Resurrection

I Maslova Makes New Friends.

The gang of prisoners to which Maslova belonged had walked about three thousand three hundred miles. She and the other prisoners condemned for criminal offences had travelled by rail and by steamboats as far as the town of Perm. It was only here that Nekhludoff succeeded in obtaining a permission for her to continue the journey with the political prisoners, as Vera Doukhova, who was among the latter, advised him to do. The journey up to Perm had been very trying to Maslova both morally and physically. Physically, because of the overcrowding, the dirt, and the disgusting vermin, which gave her no peace; morally, because of the equally disgusting men. The men, like the vermin, though they changed at each halting-place, were everywhere alike importunate; they swarmed round her, giving her no rest. Among the women prisoners and the men prisoners, the jailers and the convoy soldiers, the habit of a kind of cynical debauch was so firmly established that unless a female prisoner was willing to utilise her position as a woman she had to be constantly on the watch. To be continually in a state of fear and strife was very trying. And Maslova was specially exposed to attacks, her appearance being attractive and her past known to every one. The decided resistance with which she now met the importunity of all the men seemed offensive to them, and awakened another feeling, that of ill-will towards her. But her position was made a little easier by her intimacy with Theodosia, and Theodosia’s husband, who, having heard of the molestations his wife was subject to, had in Nijni been arrested at his own desire in order to be able to protect her, and was now travelling with the gang as a prisoner. Maslova’s position became much more bearable when she was allowed to join the political prisoners, who were provided with better accomodations, better food, and were treated less rudely, but besides all this Maslova’s condition was much improved because among the political prisoners she was no longer molested by the men, and could live without being reminded of that past which she was so anxious to forget. But the chief advantage of the change lay in the fact that she made the acquaintance of several persons who exercised a decided and most beneficial influence on her character. Maslova was allowed to stop with the political prisoners at all the halting-places, but being a strong and healthy woman she was obliged to march with the criminal convicts. In this way she walked all the way from Tomsk. Two political prisoners also marched with the gang, Mary Pavlovna Schetinina, the girl with the hazel eyes who had attracted Nekhludoff’s attention when he had been to visit Doukhova in prison, and one Simonson, who was on his way to the Takoutsk district, the dishevelled dark young fellow with deep-lying eyes, whom Nekhludoff had also noticed during that visit. Mary Pavlovna was walking because she had given her place on the cart to one of the criminals, a woman expecting to be confined, and Simonson because he did not dare to avail himself of a class privilege.

These three always started early in the morning before the rest of the political prisoners, who followed later on in the carts.

They were ready to start in this way just outside a large town, where a new convoy officer had taken charge of the gang.

It was early on a dull September morning. It kept raining and snowing alternately, and the cold wind blew in sudden gusts. The whole gang of prisoners, consisting of four hundred men and fifty women, was already assembled in the court of the halting station. Some of them were crowding round the chief of the convoy, who was giving to specially appointed prisoners money for two days’ keep to distribute among the rest, while others were purchasing food from women who had been let into the courtyard. One could hear the voices of the prisoners counting their money and making their purchases, and the shrill voices of the women with the food.

Simonson, in his rubber jacket and rubber overshoes fastened with a string over his worsted stockings (he was a vegetarian and would not wear the skin of slaughtered animals), was also in the courtyard waiting for the gang to start. He stood by the porch and jotted down in his notebook a thought that had occurred to him. This was what he wrote: “If a bacteria watched and examined a human nail it would pronounce it inorganic matter, and thus we, examining our globe and watching its crust, pronounce it to be inorganic. This is incorrect.”

Katusha and Mary Pavlovna, both wearing top-boots and with shawls tied round their heads, came out of the building into the courtyard where the women sat sheltered from the wind by the northern wall of the court, and vied with one another, offering their goods, hot meat pie, fish, vermicelli, buckwheat porridge, liver, beef, eggs, milk. One had even a roast pig to offer.

Having bought some eggs, bread, fish, and some rusks, Maslova was putting them into her bag, while Mary Pavlovna was paying the women, when a movement arose among the convicts. All were silent and took their places. The officer came out and began giving the last orders before starting. Everything was done in the usual manner. The prisoners were counted, the chains on their legs examined, and those who were to march in couples linked together with manacles. But suddenly the angry, authoritative voice of the officer shouting something was heard, also the sound of a blow and the crying of a child. All was silent for a moment and then came a hollow murmur from the crowd. Maslova and Mary Pavlovna advanced towards the spot whence the noise proceeded.

II An incident of the March.

This is what Mary Pavlovna and Katusha saw when they came up to the scene whence the noise proceeded. The officer, a sturdy fellow, with fair moustaches, stood uttering words of foul and coarse abuse, and rubbing with his left the palm of his right hand, which he had hurt in hitting a prisoner on the face. In front of him a thin, tall convict, with half his head shaved and dressed in a cloak too short for him and trousers much too short, stood wiping his bleeding face with one hand, and holding a little shrieking girl wrapped in a shawl with the other.

“I’ll give it you” (foul abuse); “I’ll teach you to reason” (more abuse); “you’re to give her to the women!” shouted the officer. “Now, then, on with them.”

The convict, who was exiled by the Commune, had been carrying his little daughter all the way from Tomsk, where his wife had died of typhus, and now the officer ordered him to be manacled. The exile’s explanation that he could not carry the child if he was manacled irritated the officer, who happened to be in a bad temper, and he gave the troublesome prisoner a beating.[29] Before the injured convict stood a convoy soldier, and a black-bearded prisoner with manacles on one hand and a look of gloom on his face, which he turned now to the officer, now to the prisoner with the little girl.

The officer repeated his orders for the soldiers to take away the girl. The murmur among the prisoners grew louder.

“All the way from Tomsk they were not put on,” came a hoarse voice from some one in the rear. “It’s a child, and not a puppy.”

“What’s he to do with the lassie? That’s not the law,” said some one else.

“Who’s that?” shouted the officer as if he had been stung, and rushed into the crowd.

“I’ll teach you the law. Who spoke. You? You?”

“Everybody says so, because—” said a short, broad-faced prisoner.

Before he had finished speaking the officer hit him in the face.

“Mutiny, is it? I’ll show you what mutiny means. I’ll have you all shot like dogs, and the authorities will be only too thankful. Take the girl.”

The crowd was silent. One convoy soldier pulled away the girl, who was screaming desperately, while another manacled the prisoner, who now submissively held out his hand.

“Take her to the women,” shouted the officer, arranging his sword belt.

The little girl, whose face had grown quite red, was trying to disengage her arms from under the shawl, and screamed unceasingly. Mary Pavlovna stepped out from among the crowd and came up to the officer.

“Will you allow me to carry the little girl?” she said.

“Who are you?” asked the officer.

“A political prisoner.”

Mary Pavlovna’s handsome face, with the beautiful prominent eyes (he had noticed her before when the prisoners were given into his charge), evidently produced an effect on the officer. He looked at her in silence as if considering, then said: “I don’t care; carry her if you like. It is easy for you to show pity; if he ran away who would have to answer?”

“How could he run away with the child in his arms?” said Mary Pavlovna.

“I have no time to talk with you. Take her if you like.”

“Shall I give her?” asked the soldier.

“Yes, give her.”

“Come to me,” said Mary Pavlovna, trying to coax the child to come to her.

But the child in the soldier’s arms stretched herself towards her father and continued to scream, and would not go to Mary Pavlovna.

“Wait a bit, Mary Pavlovna,” said Maslova, getting a rusk out of her bag; “she will come to me.”

The little girl knew Maslova, and when she saw her face and the rusk she let her take her. All was quiet. The gates were opened, and the gang stepped out, the convoy counted the prisoners over again, the bags were packed and tied on to the carts, the weak seated on the top. Maslova with the child in her arms took her place among the women next to Theodosia. Simonson, who had all the time been watching what was going on, stepped with large, determined strides up to the officer, who, having given his orders, was just getting into a trap, and said, “You have behaved badly.”

“Get to your place; it is no business of yours.”

“It is my business to tell you that you have behaved badly and I have said it,” said Simonson, looking intently into the officer’s face from under his bushy eyebrows.

“Ready? March!” the officer called out, paying no heed to Simonson, and, taking hold of the driver’s shoulder, he got into the trap. The gang started and spread out as it stepped on to the muddy high road with ditches on each side, which passed through a dense forest.

III Mary Pavlovna.

In spite of the hard conditions in which they were placed, life among the political prisoners seemed very good to Katusha after the depraved, luxurious and effeminate life she had led in town for the last six years, and after two months’ imprisonment with criminal prisoners. The fifteen to twenty miles they did per day, with one day’s rest after two days’ marching, strengthened her physically, and the fellowship with her new companions opened out to her a life full of interests such as she had never dreamed of. People so wonderful (as she expressed it) as those whom she was now going with she had not only never met but could not even have imagined.

“There now, and I cried when I was sentenced,” she said. “Why, I must thank God for it all the days of my life. I have learned to know what I never should have found out else.”

The motives she understood easily and without effort that guided these people, and, being of the people, fully sympathised with them. She understood that these persons were for the people and against the upper classes, and though themselves belonging to the upper classes had sacrificed their privileges, their liberty and their lives for the people. This especially made her value and admire them. She was charmed with all the new companions, but particularly with Mary Pavlovna, and she was not only charmed with her, but loved her with a peculiar, respectful and rapturous love. She was struck by the fact that this beautiful girl, the daughter of a rich general, who could speak three languages, gave away all that her rich brother sent her, and lived like the simplest working girl, and dressed not only simply, but poorly, paying no heed to her appearance. This trait and a complete absence of coquetry was particularly surprising and therefore attractive to Maslova. Maslova could see that Mary Pavlovna knew, and was even pleased to know, that she was handsome, and yet the effect her appearance had on men was not at all pleasing to her; she was even afraid of it, and felt an absolute disgust to all love affairs. Her men companions knew it, and if they felt attracted by her never permitted themselves to show it to her, but treated her as they would a man; but with strangers, who often molested her, the great physical strength on which she prided herself stood her in good stead.

“It happened once,” she said to Katusha, “that a man followed me in the street and would not leave me on any account. At last I gave him such a shaking that he was frightened and ran away.”

She became a revolutionary, as she said, because she felt a dislike to the life of the well-to-do from childhood up, and loved the life of the common people, and she was always being scolded for spending her time in the servants’ hall, in the kitchen or the stables instead of the drawing-room.

“And I found it amusing to be with cooks and the coachmen, and dull with our gentlemen and ladies,” she said. “Then when I came to understand things I saw that our life was altogether wrong; I had no mother and I did not care for my father, and so when I was nineteen I left home, and went with a girl friend to work as a factory hand.”

After she left the factory she lived in the country, then returned to town and lived in a lodging, where they had a secret printing press. There she was arrested and sentenced to hard labour. Mary Pavlovna said nothing about it herself, but Katusha heard from others that Mary Pavlovna was sentenced because, when the lodging was searched by the police and one of the revolutionists fired a shot in the dark, she pleaded guilty.

As soon as she had learned to know Mary Pavlovna, Katusha noticed that, whatever the conditions she found herself in, Mary Pavlovna never thought of herself, but was always anxious to serve, to help some one, in matters small or great. One of her present companions, Novodvoroff, said of her that she devoted herself to philanthropic amusements. And this was true. The interest of her whole life lay in the search for opportunities of serving others. This kind of amusement had become the habit, the business of her life. And she did it all so naturally that those who knew her no longer valued but simply expected it of her.

When Maslova first came among them, Mary Pavlovna felt repulsed and disgusted. Katusha noticed this, but she also noticed that, having made an effort to overcome these feelings, Mary Pavlovna became particularly tender and kind to her. The tenderness and kindness of so uncommon a being touched Maslova so much that she gave her whole heart, and unconsciously accepting her views, could not help imitating her in everything.

This devoted love of Katusha touched Mary Pavlovna in her turn, and she learned to love Katusha.

These women were also united by the repulsion they both felt to sexual love. The one loathed that kind of love, having experienced all its horrors, the other, never having experienced it, looked on it as something incomprehensible and at the same time as something repugnant and offensive to human dignity.

IV Simonson.

Mary Pavlovna’s influence was one that Maslova submitted to because she loved Mary Pavlovna. Simonson influenced her because he loved her.

Everybody lives and acts partly according to his own, partly according to other people’s, ideas. This is what constitutes one of the great differences among men. To some, thinking is a kind of mental game; they treat their reason as if it were a fly-wheel without a connecting strap, and are guided in their actions by other people’s ideas, by custom or laws; while others look upon their own ideas as the chief motive power of all their actions, and always listen to the dictates of their own reason and submit to it, accepting other people’s opinions only on rare occasions and after weighing them critically. Simonson was a man of the latter sort; he settled and verified everything according to his own reason and acted on the decisions he arrived at. When a schoolboy he made up his mind that his father’s income, made as a paymaster in government office was dishonestly gained, and he told his father that it ought to be given to the people. When his father, instead of listening to him, gave him a scolding, he left his father’s house and would not make use of his father’s means. Having come to the conclusion that all the existing misery was a result of the people’s ignorance, he joined the socialists, who carried on propaganda among the people, as soon as he left the university and got a place as a village schoolmaster. He taught and explained to his pupils and to the peasants what he considered to be just, and openly blamed what he thought unjust. He was arrested and tried. During his trial he determined to tell his judges that his was a just cause, for which he ought not to be tried or punished. When the judges paid no heed to his words, but went on with the trial, he decided not to answer them and kept resolutely silent when they questioned him. He was exiled to the Government of Archangel. There he formulated a religious teaching which was founded on the theory that everything in the world was alive, that nothing is lifeless, and that all the objects we consider to be without life or inorganic are only parts of an enormous organic body which we cannot compass. A man’s task is to sustain the life of that huge organism and all its animate parts. Therefore he was against war, capital punishment and every kind of killing, not only of human beings, but also of animals. Concerning marriage, too, he had a peculiar idea of his own; he thought that increase was a lower function of man, the highest function being to serve the already existing lives. He found a confirmation of his theory in the fact that there were phacocytes in the blood. Celibates, according to his opinion, were the same as phacocytes, their function being to help the weak and the sickly particles of the organism. From the moment he came to this conclusion he began to consider himself as well as Mary Pavlovna as phacocytes, and to live accordingly, though as a youth he had been addicted to vice. His love for Katusha did not infringe this conception, because he loved her platonically, and such love he considered could not hinder his activity as a phacocytes, but acted, on the contrary, as an inspiration.

Not only moral, but also most practical questions he decided in his own way. He applied a theory of his own to all practical business, had rules relating to the number of hours for rest and for work, to the kind of food to eat, the way to dress, to heat and light up the rooms. With all this Simonson was very shy and modest; and yet when he had once made up his mind nothing could make him waver. And this man had a decided influence on Maslova through his love for her. With a woman’s instinct Maslova very soon found out that he loved her. And the fact that she could awaken love in a man of that kind raised her in her own estimation. It was Nekhludoff’s magnanimity and what had been in the past that made him offer to marry her, but Simonson loved her such as she was now, loved her simply because of the love he bore her. And she felt that Simonson considered her to be an exceptional woman, having peculiarly high moral qualities. She did not quite know what the qualities he attributed to her were, but in order to be on the safe side and that he should not be disappointed in her, she tried with all her might to awaken in herself all the highest qualities she could conceive, and she tried to be as good as possible. This had begun while they were still in prison, when on a common visiting day she had noticed his kindly dark blue eyes gazing fixedly at her from under his projecting brow. Even then she had noticed that this was a peculiar man, and that he was looking at her in a peculiar manner, and had also noticed the striking combination of sternness—the unruly hair and the frowning forehead gave him this appearance—with the child-like kindness and innocence of his look. She saw him again in Tomsk, where she joined the political prisoners. Though they had not uttered a word, their looks told plainly that they had understood one another. Even after that they had had no serious conversation with each other, but Maslova felt that when he spoke in her presence his words were addressed to her, and that he spoke for her sake, trying to express himself as plainly as he could; but it was when he started walking with the criminal prisoners that they grew specially near to one another.

V The political prisoners.

Until they left Perm Nekhludoff only twice managed to see Katusha, once in Nijni, before the prisoners were embarked on a barge surrounded with a wire netting, and again in Perm in the prison office. At both these interviews he found her reserved and unkind. She answered his questions as to whether she was in want of anything, and whether she was comfortable, evasively and bashfully, and, as he thought, with the same feeling of hostile reproach which she had shown several times before. Her depressed state of mind, which was only the result of the molestations from the men that she was undergoing at the time, tormented Nekhludoff. He feared lest, influenced by the hard and degrading circumstances in which she was placed on the journey, she should again get into that state of despair and discord with her own self which formerly made her irritable with him, and which had caused her to drink and smoke excessively to gain oblivion. But he was unable to help her in any way during this part of the journey, as it was impossible for him to be with her. It was only when she joined the political prisoners that he saw how unfounded his fears were, and at each interview he noticed that inner change he so strongly desired to see in her becoming more and more marked. The first time they met in Tomsk she was again just as she had been when leaving Moscow. She did not frown or become confused when she saw him, but met him joyfully and simply, thanking him for what he had done for her, especially for bringing her among the people with whom she now was.

After two months’ marching with the gang, the change that had taken place within her became noticeable in her appearance. She grew sunburned and thinner, and seemed older; wrinkles appeared on her temples and round her mouth. She had no ringlets on her forehead now, and her hair was covered with the kerchief; in the way it was arranged, as well as in her dress and her manners, there was no trace of coquetry left. And this change, which had taken place and was still progressing in her, made Nekhludoff very happy.

He felt for her something he had never experienced before. This feeling had nothing in common with his first poetic love for her, and even less with the sensual love that had followed, nor even with the satisfaction of a duty fulfilled, not unmixed with self-admiration, with which he decided to marry her after the trial. The present feeling was simply one of pity and tenderness. He had felt it when he met her in prison for the first time, and then again when, after conquering his repugnance, he forgave her the imagined intrigue with the medical assistant in the hospital (the injustice done her had since been discovered); it was the same feeling he now had, only with this difference, that formerly it was momentary, and that now it had become permanent. Whatever he was doing, whatever he was thinking now, a feeling of pity and tenderness dwelt with him, and not only pity and tenderness for her, but for everybody. This feeling seemed to have opened the floodgates of love, which had found no outlet in Nekhludoff’s soul, and the love now flowed out to every one he met.

