<h2><SPAN name="part04"></SPAN>PART IV</h2>
<h2><SPAN name="book10"></SPAN>Book X. The Boys</h2>
<h2><SPAN name="chap63"></SPAN>Chapter I.<br/> Kolya Krassotkin</h2>
<p>It was the beginning of November. There had been a hard frost, eleven degrees
Réaumur, without snow, but a little dry snow had fallen on the frozen ground
during the night, and a keen dry wind was lifting and blowing it along the
dreary streets of our town, especially about the market‐place. It was a dull
morning, but the snow had ceased.</p>
<p>Not far from the market‐place, close to Plotnikov’s shop, there stood a
small house, very clean both without and within. It belonged to Madame
Krassotkin, the widow of a former provincial secretary, who had been dead for
fourteen years. His widow, still a nice‐looking woman of thirty‐two, was living
in her neat little house on her private means. She lived in respectable
seclusion; she was of a soft but fairly cheerful disposition. She was about
eighteen at the time of her husband’s death; she had been married only a
year and had just borne him a son. From the day of his death she had devoted
herself heart and soul to the bringing up of her precious treasure, her boy
Kolya. Though she had loved him passionately those fourteen years, he had
caused her far more suffering than happiness. She had been trembling and
fainting with terror almost every day, afraid he would fall ill, would catch
cold, do something naughty, climb on a chair and fall off it, and so on and so
on. When Kolya began going to school, the mother devoted herself to studying
all the sciences with him so as to help him, and go through his lessons with
him. She hastened to make the acquaintance of the teachers and their wives,
even made up to Kolya’s schoolfellows, and fawned upon them in the hope
of thus saving Kolya from being teased, laughed at, or beaten by them. She went
so far that the boys actually began to mock at him on her account and taunt him
with being a “mother’s darling.”</p>
<p>But the boy could take his own part. He was a resolute boy, “tremendously
strong,” as was rumored in his class, and soon proved to be the fact; he
was agile, strong‐willed, and of an audacious and enterprising temper. He was
good at lessons, and there was a rumor in the school that he could beat the
teacher, Dardanelov, at arithmetic and universal history. Though he looked down
upon every one, he was a good comrade and not supercilious. He accepted his
schoolfellows’ respect as his due, but was friendly with them. Above all,
he knew where to draw the line. He could restrain himself on occasion, and in
his relations with the teachers he never overstepped that last mystic limit
beyond which a prank becomes an unpardonable breach of discipline. But he was
as fond of mischief on every possible occasion as the smallest boy in the
school, and not so much for the sake of mischief as for creating a sensation,
inventing something, something effective and conspicuous. He was extremely
vain. He knew how to make even his mother give way to him; he was almost
despotic in his control of her. She gave way to him, oh, she had given way to
him for years. The one thought unendurable to her was that her boy had no great
love for her. She was always fancying that Kolya was “unfeeling” to
her, and at times, dissolving into hysterical tears, she used to reproach him
with his coldness. The boy disliked this, and the more demonstrations of
feeling were demanded of him the more he seemed intentionally to avoid them.
Yet it was not intentional on his part but instinctive—it was his
character. His mother was mistaken; he was very fond of her. He only disliked
“sheepish sentimentality,” as he expressed it in his schoolboy
language.</p>
<p>There was a bookcase in the house containing a few books that had been his
father’s. Kolya was fond of reading, and had read several of them by
himself. His mother did not mind that and only wondered sometimes at seeing the
boy stand for hours by the bookcase poring over a book instead of going to
play. And in that way Kolya read some things unsuitable for his age.</p>
<p>Though the boy, as a rule, knew where to draw the line in his mischief, he had
of late begun to play pranks that caused his mother serious alarm. It is true
there was nothing vicious in what he did, but a wild mad recklessness.</p>
<p>It happened that July, during the summer holidays, that the mother and son went
to another district, forty‐five miles away, to spend a week with a distant
relation, whose husband was an official at the railway station (the very
station, the nearest one to our town, from which a month later Ivan
Fyodorovitch Karamazov set off for Moscow). There Kolya began by carefully
investigating every detail connected with the railways, knowing that he could
impress his schoolfellows when he got home with his newly acquired knowledge.
But there happened to be some other boys in the place with whom he soon made
friends. Some of them were living at the station, others in the neighborhood;
there were six or seven of them, all between twelve and fifteen, and two of
them came from our town. The boys played together, and on the fourth or fifth
day of Kolya’s stay at the station, a mad bet was made by the foolish
boys. Kolya, who was almost the youngest of the party and rather looked down
upon by the others in consequence, was moved by vanity or by reckless bravado
to bet them two roubles that he would lie down between the rails at night when
the eleven o’clock train was due, and would lie there without moving
while the train rolled over him at full speed. It is true they made a
preliminary investigation, from which it appeared that it was possible to lie
so flat between the rails that the train could pass over without touching, but
to lie there was no joke! Kolya maintained stoutly that he would. At first they
laughed at him, called him a little liar, a braggart, but that only egged him
on. What piqued him most was that these boys of fifteen turned up their noses
at him too superciliously, and were at first disposed to treat him as “a
small boy,” not fit to associate with them, and that was an unendurable
insult.</p>
<p>And so it was resolved to go in the evening, half a mile from the station, so
that the train might have time to get up full speed after leaving the station.
