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.”