During this journey Nekhludoff’s feelings were so stimulated that he could not help being attentive and considerate to everybody, from the coachman and the convoy soldiers to the prison inspectors and governors whom he had to deal with. Now that Maslova was among the political prisoners, Nekhludoff could not help becoming acquainted with many of them, first in Ekaterinburg, where they had a good deal of freedom and were kept altogether in a large cell, and then on the road when Maslova was marching with three of the men and four of the women. Coming in contact with political exiles in this way made Nekhludoff completely change his mind concerning them.

From the very beginning of the revolutionary movement in Russia, but especially since that first of March, when Alexander II was murdered, Nekhludoff regarded the revolutionists with dislike and contempt. He was repulsed by the cruelty and secrecy of the methods they employed in their struggles against the government, especially the cruel murders they committed, and their arrogance also disgusted him. But having learned more intimately to know them and all they had suffered at the hands of the government, he saw that they could not be other than they were.

Terrible and endless as were the torments which were inflicted on the criminals, there was at least some semblance of justice shown them before and after they were sentenced, but in the case of the political prisoners there was not even that semblance, as Nekhludoff saw in the case of Sholostova and that of many and many of his new acquaintances. These people were dealt with like fish caught with a net; everything that gets into the nets is pulled ashore, and then the big fish which are required are sorted out and the little ones are left to perish unheeded on the shore. Having captured hundreds that were evidently guiltless, and that could not be dangerous to the government, they left them imprisoned for years, where they became consumptive, went out of their minds or committed suicide, and kept them only because they had no inducement to set them free, while they might be of use to elucidate some question at a judicial inquiry, safe in prison. The fate of these persons, often innocent even from the government point of view, depended on the whim, the humour of, or the amount of leisure at the disposal of some police officer or spy, or public prosecutor, or magistrate, or governor, or minister. Some one of these officials feels dull, or inclined to distinguish himself, and makes a number of arrests, and imprisons or sets free, according to his own fancy or that of the higher authorities. And the higher official, actuated by like motives, according to whether he is inclined to distinguish himself, or to what his relations to the minister are, exiles men to the other side of the world or keeps them in solitary confinement, condemns them to Siberia, to hard labour, to death, or sets them free at the request of some lady.

They were dealt with as in war, and they naturally employed the means that were used against them. And as the military men live in an atmosphere of public opinion that not only conceals from them the guilt of their actions, but sets these actions up as feats of heroism, so these political offenders were also constantly surrounded by an atmosphere of public opinion which made the cruel actions they committed, in the face of danger and at the risk of liberty and life, and all that is dear to men, seem not wicked but glorious actions. Nekhludoff found in this the explanation of the surprising phenomenon that men, with the mildest characters, who seemed incapable of witnessing the sufferings of any living creature, much less of inflicting pain, quietly prepared to murder men, nearly all of them considering murder lawful and just on certain occasions as a means for self-defence, for the attainment of higher aims or for the general welfare.

The importance they attribute to their cause, and consequently to themselves, flowed naturally from the importance the government attached to their actions, and the cruelty of the punishments it inflicted on them. When Nekhludoff came to know them better he became convinced that they were not the right-down villains that some imagined them to be, nor the complete heroes that others thought them, but ordinary people, just the same as others, among whom there were some good and some bad, and some mediocre, as there are everywhere.

There were some among them who had turned revolutionists because they honestly considered it their duty to fight the existing evils, but there were also those who chose this work for selfish, ambitious motives; the majority, however, was attracted to the revolutionary idea by the desire for danger, for risks, the enjoyment of playing with one’s life, which, as Nekhludoff knew from his military experiences, is quite common to the most ordinary people while they are young and full of energy. But wherein they differed from ordinary people was that their moral standard was a higher one than that of ordinary men. They considered not only self-control, hard living, truthfulness, but also the readiness to sacrifice everything, even life, for the common welfare as their duty. Therefore the best among them stood on a moral level that is not often reached, while the worst were far below the ordinary level, many of them being untruthful, hypocritical and at the same time self-satisfied and proud. So that Nekhludoff learned not only to respect but to love some of his new acquaintances, while he remained more than indifferent to others.

VI Kryltzoff’s story.

Nekhludoff grew especially fond of Kryltzoff, a consumptive young man condemned to hard labour, who was going with the same gang as Katusha. Nekhludoff had made his acquaintance already in Ekaterinburg, and talked with him several times on the road after that. Once, in summer, Nekhludoff spent nearly the whole of a day with him at a halting station, and Kryltzoff, having once started talking, told him his story and how he had become a revolutionist. Up to the time of his imprisonment his story was soon told. He lost his father, a rich landed proprietor in the south of Russia, when still a child. He was the only son, and his mother brought him up. He learned easily in the university, as well as the gymnasium, and was first in the mathematical faculty in his year. He was offered a choice of remaining in the university or going abroad. He hesitated. He loved a girl and was thinking of marriage, and taking part in the rural administration. He did not like giving up either offer, and could not make up his mind. At this time his fellow-students at the university asked him for money for a common cause. He did not know that this common cause was revolutionary, which he was not interested in at that time, but gave the money from a sense of comradeship and vanity, so that it should not be said that he was afraid. Those who received the money were caught, a note was found which proved that the money had been given by Kryltzoff, he was arrested, and first kept at the police station, then imprisoned.

“The prison where I was put,” Kryltzoff went on to relate (he was sitting on the high shelf bedstead, his elbows on his knees, with sunken chest, the beautiful, intelligent eyes with which he looked at Nekhludoff glistening feverishly)—“they were not specially strict in that prison. We managed to converse, not only by tapping the wall, but could walk about the corridors, share our provisions and our tobacco, and in the evenings we even sang in chorus. I had a fine voice—yes, if it had not been for mother it would have been all right, even pleasant and interesting. Here I made the acquaintance of the famous Petroff—he afterwards killed himself with a piece of glass at the fortress—and also of others. But I was not yet a revolutionary. I also became acquainted with my neighbours in the cells next to mine. They were both caught with Polish proclamations and arrested in the same cause, and were tried for an attempt to escape from the convoy when they were being taken to the railway station. One was a Pole, Lozinsky; the other a Jew, Rozovsky. Yes. Well, this Rozovsky was quite a boy. He said he was seventeen, but he looked fifteen—thin, small, active, with black, sparkling eyes, and, like most Jews, very musical. His voice was still breaking, and yet he sang beautifully. Yes. I saw them both taken to be tried. They were taken in the morning. They returned in the evening, and said they were condemned to death. No one had expected it. Their case was so unimportant; they only tried to get away from the convoy, and had not even wounded any one. And then it was so unnatural to execute such a child as Rozovsky. And we in prison all came to the conclusion that it was only done to frighten them, and would not be confirmed. At first we were excited, and then we comforted ourselves, and life went on as before. Yes. Well, one evening, a watchman comes to my door and mysteriously announces to me that carpenters had arrived, and were putting up the gallows. At first I did not understand. What’s that? What gallows? But the watchman was so excited that I saw at once it was for our two. I wished to tap and communicate with my comrades, but was afraid those two would hear. The comrades were also silent. Evidently everybody knew. In the corridors and in the cells everything was as still as death all that evening. They did not tap the wall nor sing. At ten the watchman came again and announced that a hangman had arrived from Moscow. He said it and went away. I began calling him back. Suddenly I hear Rozovsky shouting to me across the corridor: ‘What’s the matter? Why do you call him?’ I answered something about asking him to get me some tobacco, but he seemed to guess, and asked me: ‘Why did we not sing to-night, why did we not tap the walls?’ I do not remember what I said, but I went away so as not to speak to him. Yes. It was a terrible night. I listened to every sound all night. Suddenly, towards morning, I hear doors opening and somebody walking—many persons. I went up to my window. There was a lamp burning in the corridor. The first to pass was the inspector. He was stout, and seemed a resolute, self-satisfied man, but he looked ghastly pale, downcast, and seemed frightened; then his assistant, frowning but resolute; behind them the watchman. They passed my door and stopped at the next, and I hear the assistant calling out in a strange voice: ‘Lozinsky, get up and put on clean linen.’ Yes. Then I hear the creaking of the door; they entered into his cell. Then I hear Lozinsky’s steps going to the opposite side of the corridor. I could only see the inspector. He stood quite pale, and buttoned and unbuttoned his coat, shrugging his shoulders. Yes. Then, as if frightened of something, he moved out of the way. It was Lozinsky, who passed him and came up to my door. A handsome young fellow he was, you know, of that nice Polish type: broad shouldered, his head covered with fine, fair, curly hair as with a cap, and with beautiful blue eyes. So blooming, so fresh, so healthy. He stopped in front of my window, so that I could see the whole of his face. A dreadful, gaunt, livid face. ‘Kryltzoff, have you any cigarettes?’ I wished to pass him some, but the assistant hurriedly pulled out his cigarette case and passed it to him. He took out one, the assistant struck a match, and he lit the cigarette and began to smoke and seemed to be thinking. Then, as if he had remembered something, he began to speak. ‘It is cruel and unjust. I have committed no crime. I—’ I saw something quiver in his white young throat, from which I could not take my eyes, and he stopped. Yes. At that moment I hear Rozovsky shouting in his fine, Jewish voice. Lozinsky threw away the cigarette and stepped from the door. And Rozovsky appeared at the window. His childish face, with the limpid black eyes, was red and moist. He also had clean linen on, the trousers were too wide, and he kept pulling them up and trembled all over. He approached his pitiful face to my window. ‘Kryltzoff, it’s true that the doctor has prescribed cough mixture for me, is it not? I am not well. I’ll take some more of the mixture.’ No one answered, and he looked inquiringly, now at me, now at the inspector. What he meant to say I never made out. Yes. Suddenly the assistant again put on a stern expression, and called out in a kind of squeaking tone: ‘Now, then, no nonsense. Let us go.’ Rozovsky seemed incapable of understanding what awaited him, and hurried, almost ran, in front of him all along the corridor. But then he drew back, and I could hear his shrill voice and his cries, then the trampling of feet, and general hubbub. He was shrieking and sobbing. The sounds came fainter and fainter, and at last the door rattled and all was quiet. Yes. And so they hanged them. Throttled them both with a rope. A watchman, another one, saw it done, and told me that Lozinsky did not resist, but Rozovsky struggled for a long time, so that they had to pull him up on to the scaffold and to force his head into the noose. Yes. This watchman was a stupid fellow. He said: ‘They told me, sir, that it would be frightful, but it was not at all frightful. After they were hanged they only shrugged their shoulders twice, like this.’ He showed how the shoulders convulsively rose and fell. ‘Then the hangman pulled a bit so as to tighten the noose, and it was all up, and they never budged.“ ‘ And Kryltzoff repeated the watchman’s words, “Not at all frightful,” and tried to smile, but burst into sobs instead.

For a long time after that he kept silent, breathing heavily, and repressing the sobs that were choking him.

“From that time I became a revolutionist. Yes,” he said, when he was quieter and finished his story in a few words. He belonged to the Narodovoltzy party, and was even at the head of the disorganising group, whose object was to terrorise the government so that it should give up its power of its own accord. With this object he travelled to Petersburg, to Kiev, to Odessa and abroad, and was everywhere successful. A man in whom he had full confidence betrayed him. He was arrested, tried, kept in prison for two years, and condemned to death, but the sentence was mitigated to one of hard labour for life.

He went into consumption while in prison, and in the conditions he was now placed he had scarcely more than a few months longer to live. This he knew, but did not repent of his action, but said that if he had another life he would use it in the same way to destroy the conditions in which such things as he had seen were possible.

This man’s story and his intimacy with him explained to Nekhludoff much that he had not previously understood.

VII Nekhludoff seeks an interview with Maslova.

On the day when the convoy officer had the encounter with the prisoners at the halting station about the child, Nekhludoff, who had spent the night at the village inn, woke up late, and was some time writing letters to post at the next Government town, so that he left the inn later than usual, and did not catch up with the gang on the road as he had done previously, but came to the village where the next halting station was as it was growing dusk.

Having dried himself at the inn, which was kept by an elderly woman who had an extraordinarily fat, white neck, he had his tea in a clean room decorated with a great number of icons and pictures and then hurried away to the halting station to ask the officer for an interview with Katusha. At the last six halting stations he could not get the permission for an interview from any of the officers. Though they had been changed several times, not one of them would allow Nekhludoff inside the halting stations, so that he had not seen Katusha for more than a week. This strictness was occasioned by the fact that an important prison official was expected to pass that way. Now this official had passed without looking in at the gang, after all, and Nekhludoff hoped that the officer who had taken charge of the gang in the morning would allow him an interview with the prisoners, as former officers had done.

The landlady offered Nekhludoff a trap to drive him to the halting station, situated at the farther end of the village, but Nekhludoff preferred to walk. A young labourer, a broad-shouldered young fellow of herculean dimensions, with enormous top-boots freshly blackened with strongly smelling tar, offered himself as a guide.

A dense mist obscured the sky, and it was so dark that when the young fellow was three steps in advance of him Nekhludoff could not see him unless the light of some window happened to fall on the spot, but he could hear the heavy boots wading through the deep, sticky slush. After passing the open place in front of the church and the long street, with its rows of windows shining brightly in the darkness, Nekhludoff followed his guide to the outskirts of the village, where it was pitch dark. But soon here, too, rays of light, streaming through the mist from the lamps in the front of the halting station, became discernible through the darkness. The reddish spots of light grew bigger and bigger; at last the stakes of the palisade, the moving figure of the sentinel, a post painted with white and black stripes and the sentinel’s box became visible.

The sentinel called his usual “Who goes there?” as they approached, and seeing they were strangers treated them with such severity that he would not allow them to wait by the palisade; but Nekhludoff’s guide was not abashed by this severity.

“Hallo, lad! why so fierce? You go and rouse your boss while we wait here?”

The sentinel gave no answer, but shouted something in at the gate and stood looking at the broad-shouldered young labourer scraping the mud off Nekhludoff’s boots with a chip of wood by the light of the lamp. From behind the palisade came the hum of male and female voices. In about three minutes more something rattled, the gate opened, and a sergeant, with his cloak thrown over his shoulders, stepped out of the darkness into the lamplight.

The sergeant was not as strict as the sentinel, but he was extremely inquisitive. He insisted on knowing what Nekhludoff wanted the officer for, and who he was, evidently scenting his booty and anxious not to let it escape. Nekhludoff said he had come on special business, and would show his gratitude, and would the sergeant take a note for him to the officer. The sergeant took the note, nodded, and went away. Some time after the gate rattled again, and women carrying baskets, boxes, jugs and sacks came out, loudly chattering in their peculiar Siberian dialect as they stepped over the threshold of the gate. None of them wore peasant costumes, but were dressed town fashion, wearing jackets and fur-lined cloaks. Their skirts were tucked up high, and their heads wrapped up in shawls. They examined Nekhludoff and his guide curiously by the light of the lamp. One of them showed evident pleasure at the sight of the broad-shouldered fellow, and affectionately administered to him a dose of Siberian abuse.

“You demon, what are you doing here? The devil take you,” she said, addressing him.

“I’ve been showing this traveller here the way,” answered the young fellow. “And what have you been bringing here?”

“Dairy produce, and I am to bring more in the morning.”

The guide said something in answer that made not only the women but even the sentinel laugh, and, turning to Nekhludoff, he said:

“You’ll find your way alone? Won’t get lost, will you?”

“I shall find it all right.”

“When you have passed the church it’s the second from the two-storied house. Oh, and here, take my staff,” he said, handing the stick he was carrying, and which was longer than himself, to Nekhludoff; and splashing through the mud with his enormous boots, he disappeared in the darkness, together with the women.

His voice mingling with the voices of the women was still audible through the fog, when the gate again rattled, and the sergeant appeared and asked Nekhludoff to follow him to the officer.

VIII Nekhludoff and the officer.

This halting station, like all such stations along the Siberian road, was surrounded by a courtyard, fenced in with a palisade of sharp-pointed stakes, and consisted of three one-storied houses. One of them, the largest, with grated windows, was for the prisoners, another for the convoy soldiers, and the third, in which the office was, for the officers.

There were lights in the windows of all the three houses, and, like all such lights, they promised, here in a specially deceptive manner, something cosy inside the walls. Lamps were burning before the porches of the houses and about five lamps more along the walls lit up the yard.

The sergeant led Nekhludoff along a plank which lay across the yard up to the porch of the smallest of the houses.

When he had gone up the three steps of the porch he let Nekhludoff pass before him into the ante-room, in which a small lamp was burning, and which was filled with smoky fumes. By the stove a soldier in a coarse shirt with a necktie and black trousers, and with one top-boot on, stood blowing the charcoal in a somovar, using the other boot as bellows.[30] When he saw Nekhludoff, the soldier left the somovar and helped him off with his waterproof; then went into the inner room.

“He has come, your honour.”

“Well, ask him in,” came an angry voice.

“Go in at the door,” said the soldier, and went back to the somovar.

In the next room an officer with fair moustaches and a very red face, dressed in an Austrian jacket that closely fitted his broad chest and shoulders, sat at a covered table, on which were the remains of his dinner and two bottles; there was a strong smell of tobacco and some very strong, cheap scent in the warm room. On seeing Nekhludoff the officer rose and gazed ironically and suspiciously, as it seemed, at the newcomer.

“What is it you want?” he asked, and, not waiting for a reply, he shouted through the open door:

“Bernoff, the somovar! What are you about?”

“Coming at once.”

“You’ll get it ‘at once’ so that you’ll remember it,” shouted the officer, and his eyes flashed.

