Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART SEVEN CHAPTER 19
school, and made friends among his schoolfellows. The dreams and memories of his
mother, which had made him ill after seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now.
When they came back to him, he studiously drove them away, regarding them as
shameful and girlish, below the dignity of a boy and a schoolboy. He knew that his
father and mother were separated by some quarrel, he knew that he had to remain
with his father, and he tried to get used to that idea.
He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it called up those memories
of which he was ashamed. He disliked it all the more as from some words he had
caught as he waited at the study door, and still more from the faces of his father
and uncle, he guessed that they must have been talking of his mother. And to avoid
condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent, and,
above all, to avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he considered so degrading,
Seryozha tried not to look at his uncle who had come to disturb his peace of mind,
and not to think of what he recalled to him.
But when Stepan Arkadyevitch, going out after him, saw him on the stairs, and
calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at school, Seryozha talked more
freely to him away from his father’s presence.
“We have a railway now,” he said in answer to his uncle’s question. “It’s like this,
do you see: two sit on a bench– they’re the passengers; and one stands up straight
on the bench. And all are harnessed to it by their arms or by their belts, and they run
through all the rooms–the doors are left open beforehand. Well, and it’s pretty hard
work being the conductor!”
“That’s the one that stands?” Stepan Arkadyevitch inquired, smiling.
“Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too, especially when they stop all of a
sudden, or someone falls down.”
“Yes, that must be a serious matter,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, watching with
mournful interest the eager eyes, like his mother’s; not childish now–no longer
fully innocent. And though he had promised Alexey Alexandrovitch not to speak
of Anna, he could not restrain himself.
“Do you remember your mother?” he asked suddenly.
“No, I don’t,” Seryozha said quickly. He blushed crimson, and his face clouded
over. And his uncle could get nothing more out of him. His tutor found his pupil on
the staircase half an hour later, and for a long while he could not make out whether
he was ill-tempered or crying.
“What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell down?” said the tutor. “I
told you it was a dangerous game. And we shall have to speak to the director.”
“If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out, that’s certain.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don’t remember?...what business is it of
his? Why should I remember? Leave me in peace!” he said, addressing not his tutor,
but the whole world.
667