The flow of Nilovna’s life was strangely serene. This serenity amazed her at times. Her son was in prison, and she knew a grave punishment awaited him, but every time she thought about this, her memory, irrespective of her will, summoned up before her Andrei, Fedya and a long row of other faces. Absorbing all those people who shared his fate, Pavel’s figure grew in her eyes and prompted a contemplative feeling, which involuntarily and imperceptibly extended her thoughts about him and sent them off in all directions. They spread out everywhere in slender, uneven rays, touching everything, and they sought to cast light on everything, to gather everything into a single picture, and they prevented her from fixing on any one thing, prevented her longing for her son and her fear for him taking firm shape.
Sofia soon went away somewhere, then appeared some five days later, cheerful and lively, but after a few hours she vanished again, appearing once more after a couple of weeks. She seemed to be rushing through life in wide circles, looking in occasionally on her brother to fill his apartment with her good cheer and music.
The music became pleasant for the mother. As she listened, she felt as if warm waves were beating her in the chest and pouring into her heart, which beat more evenly, and in which, like seeds in earth that is abundantly moistened and deeply ploughed, the waves of her thoughts grew quickly and boldly, and words bloomed easily and beautifully, awakened by the power of the sounds.
The mother found it hard to come to terms with Sofia’s untidiness, as she threw her things about everywhere, her cigarette butts and ash, but even more so with her sweeping speeches; the impression was all too painful beside Nikolai’s serene certainty and the invariable soft seriousness of his words. Sofia seemed to her like an adolescent in a hurry to pass herself off as a grown-up, who looks upon people as curious toys. She talked a lot about the sanctity of labour, yet senselessly increased that of the mother with her untidiness; she talked about freedom, yet the mother could see she inhibited everyone with her sharp impatience and continual arguments. There was a lot that was contradictory about her, and the mother, seeing this, treated her with tense caution and watchful attention, without the constant warmth in her heart that Nikolai elicited from her.
Always preoccupied, he led from day to day a monotonous, measured life: at eight o’clock in the morning he had tea and, reading the newspaper, told the mother the news. Listening to him, the mother saw with astonishing clarity how the heavy machine of life pitilessly ground people down and turned them into money. She sensed in him something he had in common with Andrei. Like the Ukrainian, he spoke about people without malice, considering everyone to be to blame for life’s bad order, but his faith in a new life was not as fervent as Andrei’s, and not as bright. He always spoke calmly, with the voice of an honest, stern judge, and although he smiled a quiet smile of regret, even when talking of something terrible, still his eyes shone coldly and firmly. Seeing their brilliance, the mother understood that this man forgave no one anything, was unable to forgive, and, sensing that this firmness was hard for him, she felt sorry for Nikolai. And she liked him more and more.
At nine o’clock he would leave for work, and she would tidy the rooms, prepare dinner, wash, put on a clean dress and, sitting in her room, look at the pictures in books. She had already learnt to read, but this always demanded an effort of her and, when reading, she quickly became weary and ceased to understand the connections between the words. Whereas looking at the pictures fascinated her like a child, as they opened up before her a comprehensible, almost palpable world that was new and wonderful. Huge cities arose, fine buildings, machines, ships, monuments, the innumerable riches created by men and the mind-boggling diversity of the work of nature. Life broadened endlessly, revealing to her eyes each day the huge, the mysterious, the wonderful, and it aroused ever more strongly the woman’s awakened and hungry soul with the abundance of its riches, the innumerableness of its beauties. She especially enjoyed looking at the folios of the zoological atlas, and although it was printed in a foreign language, still it gave her the most vivid impression of the earth’s beauty, richness and vastness.
“Great is the earth!” she said to Nikolai.
She was touched most of all by the insects, and especially the butterflies, and she looked in astonishment at the drawings depicting them, reasoning:
“What beauty, Nikolai Ivanovich, eh? And there’s so much of this sweet beauty everywhere, yet everything’s hidden from us, and everything flies by, and we don’t see it. People rush around, and they know nothing, they can’t admire anything, they don’t have the time for it, or the desire. How much pleasure they could take if they knew how rich the earth was, how many amazing things lived on it. And everything is for everyone, and each one is for everything, isn’t that so?”
“Precisely!” said Nikolai, smiling. And he brought more books with pictures.