“I’m coming,” shouted the soldier, and brought in the somovar. Nekhludoff waited while the soldier placed the somovar on the table. When the officer had followed the soldier out of the room with his cruel little eyes looking as if they were aiming where best to hit him, he made the tea, got the four-cornered decanter out of his travelling case and some Albert biscuits, and having placed all this on the cloth he again turned to Nekhludoff. “Well, how can I be of service to you?”

“I should like to be allowed to visit a prisoner,” said Nekhludoff, without sitting down.

“A political one? That’s forbidden by the law,” said the officer.

“The woman I mean is not a political prisoner,” said Nekhludoff.

“Yes. But pray take a scat,” said the officer. Nekhludoff sat down.

“She is not a political one, but at my request she has been allowed by the higher authorities to join the political prisoners—”

“Oh, yes, I know,” interrupted the other; “a little dark one? Well, yes, that can be managed. Won’t you smoke?” He moved a box of cigarettes towards Nekhludoff, and, having carefully poured out two tumblers of tea, he passed one to Nekhludoff. “If you please,” he said.

“Thank you; I should like to see—”

“The night is long. You’ll have plenty of time. I shall order her to be sent out to you.”

“But could I not see her where she is? Why need she be sent for?” Nekhludoff said.

“In to the political prisoners? It is against the law.”

“I have been allowed to go in several times. If there is any danger of my passing anything in to them I could do it through her just as well.”

“Oh, no; she would be searched,” said the officer, and laughed in an unpleasant manner.

“Well, why not search me?”

“All right; we’ll manage without that,” said the officer, opening the decanter, and holding it out towards Nekhludoff’s tumbler of tea. “May I? No? Well, just as you like. When you are living here in Siberia you are too glad to meet an educated person. Our work, as you know, is the saddest, and when one is used to better things it is very hard. The idea they have of us is that convoy officers are coarse, uneducated men, and no one seems to remember that we may have been born for a very different position.”

This officer’s red face, his scents, his rings, and especially his unpleasant laughter disgusted Nekhludoff very much, but to-day, as during the whole of his journey, he was in that serious, attentive state which did not allow him to behave slightingly or disdainfully towards any man, but made him feel the necessity of speaking to every one “entirely,” as he expressed to himself, this relation to men. When he had heard the officer and understood his state of mind, he said in a serious manner:

“I think that in your position, too, some comfort could be found in helping the suffering people,” he said.

“What are their sufferings? You don’t know what these people are.”

“They are not special people,” said Nekhludoff; “they are just such people as others, and some of them are quite innocent.”

“Of course, there are all sorts among them, and naturally one pities them. Others won’t let anything off, but I try to lighten their condition where I can. It’s better that I should suffer, but not they. Others keep to the law in every detail, even as far as to shoot, but I show pity. May I?—Take another,” he said, and poured out another tumbler of tea for Nekhludoff.

“And who is she, this woman that you want to see?” he asked.

“It is an unfortunate woman who got into a brothel, and was there falsely accused of poisoning, and she is a very good woman,” Nekhludoff answered.

The officer shook his head. “Yes, it does happen. I can tell you about a certain Emma who lived in Kasan. She was a Hungarian by birth, but she had quite Persian eyes,” he continued, unable to restrain a smile at the recollection; “there was so much chic about her that a countess—”

Nekhludoff interrupted the officer and returned to the former topic of conversation.

“I think that you could lighten the condition of the people while they are in your charge. And in acting that way I am sure you would find great joy!” said Nekhludoff, trying to pronounce as distinctly as possible, as he might if talking to a foreigner or a child.

The officer looked at Nekhludoff impatiently, waiting for him to stop so as to continue the tale about the Hungarian with Persian eyes, who evidently presented herself very vividly to his imagination and quite absorbed his attention.

“Yes, of course, this is all quite true,” he said, “and I do pity them; but I should like to tell you about Emma. What do you think she did—?”

“It does not interest me,” said Nekhludoff, “and I will tell you straight, that though I was myself very different at one time, I now hate that kind of relation to women.”

The officer gave Nekhludoff a frightened look.

“Won’t you take some more tea?” he said.

“No, thank you.”

“Bernoff!” the officer called, “take the gentleman to Vakouloff. Tell him to let him into the separate political room. He may remain there till the inspection.”

IX The political prisoners.

Accompanied by the orderly, Nekhludoff went out into the courtyard, which was dimly lit up by the red light of the lamps.

“Where to?” asked the convoy sergeant, addressing the orderly.

“Into the separate cell, No. 5.”

“You can’t pass here; the boss has gone to the village and taken the keys.”

“Well, then, pass this way.”

The soldier led Nekhludoff along a board to another entrance. While still in the yard Nekhludoff could hear the din of voices and general commotion going on inside as in a beehive when the bees are preparing to swarm; but when he came nearer and the door opened the din grew louder, and changed into distinct sounds of shouting, abuse and laughter. He heard the clatter of chairs and smelt the well-known foul air. This din of voices and the clatter of the chairs, together with the close smell, always flowed into one tormenting sensation, and produced in Nekhludoff a feeling of moral nausea which grew into physical sickness, the two feelings mingling with and heightening each other.

The first thing Nekhludoff saw, on entering, was a large, stinking tub. A corridor into which several doors opened led from the entrance. The first was the family room, then the bachelors’ room, and at the very end two small rooms were set apart for the political prisoners.

The buildings, which were arranged to hold one hundred and fifty prisoners, now that there were four hundred and fifty inside, were so crowded that the prisoners could not all get into the rooms, but filled the passage, too. Some were sitting or lying on the floor, some were going out with empty teapots, or bringing them back filled with boiling water. Among the latter was Taras. He overtook Nekhludoff and greeted him affectionately. The kind face of Taras was disfigured by dark bruises on his nose and under his eye.

“What has happened to you?” asked Nekhludoff.

“Yes, something did happen,” Taras said, with a smile.

“All because of the woman,” added a prisoner, who followed Taras; “he’s had a row with Blind Fedka.”

“And how’s Theodosia?”

“She’s all right. Here I am bringing her the water for her tea,” Taras answered, and went into the family room.

Nekhludoff looked in at the door. The room was crowded with women and men, some of whom were on and some under the bedsteads; it was full of steam from the wet clothes that were drying, and the chatter of women’s voices was unceasing. The next door led into the bachelors’ room. This room was still more crowded; even the doorway and the passage in front of it were blocked by a noisy crowd of men, in wet garments, busy doing or deciding something or other.

The convoy sergeant explained that it was the prisoner appointed to buy provisions, paying off out of the food money what was owing to a sharper who had won from or lent money to the prisoners, and receiving back little tickets made of playing cards. When they saw the convoy soldier and a gentleman, those who were nearest became silent, and followed them with looks of ill-will. Among them Nekhludoff noticed the criminal Fedoroff, whom he knew, and who always kept a miserable lad with a swelled appearance and raised eyebrows beside him, and also a disgusting, noseless, pock-marked tramp, who was notorious among the prisoners because he killed his comrade in the marshes while trying to escape, and had, as it was rumoured, fed on his flesh. The tramp stood in the passage with his wet cloak thrown over one shoulder, looking mockingly and boldly at Nekhludoff, and did not move out of the way. Nekhludoff passed him by.

Though this kind of scene had now become quite familiar to him, though he had during the last three months seen these four hundred criminal prisoners over and over again in many different circumstances; in the heat, enveloped in clouds of dust which they raised as they dragged their chained feet along the road, and at the resting places by the way, where the most horrible scenes of barefaced debauchery had occurred, yet every time he came among them, and felt their attention fixed upon him as it was now, shame and consciousness of his sin against them tormented him. To this sense of shame and guilt was added an unconquerable feeling of loathing and horror. He knew that, placed in a position such as theirs, they could not be other than they were, and yet he was unable to stifle his disgust.

“It’s well for them do-nothings,” Nekhludoff heard some one say in a hoarse voice as he approached the room of the political prisoners. Then followed a word of obscene abuse, and spiteful, mocking laughter.

X Makar Devkin.

When they had passed the bachelors’ room the sergeant who accompanied Nekhludoff left him, promising to come for him before the inspection would take place. As soon as the sergeant was gone a prisoner, quickly stepping with his bare feet and holding up the chains, came close up to Nekhludoff, enveloping him in the strong, acid smell of perspiration, and said in a mysterious whisper:

“Help the lad, sir; he’s got into an awful mess. Been drinking. To-day he’s given his name as Karmanoff at the inspection. Take his part, sir. We dare not, or they’ll kill us,” and looking uneasily round he turned away.

This is what had happened. The criminal Kalmanoff had persuaded a young fellow who resembled him in appearance and was sentenced to exile to change names with him and go to the mines instead of him, while he only went to exile. Nekhludoff knew all this. Some convict had told him about this exchange the week before. He nodded as a sign that he understood and would do what was in his power, and continued his way without looking round.

Nekhludoff knew this convict, and was surprised by his action. When in Ekaterinburg the convict had asked Nekhludoff to get a permission for his wife to follow him. The convict was a man of medium size and of the most ordinary peasant type, about thirty years old. He was condemned to hard labour for an attempt to murder and rob. His name was Makar Devkin. His crime was a very curious one. In the account he gave of it to Nekhludoff, he said it was not his but his devil’s doing. He said that a traveller had come to his father’s house and hired his sledge to drive him to a village thirty miles off for two roubles. Makar’s father told him to drive the stranger. Makar harnessed the horse, dressed, and sat down to drink tea with the stranger. The stranger related at the tea-table that he was going to be married and had five hundred roubles, which he had earned in Moscow, with him. When he had heard this, Makar went out into the yard and put an axe into the sledge under the straw. “And I did not myself know why I was taking the axe,” he said. “ ‘Take the axe,’ says he, and I took it. We got in and started. We drove along all right; I even forgot about the axe. Well, we were getting near the village; only about four miles more to go. The way from the cross-road to the high road was up hill, and I got out. I walked behind the sledge and he whispers to me, ‘What are you thinking about? When you get to the top of the hill you will meet people along the highway, and then there will be the village. He will carry the money away. If you mean to do it, now’s the time.’ I stooped over the sledge as if to arrange the straw, and the axe seemed to jump into my hand of itself. The man turned round. ‘What are you doing?’ I lifted the axe and tried to knock him down, but he was quick, jumped out, and took hold of my hands. ‘What are you doing, you villain?’ He threw me down into the snow, and I did not even struggle, but gave in at once. He bound my arms with his girdle, and threw me into the sledge, and took me straight to the police station. I was imprisoned and tried. The commune gave me a good character, said that I was a good man, and that nothing wrong had been noticed about me. The masters for whom I worked also spoke well of me, but we had no money to engage a lawyer, and so I was condemned to four years’ hard labour.”

It was this man who, wishing to save a fellow-villager, knowing that he was risking his life thereby, told Nekhludoff the prisoner’s secret, for doing which (if found out) he should certainly be throttled.

XI Maslova and her companions.

The political prisoners were kept in two small rooms, the doors of which opened into a part of the passage partitioned off from the rest. The first person Nekhludoff saw on entering into this part of the passage was Simonson in his rubber jacket and with a log of pine wood in his hands, crouching in front of a stove, the door of which trembled, drawn in by the heat inside.

When he saw Nekhludoff he looked up at him from under his protruding brow, and gave him his hand without rising.

“I am glad you have come; I want to speak to you,” he said, looking Nekhludoff straight in the eyes with an expression of importance.

“Yes; what is it?” Nekhludoff asked.

“It will do later on; I am busy just now,” and Simonson turned again towards the stove, which he was heating according to a theory of his own, so as to lose as little heat energy as possible.

Nekhludoff was going to enter in at the first door, when Maslova, stooping and pushing a large heap of rubbish and dust towards the stove with a handleless birch broom, came out of the other. She had a white jacket on, her skirt was tucked up, and a kerchief, drawn down to her eyebrows, protected her hair from the dust. When she saw Nekhludoff, she drew herself up, flushing and animated, put down the broom, wiped her hands on her skirt, and stopped right in front of him. “You are tidying up the apartments, I see,” said Nekhludoff, shaking hands.

“Yes; my old occupation,” and she smiled. “But the dirt! You can’t imagine what it is. We have been cleaning and cleaning. Well, is the plaid dry?” she asked, turning to Simonson.

“Almost,” Simonson answered, giving her a strange look, which struck Nekhludoff.

“All right, I’ll come for it, and will bring the cloaks to dry. Our people are all in here,” she said to Nekhludoff, pointing to the first door as she went out of the second.

Nekhludoff opened the door and entered a small room dimly lit by a little metal lamp, which was standing low down on the shelf bedstead. It was cold in the room, and there was a smell of the dust, which had not had time to settle, damp and tobacco smoke.

Only those who were close to the lamp were clearly visible, the bedsteads were in the shade and wavering shadows glided over the walls. Two men, appointed as caterers, who had gone to fetch boiling water and provisions, were away; most of the political prisoners were gathered together in the small room. There was Nekhludoff’s old acquaintance, Vera Doukhova, with her large, frightened eyes, and the swollen vein on her forehead, in a grey jacket with short hair, and thinner and yellower than ever.. She had a newspaper spread out in front of her, and sat rolling cigarettes with a jerky movement of her hands.

Emily Rintzeva, whom Nekhludoff considered to be the pleasantest of the political prisoners, was also here. She looked after the housekeeping, and managed to spread a feeling of home comfort even in the midst of the most trying surroundings. She sat beside the lamp, with her sleeves rolled up, wiping cups and mugs, and placing them, with her deft, red and sunburnt hands, on a cloth that was spread on the bedstead. Rintzeva was a plain-looking young woman, with a clever and mild expression of face, which, when she smiled, had a way of suddenly becoming merry, animated and captivating. It was with such a smile that she now welcomed Nekhludoff.

“Why, we thought you had gone back to Russia,” she said.

Here in a dark corner was also Mary Pavlovna, busy with a little, fair-haired girl, who kept prattling in her sweet, childish accents.

“How nice that you have come,” she said to Nekhludoff.

“Have you seen Katusha? And we have a visitor here,” and she pointed to the little girl.

Here was also Anatole Kryltzoff with felt boots on, sitting in a far corner with his feet under him, doubled up and shivering, his arms folded in the sleeves of his cloak, and looking at Nekhludoff with feverish eyes. Nekhludoff was going up to him, but to the right of the door a man with spectacles and reddish curls, dressed in a rubber jacket, sat talking to the pretty, smiling Grabetz. This was the celebrated revolutionist Novodvoroff. Nekhludoff hastened to greet him. He was in a particular hurry about it, because this man was the only one among all the political prisoners whom he disliked. Novodvoroff’s eyes glistened through his spectacles as he looked at Nekhludoff and held his narrow hand out to him.

“Well, are you having a pleasant journey?” he asked, with apparent irony.

“Yes, there is much that is interesting,” Nekhludoff answered, as if he did not notice the irony, but took the question for politeness, and passed on to Kryltzoff.

Though Nekhludoff appeared indifferent, he was really far from indifferent, and these words of Novodvoroff, showing his evident desire to say or do something unpleasant, interfered with the state of kindness in which Nekhludoff found himself, and he felt depressed and sad.

“Well, how are you?” he asked, pressing Kryltzoff’s cold and trembling hand.

“Pretty well, only I cannot get warm; I got wet through,” Kryltzoff answered, quickly replacing his hands into the sleeves of his cloak. “And here it is also beastly cold. There, look, the window-panes are broken,” and he pointed to the broken panes behind the iron bars. “And how are you? Why did you not come?”

“I was not allowed to, the authorities were so strict, but to-day the officer is lenient.”

“Lenient indeed!” Kryltzoff remarked. “Ask Mary what she did this morning.”

Mary Pavlovna from her place in the corner related what had happened about the little girl that morning when they left the halting station.

“I think it is absolutely necessary to make a collective protest,” said Vera Doukhova, in a determined tone, and yet looking now at one, now at another, with a frightened, undecided look. “Valdemar Simonson did protest, but that is not sufficient.”

“What protest!” muttered Kryltzoff, cross and frowning. Her want of simplicity, artificial tone and nervousness had evidently been irritating him for a long time.

“Are you looking for Katusha?” he asked, addressing Nekhludoff. “She is working all the time. She has cleaned this, the men’s room, and now she has gone to clean the women’s! Only it is not possible to clean away the fleas. And what is Mary doing there?” he asked, nodding towards the corner where Mary Pavlovna sat.

“She is combing out her adopted daughter’s hair,” replied Rintzeva.

“But won’t she let the insects loose on us?” asked Kryltzoff.

“No, no; I am very careful. She is a clean little girl now. You take her,” said Mary, turning to Rintzeva, “while I go and help Katusha, and I will also bring him his plaid.”

Rintzeva took the little girl on her lap, pressing her plump, bare, little arms to her bosom with a mother’s tenderness, and gave her a bit of sugar. As Mary Pavlovna left the room, two men came in with boiling water and provisions.

XII Nabatoff and Markel.

One of the men who came in was a short, thin, young man, who had a cloth-covered sheepskin coat on, and high top-boots. He stepped lightly and quickly, carrying two steaming teapots, and holding a loaf wrapped in a cloth under his arm.

“Well, so our prince has put in an appearance again,” he said, as he placed the teapot beside the cups, and handed the bread to Rintzeva. “We have bought wonderful things,” he continued, as he took off his sheepskin, and flung it over the heads of the others into the corner of the bedstead. “Markel has bought milk and eggs. Why, we’ll have a regular ball to-day. And Rintzeva is spreading out her aesthetic cleanliness,” he said, and looked with a smile at Rintzeva, “and now she will make the tea.”

The whole presence of this man—his motion, his voice, his look—seemed to breathe vigour and merriment. The other newcomer was just the reverse of the first. He looked despondent and sad. He was short, bony, had very prominent cheek bones, a sallow complexion, thin lips and beautiful, greenish eyes, rather far apart. He wore an old wadded coat, top-boots and goloshes, and was carrying two pots of milk and two round boxes made of birch bark, which he placed in front of Rintzeva. He bowed to Nekhludoff, bending only his neck, and with his eyes fixed on him. Then, having reluctantly given him his damp hand to shake, he began to take out the provisions.

