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Volodya
by
When the footman came to wake him for the morning train, he pretended to be asleep. . . .
“Bother it! Damn it all!” he thought.
He got up between ten and eleven.
Combing his hair before the looking-glass, and looking at his ugly face, pale from his sleepless night, he thought:
“It’s perfectly true . . . an ugly duckling!”
When maman saw him and was horrified that he was not at his examination, Volodya said:
“I overslept myself, maman. . . . But don’t worry, I will get a medical certificate.”
Madame Shumihin and Nyuta waked up at one o’clock. Volodya heard Madame Shumihin open her window with a bang, heard Nyuta go off into a peal of laughter in reply to her coarse voice. He saw the door open and a string of nieces and other toadies (among the latter was his maman) file into lunch, caught a glimpse of Nyuta’s freshly washed laughing face, and, beside her, the black brows and beard of her husband the architect, who had just arrived.
Nyuta was wearing a Little Russian dress which did not suit her at all, and made her look clumsy; the architect was making dull and vulgar jokes. The rissoles served at lunch had too much onion in them–so it seemed to Volodya. It also seemed to him that Nyuta laughed loudly on purpose, and kept glancing in his direction to give him to understand that the memory of the night did not trouble her in the least, and that she was not aware of the presence at table of the “ugly duckling.”
At four o’clock Volodya drove to the station with his maman. Foul memories, the sleepless night, the prospect of expulsion from school, the stings of conscience–all roused in him now an oppressive, gloomy anger. He looked at maman‘s sharp profile, at her little nose, and at the raincoat which was a present from Nyuta, and muttered:
“Why do you powder? It’s not becoming at your age! You make yourself up, don’t pay your debts at cards, smoke other people’s tobacco . . . . It’s hateful! I don’t love you . . . I don’t love you!”
He was insulting her, and she moved her little eyes about in alarm, flung up her hands, and whispered in horror:
“What are you saying, my dear! Good gracious! the coachman will hear! Be quiet or the coachman will hear! He can overhear everything.”
“I don’t love you . . . I don’t love you!” he went on breathlessly. “You’ve no soul and no morals. . . . Don’t dare to wear that raincoat! Do you hear? Or else I will tear it into rags. . . .”
“Control yourself, my child,” maman wept; “the coachman can hear!”
“And where is my father’s fortune? Where is your money? You have wasted it all. I am not ashamed of being poor, but I am ashamed of having such a mother. . . . When my schoolfellows ask questions about you, I always blush.”
In the train they had to pass two stations before they reached the town. Volodya spent all the time on the little platform between two carriages and shivered all over. He did not want to go into the compartment because there the mother he hated was sitting. He hated himself, hated the ticket collectors, the smoke from the engine, the cold to which he attributed his shivering. And the heavier the weight on his heart, the more strongly he felt that somewhere in the world, among some people, there was a pure, honourable, warm, refined life, full of love, affection, gaiety, and serenity. . . . He felt this and was so intensely miserable that one of the passengers, after looking in his face attentively, actually asked:
“You have the toothache, I suppose?”
In the town maman and Volodya lived with Marya Petrovna, a lady of noble rank, who had a large flat and let rooms to boarders. Maman had two rooms, one with windows and two pictures in gold frames hanging on the walls, in which her bed stood and in which she lived, and a little dark room opening out of it in which Volodya lived. Here there was a sofa on which he slept, and, except that sofa, there was no other furniture; the rest of the room was entirely filled up with wicker baskets full of clothes, cardboard hat-boxes, and all sorts of rubbish, which maman preserved for some reason or other. Volodya prepared his lessons either in his mother’s room or in the “general room,” as the large room in which the boarders assembled at dinner-time and in the evening was called.