you stop to consider that he was only a village schoolmaster who had lost his place, and had been knocking about already a year or so on strange stairways, in search of work. Nevertheless, the glimmer of hunger persisted in his dark, sad eyes, and it gave his lean, smooth face a kind of unlooked-for significance.

Moshkin spent his last three-rouble note on this dinner, and now a few coppers jingled in his pocket, while his purse contained a smooth fifteen-copeck piece. He banqueted out of sheer joy. He knew quite well that it was stupid to rejoice prematurely and without sufficient cause. But he had been seeking work so long, and had been having such a time of it, that even the shadow of a hope gave him joy.

Moshkin had put an advertisement in the _Novo Vremya_. He announced himself a pedagogue who had command of the pen; he based his claim on the fact that he corresponded for a provincial newspaper. This, indeed, was why he had lost his place; it was discovered that he had written articles reflecting unfavourably on the authorities; the chief official of the district called the attention of the inspector of public schools to this, and the inspector, of course, would not brook such doings by any of his staff.

“We don’t want that kind,” the inspector said to him in a personal interview.

Moshkin asked: “What kind do you want?”

The inspector, without replying to this irrelevant question, remarked dryly: “Good-bye. I hope to meet you in the next world.”

Moshkin stated further in his advertisement that he wished to be a secretary, a permanent collaborator on a newspaper, a private tutor; also that he was willing to accompany his employer to the Caucasus or the Crimea, and to make himself useful in the house, etc. He gave an assurance of his reasonableness, and that he had no objections to travelling.

He waited. One postcard came. It inspired him with hope; he hardly knew why.

It came in the morning while Moshkin was drinking his tea. The landlady brought it in herself. There was a glitter in her dark, snake-like eyes as she remarked tauntingly:

“Here’s some correspondence for Mr. Sergei Matveyevich Moshkin.”

And while he was reading she smoothed her black hair down her triangular yellow forehead, and hissed: “What’s the good of getting letters? Much better if you paid for your board and lodging. A letter won’t feed your hunger; you ought to go among people, look for a job and not expect things to come to you.”

He read:

“_Be so good as to come in for a talk, between_ 6 _and_ 7 _in the evening, at Row_ 6, _House_ 78, _Apartment_ 57.”

There was no signature.

Moshkin glanced angrily at his landlady. She was broad and erect, and as she stood there at the door quite calm, with lowered arms, she was like a doll; she seemed deliberately malicious, and she looked at him with her motionless, anger-provoking eyes.

Moshkin exclaimed: “Basta!”

He hit the table with his fist. Then he rose, and paced up and down the room. He kept on repeating: “Basta!”

The landlady asked quietly and spitefully: “Are you going to pay or not, you Kazan and Astrakhan correspondent, you impudent face?”

Moshkin stopped in front of her, put out his empty palm, and said: “That’s all I have.”

He said nothing about his last three-rouble note. The landlady hissed: “I’m not hard on you, but I need money. Wood’s seven roubles a load now, how am I to pay it? You can’t live on nothing. Can’t you find some one to look after you? You’re a young man of ability, and you have quite a charming appearance. You can always get hold of some goose or other. But how am I to pay? Whichever way you turn you’ve got to put down money.”

Moshkin replied: “Don’t worry, Praskovya Petrovna, I am getting a job to-night, and I’ll pay what I owe you.”

He began to pace the room again, making a flapping noise with his slippers.

The landlady paused at the door, and kept on with her grumbling. When she went at last, she cried out: “Another in my place would have shown you the door long ago.”

For some time after she had left there still remained in his memory her strange, erect figure, with relaxed arms; her broad, yellow forehead, shaped like a triangle under her smoothly-oiled hair; her worn yellow dress, cut away like a narrow triangle, and her red, sniffling nose shaped like a small triangle. Three triangles in all.

All day long Moshkin was hungry, cheerful, and indignant. He walked aimlessly in the streets. He looked at the girls, and they all seemed to him to be lovable, happy, and accessible—to the rich. He stopped before the shop windows, where expensive goods were displayed. The glimmer of hunger in his eyes grew keener and keener.