Both these political prisoners were of the people; the first was Nabatoff, a peasant; the second, Markel Kondratieff, a factory hand. Markel did not come among the revolutionists till he was quite a man, Nabatoff only eighteen. After leaving the village school, owing to his exceptional talents Nabatoff entered the gymnasium, and maintained himself by giving lessons all the time he studied there, and obtained the gold medal. He did not go to the university because, while still in the seventh class of the gymnasium, he made up his mind to go among the people and enlighten his neglected brethren. This he did, first getting the place of a Government clerk in a large village. He was soon arrested because he read to the peasants and arranged a co-operative industrial association among them. They kept him imprisoned for eight months and then set him free, but he remained under police supervision. As soon as he was liberated he went to another village, got a place as schoolmaster, and did the same as he had done in the first village. He was again taken up and kept fourteen months in prison, where his convictions became yet stronger. After that he was exiled to the Perm Government, from where he escaped. Then he was put to prison for seven months and after that exiled to Archangel. There he refused to take the oath of allegiance that was required of them and was condemned to be exiled to the Takoutsk Government, so that half his life since he reached manhood was passed in prison and exile. All these adventures did not embitter him nor weaken his energy, but rather stimulated it. He was a lively young fellow, with a splendid digestion, always active, gay and vigorous. He never repented of anything, never looked far ahead, and used all his powers, his cleverness, his practical knowledge to act in the present. When free he worked towards the aim he had set himself, the enlightening and the uniting of the working men, especially the country labourers. When in prison he was just as energetic and practical in finding means to come in contact with the outer world, and in arranging his own life and the life of his group as comfortably as the conditions would allow. Above all things he was a communist. He wanted, as it seemed to him, nothing for himself and contented himself with very little, but demanded very much for the group of his comrades, and could work for it either physically or mentally day and night, without sleep or food. As a peasant he had been industrious, observant, clever at his work, and naturally self-controlled, polite without any effort, and attentive not only to the wishes but also the opinions of others. His widowed mother, an illiterate, superstitious, old peasant woman, was still living, and Nabatoff helped her and went to see her while he was free. During the time he spent at home he entered into all the interests of his mother’s life, helped her in her work, and continued his intercourse with former playfellows; smoked cheap tobacco with them in so-called “dog’s feet,”[31] took part in their fist fights, and explained to them how they were all being deceived by the State, and how they ought to disentangle themselves out of the deception they were kept in. When he thought or spoke of what a revolution would do for the people he always imagined this people from whom he had sprung himself left in very nearly the same conditions as they were in, only with sufficient land and without the gentry and without officials. The revolution, according to him, and in this he differed from Novodvoroff and Novodvoroff’s follower, Markel Kondratieff, should not alter the elementary forms of the life of the people, should not break down the whole edifice, but should only alter the inner walls of the beautiful, strong, enormous old structure he loved so dearly. He was also a typical peasant in his views on religion, never thinking about metaphysical questions, about the origin of all origin, or the future life. God was to him, as also to Arago, an hypothesis, which he had had no need of up to now. He had no business with the origin of the world, whether Moses or Darwin was right. Darwinism, which seemed so important to his fellows, was only the same kind of plaything of the mind as the creation in six days. The question how the world had originated did not interest him, just because the question how it would be best to live in this world was ever before him. He never thought about future life, always bearing in the depth of his soul the firm and quiet conviction inherited from his forefathers, and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that lead towards it, but did not care and did not know how to speak about it. He loved work, was always employed in some practical business, and put his comrades in the way of the same kind of practical work.

The other political prisoner from among the people, Markel Kondratieff, was a very different kind of man. He began to work at the age of fifteen, and took to smoking and drinking in order to stifle a dense sense of being wronged. He first realised he was wronged one Christmas when they, the factory children, were invited to a Christmas tree, got up by the employer’s wife, where he received a farthing whistle, an apple, a gilt walnut and a fig, while the employer’s children had presents given them which seemed gifts from fairyland, and had cost more than fifty roubles, as he afterwards heard.

When he was twenty a celebrated revolutionist came to their factory to work as a working girl, and noticing his superior qualities began giving books and pamphlets to Kondratieff and to talk and explain his position to him, and how to remedy it. When the possibility of freeing himself and others from their oppressed state rose clearly in his mind, the injustice of this state appeared more cruel and more terrible than before, and he longed passionately not only for freedom, but also for the punishment of those who had arranged and who kept up this cruel injustice. Kondratieff devoted himself with passion to the acquirement of knowledge. It was not clear to him how knowledge should bring about the realisation of the social ideal, but he believed that the knowledge that had shown him the injustice of the state in which he lived would also abolish that injustice itself. Besides knowledge would, in his opinion, raise him above others. Therefore he left off drinking and smoking, and devoted all his leisure time to study. The revolutionist gave him lessons, and his thirst for every kind of knowledge, and the facility with which he took it in, surprised her. In two years he had mastered algebra, geometry, history—which he was specially fond of—and made acquaintance with artistic and critical, and especially socialistic literature. The revolutionist was arrested, and Kondratieff with her, forbidden books having been found in their possession, and they were imprisoned and then exiled to the Vologda Government. There Kondratieff became acquainted with Novodvoroff, and read a great deal more revolutionary literature, remembered it all, and became still firmer in his socialistic views. While in exile he became leader in a large strike, which ended in the destruction of a factory and the murder of the director. He was again arrested and condemned to Siberia.

His religious views were of the same negative nature as his views of the existing economic conditions. Having seen the absurdity of the religion in which he was brought up, and having gained with great effort, and at first with fear, but later with rapture, freedom from it, he did not tire of viciously and with venom ridiculing priests and religious dogmas, as if wishing to revenge himself for the deception that had been practised on him.

He was ascetic through habit, contented himself with very little, and, like all those used to work from childhood and whose muscles have been developed, he could work much and easily, and was quick at any manual labour; but what he valued most was the leisure in prisons and halting stations, which enabled him to continue his studies. He was now studying the first volume of Karl Marks’s, and carefully hid the book in his sack as if it were a great treasure. He behaved with reserve and indifference to all his comrades, except Novodvoroff, to whom he was greatly attached, and whose arguments on all subjects he accepted as unanswerable truths.

He had an indefinite contempt for women, whom he looked upon as a hindrance in all necessary business. But he pitied Maslova and was gentle with her, for he considered her an example of the way the lower are exploited by the upper classes. The same reason made him dislike Nekhludoff, so that he talked little with him, and never pressed Nekhludoff’s hand, but only held out his own to be pressed when greeting him.

XIII Love affairs of the exiles.

The stove had burned up and got warm, the tea was made and poured out into mugs and cups, and milk was added to it; rusks, fresh rye and wheat bread, hard-boiled eggs, butter, and calf’s head and feet were placed on the cloth. Everybody moved towards the part of the shelf beds which took the place of the table and sat eating and talking. Rintzeva sat on a box pouring out the tea. The rest crowded round her, only Kryltzoff, who had taken off his wet cloak and wrapped himself in his dry plaid and lay in his own place talking to Nekhludoff.

After the cold and damp march and the dirt and disorder they had found here, and after the pains they had taken to get it tidy, after having drunk hot tea and eaten, they were all in the best and brightest of spirits.

The fact that the tramp of feet, the screams and abuse of the criminals, reached them through the wall, reminding them of their surroundings, seemed only to increase the sense of coziness. As on an island in the midst of the sea, these people felt themselves for a brief interval not swamped by the degradation and sufferings which surrounded them; this made their spirits rise, and excited them. They talked about everything except their present position and that which awaited them. Then, as it generally happens among young men, and women especially, if they are forced to remain together, as these people were, all sorts of agreements and disagreements and attractions, curiously blended, had sprung up among them. Almost all of them were in love. Novodvoroff was in love with the pretty, smiling Grabetz. This Grabetz was a young, thoughtless girl who had gone in for a course of study, perfectly indifferent to revolutionary questions, but succumbing to the influence of the day, she compromised herself in some way and was exiled. The chief interest of her life during the time of her trial in prison and in exile was her success with men, just as it had been when she was free. Now on the way she comforted herself with the fact that Novodvoroff had taken a fancy to her, and she fell in love with him. Vera Doukhova, who was very prone to fall in love herself, but did not awaken love in others, though she was always hoping for mutual love, was sometimes drawn to Nabatoff, then to Novodvoroff. Kryltzoff felt something like love for Mary Pavlovna. He loved her with a man’s love, but knowing how she regarded this sort of love, hid his feelings under the guise of friendship and gratitude for the tenderness with which she attended to his wants. Nabatoff and Rintzeva were attached to each other by very complicated ties. Just as Mary Pavlovna was a perfectly chaste maiden, in the same way Rintzeva was perfectly chaste as her own husband’s wife. When only a schoolgirl of sixteen she fell in love with Rintzeff, a student of the Petersburg University, and married him before he left the university, when she was only nineteen years old. During his fourth year at the university her husband had become involved in the students’ rows, was exiled from Petersburg, and turned revolutionist. She left the medical courses she was attending, followed him, and also turned revolutionist. If she had not considered her husband the cleverest and best of men she would not have fallen in love with him; and if she had not fallen in love would not have married; but having fallen in love and married him whom she thought the best and cleverest of men, she naturally looked upon life and its aims in the way the best and cleverest of men looked at them. At first he thought the aim of life was to learn, and she looked upon study as the aim of life. He became a revolutionist, and so did she. She could demonstrate very clearly that the existing state of things could not go on, and that it was everybody’s duty to fight this state of things and to try to bring about conditions in which the individual could develop freely, etc. And she imagined that she really thought and felt all this, but in reality she only regarded everything her husband thought as absolute truth, and only sought for perfect agreement, perfect identification of her own soul with his which alone could give her full moral satisfaction. The parting with her husband and their child, whom her mother had taken, was very hard to bear; but she bore it firmly and quietly, since it was for her husband’s sake and for that cause which she had not the slightest doubt was true, since he served it. She was always with her husband in thoughts, and did not love and could not love any other any more than she had done before. But Nabatoff’s devoted and pure love touched and excited her. This moral, firm man, her husband’s friend, tried to treat her as a sister, but something more appeared in his behaviour to her, and this something frightened them both, and yet gave colour to their life of hardship.

So that in all this circle only Mary Pavlovna and Kondratieff were quite free from love affairs.

XIV Conversations in prison.

Expecting to have a private talk with Katusha, as usual, after tea, Nekhludoff sat by the side of Kryltzoff, conversing with him. Among other things he told him the story of Makar’s crime and about his request to him. Kryltzoff listened attentively, gazing at Nekhludoff with glistening eyes.

“Yes,” said Kryltzoff suddenly, “I often think that here we are going side by side with them, and who are they? The same for whose sake we are going, and yet we not only do not know them, but do not even wish to know them. And they, even worse than that, they hate us and look upon us as enemies. This is terrible.”

“There is nothing terrible about it,” broke in Novodvoroff. “The masses always worship power only. The government is in power, and they worship it and hate us. To-morrow we shall have the power, and they will worship us,” he said with his grating voice. At that moment a volley of abuse and the rattle of chains sounded from behind the wall, something was heard thumping against it and screaming and shrieking, some one was being beaten, and some one was calling out, “Murder! help!”

“Hear them, the beasts! What intercourse can there be between us and such as them?” quietly remarked Novodvoroff.

“You call them beasts, and Nekhludoff was just telling me about such an action!” irritably retorted Kryltzoff, and went on to say how Makar was risking his life to save a fellow-villager. “That is not the action of a beast, it is heroism.”

“Sentimentality!” Novodvoroff ejaculated ironically; “it is difficult for us to understand the emotions of these people and the motives on which they act. You see generosity in the act, and it may be simply jealousy of that other criminal.”

“How is it that you never wish to see anything good in another?” Mary Pavlovna said suddenly, flaring up.

“How can one see what does not exist!”

“How does it not exist, when a man risks dying a terrible death?”

“I think,” said Novodvoroff, “that if we mean to do our work, the first condition is that” (here Kondratieff put down the book he was reading by the lamplight and began to listen attentively to his master’s words) “we should not give way to fancy, but look at things as they are. We should do all in our power for the masses, and expect nothing in return. The masses can only be the object of our activity, but cannot be our fellow-workers as long as they remain in that state of inertia they are in at present,” he went on, as if delivering a lecture. “Therefore, to expect help from them before the process of development—that process which we are preparing them for—has taken place is an illusion.”

“What process of development?” Kryltzoff began, flushing all over. “We say that we are against arbitrary rule and despotism, and is this not the most awful despotism?”

“No despotism whatever,” quietly rejoined Novodvoroff. “I am only saying that I know the path that the people must travel, and can show them that path.”

“But how can you be sure that the path you show is the true path? Is this not the same kind of despotism that lay at the bottom of the Inquisition, all persecutions, and the great revolution? They, too, knew the one true way, by means of their science.”

“Their having erred is no proof of my going to err; besides, there is a great difference between the ravings of idealogues and the facts based on sound, economic science.” Novodvoroff’s voice filled the room; he alone was speaking, all the rest were silent.

“They are always disputing,” Mary Pavlovna said, when there was a moment’s silence.

“And you yourself, what do you think about it?” Nekhludoff asked her.

“I think Kryltzoff is right when he says we should not force our views on the people.”

“And you, Katusha?” asked Nekhludoff with a smile, waiting anxiously for her answer, fearing she would say something awkward.

“I think the common people are wronged,” she said, and blushed scarlet. “I think they are dreadfully wronged.”

“That’s right, Maslova, quite right,” cried Nabatoff. “They are terribly wronged, the people, and they must not be wronged, and therein lies the whole of our task.”

“A curious idea of the object of revolution,” Novodvoroff remarked crossly, and began to smoke.

“I cannot talk to him,” said Kryltzoff in a whisper, and was silent.

“And it is much better not to talk,” Nekhludoff said.

XV Novodvoroff.

Although Novodvoroff was highly esteemed of all the revolutionists, though he was very learned, and considered very wise, Nekhludoff reckoned him among those of the revolutionists who, being below the average moral level, were very far below it. His inner life was of a nature directly opposite to that of Simonson’s. Simonson was one of those people (of an essentially masculine type) whose actions follow the dictates of their reason, and are determined by it. Novodvoroff belonged, on the contrary, to the class of people of a feminine type, whose reason is directed partly towards the attainment of aims set by their feelings, partly to the justification of acts suggested by their feelings. The whole of Novodvoroff’s revolutionary activity, though he could explain it very eloquently and very convincingly, appeared to Nekhludoff to be founded on nothing but ambition and the desire for supremacy. At first his capacity for assimilating the thoughts of others, and of expressing them correctly, had given him a position of supremacy among pupils and teachers in the gymnasium and the university, where qualities such as his are highly prized, and he was satisfied. When he had finished his studies and received his diploma he suddenly altered his views, and from a modern liberal he turned into a rabid Narodovoletz, in order (so Kryltzoff, who did not like him, said) to gain supremacy in another sphere.

As he was devoid of those moral and aesthetic qualities which call forth doubts and hesitation, he very soon acquired a position in the revolutionary world which satisfied him—that of the leader of a party. Having once chosen a direction, he never doubted or hesitated, and was therefore certain that he never made a mistake. Everything seemed quite simple, clear and certain. And the narrowness and one-sidedness of his views did make everything seem simple and clear. One only had to be logical, as he said. His self-assurance was so great that it either repelled people or made them submit to him. As he carried on his work among very young people, his boundless self-assurance led them to believe him very profound and wise; the majority did submit to him, and he had a great success in revolutionary circles. His activity was directed to the preparation of a rising in which he was to usurp the power and call together a council. A programme, composed by him, should be proposed before the council, and he felt sure that this programme of his solved every problem, and that it would be impossible not to carry it out.

His comrades respected but did not love him. He did not love any one, looked upon all men of note as upon rivals, and would have willingly treated them as old male monkeys treat young ones if he could have done it. He would have torn all mental power, every capacity, from other men, so that they should not interfere with the display of his talents. He behaved well only to those who bowed before him. Now, on the journey he behaved well to Kondratieff, who was influenced by his propaganda; to Vera Doukhova and pretty little Grabetz, who were both in love with him. Although in principle he was in favour of the woman’s movement, yet in the depth of his soul he considered all women stupid and insignificant except those whom he was sentimentally in love with (as he was now in love with Grabetz), and such women he considered to be exceptions, whose merits he alone was capable of discerning.

The question of the relations of the sexes he also looked upon as thoroughly solved by accepting free union. He had one nominal and one real wife, from both of whom he was separated, having come to the conclusion that there was no real love between them, and now he thought of entering on a free union with Grabetz. He despised Nekhludoff for “playing the fool,” as Novodvoroff termed it, with Maslova, but especially for the freedom Nekhludoff took of considering the defects of the existing system and the methods of correcting those defects in a manner which was not only not exactly the same as Novodvoroff’s, but was Nekhludoff’s own—a prince’s, that is, a fool’s manner. Nekhludoff felt this relation of Novodvoroff’s towards him, and knew to his sorrow that in spite of the state of good will in which he found himself on this journey he could not help paying this man in his own coin, and could not stifle the strong antipathy he felt for him.

XVI Simonson speaks to Nekhludoff.

The voices of officials sounded from the next room. All the prisoners were silent, and a sergeant, followed by two convoy soldiers, entered. The time of the inspection had come. The sergeant counted every one, and when Nekhludoff’s turn came he addressed him with kindly familiarity.

“You must not stay any longer, Prince, after the inspection; you must go now.”

Nekhludoff knew what this meant, went up to the sergeant and shoved a three-rouble note into his hand.

“Ah, well, what is one to do with you; stay a bit longer, if you like.” The sergeant was about to go when another sergeant, followed by a convict, a spare man with a thin beard and a bruise under his eye, came in.

“It’s about the girl I have come,” said the convict.

“Here’s daddy come,” came the ringing accents of a child’s voice, and a flaxen head appeared from behind Rintzeva, who, with Katusha’s and Mary Pavlovna’s help, was making a new garment for the child out of one of Rintzeva’s own petticoats.