The boys assembled. It was a pitch‐dark night without a moon. At the time
fixed, Kolya lay down between the rails. The five others who had taken the bet
waited among the bushes below the embankment, their hearts beating with
suspense, which was followed by alarm and remorse. At last they heard in the
distance the rumble of the train leaving the station. Two red lights gleamed
out of the darkness; the monster roared as it approached.</p>
<p>“Run, run away from the rails,” the boys cried to Kolya from the
bushes, breathless with terror. But it was too late: the train darted up and
flew past. The boys rushed to Kolya. He lay without moving. They began pulling
at him, lifting him up. He suddenly got up and walked away without a word. Then
he explained that he had lain there as though he were insensible to frighten
them, but the fact was that he really had lost consciousness, as he confessed
long after to his mother. In this way his reputation as “a desperate
character,” was established for ever. He returned home to the station as
white as a sheet. Next day he had a slight attack of nervous fever, but he was
in high spirits and well pleased with himself. The incident did not become
known at once, but when they came back to the town it penetrated to the school
and even reached the ears of the masters. But then Kolya’s mother
hastened to entreat the masters on her boy’s behalf, and in the end
Dardanelov, a respected and influential teacher, exerted himself in his favor,
and the affair was ignored.</p>
<p>Dardanelov was a middle‐aged bachelor, who had been passionately in love with
Madame Krassotkin for many years past, and had once already, about a year
previously, ventured, trembling with fear and the delicacy of his sentiments,
to offer her most respectfully his hand in marriage. But she refused him
resolutely, feeling that to accept him would be an act of treachery to her son,
though Dardanelov had, to judge from certain mysterious symptoms, reason for
believing that he was not an object of aversion to the charming but too chaste
and tender‐hearted widow. Kolya’s mad prank seemed to have broken the
ice, and Dardanelov was rewarded for his intercession by a suggestion of hope.
The suggestion, it is true, was a faint one, but then Dardanelov was such a
paragon of purity and delicacy that it was enough for the time being to make
him perfectly happy. He was fond of the boy, though he would have felt it
beneath him to try and win him over, and was severe and strict with him in
class. Kolya, too, kept him at a respectful distance. He learned his lessons
perfectly; he was second in his class, was reserved with Dardanelov, and the
whole class firmly believed that Kolya was so good at universal history that he
could “beat” even Dardanelov. Kolya did indeed ask him the
question, “Who founded Troy?” to which Dardanelov had made a very
vague reply, referring to the movements and migrations of races, to the
remoteness of the period, to the mythical legends. But the question, “Who
had founded Troy?” that is, what individuals, he could not answer, and
even for some reason regarded the question as idle and frivolous. But the boys
remained convinced that Dardanelov did not know who founded Troy. Kolya had
read of the founders of Troy in Smaragdov, whose history was among the books in
his father’s bookcase. In the end all the boys became interested in the
question, who it was that had founded Troy, but Krassotkin would not tell his
secret, and his reputation for knowledge remained unshaken.</p>
<p>After the incident on the railway a certain change came over Kolya’s
attitude to his mother. When Anna Fyodorovna (Madame Krassotkin) heard of her
son’s exploit, she almost went out of her mind with horror. She had such
terrible attacks of hysterics, lasting with intervals for several days, that
Kolya, seriously alarmed at last, promised on his honor that such pranks should
never be repeated. He swore on his knees before the holy image, and swore by
the memory of his father, at Madame Krassotkin’s instance, and the
“manly” Kolya burst into tears like a boy of six. And all that day
the mother and son were constantly rushing into each other’s arms
sobbing. Next day Kolya woke up as “unfeeling” as before, but he
had become more silent, more modest, sterner, and more thoughtful.</p>
<p>Six weeks later, it is true, he got into another scrape, which even brought his
name to the ears of our Justice of the Peace, but it was a scrape of quite
another kind, amusing, foolish, and he did not, as it turned out, take the
leading part in it, but was only implicated in it. But of this later. His
mother still fretted and trembled, but the more uneasy she became, the greater
were the hopes of Dardanelov. It must be noted that Kolya understood and
divined what was in Dardanelov’s heart and, of course, despised him
profoundly for his “feelings”; he had in the past been so tactless
as to show this contempt before his mother, hinting vaguely that he knew what
Dardanelov was after. But from the time of the railway incident his behavior in
this respect also was changed; he did not allow himself the remotest allusion
to the subject and began to speak more respectfully of Dardanelov before his
mother, which the sensitive woman at once appreciated with boundless gratitude.
But at the slightest mention of Dardanelov by a visitor in Kolya’s
presence, she would flush as pink as a rose. At such moments Kolya would either
stare out of the window scowling, or would investigate the state of his boots,
or would shout angrily for “Perezvon,” the big, shaggy, mangy dog,
which he had picked up a month before, brought home, and kept for some reason
secretly indoors, not showing him to any of his schoolfellows. He bullied him
frightfully, teaching him all sorts of tricks, so that the poor dog howled for
him whenever he was absent at school, and when he came in, whined with delight,
rushed about as if he were crazy, begged, lay down on the ground pretending to
be dead, and so on; in fact, showed all the tricks he had taught him, not at
the word of command, but simply from the zeal of his excited and grateful
heart.</p>
<p>I have forgotten, by the way, to mention that Kolya Krassotkin was the boy
stabbed with a penknife by the boy already known to the reader as the son of
Captain Snegiryov. Ilusha had been defending his father when the schoolboys
jeered at him, shouting the nickname “wisp of tow.”</p>
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