The next evening, before tea, Volodya again thought of his shadows, and
gave himself up to them. One shadow insisted on turning out badly, no
matter how hard he stretched and bent his fingers.
Volodya was so absorbed in this that he did not hear his mother coming.
At the creaking of the door he quickly put the leaflet into his pocket
and turned away, confused, from the wall. But his mother was already
looking at his hands, and a tremor of fear lit up her eyes.
“What are you doing, Volodya? What have you hidden?”
“Nothing, really,” muttered Volodya, flushing and changing colour
rapidly.
It flashed upon her that Volodya wished to smoke, and that he had
hidden a cigarette.
“Volodya, show me at once what you are hiding,” she said in a
frightened voice.
“Really, mamma....”
She caught Volodya by the elbow.
“Must I feel in your pocket myself?”
Volodya grew even redder, and pulled the little book out of his pocket.
“Here it is,” he said, giving it to his mother.
“Well, what is it?”
“Well, here,” he explained, “on this side are the drawings, and here,
as you see, are the shadows. I was trying to throw them on the wall,
and I haven’t succeeded very well.”
“What is there to hide here!” said his mother, becoming more tranquil.
“Now show me what they look like.”
Volodya, taken aback, began obediently to show his mother the shadows.
“Now this is the profile of a bald-headed man. And this is the head of
a hare.”
“And so this is how you are studying your lessons!”
“Only for a little, mother.”
“For a little! Why are you blushing then, my dear? Well, I shan’t say
anything more. I think I can depend on you to do what is right.”
His mother moved her hand over his short, bristling hair, whereupon
Volodya laughed and hid his flushing face under his mother’s elbow.
Then his mother left him, and for a long time Volodya felt awkward and
ashamed. His mother had caught him doing something that he himself
would have ridiculed had he caught any of his companions doing it.
Volodya knew that he was a clever lad, and he deemed himself serious;
and this was, after all, a game fit only for little girls when they got
together.
He pushed the little book with the shadows deeper into the
table-drawer, and did not take it out again for more than a week;
indeed, he thought little about the shadows that week. Only in the
evening sometimes, in changing from one lesson to another, he would
smile at the recollection of the girl in the hat—there were, indeed,
moments when he put his hand in the drawer to get the little book, but
he always quickly remembered the shame he experienced when his mother
first found him out, and this made him resume his work at once.
V
Volodya and his mother lived in their own house on the outskirts of the
district town. Eugenia Stepanovna had been a widow for nine years. She
was now thirty-five years old; she seemed young and handsome, and
Volodya loved her tenderly. She lived entirely for her son, studied
ancient languages for his sake, and shared all his school cares. A
quiet and gentle woman, she looked somewhat apprehensively upon the
world out of her large, benign eyes.
They had one domestic. Praskovya was a widow; she was gruff, sturdy,
and strong; she was forty-five years old, but in her stern taciturnity
she was more like a woman a hundred years old.
Whenever Volodya looked at her morose, stony face he wondered what she
was thinking of in her kitchen during the long winter evenings, as the
cold knitting-needles, clinking, shifted in her bony fingers with a
regular movement, and her dry lips stirred yet uttered no sound. Was
she recalling her drunken husband, or her children who had died
earlier? or was she musing upon her lonely and homeless old age?
Her stony face seemed hopelessly gloomy and austere.