“Yes, daughter, it’s me,” Bousovkin, the prisoner, said softly.

“She is quite comfortable here,” said Mary Pavlovna, looking with pity at Bousovkin’s bruised face. “Leave her with us.”

“The ladies are making me new clothes,” said the girl, pointing to Rintzeva’s sewing—“nice red ones,” she went on, prattling.

“Do you wish to sleep with us?” asked Rintzeva, caressing the child.

“Yes, I wish. And daddy, too.”

“No, daddy can’t. Well, leave her then,” she said, turning to the father.

“Yes, you may leave her,” said the first sergeant, and went out with the other.

As soon as they were out of the room Nabatoff went up to Bousovkin, slapped him on the shoulder, and said: “I say, old fellow, is it true that Karmanoff wishes to exchange?”

Bousovkin’s kindly, gentle face turned suddenly sad and a veil seemed to dim his eyes.

“We have heard nothing—hardly,” he said, and with the same dimness still over his eyes he turned to the child.

“Well, Aksutka, it seems you’re to make yourself comfortable with the ladies,” and he hurried away.

“It’s true about the exchange, and he knows it very well,” said Nabatoff.

“What are you going to do?”

“I shall tell the authorities in the next town. I know both prisoners by sight,” said Nekhludoff.

All were silent, fearing a recommencement of the dispute.

Simonson, who had been lying with his arms thrown back behind his head, and not speaking, rose, and determinately walked up to Nekhludoff, carefully passing round those who were sitting.

“Could you listen to me now?”

“Of course,” and Nekhludoff rose and followed him.

Katusha looked up with an expression of suspense, and meeting Nekhludoff’s eyes, she blushed and shook her head.

“What I want to speak to you about is this,” Simonson began, when they had come out into the passage. In the passage the din of the criminal’s voices and shouts sounded louder. Nekhludoff made a face, but Simonson did not seem to take any notice.

“Knowing of your relations to Katerina Maslova,” he began seriously and frankly, with his kind eyes looking straight into Nekhludoff’s face, “I consider it my duty”—He was obliged to stop because two voices were heard disputing and shouting, both at once, close to the door.

“I tell you, blockhead, they are not mine,” one voice shouted.

“May you choke, you devil,” snorted the other.

At this moment Mary Pavlovna came out into the passage.

“How can one talk here?” she said; “go in, Vera is alone there,” and she went in at the second door, and entered a tiny room, evidently meant for a solitary cell, which was now placed at the disposal of the political women prisoners, Vera Doukhova lay covered up, head and all, on the bed.

“She has got a headache, and is asleep, so she cannot hear you, and I will go away,” said Mary Pavlovna.

“On the contrary, stay here,” said Simonson; “I have no secrets from any one, certainly none from you.”

“All right,” said Mary Pavlovna, and moving her whole body from side to side, like a child, so as to get farther back on to the bed, she settled down to listen, her beautiful hazel eyes seeming to look somewhere far away.

“Well, then, this is my business,” Simonson repeated. “Knowing of your relations to Katerina Maslova, I consider myself bound to explain to you my relations to her.”

Nekhludoff could not help admiring the simplicity and truthfulness with which Simonson spoke to him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I should like to marry Katerina Maslova—”

“How strange!” said Mary Pavlovna, fixing her eyes on Simonson.

“—And so I made up my mind to ask her to be my wife,” Simonson continued.

“What can I do? It depends on her,” said Nekhludoff.

“Yes; but she will not come to any decision without you.”

“Why?”

“Because as long as your relations with her are unsettled she cannot make up her mind.”

“As far as I am concerned, it is finally settled. I should like to do what I consider to be my duty and also to lighten her fate, but on no account would I wish to put any restraint on her.”

“Yes, but she does not wish to accept your sacrifice.”

“It is no sacrifice.”

“And I know that this decision of hers is final.”

“Well, then, there is no need to speak to me,” said Nekhludoff.

“She wants you to acknowledge that you think as she does.”

“How can I acknowledge that I must not do what I consider to be my duty? All I can say is that I am not free, but she is.”

Simonson was silent; then, after thinking a little, he said: “Very well, then, I’ll tell her. You must not think I am in love with her,” he continued; “I love her as a splendid, unique, human being who has suffered much. I want nothing from her. I have only an awful longing to help her, to lighten her posi—”

Nekhludoff was surprised to hear the trembling in Simonson’s voice.

“—To lighten her position,” Simonson continued. “If she does not wish to accept your help, let her accept mine. If she consents, I shall ask to be sent to the place where she will be imprisoned. Four years are not an eternity. I would live near her, and perhaps might lighten her fate—” and he again stopped, too agitated to continue.

“What am I to say?” said Nekhludoff. “I am very glad she has found such a protector as you—”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” Simonson interrupted.

“I wanted to know if, loving her and wishing her happiness, you would consider it good for her to marry me?”

“Oh, yes,” said Nekhludoff decidedly.

“It all depends on her; I only wish that this suffering soul should find rest,” said Simonson, with such childlike tenderness as no one could have expected from so morose-looking a man.

Simonson rose, and stretching his lips out to Nekhludoff, smiled shyly and kissed him.

“So I shall tell her,” and he went away.

XVII “I have nothing more to say.”

“What do you think of that?” said Mary Pavlovna. “In love—quite in love. Now, that’s a thing I never should have expected, that Valdemar Simonson should be in love, and in the silliest, most boyish manner. It is strange, and, to say the truth, it is sad,” and she sighed.

“But she? Katusha? How does she look at it, do you think?” Nekhludoff asked.

“She?” Mary Pavlovna waited, evidently wishing to give as exact an answer as possible. “She? Well, you see, in spite of her past she has one of the most moral natures—and such fine feelings. She loves you—loves you well, and is happy to be able to do you even the negative good of not letting you get entangled with her. Marriage with you would be a terrible fall for her, worse than all that’s past, and therefore she will never consent to it. And yet your presence troubles her.”

“Well, what am I to do? Ought I to vanish?”

Mary Pavlovna smiled her sweet, childlike smile, and said, “Yes, partly.”

“How is one to vanish partly?”

“I am talking nonsense. But as for her, I should like to tell you that she probably sees the silliness of this rapturous kind of love (he has not spoken to her), and is both flattered and afraid of it. I am not competent to judge in such affairs, you know, still I believe that on his part it is the most ordinary man’s feeling, though it is masked. He says that this love arouses his energy and is Platonic, but I know that even if it is exceptional, still at the bottom it is degrading.”

Mary Pavlovna had wandered from the subject, having started on her favourite theme.

“Well, but what am I to do?” Nekhludoff asked.

“I think you should tell her everything; it is always best that everything should be clear. Have a talk with her; I shall call her. Shall I?” said Mary Pavlovna.

“If you please,” said Nekhludoff, and Mary Pavlovna went.

A strange feeling overcame Nekhludoff when he was alone in the little room with the sleeping Vera Doukhova, listening to her soft breathing, broken now and then by moans, and to the incessant dirt that came through the two doors that separated him from the criminals. What Simonson had told him freed him from the self-imposed duty, which had seemed hard and strange to him in his weak moments, and yet now he felt something that was not merely unpleasant but painful.

He had a feeling that this offer of Simonson’s destroyed the exceptional character of his sacrifice, and thereby lessened its value in his own and others’ eyes; if so good a man who was not bound to her by any kind of tie wanted to join his fate to hers, then this sacrifice was not so great. There may have also been an admixture of ordinary jealousy. He had got so used to her love that he did not like to admit that she loved another.

Then it also upset the plans he had formed of living near her while she was doing her term. If she married Simonson his presence would be unnecessary, and he would have to form new plans.

Before he had time to analyse his feelings the loud din of the prisoners’ voices came in with a rush (something special was going on among them to-day) as the door opened to let Katusha in.

She stepped briskly close up to him and said, “Mary Pavlovna has sent me.”

“Yes, I must have a talk with you. Sit down. Valdemar Simonson has been speaking to me.”

She sat down and folded her hands in her lap and seemed quite calm, but hardly had Nekhludoff uttered Simonson’s name when she flushed crimson.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He told me he wanted to marry you.”

Her face suddenly puckered up with pain, but she said nothing and only cast down her eyes.

“He is asking for my consent or my advice. I told him that it all depends entirely on you—that you must decide.”

“Ah, what does it all mean? Why?” she muttered, and looked in his eyes with that peculiar squint that always strangely affected Nekhludoff.

They sat silent for a few minutes looking into each other’s eyes, and this look told much to both of them.

“You must decide,” Nekhludoff repeated.

“What am I to decide? Everything has long been decided.”

“No; you must decide whether you will accept Mr. Simonson’s offer,” said Nekhludoff.

“What sort of a wife can I be—I, a convict? Why should I ruin Mr. Simonson, too?” she said, with a frown.

“Well, but if the sentence should be mitigated.”

“Oh, leave me alone. I have nothing more to say,” she said, and rose to leave the room.

XVIII Neveroff’s fate.

When, following Katusha, Nekhludoff returned to the men’s room, he found every one there in agitation. Nabatoff, who went about all over the place, and who got to know everybody, and noticed everything, had just brought news which staggered them all. The news was that he had discovered a note on a wall, written by the revolutionist Petlin, who had been sentenced to hard labour, and who, every one thought, had long since reached the Kara; and now it turned out that he had passed this way quite recently, the only political prisoner among criminal convicts.

“On the 17th of August,” so ran the note, “I was sent off alone with the criminals. Neveroff was with me, but hanged himself in the lunatic asylum in Kasan. I am well and in good spirits and hope for the best.”

All were discussing Petlin’s position and the possible reasons of Neveroff’s suicide. Only Kryltzoff sat silent and preoccupied, his glistening eyes gazing fixedly in front of him.

“My husband told me that Neveroff had a vision while still in the Petropavlovski prison,” said Rintzeva.

“Yes, he was a poet, a dreamer; this sort of people cannot stand solitary confinement,” said Novodvoroff. “Now, I never gave my imagination vent when in solitary confinement, but arranged my days most systematically, and in this way always bore it very well.”

“What is there unbearable about it? Why, I used to be glad when they locked me up,” said Nabatoff cheerfully, wishing to dispel the general depression.

“A fellow’s afraid of everything; of being arrested himself and entangling others, and of spoiling the whole business, and then he gets locked up, and all responsibility is at an end, and he can rest; he can just sit and smoke.”

“You knew him well?” asked Mary Pavlovna, glancing anxiously at the altered, haggard expression of Kryltzoff’s face.

“Neveroff a dreamer?” Kryltzoff suddenly began, panting for breath as if he had been shouting or singing for a long time. “Neveroff was a man ‘such as the earth bears few of,’ as our doorkeeper used to express it. Yes, he had a nature like crystal, you could see him right through; he could not lie, he could not dissemble; not simply thin skinned, but with all his nerves laid bare, as if he were flayed. Yes, his was a complicated, rich nature, not such a—But where is the use of talking?” he added, with a vicious frown. “Shall we first educate the people and then change the forms of life, or first change the forms and then struggle, using peaceful propaganda or terrorism? So we go on disputing while they kill; they do not dispute—they know their business; they don’t care whether dozens, hundreds of men perish—and what men! No; that the best should perish is just what they want. Yes, Herzen said that when the Decembrists were withdrawn from circulation the average level of our society sank. I should think so, indeed. Then Herzen himself and his fellows were withdrawn; now is the turn of the Neveroffs.”

“They can’t all be got rid off,” said Nabatoff, in his cheerful tones. “There will always be left enough to continue the breed. No, there won’t, if we show any pity to them there,” Nabatoff said, raising his voice; and not letting himself be interrupted, “Give me a cigarette.”

“Oh, Anatole, it is not good for you,” said Mary Pavlovna. “Please do not smoke.”

“Oh, leave me alone,” he said angrily, and lit a cigarette, but at once began to cough and to retch, as if he were going to be sick. Having cleared his throat though, he went on:

“What we have been doing is not the thing at all. Not to argue, but for all to unite—to destroy them—that’s it.”

“But they are also human beings,” said Nekhludoff.

“No, they are not human, they who can do what they are doing—No—There, now, I heard that some kind of bombs and balloons have been invented. Well, one ought to go up in such a balloon and sprinkle bombs down on them as if they were bugs, until they are all exterminated—Yes. Because—” he was going to continue, but, flushing all over, he began coughing worse than before, and a stream of blood rushed from his mouth.

Nabatoff ran to get ice. Mary Pavlovna brought valerian drops and offered them to him, but he, breathing quickly and heavily, pushed her away with his thin, white hand, and kept his eyes closed. When the ice and cold water had eased Kryltzoff a little, and he had been put to bed, Nekhludoff, having said good-night to everybody, went out with the sergeant, who had been waiting for him some time.

The criminals were now quiet, and most of them were asleep. Though the people were lying on and under the bed shelves and in the space between, they could not all be placed inside the rooms, and some of them lay in the passage with their sacks under their heads and covered with their cloaks. The moans and sleepy voices came through the open doors and sounded through the passage. Everywhere lay compact heaps of human beings covered with prison cloaks. Only a few men who were sitting in the bachelors’ room by the light of a candle end, which they put out when they noticed the sergeant, were awake, and an old man who sat naked under the lamp in the passage picking the vermin off his shirt. The foul air in the political prisoners’ rooms seemed pure compared to the stinking closeness here. The smoking lamp shone dimly as through a mist, and it was difficult to breathe. Stepping along the passage, one had to look carefully for an empty space, and having put down one foot had to find place for the other. Three persons, who had evidently found no room even in the passage, lay in the anteroom, close to the stinking and leaking tub. One of these was an old idiot, whom Nekhludoff had often seen marching with the gang; another was a boy about twelve; he lay between the two other convicts, with his head on the leg of one of them.

When he had passed out of the gate Nekhludoff took a deep breath and long continued to breathe in deep draughts of frosty air.

XIX Why is it done?

It had cleared up and was starlight. Except in a few places the mud was frozen hard when Nekhludoff returned to his inn and knocked at one of its dark windows. The broad-shouldered labourer came barefooted to open the door for him and let him in. Through a door on the right, leading to the back premises, came the loud snoring of the carters, who slept there, and the sound of many horses chewing oats came from the yard. The front room, where a red lamp was burning in front of the icons, smelt of wormwood and perspiration, and some one with mighty lungs was snoring behind a partition. Nekhludoff undressed, put his leather travelling pillow on the oilcloth sofa, spread out his rug and lay down, thinking over all he had seen and heard that day; the boy sleeping on the liquid that oozed from the stinking tub, with his head on the convict’s leg, seemed more dreadful than all else.

Unexpected and important as his conversation with Simonson and Katusha that evening had been, he did not dwell on it; his situation in relation to that subject was so complicated and indefinite that he drove the thought from his mind. But the picture of those unfortunate beings, inhaling the noisome air, and lying in the liquid oozing out of the stinking tub, especially that of the boy, with his innocent face asleep on the leg of a criminal, came all the more vividly to his mind, and he could not get it out of his head.

To know that somewhere far away there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradation and sufferings on them, or for three months incessantly to look on while men were inflicting these humiliations and sufferings on other men is a very different thing. And Nekhludoff felt it. More than once during these three months he asked himself, “Am I mad because I see what others do not, or are they mad that do these things that I see?”

Yet they (and there were many of them) did what seemed so astonishing and terrible to him with such quiet assurance that what they were doing was necessary and was important and useful work that it was hard to believe they were mad; nor could he, conscious of the clearness of his thoughts, believe he was mad; and all this kept him continually in a state of perplexity.

This is how the things he saw during these three months impressed Nekhludoff: From among the people who were free, those were chosen, by means of trials and the administration, who were the most nervous, the most hot tempered, the most excitable, the most gifted, and the strongest, but the least careful and cunning. These people, not a wit more dangerous than many of those who remained free, were first locked in prisons, transported to Siberia, where they were provided for and kept months and years in perfect idleness, and away from nature, their families, and useful work—that is, away from the conditions necessary for a natural and moral life. This firstly. Secondly, these people were subjected to all sorts of unnecessary indignity in these different Places—chains, shaved heads, shameful clothing—that is, they were deprived of the chief motives that induce the weak to live good lives, the regard for public opinion, the sense of shame and the consciousness of human dignity. Thirdly, they were continually exposed to dangers, such as the epidemics so frequent in places of confinement, exhaustion, flogging, not to mention accidents, such as sunstrokes, drowning or conflagrations, when the instinct of self-preservation makes even the kindest, most moral men commit cruel actions, and excuse such actions when committed by others.

Fourthly, these people were forced to associate with others who were particularly depraved by life, and especially by these very institutions—rakes, murderers and villains—who act on those who are not yet corrupted by the measures inflicted on them as leaven acts on dough.

And, fifthly, the fact that all sorts of violence, cruelty, inhumanity, are not only tolerated, but even permitted by the government, when it suits its purposes, was impressed on them most forcibly by the inhuman treatment they were subjected to; by the sufferings inflicted on children, women and old men; by floggings with rods and whips; by rewards offered for bringing a fugitive back, dead or alive; by the separation of husbands and wives, and the uniting them with the wives and husbands of others for sexual intercourse; by shooting or hanging them. To those who were deprived of their freedom, who were in want and misery, acts of violence were evidently still more permissible. All these institutions seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.

“Just as if a problem had been set to find the best, the surest means of depraving the greatest number of persons,” thought Nekhludoff, while investigating the deeds that were being done in the prisons and halting stations. Every year hundreds of thousands were brought to the highest pitch of depravity, and when completely depraved they were set free to carry the depravity they had caught in prison among the people. In the prisons of Tamen, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk and at the halting stations Nekhludoff saw how successfully the object society seemed to have set itself was attained.

