Ten minutes later he was standing in her presence.
Arina Petrovna met him severely and solemnly, and measured him icily from head to foot, but allowed herself no useless reproaches.
She received him, not in the living room, but on the porch, and ordered the young master to be taken to his father through another entrance.
The old man was dozing in his bed, under a white coverlet, in a white nightcap, all white like a corpse.
When he felt the presence of his son he woke up and began to laugh idiotically.
"Well, friend, so now you are under the hag's paw," he cried, while his son kissed his hand.
Then he crowed like a cock, burst out laughing again, and repeated several times: "She'll eat him up!
She'll eat him up!" The phrase found echo in Stepan's soul.
His fears were justified.
He was installed in a separate room in the wing that also housed the counting-room.
He was given homespun underwear and an old discarded dressing-gown of his father's, which he put on immediately.
The doors of the burial vault had opened, let him in, and closed again.
There now began a long succession of dull, ugly days, which Time's grey, yawning abyss swallowed up, one after the other.
Arina Petrovna never received him, nor was he allowed to see his father.
Three days after his arrival, his mother informed him through Finogey Ipatych, the bailiff, that he would receive board and clothing and also a pound of Faler's tobacco monthly.
Stepan Vladimirych listened to the bailiff, and merely remarked:
"The hag!
She's found out that Zhukov's tobacco costs two rubles, while Faler's is only one ruble ninety kopeks a pound. So she pockets ten kopeks a month."
The symptoms of the moral sobering that had appeared during the hours of his approaching Golovliovo on the country road, vanished.
Frivolity reasserted its rights and was followed by an acceptance of the conditions his mother imposed upon him.
The disquieting thought of the hopeless future, which had once pierced his mind, faded gradually away and finally was no more.
The day and the evil thereof, the petty interests of existence in all its undisguised ugliness absorbed his entire being.
What part, indeed, could his intentions and opinions play when the course of the rest of his life in all its details was laid out in advance in Arina Petrovna's brain?
All day long he walked to and fro in his room, pipe in mouth, humming bits of songs, passing unaccountably from church tunes to boisterous airs.
If the village clerk happened to be in the office, he went up to him and engaged in a conversation, of which the chief topic was Arina Petrovna's income.
"What does she do with all her wealth?" he would exclaim wonderingly, having reached the sum of more than eighty thousand rubles. "My brothers' allowances are rather poor; she herself lives shabbily, and she feeds cured meats to father. She deposits the money in the bank, that's what she does with it."
On one occasion Finogey Ipatych came to deliver the taxes he had gathered, and the table was littered with paper money, and Stepan's eyes glittered.
"Ah, what a heap of money!" he exclaimed. "And it all flows right down her throat. As for giving her son some of these nice greenbacks, no, she wouldn't do that. She wouldn't say: 'Here, my son, you who are visited by sorrow, here is some cash for wine and tobacco.'"
This was usually followed by endless cynical talks about how he could win over his mother's heart.
"In Moscow," he held forth, "I used to meet a man who knew a magic word. If his mother refused to give him money he would utter 'the word,' and she instantly got cramps in her hands and feet, in fact all over."
"It must have been a spell, I suppose," remarked the village clerk.
"Well, whatever it may have been, it is gospel truth that there is such a 'word.'
Another man told me this: 'Take,' he says, 'a frog, and put it into an anthill at midnight. By morning the ants will have gnawed it clean, so that only its skeleton will be left. Take the skeleton, and when it is in your pocket ask anything you wish of any woman, and she won't refuse you."
"Well, that's easy."
"The trouble is, one must first damn oneself forever.
If it weren't for that, the old hag would be cringing before me."
Hours on end were spent in such talk, but no remedy was found.
The preliminary condition was that you either had to call a curse down on yourself, or sell your soul to the devil.
There was no help. Stepan Vladimirych had to go on living under his mother's rule, the only relief coming in the small voluntary contributions that he raised from the village officials in the form of tobacco, tea, and sugar.
His fare consisted mainly of what remained from his mother's table, and as Arina Petrovna was moderate to the point of avarice, his board was meagre, to say the least; which was all the more painful because ever since vodka had become unattainable, his appetite had grown considerably keener.
All day long hunger gnawed at him, and his sole preoccupation was how to fill his stomach.
He awaited the hour when his mother would retire for a rest, then sneaked into the kitchen and looked into the servants' quarters, snatching a bit here, a bit there.
Sometimes he would sit at his open window watching for passers-by.
If one of the serfs came along, he stopped him and levied toll in the form of an egg, a curd-cake, and the like.
At the first meeting between mother and son, Arina Petrovna briefly explained the whole program of his life.
"Live here," she said. "Here is a shelter for you in the counting-house. Your meals you will get from my table. In other matters you will have to put up with things as they are.
There were never any dainties in the house, and I shan't change my ways for your sake.
Your brothers will soon arrive. Whatever they will decide about you, I shall carry out.
I shall take no sin upon my soul. Let them dispose of your fate."
He looked forward to his brothers' arrival with impatience.