Short Fiction, Fyodor Sologub [most popular novels of all time .txt] 📗

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 icons.

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 icon. 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 icon 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 bedcover. 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 hunchbacked, 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