Ordinary, simple men with a conception of the demands of the social and Christian Russian peasant morality lost this conception, and found a new one, founded chiefly on the idea that any outrage or violence was justifiable if it seemed profitable. After living in a prison those people became conscious with the whole of their being that, judging by what was happening to themselves, all the moral laws, the respect and the sympathy for others which church and the moral teachers preach, was really set aside, and that, therefore, they, too, need not keep the laws. Nekhludoff noticed the effects of prison life on all the convicts he knew—on Fedoroff, on Makar, and even on Taras, who, after two months among the convicts, struck Nekhludoff by the want of morality in his arguments. Nekhludoff found out during his journey how tramps, escaping into the marshes, persuade a comrade to escape with them, and then kill him and feed on his flesh. (He saw a living man who was accused of this and acknowledged the fact.) And the most terrible part was that this was not a solitary, but a recurring case.

Only by a special cultivation of vice, such as was perpetrated in these establishments, could a Russian be brought to the state of this tramp, who excelled Nietzsche’s newest teaching, and held that everything was possible and nothing forbidden, and who spread this teaching first among the convicts and then among the people in general.

The only explanation of all that was being done was the wish to put a stop to crime by fear, by correction, by lawful vengeance as it was written in the books. But in reality nothing in the least resembling any of these results came to pass. Instead of vice being put a stop to, it only spread further; instead of being frightened, the criminals were encouraged (many a tramp returned to prison of his own free will). Instead of being corrected, every kind of vice was systematically instilled, while the desire for vengeance did not weaken by the measures of the government, but was bred in the people who had none of it.

“Then why is it done?” Nekhludoff asked himself, but could find no answer. And what seemed most surprising was that all this was not being done accidentally, not by mistake, not once, but that it had continued for centuries, with this difference only, that at first the people’s nostrils used to be torn and their ears cut off; then they were branded, and now they were manacled and transported by steam instead of on the old carts. The arguments brought forward by those in government service, who said that the things which aroused his indignation were simply due to the imperfect arrangements of the places of confinement, and that they could all be put to rights if prisons of a modern type were built, did not satisfy Nekhludoff, because he knew that what revolted him was not the consequence of a better or worse arrangement of the prisons. He had read of model prisons with electric bells, of executions by electricity, recommended by Tard; but this refined kind of violence revolted him even more.

But what revolted Nekhludoff most was that there were men in the law courts and in the ministry who received large salaries, taken from the people, for referring to books written by men like themselves and with like motives, and sorting actions that violated laws made by themselves according to different statutes; and, in obedience to these statutes, sending those guilty of such actions to places where they were completely at the mercy of cruel, hardened inspectors, jailers, convoy soldiers, where millions of them perished body and soul.

Now that he had a closer knowledge of prisons, Nekhludoff found out that all those vices which developed among the prisoners—drunkenness, gambling, cruelty, and all these terrible crimes, even cannibalism—were not casual, or due to degeneration or to the existence of monstrosities of the criminal type, as science, going hand in hand with the government, explained it, but an unavoidable consequence of the incomprehensible delusion that men may punish one another. Nekhludoff saw that cannibalism did not commence in the marshes, but in the ministry. He saw that his brother-in-law, for example, and, in fact, all the lawyers and officials, from the usher to the minister, do not care in the least for justice or the good of the people about whom they spoke, but only for the roubles they were paid for doing the things that were the source whence all this degradation and suffering flowed. This was quite evident.

“Can it be, then, that all this is done simply through misapprehension? Could it not be managed that all these officials should have their salaries secured to them, and a premium paid them, besides, so that they should leave off, doing all that they were doing now?” Nekhludoff thought, and in spite of the fleas, that seemed to spring up round him like water from a fountain whenever he moved, he fell fast asleep.

XX The journey resumed.

The carters had left the inn long before Nekhludoff awoke. The landlady had had her tea, and came in wiping her fat, perspiring neck with her handkerchief, and said that a soldier had brought a note from the halting station. The note was from Mary Pavlovna. She wrote that Kryltzoff’s attack was more serious than they had imagined. “We wished him to be left behind and to remain with him, but this has not been allowed, so that we shall take him on; but we fear the worst. Please arrange so that if he should be left in the next town, one of us might remain with him. If in order to get the permission to stay I should be obliged to get married to him, I am of course ready to do so.”

Nekhludoff sent the young labourer to the post station to order horses and began packing up hurriedly. Before he had drunk his second tumbler of tea the three-horsed postcart drove up to the porch with ringing bells, the wheels rattling on the frozen mud as on stones. Nekhludoff paid the fat-necked landlady, hurried out and got into the cart, and gave orders to the driver to go on as fast as possible, so as to overtake the gang. Just past the gates of the commune pasture ground they did overtake the carts, loaded with sacks and the sick prisoners, as they rattled over the frozen mud, that was just beginning to be rolled smooth by the wheels (the officer was not there, he had gone in advance). The soldiers, who had evidently been drinking, followed by the side of the road, chatting merrily. There were a great many carts. In each of the first carts sat six invalid criminal convicts, close packed. On each of the last two were three political prisoners. Novodvoroff, Grabetz and Kondratieff sat on one, Rintzeva, Nabatoff and the woman to whom Mary Pavlovna had given up her own place on the other, and on one of the carts lay Kryltzoff on a heap of hay, with a pillow under his head, and Mary Pavlovna sat by him on the edge of the cart. Nekhludoff ordered his driver to stop, got out and went up to Kryltzoff. One of the tipsy soldiers waved his hand towards Nekhludoff, but he paid no attention and started walking by Kryltzoff’s side, holding on to the side of the cart with his hand. Dressed in a sheepskin coat, with a fur cap on his head and his mouth bound up with a handkerchief, he seemed paler and thinner than ever. His beautiful eyes looked very large and brilliant. Shaken from side to side by the jottings of the cart, he lay with his eyes fixed on Nekhludoff; but when asked about his health, he only closed his eyes and angrily shook his head. All his energy seemed to be needed in order to bear the jolting of the cart. Mary Pavlovna was on the other side. She exchanged a significant glance with Nekhludoff, which expressed all her anxiety about Kryltzoff’s state, and then began to talk at once in a cheerful manner.

“It seems the officer is ashamed of himself,” she shouted, so as to be heard above the rattle of the wheels. “Bousovkin’s manacles have been removed, and he is carrying his little girl himself. Katusha and Simonson are with him, and Vera, too. She has taken my place.”

Kryltzoff said something that could not be heard because of the noise, and frowning in the effort to repress his cough shook his head. Then Nekhludoff stooped towards him, so as to hear, and Kryltzoff, freeing his mouth of the handkerchief, whispered:

“Much better now. Only not to catch cold.”

Nekhludoff nodded in acquiescence, and again exchanged a glance with Mary Pavlovna.

“How about the problem of the three bodies?” whispered Kryltzoff, smiling with great difficulty. “The solution is difficult.”

Nekhludoff did not understand, but Mary Pavlovna explained that he meant the well-known mathematical problem which defined the position of the sun, moon and earth, which Kryltzoff compared to the relations between Nekhludoff, Katusha and Simonson. Kryltzoff nodded, to show that Mary Pavlovna had explained his joke correctly.

“The decision does not lie with me,” Nekhludoff said.

“Did you get my note? Will you do it?” Mary Pavlovna asked.

“Certainly,” answered Nekhludoff; and noticing a look of displeasure on Kryltzoff’s face, he returned to his conveyance, and holding with both hands to the sides of the cart, got in, which jolted with him over the ruts of the rough road. He passed the gang, which, with its grey cloaks and sheepskin coats, chains and manacles, stretched over three-quarters of a mile of the road. On the opposite side of the road Nekhludoff noticed Katusha’s blue shawl, Vera Doukhova’s black coat, and Simonson’s crochet cap, white worsted stockings, with bands, like those of sandals, tied round him. Simonson was walking with the woman and carrying on a heated discussion.

When they saw Nekhludoff they bowed to him, and Simonson raised his hat in a solemn manner. Nekhludoff, having nothing to say, did not stop, and was soon ahead of the carts. Having got again on to a smoother part of the road, they drove still more quickly, but they had continually to turn aside to let pass long rows of carts that were moving along the road in both directions.

The road, which was cut up by deep ruts, lay through a thick pine forest, mingled with birch trees and larches, bright with yellow leaves they had not yet shed. By the time Nekhludoff had passed about half the gang he reached the end of the forest. Fields now lay stretched along both sides of the road, and the crosses and cupolas of a monastery appeared in the distance. The clouds had dispersed, and it had cleared up completely; the leaves, the frozen puddles and the gilt crosses and cupolas of the monastery glittered brightly in the sun that had risen above the forest. A little to the right mountains began to gleam white in the blue-grey distance, and the trap entered a large village. The village street was full of people, both Russians and other nationalities, wearing peculiar caps and cloaks. Tipsy men and women crowded and chattered round booths, traktirs, public houses and carts. The vicinity of a town was noticeable. Giving a pull and a lash of the whip to the horse on his right, the driver sat down sideways on the right edge of the seat, so that the reins hung over that side, and with evident desire of showing off, he drove quickly down to the river, which had to be crossed by a ferry. The raft was coming towards them, and had reached the middle of the river. About twenty carts were waiting to cross. Nekhludoff had not long to wait. The raft, which had been pulled far up the stream, quickly approached the landing, carried by the swift waters. The tall, silent, broad-shouldered, muscular ferryman, dressed in sheepskins, threw the ropes and moored the raft with practised hand, landed the carts that were on it, and put those that were waiting on the bank on board. The whole raft was filled with vehicles and horses shuffling at the sight of the water. The broad, swift river splashed against the sides of the ferryboats, tightening their moorings.

When the raft was full, and Nekhludoff’s cart, with the horses taken out of it, stood closely surrounded by other carts on the side of the raft, the ferryman barred the entrance, and, paying no heed to the prayers of those who had not found room in the raft, unfastened the ropes and set off.

All was quiet on the raft; one could hear nothing but the tramp of the ferryman’s boots and the horses changing from foot to foot.

XXI “Just a worthless tramp.”

Nekhludoff stood on the edge of the raft looking at the broad river. Two pictures kept rising up in his mind. One, that of Kryltzoff, unprepared for death and dying, made a heavy, sorrowful impression on him. The other, that of Katusha, full of energy, having gained the love of such a man as Simonson, and found a true and solid path towards righteousness, should have been pleasant, yet it also created a heavy impression on Nekhludoff’s mind, and he could not conquer this impression.

The vibrating sounds of a big brass bell reached them from the town. Nekhludoff’s driver, who stood by his side, and the other men on the raft raised their caps and crossed themselves, all except a short, dishevelled old man, who stood close to the railway and whom Nekhludoff had not noticed before. He did not cross himself, but raised his head and looked at Nekhludoff. This old man wore a patched coat, cloth trousers and worn and patched shoes. He had a small wallet on his back, and a high fur cap with the fur much rubbed on his head.

“Why don’t you pray, old chap?” asked Nekhludoff’s driver as he replaced and straightened his cap. “Are you unbaptized?”

“Who’s one to pray to?” asked the old man quickly, in a determinately aggressive tone.

“To whom? To God, of course,” said the driver sarcastically.

“And you just show me where he is, that god.” There was something so serious and firm in the expression of the old man, that the driver felt that he had to do with a strong-minded man, and was a bit abashed. And trying not to show this, not to be silenced, and not to be put to shame before the crowd that was observing them, he answered quickly.

“Where? In heaven, of course.”

“And have you been up there?”

“Whether I’ve been or not, every one knows that you must pray to God.”

“No one has ever seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father he hath declared him,” said the old man in the same rapid manner, and with a severe frown on his brow.

“It’s clear you are not a Christian, but a hole worshipper. You pray to a hole,” said the driver, shoving the handle of his whip into his girdle, pulling straight the harness on one of the horses.

Some one laughed.

“What is your faith, Dad?” asked a middle-aged man, who stood by his cart on the same side of the raft.

“I have no kind of faith, because I believe no one—no one but myself,” said the old man as quickly and decidedly as before.

“How can you believe yourself?” Nekhludoff asked, entering into a conversation with him. “You might make a mistake.”

“Never in your life,” the old man said decidedly, with a toss of his head.

“Then why are there different faiths?” Nekhludoff asked.

“It’s just because men believe others and do not believe themselves that there are different faiths. I also believed others, and lost myself as in a swamp,—lost myself so that I had no hope of finding my way out. Old believers and new believers and Judaisers and Khlysty and Popovitzy, and Bespopovitzy and Avstriaks and Molokans and Skoptzy—every faith praises itself only, and so they all creep about like blind puppies. There are many faiths, but the spirit is one—in me and in you and in him. So that if every one believes himself all will be united. Every one be himself, and all will be as one.”

The old man spoke loudly and often looked round, evidently wishing that as many as possible should hear him.

“And have you long held this faith?”

“I? A long time. This is the twenty-third year that they persecute me.”

“Persecute you? How?”

“As they persecuted Christ, so they persecute me. They seize me, and take me before the courts and before the priests, the Scribes and the Pharisees. Once they put me into a madhouse; but they can do nothing because I am free. They say, ‘What is your name?’ thinking I shall name myself. But I do not give myself a name. I have given up everything: I have no name, no place, no country, nor anything. I am just myself. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Man.’ ‘How old are you?’ I say, ‘I do not count my years and cannot count them, because I always was, I always shall be.’ ‘Who are your parents?’ ‘I have no parents except God and Mother Earth. God is my father.’ ‘And the Tsar? Do you recognise the Tsar?’ they say. I say, ‘Why not? He is his own Tsar, and I am my own Tsar.’ ‘Where’s the good of talking to him,’ they say, and I say, ‘I do not ask you to talk to me.’ And so they begin tormenting me.”

“And where are you going now?” asked Nekhludoff.

“Where God will lead me. I work when I can find work, and when I can’t I beg.” The old man noticed that the raft was approaching the bank and stopped, looking round at the bystanders with a look of triumph.

Nekhludoff got out his purse and offered some money to the old man, but he refused, saying:

“I do not accept this sort of thing—bread I do accept.”

“Well, then, excuse me.”

“There is nothing to excuse, you have not offended me. And it is not possible to offend me.” And the old man put the wallet he had taken off again on his back. Meanwhile, the post-cart had been landed and the horses harnessed.

“I wonder you should care to talk to him, sir,” said the driver, when Nekhludoff, having tipped the bowing ferryman, got into the cart again. “He is just a worthless tramp.”

XXII Nekhludoff sees the general.

When they got to the top of the hill bank the driver turned to Nekhludoff.

“Which hotel am I to drive to?”

“Which is the best?”

“Nothing could be better than the Siberian, but Dukeoff’s is also good.”

“Drive to whichever you like.”

The driver again seated himself sideways and drove faster. The town was like all such towns. The same kind of houses with attic windows and green roofs, the same kind of cathedral, the same kind of shops and stores in the principal street, and even the same kind of policemen. Only the houses were almost all of them wooden, and the streets were not paved. In one of the chief streets the driver stopped at the door of an hotel, but there was no room to be had, so he drove to another. And here Nekhludoff, after two months, found himself once again in surroundings such as he had been accustomed to as far as comfort and cleanliness went. Though the room he was shown to was simple enough, yet Nekhludoff felt greatly relieved to be there after two months of post-carts, country inns and halting stations. His first business was to clean himself of the lice which he had never been able to get thoroughly rid of after visiting a halting station. When he had unpacked he went to the Russian bath, after which he made himself fit to be seen in a town, put on a starched shirt, trousers that had got rather creased along the seams, a frock-coat and an overcoat, and drove to the Governor of the district. The hotel-keeper called an isvostchik, whose well-fed Kirghiz horse and vibrating trap soon brought Nekhludoff to the large porch of a big building, in front of which stood sentinels and a policeman. The house had a garden in front, and at the back, among the naked branches of aspen and birch trees, there grew thick and dark green pines and firs. The General was not well, and did not receive; but Nekhludoff asked the footman to hand in his card all the same, and the footman came back with a favourable reply.

“You are asked to come in.”

The hall, the footman, the orderly, the staircase, the dancing-room, with its well-polished floor, were very much the same as in Petersburg, only more imposing and rather dirtier. Nekhludoff was shown into the cabinet.

The General, a bloated, potato-nosed man, with a sanguine disposition, large bumps on his forehead, bald head, and puffs under his eyes, sat wrapped in a Tartar silk dressing-gown smoking a cigarette and sipping his tea out of a tumbler in a silver holder.

“How do you do, sir? Excuse my dressing-gown; it is better so than if I had not received you at all,” he said, pulling up his dressing-gown over his fat neck with its deep folds at the nape. “I am not quite well, and do not go out. What has brought you to our remote region?”

“I am accompanying a gang of prisoners, among whom there is a person closely connected with me, said Nekhludoff, and now I have come to see your Excellency partly in behalf of this person, and partly about another business.” The General took a whiff and a sip of tea, put his cigarette into a malachite ashpan, with his narrow eyes fixed on Nekhludoff, listening seriously. He only interrupted him once to offer him a cigarette.

The General belonged to the learned type of military men who believed that liberal and humane views can be reconciled with their profession. But being by nature a kind and intelligent man, he soon felt the impossibility of such a reconciliation; so as not to feel the inner discord in which he was living, he gave himself up more and more to the habit of drinking, which is so widely spread among military men, and was now suffering from what doctors term alcoholism. He was imbued with alcohol, and if he drank any kind of liquor it made him tipsy. Yet strong drink was an absolute necessity to him, he could not live without it, so he was quite drunk every evening; but had grown so used to this state that he did not reel nor talk any special nonsense. And if he did talk nonsense, it was accepted as words of wisdom because of the important and high position which he occupied. Only in the morning, just at the time Nekhludoff came to see him, he was like a reasonable being, could understand what was said to him, and fulfil more or less aptly a proverb he was fond of repeating: “He’s tipsy, but he’s wise, so he’s pleasant in two ways.”

The higher authorities knew he was a drunkard, but he was more educated than the rest, though his education had stopped at the spot where drunkenness had got hold of him. He was bold, adroit, of imposing appearance, and showed tact even when tipsy; therefore, he was appointed, and was allowed to retain so public and responsible an office.

Nekhludoff told him that the person he was interested in was a woman, that she was sentenced, though innocent, and that a petition had been sent to the Emperor in her behalf.