He bought a newspaper. He read as he sat on a form in the square, where the children laughed and ran, where the nurses tried to look fashionable, where there was a smell of dust and of consumptive trees—and where the smells of the street and of the garden mingled unpleasantly, reminding him of the smell of gutta-percha. Moshkin was very much struck by an account in the newspaper of a hungry fanatic who had slashed a picture by a celebrated artist in the museum.

“Now that’s something I can understand!”

Moshkin walked briskly along the path. He repeated: “Now that’s something I can understand!”

And afterwards, as he walked in the streets and looked at the huge and stately houses, at the exposed wealth of the shops, at the elegant dress of the people of fashion, at the swiftly moving carriages, at all these beauties and comforts of life, accessible to all who have money, and inaccessible to him—as he looked and observed and envied, he felt more and more keenly the mood of destructive rage.

“Now that’s something I can understand!”

He walked up to a stout and pompous house-porter, and shouted: “Now that’s something I can understand!”

The porter looked at him with silent scorn. Moshkin laughed joyously, and said: “Clever chaps those anarchists!”

“Be off with you!” exclaimed the porter angrily. “And see that you don’t over-eat yourself.”

Moshkin was about to leave him but stopped short in fright. There was a policeman quite near, and his white gloves stood out with startling sharpness. Moshkin thought in his sadness:

“A bomb might come in handy here.”

The porter spat angrily after him, and turned away.

Moshkin walked on. At six o’clock he entered a restaurant of the middle rank. He chose a table by the window. He had some vodka, and followed it with anchovies. He ordered a seventy-five copeck dinner. He had a bottle of chablis on ice; after dinner a liqueur. He got slightly intoxicated. His head went round at the sound of music. He did not take his change. He left, reeling slightly, accompanied respectfully by a porter, into whose hand he stuck a twenty-copeck piece.

He looked at his nickelled watch. It was just past seven. It was time to go. He had to make haste. They might hire another. He strode impetuously toward his destination.

He was hindered by: dug up pavements; superannuated, eternally somnolent cabbies, at street crossings; passers-by, especially _muzhiks_ and women; those who came toward him, without stepping aside at all, or who stepped aside more often to the left than to the right—while those whom he had to overtake joggled along indifferently on the narrow way, and it was hard to tell at once on which side to pass them; beggars—these clung to him; and the mechanical process of walking itself.

How difficult to conquer space and time when one is in a hurry! Truly the earth drew him to itself and he purchased every step with violence and exhaustion. He felt pains in his legs. This increased his spite, and intensified the glimmer of hunger in his eyes.

Moshkin thought:

“I’d like to chuck it all to the devil! To all the devils!”

At last he got there.

Here was the Row, and here was House No. 78. It was a four-storey house, in a state of neglect; the two approaches had a gloomy look, the gates in the middle stood wide agape. He looked at the plates at the approaches; the first numbers were here, and there was no No. 57. No one was in sight. There was a white button at the gates; and on the brass plate, below, buried under dirt, was the word “porter.”

He pressed the button and entered the gate to look for the directory of the tenants. Before he had got that far he was met by the porter, a man of insinuating appearance, with a black beard.

“Where is apartment No. 57?”

Moshkin asked the question in a careless manner, borrowed from the district official who had caused him to lose his place. He also knew from experience that one must address porters just like this, and not like that. Wandering in strange gates and on strange staircases gives one a certain polish.

The porter asked somewhat suspiciously: “Who do you want?”

Moshkin drawled out his words with artless carelessness: “I don’t exactly know. I’ve come in answer to an announcement. I’ve received a letter, but the name is not signed. Only the address is given. Who lives at No. 57?”

“Madame Engelhardova,” said the porter.

“Engelhardt?” asked Moshkin.

The porter repeated: “Engelhardova.”

Moshkin smiled. “And what’s her Russian name?”

“Elena Petrovna,” the porter answered.

“Is she a bad-tempered hag?” asked Moshkin for some reason or other.