Mother

His dark, deep eyes looked at her with a questioning, expectant look. His powerful body bent forward, propped by his hands resting on the seat of the chair, and his swarthy face seemed pale in the black frame of his beard.

"Did you hear what Christ said about the seed? 'Thou shalt not die, but rise to life again in the new ear.' I don't regard myself as near death at all. I am shrewd. I follow a straighter course than the others. You can get further that way. Only, you see, I feel sorry – I don't know why." He fidgeted on his chair, then slowly rose. "I'll go to the tavern and be with the people a while. The Little Russian is not coming. Has he gotten busy already?"

"Yes!" The mother smiled. "No sooner out of prison than they rush to their work."

"That's the way it should be. Tell him about me."

They walked together slowly into the kitchen, and without looking at each other exchanged brief remarks:

"I'll tell him," she promised.

"Well, good-by!"

"Good-by! When do you quit your job?"

"I have already."

"When are you going?"

"To-morrow, early in the morning. Good-by!"

He bent his head and crawled off the porch reluctantly, it seemed, and clumsily. The mother stood for a moment at the door listening to the heavy departing footsteps and to the doubts that stirred in her heart. Then she noiselessly turned away into the room, and drawing the curtain peered through the window. Black darkness stood behind, motionless, waiting, gaping, with its flat, abysmal mouth.

"I live in the night!" she thought. "In the night forever!" She felt a pity for the black-bearded, sedate peasant. He was so broad and strong – and yet there was a certain helplessness about him, as about all the people.

Presently Andrey came in gay and vivacious. When the mother told him about Rybin, he exclaimed:

"Going, is he? Well, let him go through the villages. Let him ring forth the word of truth. Let him arouse the people. It's hard for him here with us."

"He was talking about the masters. Is there anything in it?" she inquired circumspectly. "Isn't it possible that they want to deceive you?"

"It bothers you, mother, doesn't it?" The Little Russian laughed. "Oh, mother dear – money! If we only had money! We are still living on charity. Take, for instance, Nikolay Ivanych. He earns seventy-five rubles a month, and gives us fifty! And others do the same. And the hungry students send us money sometimes, which they collect penny by penny. And as to the masters, of course there are different kinds among them. Some of them will deceive us, and some will leave us; but the best will stay with us and march with us up to our holiday." He clapped his hands, and rubbing them vigorously against each other continued: "But not even the flight of an eagle's wings will enable anyone to reach that holiday, so we'll make a little one for the first of May. It will be jolly."

His words and his vivacity dispelled the alarm excited in the mother's heart by Rybin. The Little Russian walked up and down the room, his feet sounding on the floor. He rubbed his head with one hand and his chest with the other, and spoke looking at the floor:

"You know, sometimes you have a wonderful feeling living in your heart. It seems to you that wherever you go, all men are comrades; all burn with one and the same fire; all are merry; all are good. Without words they all understand one another; and no one wants to hinder or insult the other. No one feels the need of it. All live in unison, but each heart sings its own song. And the songs flow like brooks into one stream, swelling into a huge river of bright joys, rolling free and wide down its course. And when you think that this will be – that it cannot help being if we so wish it – then the wonderstruck heart melts with joy. You feel like weeping – you feel so happy."

He spoke and looked as if he were searching something within himself. The mother listened and tried not to stir, so as not to disturb him and interrupt his speech. She always listened to him with more attention than to anybody else. He spoke more simply than all the rest, and his words gripped her heart more powerfully. Pavel, too, was probably looking to the future. How could it be otherwise, when one is following such a course of life? But when he looked into the remote future it was always by himself; he never spoke of what he saw. This Little Russian, however, it seemed to her, was always there with a part of his heart; the legend of the future holiday for all upon earth, always sounded in his speech. This legend rendered the meaning of her son's life, of his work, and that of all of his comrades, clear to the mother.

"And when you wake up," continued the Little Russian, tossing his head and letting his hands drop alongside his body, "and look around, you see it's all filthy and cold. All are tired and angry; human life is all churned up like mud on a busy highway, and trodden underfoot!"

He stopped in front of the mother, and with deep sorrow in his eyes, and shaking his head, added in a low, sad voice:

"Yes, it hurts, but you must – you must distrust man; you must fear him, and even hate him! Man is divided, he is cut in two by life. You'd like only to love him; but how is it possible? How can you forgive a man if he goes against you like a wild beast, does not recognize that there is a living soul in you, and kicks your face – a human face! You must not forgive. It's not for yourself that you mustn't. I'd stand all the insults as far as I myself am concerned; but I don't want to show indulgence for insults. I don't want to let them learn on my back how to beat others!"