“Yes, well?” said the General.

“I was promised in Petersburg that the news concerning her fate should be sent to me not later than this month and to this place—”

The General stretched his hand with its stumpy fingers towards the table, and rang a bell, still looking at Nekhludoff and puffing at his cigarette.

“So I would like to ask you that this woman should be allowed to remain here until the answer to her petition comes.”

The footman, an orderly in uniform, came in.

“Ask if Anna Vasilievna is up,” said the General to the orderly, “and bring some more tea.” Then, turning to Nekhludoff, “Yes, and what else?”

“My other request concerns a political prisoner who is with the same gang.”

“Dear me,” said the General, with a significant shake of the head.

“He is seriously ill—dying, and he will probably be left here in the hospital, so one of the women prisoners would like to stay behind with him.”

“She is no relation of his?”

“No, but she is willing to marry him if that will enable her to remain with him.”

The General looked fixedly with twinkling eyes at his interlocutor, and, evidently with a wish to discomfit him, listened, smoking in silence.

When Nekhludoff had finished, the General took a book off the table, and, wetting his finger, quickly turned over the pages and found the statute relating to marriage.

“What is she sentenced to?” he asked, looking up from the book.

“She? To hard labour.”

“Well, then, the position of one sentenced to that cannot be bettered by marriage.”

“Yes, but—”

“Excuse me. Even if a free man should marry her, she would have to serve her term. The question in such cases is, whose is the heavier punishment, hers or his?”

“They are both sentenced to hard labour.”

“Very well; so they are quits,” said the General, with a laugh. “She’s got what he has, only as he is sick he may be left behind, and of course what can be done to lighten his fate shall be done. But as for her, even if she did marry him, she could not remain behind.”

“The Generaless is having her coffee,” the footman announced.

The General nodded and continued:

“However, I shall think about it. What are their names? Put them down here.”

Nekhludoff wrote down the names.

Nekhludoff’s request to be allowed to see the dying man the General answered by saying, “Neither can I do that. Of course I do not suspect you, but you take an interest in him and in the others, and you have money, and here with us anything can be done with money. I have been told to put down bribery. But how can I put down bribery when everybody takes bribes? And the lower their rank the more ready they are to be bribed. How can one find it out across more than three thousand miles? There any official is a little Tsar, just as I am here,” and he laughed. “You have in all likelihood been to see the political prisoners; you gave money and got permission to see them,” he said, with a smile. “Is it not so?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I quite understand that you had to do it. You pity a political prisoner and wish to see him. And the inspector or the convoy soldier accepts, because he has a salary of twice twenty copecks and a family, and he can’t help accepting it. In his place and yours I should have acted in the same way as you and he did. But in my position I do not permit myself to swerve an inch from the letter of the law, just because I am a man, and might be influenced by pity. But I am a member of the executive, and I have been placed in a position of trust on certain conditions, and these conditions I must carry out. Well, so this business is finished. And now let us hear what is going on in the metropolis.” And the General began questioning with the evident desire to hear the news and to show how very human he was.

XXIII The sentence commuted.

“By—the-way, where are you staying?” asked the General as he was taking leave of Nekhludoff. “At Duke’s? Well, it’s horrid enough there. Come and dine with us at five o’clock. You speak English?”

“Yes, I do.”

“That’s good. You see, an English traveller has just arrived here. He is studying the question of transportation and examining the prisons of Siberia. Well, he is dining with us to-night, and you come and meet him. We dine at five, and my wife expects punctuality. Then I shall also give you an answer what to do about that woman, and perhaps it may be possible to leave some one behind with the sick prisoner.”

Having made his bow to the General, Nekhludoff drove to the post-office, feeling himself in an extremely animated and energetic frame of mind.

The post-office was a low-vaulted room. Several officials sat behind a counter serving the people, of whom there was quite a crowd. One official sat with his head bent to one side and kept stamping the envelopes, which he slipped dexterously under the stamp. Nekhludoff had not long to wait. As soon as he had given his name, everything that had come for him by post was at once handed to him. There was a good deal: letters, and money, and books, and the last number of Fatherland Notes. Nekhludoff took all these things to a wooden bench, on which a soldier with a book in his hand sat waiting for something, took the seat by his side, and began sorting the letters. Among them was one registered letter in a fine envelope, with a distinctly stamped bright red seal. He broke the seal, and seeing a letter from Selenin and some official paper inside the envelope, he felt the blood rush to his face, and his heart stood still. It was the answer to Katusha’s petition. What would that answer be? Nekhludoff glanced hurriedly through the letter, written in an illegibly small, hard, and cramped hand, and breathed a sigh of relief. The answer was a favourable one.

“Dear friend,” wrote Selenin, “our last talk has made a profound impression on me. You were right concerning Maslova. I looked carefully through the case, and see that shocking injustice has been done her. It could be remedied only by the Committee of Petitions before which you laid it. I managed to assist at the examination of the case, and I enclose herewith the copy of the mitigation of the sentence. Your aunt, the Countess Katerina Ivanovna, gave me the address which I am sending this to. The original document has been sent to the place where she was imprisoned before her trial, and will from there he probably sent at once to the principal Government office in Siberia. I hasten to communicate this glad news to you and warmly press your hand.

The document ran thus: “His Majesty’s office for the reception of petitions, addressed to his Imperial name”—here followed the date——“by order of the chief of his Majesty’s office for the reception of petitions addressed to his Imperial name. The meschanka Katerina Maslova is hereby informed that his Imperial Majesty, with reference to her most loyal petition, condescending to her request, deigns to order that her sentence to hard labour should be commuted to one of exile to the less distant districts of Siberia.”

This was joyful and important news; all that Nekhludoff could have hoped for Katusha, and for himself also, had happened. It was true that the new position she was in brought new complications with it. While she was a convict, marriage with her could only be fictitious, and would have had no meaning except that he would have been in a position to alleviate her condition. And now there was nothing to prevent their living together, and Nekhludoff had not prepared himself for that. And, besides, what of her relations to Simonson? What was the meaning of her words yesterday? If she consented to a union with Simonson, would it be well? He could not unravel all these questions, and gave up thinking about it. “It will all clear itself up later on,” he thought; “I must not think about it now, but convey the glad news to her as soon as possible, and set her free.” He thought that the copy of the document he had received would suffice, so when he left the post-office he told the isvostchik to drive him to the prison.

Though he had received no order from the governor to visit the prison that morning, he knew by experience that it was easy to get from the subordinates what the higher officials would not grant, so now he meant to try and get into the prison to bring Katusha the joyful news, and perhaps to get her set free, and at the same time to inquire about Kryltzoff’s state of health, and tell him and Mary Pavlovna what the general had said. The prison inspector was a tall, imposing-looking man, with moustaches and whiskers that twisted towards the corners of his mouth. He received Nekhludoff very gravely, and told him plainly that he could not grant an outsider the permission to interview the prisoners without a special order from his chief. To Nekhludoff’s remark that he had been allowed to visit the prisoners even in the cities he answered:

“That may be so, but I do not allow it,” and his tone implied, “You city gentlemen may think to surprise and perplex us, but we in Eastern Siberia also know what the law is, and may even teach it you.” The copy of a document straight from the Emperor’s own office did not have any effect on the prison inspector either. He decidedly refused to let Nekhludoff come inside the prison walls. He only smiled contemptuously at Nekhludoff’s naive conclusion, that the copy he had received would suffice to set Maslova free, and declared that a direct order from his own superiors would be needed before any one could be set at liberty. The only things he agreed to do were to communicate to Maslova that a mitigation had arrived for her, and to promise that he would not detain her an hour after the order from his chief to liberate her would arrive. He would also give no news of Kryltzoff, saying he could not even tell if there was such a prisoner; and so Nekhludoff, having accomplished next to nothing, got into his trap and drove back to his hotel.

The strictness of the inspector was chiefly due to the fact that an epidemic of typhus had broken out in the prison, owing to twice the number of persons that it was intended for being crowded in it. The isvostchik who drove Nekhludoff said, “Quite a lot of people are dying in the prison every day, some kind of disease having sprung up among them, so that as many as twenty were buried in one day.”

XXIV The general’s household.

In spite of his ineffectual attempt at the prison, Nekhludoff, still in the same vigorous, energetic frame of mind, went to the Governor’s office to see if the original of the document had arrived for Maslova. It had not arrived, so Nekhludoff went back to the hotel and wrote without delay to Selenin and the advocate about it. When he had finished writing he looked at his watch and saw it was time to go to the General’s dinner party.

On the way he again began wondering how Katusha would receive the news of the mitigation of her sentence. Where she would be settled? How he should live with her? What about Simonson? What would his relations to her be? He remembered the change that had taken place in her, and this reminded him of her past. “I must forget it for the present,” he thought, and again hastened to drive her out of his mind. “When the time comes I shall see,” he said to himself, and began to think of what he ought to say to the General.

The dinner at the General’s, with the luxury habitual to the lives of the wealthy and those of high rank, to which Nekhludoff had been accustomed, was extremely enjoyable after he had been so long deprived not only of luxury but even of the most ordinary comforts. The mistress of the house was a Petersburg grande dame of the old school, a maid of honour at the court of Nicholas I., who spoke French quite naturally and Russian very unnaturally. She held herself very erect and, moving her hands, she kept her elbows close to her waist. She was quietly and, somewhat sadly considerate for her husband, and extremely kind to all her visitors, though with a tinge of difference in her behaviour according to their position. She received Nekhludoff as if he were one of them, and her fine, almost imperceptible flattery made him once again aware of his virtues and gave him a feeling of satisfaction. She made him feel that she knew of that honest though rather singular step of his which had brought him to Siberia, and held him to be an exceptional man. This refined flattery and the elegance and luxury of the General’s house had the effect of making Nekhludoff succumb to the enjoyment of the handsome surroundings, the delicate dishes and the ease and pleasure of intercourse with educated people of his own class, so that the surroundings in the midst of which he had lived for the last months seemed a dream from which he had awakened to reality. Besides those of the household, the General’s daughter and her husband and an aide-de-camp, there were an Englishman, a merchant interested in gold mines, and the governor of a distant Siberian town. All these people seemed pleasant to Nekhludoff. The Englishman, a healthy man with a rosy complexion, who spoke very bad French, but whose command of his own language was very good and oratorically impressive, who had seen a great deal, was very interesting to listen to when he spoke about America, India, Japan and Siberia.

The young merchant interested in the gold mines, the son of a peasant, whose evening dress was made in London, who had diamond studs to his shirt, possessed a fine library, contributed freely to philanthropic work, and held liberal European views, seemed pleasant to Nekhludoff as a sample of a quite new and good type of civilised European culture, grafted on a healthy, uncultivated peasant stem.

The governor of the distant Siberian town was that same man who had been so much talked about in Petersburg at the time Nekhludoff was there. He was plump, with thin, curly hair, soft blue eyes, carefully-tended white hands, with rings on the fingers, a pleasant smile, and very big in the lower part of his body. The master of the house valued this governor because of all the officials he was the only one who would not be bribed. The mistress of the house, who was very fond of music and a very good pianist herself, valued him because he was a good musician and played duets with her.

Nekhludoff was in such good humour that even this man was not unpleasant to him, in spite of what he knew of his vices. The bright, energetic aide-de-camp, with his bluey grey chin, who was continually offering his services, pleased Nekhludoff by his good nature. But it was the charming young couple, the General’s daughter and her husband, who pleased Nekhludoff best. The daughter was a plain-looking, simple-minded young woman, wholly absorbed in her two children. Her husband, whom she had fallen in love with and married after a long struggle with her parents, was a Liberal, who had taken honours at the Moscow University, a modest and intellectual young man in Government service, who made up statistics and studied chiefly the foreign tribes, which he liked and tried to save from dying out.

All of them were not only kind and attentive to Nekhludoff, but evidently pleased to see him, as a new and interesting acquaintance. The General, who came in to dinner in uniform and with a white cross round his neck, greeted Nekhludoff as a friend, and asked the visitors to the side table to take a glass of vodka and something to whet their appetites. The General asked Nekhludoff what he had been doing since he left that morning, and Nekhludoff told him he had been to the post-office and received the news of the mitigation of that person’s sentence that he had spoken of in the morning, and again asked for a permission to visit the prison.

The General, apparently displeased that business should be mentioned at dinner, frowned and said nothing.

“Have a glass of vodka,” he said, addressing the Englishman, who had just come up to the table. The Englishman drank a glass, and said he had been to see the cathedral and the factory, but would like to visit the great transportation prison.

“Oh, that will just fit in,” said the General to Nekhludoff. “You will be able to go together. Give them a pass,” he added, turning to his aide-de-camp.

“When would you like to go?” Nekhludoff asked.

“I prefer visiting the prisons in the evening,” the Englishman answered. “All are indoors and there is no preparation; you find them all as they are.”

“Ah, he would like to see it in all its glory! Let him do so. I have written about it and no attention has been paid to it. Let him find out from foreign publications,” the General said, and went up to the dinner table, where the mistress of the house was showing the visitors their places. Nekhludoff sat between his hostess and the Englishman. In front of him sat the General’s daughter and the ex-director of the Government department in Petersburg. The conversation at dinner was carried on by fits and starts, now it was India that the Englishman talked about, now the Tonkin expedition that the General strongly disapproved of, now the universal bribery and corruption in Siberia. All these topics did not interest Nekhludoff much.

But after dinner, over their coffee, Nekhludoff and the Englishman began a very interesting conversation about Gladstone, and Nekhludoff thought he had said many clever things which were noticed by his interlocutor. And Nekhludoff felt it more and more pleasant to be sipping his coffee seated in an easy-chair among amiable, well-bred people. And when at the Englishman’s request the hostess went up to the piano with the ex-director of the Government department, and they began to play in well-practised style Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Nekhludoff fell into a mental state of perfect self-satisfaction to which he had long been a stranger, as though he had only just found out what a good fellow he was.

The grand piano was a splendid instrument, the symphony was well performed. At least, so it seemed to Nekhludoff, who knew and liked that symphony. Listening to the beautiful andante, he felt a tickling in his nose, he was so touched by his many virtues.

Nekhludoff thanked his hostess for the enjoyment that he had been deprived of for so long, and was about to say goodbye and go when the daughter of the house came up to him with a determined look and said, with a blush, “You asked about my children. Would you like to see them?”

“She thinks that everybody wants to see her children,” said her mother, smiling at her daughter’s winning tactlessness. “The Prince is not at all interested.”

“On the contrary, I am very much interested,” said Nekhludoff, touched by this overflowing, happy mother-love. “Please let me see them.”

“She’s taking the Prince to see her babies,” the General shouted, laughing from the card-table, where he sat with his son-in-law, the mine owner and the aide-de-camp. “Go, go, pay your tribute.”

The young woman, visibly excited by the thought that judgment was about to be passed on her children, went quickly towards the inner apartments, followed by Nekhludoff. In the third, a lofty room, papered with white and lit up by a shaded lamp, stood two small cots, and a nurse with a white cape on her shoulders sat between the cots. She had a kindly, true Siberian face, with its high cheek-bones.

The nurse rose and bowed. The mother stooped over the first cot, in which a two-year-old little girl lay peacefully sleeping with her little mouth open and her long, curly hair tumbled over the pillow.

“This is Katie,” said the mother, straightening the white and blue crochet coverlet, from under which a little white foot pushed itself languidly out.

“Is she not pretty? She’s only two years old, you know.”

“Lovely.”

“And this is Vasiuk, as ‘grandpapa’ calls him. Quite a different type. A Siberian, is he not?”

“A splendid boy,” said Nekhludoff, as he looked at the little fatty lying asleep on his stomach.

“Yes,” said the mother, with a smile full of meaning.

Nekhludoff recalled to his mind chains, shaved heads, fighting debauchery, the dying Kryltzoff, Katusha and the whole of her past, and he began to feel envious and to wish for what he saw here, which now seemed to him pure and refined happiness.

After having repeatedly expressed his admiration of the children, thereby at least partially satisfying their mother, who eagerly drank in this praise, he followed her back to the drawing-room, where the Englishman was waiting for him to go and visit the prison, as they had arranged. Having taken leave of their hosts, the old and the young ones, the Englishman and Nekhludoff went out into the porch of the General’s house.

The weather had changed. It was snowing, and the snow fell densely in large flakes, and already covered the road, the roof and the trees in the garden, the steps of the porch, the roof of the trap and the back of the horse.

The Englishman had a trap of his own, and Nekhludoff, having told the coachman to drive to the prison, called his isvostchik and got in with the heavy sense of having to fulfil an unpleasant duty, and followed the Englishman over the soft snow, through which the wheels turned with difficulty.

XXV Maslova’s decision.

The dismal prison house, with its sentinel and lamp burning under the gateway, produced an even more dismal impression, with its long row of lighted windows, than it had done in the morning, in spite of the white covering that now lay over everything—the porch, the roof and the walls.

The imposing inspector came up to the gate and read the pass that had been given to Nekhludoff and the Englishman by the light of the lamp, shrugged his fine shoulders in surprise, but, in obedience to the order, asked the visitors to follow him in. He led them through the courtyard and then in at a door to the right and up a staircase into the office. He offered them a seat and asked what he could do for them, and when he heard that Nekhludoff would like to see Maslova at once, he sent a jailer to fetch her. Then he prepared himself to answer the questions which the Englishman began to put to him, Nekhludoff acting as interpreter.

“How many persons is the prison built to hold?” the Englishman asked. “How many are confined in it? How many men? How many women? Children? How many sentenced to the mines? How many exiles? How many sick persons?”

Nekhludoff translated the Englishman’s and the inspector’s words without paying any attention to their meaning, and felt an awkwardness he had not in the least expected at the thought of the impending interview. When, in the midst of a sentence he was translating for the Englishman, he heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and the office door opened, and, as had happened many times before, a jailer came in, followed by Katusha, and he saw her with a kerchief tied round her head, and in a prison jacket a heavy sensation came over him. “I wish to live, I want a family, children, I want a human life.” These thoughts flashed through his mind as she entered the room with rapid steps and blinking her eyes.

