Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1was 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.
After the incident on the railway a certain change came
over Kolya’s attitude to his mother. When Anna Fyodor-
ovna (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 sev-
eral days, that Kolya, seriously alarmed at last, promised
on his honour 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.
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, amus-
ing, 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 profound-
ly for his ‘feelings”; he had in the past been so tactless as to
show this contempt before his mother, hinting vaguely that