His eyes now sparkled with a cold gleam; he inclined his head doggedly, and continued in a more resolute tone:

"I must not forgive anything that is noxious, even though it does not hurt! I'm not alone in the world. If I allow myself to be insulted to-day – maybe I can afford to laugh at the insult, maybe it doesn't sting me at all – but, having tested his strength on me, the offender will proceed to flay some one else the next day! That's why one is compelled to discriminate between people, to keep a firm grip on one's heart, and to classify mankind – these belong to me, those are strangers."

The mother thought of the officer and Sashenka, and said with a sigh:

"What sort of bread can you expect from unbolted meal?"

"That's it; that's the trouble!" the Little Russian exclaimed. "You must look with two kinds of eyes; two hearts throb in your bosom. The one loves all; the other says: 'Halt! You mustn't!'"

The figure of her husband, somber and ponderous, like a huge moss-covered stone, now rose in her memory. She made a mental image for herself of the Little Russian as married to Natasha, and her son as the husband of Sashenka.

"And why?" asked the Little Russian, warming up. "It's so plainly evident that it's downright ridiculous – simply because men don't stand on an equal footing. Then let's equalize them, put them all in one row! Let's divide equally all that's produced by the brains and all that's made by the hands. Let's not keep one another in the slavery of fear and envy, in the thraldom of greed and stupidity!"

The mother and the Little Russian now began to carry on such conversations with each other frequently. He was again taken into the factory. He turned over all his earnings to the mother, and she took the money from him with as little fuss as from Pavel. Sometimes Andrey would suggest with a twinkle in his eyes:

"Shall we read a little, mother, eh?"

She would invariably refuse, playfully but resolutely. The twinkle in his eyes discomfited her, and she thought to herself, with a slight feeling of offense: "If you laugh at me, then why do you ask me to read with you?"

He noticed that the mother began to ask him with increasing frequency for the meaning of this or that book word. She always looked aside when asking for such information, and spoke in a monotonous tone of indifference. He divined that she was studying by herself in secret, understood her bashfulness, and ceased to invite her to read with him. Shortly afterwards she said to him:

"My eyes are getting weak, Andriusha. I guess I need glasses."

"All right! Next Sunday I'll take you to a physician in the city, a friend of mine, and you shall have glasses!"

She had already been three times in the prison to ask for a meeting with Pavel, and each time the general of the gendarmes, a gray old man with purple cheeks and a huge nose, turned her gently away.

"In about a week, little mother, not before! A week from now we shall see, but at present it's impossible!"

He was a round, well-fed creature, and somehow reminded her of a ripe plum, somewhat spoiled by too long keeping, and already covered with a downy mold. He kept constantly picking his small, white teeth with a sharp yellow toothpick. There was a little smile in his small greenish eyes, and his voice had a friendly, caressing sound.

"Polite!" said the mother to the Little Russian with a thoughtful air. "Always with a smile on him. I don't think it's right. When a man is tending to affairs like these, I don't think he ought to grin."

"Yes, yes. They are so gentle, always smiling. If they should be told: 'Look here, this man is honest and wise, he is dangerous to us; hang him!' they would still smile and hang him, and keep on smiling."

"The one who made the search in our place is the better of the two; he is simpler. You can see at once that he is a dog."

"None of them are human beings; they are used to stun the people and render them insensible. They are tools, the means wherewith our kind is rendered more convenient to the state. They themselves have already been so fixed that they have become convenient instruments in the hand that governs us. They can do whatever they are told to do without thought, without asking why it is necessary to do it."

At last Vlasova got permission to see her son, and one Sunday she was sitting modestly in a corner of the prison office, a low, narrow, dingy apartment, where a few more people were sitting and waiting for permission to see their relatives and friends. Evidently it was not the first time they were here, for they knew one another and in a low voice kept up a lazy, languid conversation.

"Have you heard?" said a stout woman with a wizened face and a traveling bag on her lap. "At early mass to-day the church regent again ripped up the ear of one of the choir boys."

An elderly man in the uniform of a retired soldier coughed aloud and remarked:

"These choir boys are such loafers!"

A short, bald, little man with short legs, long arms, and protruding jaw, ran officiously up and down the room. Without stopping he said in a cracked, agitated voice:

"The cost of living is getting higher and higher. An inferior quality of beef, fourteen cents; bread has again risen to two and a half."

Now and then prisoners came into the room – gray, monotonous, with coarse, heavy, leather shoes. They blinked as they entered; iron chains rattled at the feet of one of them. The quiet and calm and simplicity all around produced a strange, uncouth impression. It seemed as if all had grown accustomed to their situation. Some sat there quietly, others looked on idly, while still others seemed to pay their regular visits with a sense of weariness. The mother's heart quivered with impatience, and she looked with a puzzled air at everything around her, amazed at the oppressive simplicity of life in this corner of the world.