Guests often gathered at his place in the evenings – Alexei Vasilyevich, a handsome man with a pale face and a black beard, solid and taciturn; Roman Petrovich, a pimply, round-headed man who was always smacking his lips regretfully; Ivan Danilovich, small and slim, with a sharp little beard and a thin voice, provocative, loud and sharp as a needle; Yegor, always laughing at himself, his comrades and his illness, which kept on spreading inside him. There were other people, too, who came from various far-off towns. Nikolai had long, quiet talks with them, always about the same thing, about the working people of the earth. They argued and grew heated, waving their arms about, and they drank a lot of tea; sometimes, to the noise of the conversation, Nikolai would silently compose proclamations, then read them to his comrades and rewrite them straight away in block capitals, while the mother would painstakingly collect the little pieces of torn-up drafts and burn them.
She poured the tea and was amazed at the fervour with which they spoke about the life and fate of the working people, about how quicker and better to sow ideas about the truth among them and raise their spirits. They often got angry and disagreed with one another; they would accuse each other of things, take umbrage and then argue again.
The mother felt that she knew the life of the workers better than these people, and it seemed to her that she saw more clearly than they did the immensity of the task they had taken upon themselves, and this allowed her to have for all of them the condescending, slightly sad feeling an adult has for children who are playing husband and wife without understanding the drama of their relationship. She involuntarily compared their speeches with the speeches of her son and Andrei and, in comparing, sensed a difference which she could not at first understand. It seemed to her at times that here they shouted more forcefully than they had sometimes in the settlement, and she explained it to herself thus:
“They know more, so they talk louder…”
But too often did she see that all of these people seemed to be provoking one another deliberately and getting heated for show, as though each of them wanted to prove to his comrades that the truth was nearer and dearer to him than to them, and the others took offence at this and, trying to prove in their turn their nearness to the truth, began arguing sharply and rudely. Each wanted to jump higher than the other, it seemed to her, and this aroused her anxious sorrow. She would twitch an eyebrow and, looking at them all with beseeching eyes, think:
“They’ve forgotten about Pasha and his comrades…”
Always straining to listen closely to the arguments and, of course, not understanding them, she sought the emotion behind the words and saw that, when they had talked about goodness in the settlement, they had taken it in the round, as a whole, while here everything was broken down into pieces and diminished; there they had had deeper and stronger emotions, while here was a place of sharp ideas that dissected everything. And here they spoke more of the destruction of the old, while there they had dreamt of the new, and that had made the speeches of her son and Andrei more accessible and more comprehensible to her…
She noticed that whenever any working people came to see Nikolai, he would become unusually familiar, a sweet sort of expression would appear on his face and he would speak differently to the way he generally did, perhaps more coarsely, perhaps more carelessly.
“He’s making an effort to be understood!” she thought.
But this was no comfort to her, and she could see the visiting worker was shrinking as well, as if bound from within, unable to speak as easily and freely as he did with her, a simple woman. Once, when Nikolai had left the room she remarked to some young man:
“Why are you so shy? You’re not a little boy taking an exam, are you?…”
He gave a broad grin:
“Even lobsters go red out of water… he’s not one of us, after all…”
Sometimes Sashenka would visit, but she never stayed long, was always businesslike in her talk, never laughing, and each time, as she was leaving, she would ask the mother:
“So, is Pavel Mikhailovich well?”
“Thank God!” the mother would say. “He’s all right, he’s cheerful!”
“Give him my greetings!” the girl would request, and then disappear.
At times the mother complained to her that they were holding Pavel for a long time and not setting a date for his trial. Sashenka frowned and was silent, but her fingers would be moving about rapidly.
Nilovna felt a desire to say to her:
“My dear girl, I do know you love him…”
But she could not bring herself to do so – it was as if the girl’s stern face, her tightly pursed lips and dry, businesslike speech repulsed any affection in advance. Sighing, the mother would wordlessly squeeze the hand reached out to her and think:
“My unhappy girl…”
One day Natasha came. She was overjoyed to see the mother, smothered her in kisses and, incidentally, all of a sudden somehow, announced quietly:
“My mummy’s died, died, the poor thing!…”
She gave a toss of the head, wiped her eyes with a quick gesture of her hand and continued:
“I do feel sorry for her – she wasn’t fifty, she might have lived for a long time yet. But if you look at it a different way, you can’t help thinking death is probably easier than that life. Always alone, a stranger to everyone, not needed by anyone, cowed by my father’s shouting – was that really a life she had? It’s a life when people can expect something good, but she had nothing to wait for other than hurt…”
“It’s true what you say, Natasha!” said the mother after some thought. “It’s a life when people can expect some good, but if there’s nothing to wait for, what sort of life is that?” And gently stroking the girl’s hand, she asked: “Are you left all alone now?”
“All alone!” Natasha replied easily.
The mother paused, and then suddenly remarked with a smile:
“Never mind! Good people don’t live alone: other people always attach themselves to them…”