He rose and made a few steps to meet her, and her face appeared hard and unpleasant to him. It was again as it had been at the time when she reproached him. She flushed and turned pale, her fingers nervously twisting a corner of her jacket. She looked up at him, then cast down her eyes.

“You know that a mitigation has come?”

“Yes, the jailer told me.”

“So that as soon as the original document arrives you may come away and settle where you like. We shall consider—”

She interrupted him hurriedly. “What have I to consider? Where Valdemar Simonson goes, there I shall follow.” In spite of the excitement she was in she raised her eyes to Nekhludoff’s and pronounced these words quickly and distinctly, as if she had prepared what she had to say.

“Indeed!”

“Well, Dmitri Ivanovitch, you see he wishes me to live with him—” and she stopped, quite frightened, and corrected herself. “He wishes me to be near him. What more can I desire? I must look upon it as happiness. What else is there for me—”

“One of two things,” thought he. “Either she loves Simonson and does not in the least require the sacrifice I imagined I was bringing her, or she still loves me and refuses me for my own sake, and is burning her ships by uniting her fate with Simonson.” And Nekhludoff felt ashamed and knew that he was blushing.

“And you yourself, do you love him?” he asked.

“Loving or not loving, what does it matter? I have given up all that. And then Valdemar Simonson is quite an exceptional man.”

“Yes, of course,” Nekhludoff began. “He is a splendid man, and I think—”

But she again interrupted him, as if afraid that he might say too much or that she should not say all. “No, Dmitri Ivanovitch, you must forgive me if I am not doing what you wish,” and she looked at him with those unfathomable, squinting eyes of hers. “Yes, it evidently must be so. You must live, too.”

She said just what he had been telling himself a few moments before, but he no longer thought so now and felt very differently. He was not only ashamed, but felt sorry to lose all he was losing with her. “I did not expect this,” he said.

“Why should you live here and suffer? You have suffered enough.”

“I have not suffered. It was good for me, and I should like to go on serving you if I could.”

“We do not want anything,” she said, and looked at him.

“You have done so much for me as it is. If it had not been for you—” She wished to say more, but her voice trembled.

“You certainly have no reason to thank me,” Nekhludoff said.

“Where is the use of our reckoning? God will make up our accounts,” she said, and her black eyes began to glisten with the tears that filled them.

“What a good woman you are,” he said.

“I good?” she said through her tears, and a pathetic smile lit up her face.

“Are you ready?” the Englishman asked.

“Directly,” replied Nekhludoff and asked her about Kryltzoff.

She got over her emotion and quietly told him all she knew. Kryltzoff was very weak and had been sent into the infirmary. Mary Pavlovna was very anxious, and had asked to be allowed to go to the infirmary as a nurse, but could not get the permission.

“Am I to go?” she asked, noticing that the Englishman was waiting.

“I will not say good-bye; I shall see you again,” said Nekhludoff, holding out his hand.

“Forgive me,” she said so low that he could hardly hear her. Their eyes met, and Nekhludoff knew by the strange look of her squinting eyes and the pathetic smile with which she said not “Good-bye” but “Forgive me,” that of the two reasons that might have led to her resolution, the second was the real one. She loved him, and thought that by uniting herself to him she would be spoiling his life. By going with Simonson she thought she would be setting Nekhludoff free, and felt glad that she had done what she meant to do, and yet she suffered at parting from him.

She pressed his hand, turned quickly and left the room.

Nekhludoff was ready to go, but saw that the Englishman was noting something down, and did not disturb him, but sat down on a wooden seat by the wall, and suddenly a feeling of terrible weariness came over him. It was not a sleepless night that had tired him, not the journey, not the excitement, but he felt terribly tired of living. He leaned against the back of the bench, shut his eyes and in a moment fell into a deep, heavy sleep.

“Well, would you like to look round the cells now?” the inspector asked.

Nekhludoff looked up and was surprised to find himself where he was. The Englishman had finished his notes and expressed a wish to see the cells.

Nekhludoff, tired and indifferent, followed him.

XXVI The English visitor.

When they had passed the anteroom and the sickening, stinking corridor, the Englishman and Nekhludoff, accompanied by the inspector, entered the first cell, where those sentenced to hard labour were confined. The beds took up the middle of the cell and the prisoners were all in bed. There were about 70 of them. When the visitors entered all the prisoners jumped up and stood beside the beds, excepting two, a young man who was in a state of high fever, and an old man who did nothing but groan.

The Englishman asked if the young man had long been ill. The inspector said that he was taken ill in the morning, but that the old man had long been suffering with pains in the stomach, but could not be removed, as the infirmary had been overfilled for a long time. The Englishman shook his head disapprovingly, said he would like to say a few words to these people, asking Nekhludoff to interpret. It turned out that besides studying the places of exile and the prisons of Siberia, the Englishman had another object in view, that of preaching salvation through faith and by the redemption.

“Tell them,” he said, “that Christ died for them. If they believe in this they shall be saved.” While he spoke, all the prisoners stood silent with their arms at their sides. “This book, tell them,” he continued, “says all about it. Can any of them read?”

There were more than 20 who could.

The Englishman took several bound Testaments out of a hang-bag, and many strong hands with their hard, black nails stretched out from beneath the coarse shirt-sleeves towards him. He gave away two Testaments in this cell.

The same thing happened in the second cell. There was the same foul air, the same icon hanging between the windows, the same tub to the left of the door, and they were all lying side by side close to one another, and jumped up in the same manner and stood stretched full length with their arms by their sides, all but three, two of whom sat up and one remained lying, and did not even look at the newcomers; these three were also ill. The Englishman made the same speech and again gave away two books.

In the third room four were ill. When the Englishman asked why the sick were not put all together into one cell, the inspector said that they did not wish it themselves, that their diseases were not infectious, and that the medical assistant watched them and attended to them.

“He has not set foot here for a fortnight,” muttered a voice.

The inspector did not say anything and led the way to the next cell. Again the door was unlocked, and all got up and stood silent. Again the Englishman gave away Testaments. It was the same in the fifth and sixth cells, in those to the right and those to the left.

From those sentenced to hard labour they went on to the exiles.

From the exiles to those evicted by the Commune and those who followed of their own free will.

Everywhere men, cold, hungry, idle, infected, degraded, imprisoned, were shown off like wild beasts.

The Englishman, having given away the appointed number of Testaments, stopped giving any more, and made no speeches. The oppressing sight, and especially the stifling atmosphere, quelled even his energy, and he went from cell to cell, saying nothing but “All right” to the inspector’s remarks about what prisoners there were in each cell.

Nekhludoff followed as in a dream, unable either to refuse to go on or to go away, and with the same feelings of weariness and hopelessness.

XXVII Kryltzoff at rest.

In one of the exiles’ cells Nekhludoff, to his surprise, recognised the strange old man he had seen crossing the ferry that morning. This old man was sitting on the floor by the beds, barefooted, with only a dirty cinder-coloured shirt on, torn on one shoulder, and similar trousers. He looked severely and enquiringly at the newcomers. His emaciated body, visible through the holes of his shirt, looked miserably weak, but in his face was even more concentrated seriousness and animation than when Nekhludoff saw him crossing the ferry. As in all the other cells, so here also the prisoners jumped up and stood erect when the official entered, but the old man remained sitting. His eyes glittered and his brows frowned with wrath.

“Get up,” the inspector called out to him.

The old man did not rise and only smiled contemptuously.

“Thy servants are standing before thee. I am not thy servant. Thou bearest the seal—” The old man pointed to the inspector’s forehead.

“Wha—a-t?” said the inspector threateningly, and made a step towards him.

“I know this man,” Nekhludoff hastened to say; “what is he imprisoned for?”

“The police have sent him here because he has no passport. We ask them not to send such, but they will do it,” said the inspector, casting an angry side look at the old man.

“And so it seems thou, too, art one of Antichrist’s army?” the old man said to Nekhludoff.

“No, I am a visitor,” said Nekhludoff.

“What, hast thou come to see how Antichrist tortures men? There, look, he has locked them up in a cage, a whole army of them. Men should eat bread in the sweat of their brow. And he has locked them up with no work to do, and feeds them like swine, so that they should turn into beasts.”

“What is he saying?” asked the Englishman.

Nekhludoff told him the old man was blaming the inspector for keeping men imprisoned.

“Ask him how he thinks one should treat those who do not keep to the laws,” said the Englishman.

Nekhludoff translated the question. The old man laughed in a strange manner, showing his teeth.

“The laws?” he repeated with contempt. “He first robbed everybody, took all the earth, all the rights away from men, killed all those who were against him, and then wrote laws, forbidding robbery and murder. He should have written these laws before.”

Nekhludoff translated. The Englishman smiled. “Well, anyhow, ask him how one should treat thieves and murderers at present?”

Nekhludoff again translated his question.

“Tell him he should take the seal of Antichrist off himself,” the old man said, frowning severely; “then there will be no thieves and murderers. Tell him so.”

“He is crazy,” said the Englishman, when Nekhludoff had translated the old man’s words, and, shrugging his shoulders, he left the cell.

“Do thy business and leave them alone. Every one for himself. God knows whom to execute, whom to forgive, and we do not know,” said the old man. “Every man be his own chief, then the chiefs will not be wanted. Go, go!” he added, angrily frowning and looking with glittering eyes at Nekhludoff, who lingered in the cell. “Hast thou not looked on long enough how the servants of Antichrist feed lice on men? Go, go!”

When Nekhludoff went out he saw the Englishman standing by the open door of an empty cell with the inspector, asking what the cell was for. The inspector explained that it was the mortuary.

“Oh,” said the Englishman when Nekhludoff had translated, and expressed the wish to go in.

The mortuary was an ordinary cell, not very large. A small lamp hung on the wall and dimly lit up sacks and logs of wood that were piled up in one corner, and four dead bodies lay on the bedshelves to the right. The first body had a coarse linen shirt and trousers on; it was that of a tall man with a small beard and half his head shaved. The body was quite rigid; the bluish hands, that had evidently been folded on the breast, had separated; the legs were also apart and the bare feet were sticking out. Next to him lay a bare-footed old woman in a white petticoat, her head, with its thin plait of hair, uncovered, with a little, pinched yellow face and a sharp nose. Beyond her was another man with something lilac on. This colour reminded Nekhludoff of something. He came nearer and looked at the body. The small, pointed beard sticking upwards, the firm, well-shaped nose, the high, white forehead, the thin, curly hair; he recognised the familiar features and could hardly believe his eyes. Yesterday he had seen this face, angry, excited, and full of suffering; now it was quiet, motionless, and terribly beautiful. Yes, it was Kryltzoff, or at any rate the trace that his material existence had left behind. “Why had he suffered? Why had he lived? Does he now understand?” Nekhludoff thought, and there seemed to be no answer, seemed to be nothing but death, and he felt faint. Without taking leave of the Englishman, Nekhludoff asked the inspector to lead him out into the yard, and feeling the absolute necessity of being alone to think over all that had happened that evening, he drove back to his hotel.

XXVIII A new life dawns for Nekhludoff.

Nekhludoff did not go to bed, but went up and down his room for a long time. His business with Katusha was at an end. He was not wanted, and this made him sad and ashamed. His other business was not only unfinished, but troubled him more than ever and demanded his activity. All this horrible evil that he had seen and learned to know lately, and especially to-day in that awful prison, this evil, which had killed that dear Kryltzoff, ruled and was triumphant, and he could foreseen possibility of conquering or even knowing how to conquer it. Those hundreds and thousands of degraded human beings locked up in the noisome prisons by indifferent generals, procureurs, inspectors, rose up in his imagination; he remembered the strange, free old man accusing the officials, and therefore considered mad, and among the corpses the beautiful, waxen face of Kryltzoff, who had died in anger. And again the question as to whether he was mad or those who considered they were in their right minds while they committed all these deeds stood before him with renewed force and demanded an answer.

Tired of pacing up and down, tired of thinking, he sat down on the sofa near the lamp and mechanically opened the Testament which the Englishman had given him as a remembrance, and which he had thrown on the table when he emptied his pockets on coming in.

“It is said one can find an answer to everything here,” he thought, and opened the Testament at random and began reading Matt. xviii. 1-4: “In that hour came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who then is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven? And He called to Him a little child, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in nowise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child the same is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“Yes, yes, that is true,” he said, remembering that he had known the peace and joy of life only when he had humbled himself.

“And whosoever shall receive one such little child in My name receiveth Me, but whoso shall cause one of these little ones to stumble, it is more profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck and that he should be sunk in the depths of the sea.” (Matt. xviii. 5, 6.)

“What is this for, ‘Whosoever shall receive?’ Receive where? And what does ‘in my name’ mean?” he asked, feeling that these words did not tell him anything. “And why ‘the millstone round his neck and the depths of the sea?’ No, that is not it: it is not clear,” and he remembered how more than once in his life he had taken to reading the Gospels, and how want of clearness in these passages had repulsed him. He went on to read the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth verses about the occasions of stumbling, and that they must come, and about punishment by casting men into hell fire, and some kind of angels who see the face of the Father in Heaven. “What a pity that this is so incoherent,” he thought, “yet one feels that there is something good in it.”

“For the Son of Man came to save that which was lost,” he continued to read.

“How think ye? If any man have a hundred sheep and one of them go astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine and go into the mountains and seek that which goeth astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth over it more than over the ninety and nine which have not gone astray.

“Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in Heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”

“Yes, it is not the will of the Father that they should perish, and here they are perishing by hundreds and thousands. And there is no possibility of saving them,” he thought.

“Then came Peter and said to him, How oft shall my brother offend me and I forgive him? Until seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee until seven times, but until seventy times seven.

“Therefore is the Kingdom of Heaven likened unto a certain king which made a reckoning with his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him which owed him ten thousand talents. But forasmuch as he had not wherewith to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me; I will pay thee all. And the lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out, and found one of his fellow-servants which owed him a hundred pence; and he laid hold on him and took him by the throat, saying, Pay what thou owest. So his fellow-servant fell down and besought him, saying, Have patience with me and I will pay thee. And he would not, but went and cast him into prison till he should pay that which was due. So when his fellow-servants saw what was done, they were exceeding sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done. Then his lord called him unto him and saith to him, Thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt because thou besought me; shouldst not thou also have mercy on thy fellow-servant as I had mercy on thee?”

“And is this all?” Nekhludoff suddenly exclaimed aloud, and the inner voice of the whole of his being said, “Yes, it is all.” And it happened to Nekhludoff, as it often happens to men who are living a spiritual life. The thought that seemed strange at first and paradoxical or even to be only a joke, being confirmed more and more often by life’s experience, suddenly appeared as the simplest, truest certainty. In this way the idea that the only certain means of salvation from the terrible evil from which men were suffering was that they should always acknowledge themselves to be sinning against God, and therefore unable to punish or correct others, because they were dear to Him. It became clear to him that all the dreadful evil he had been witnessing in prisons and jails and the quiet self-satisfaction of the perpetrators of this evil were the consequences of men trying to do what was impossible; trying to correct evil while being evil themselves; vicious men were trying to correct other vicious men, and thought they could do it by using mechanical means, and the only consequence of all this was that the needs and the cupidity of some men induced them to take up this so-called punishment and correction as a profession, and have themselves become utterly corrupt, and go on unceasingly depraving those whom they torment. Now he saw clearly what all the terrors he had seen came from, and what ought to be done to put a stop to them. The answer he could not find was the same that Christ gave to Peter. It was that we should forgive always an infinite number of times because there are no men who have not sinned themselves, and therefore none can punish or correct others.

“But surely it cannot be so simple,” thought Nekhludoff, and yet he saw with certainty, strange as it had seemed at first, that it was not only a theoretical but also a practical solution of the question. The usual objection, “What is one to do with the evil doers? Surely not let them go unpunished?” no longer confused him. This objection might have a meaning if it were proved that punishment lessened crime, or improved the criminal, but when the contrary was proved, and it was evident that it was not in people’s power to correct each other, the only reasonable thing to do is to leave off doing the things which are not only useless, but harmful, immoral and cruel.

For many centuries people who were considered criminals have been tortured. Well, and have they ceased to exist? No; their numbers have been increased not alone by the criminals corrupted by punishment but also by those lawful criminals, the judges, procureurs, magistrates and jailers, who judge and punish men. Nekhludoff now understood that society and order in general exists not because of these lawful criminals who judge and punish others, but because in spite of men being thus depraved, they still pity and love one another.

In hopes of finding a confirmation of this thought in the Gospel, Nekhludoff began reading it from the beginning. When he had read the Sermon on the Mount, which had always touched him, he saw in it for the first time to-day not beautiful abstract thoughts, setting forth for the most part exaggerated and impossible demands, but simple, clear, practical laws. If these laws were carried out in practice (and this was quite possible) they would establish perfectly new and surprising conditions of social life, in which the violence that filled Nekhludoff with such indignation would cease of itself. Not only this, but the greatest blessing that is obtainable to men, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth would be established. There were five of these laws.

The first (Matt. v. 21-26), that man should not only do no murder, but not even be angry with his brother, should not consider any one worthless: “Raca,” and if he has quarrelled with any one he should make it up with him before bringing his gift to God—i.e., before praying.

The second (Matt. v. 27-32), that man should not only not commit adultery but should not even seek for enjoyment in a woman’s beauty, and if he has once come together with a woman he should never be faithless to her.

The third (Matt. 33-37), that man should never bind himself by oath.

The fourth (Matt. 38-42), that man should not only not demand an eye for an eye, but when struck on one cheek should hold out the other, should forgive an offence and bear it humbly, and never refuse the service others demand of him.

The fifth (Matt. 43-48), that man should not only not hate his enemy and not fight him, but love him, help him, serve him.

Nekhludoff sat staring at the lamp and his heart stood still. Recalling the monstrous confusion of the life we lead, he distinctly saw what that life could be if men were brought up to obey these rules, and rapture such as he had long not felt filled his soul, just as if after long days of weariness and suffering he had suddenly found ease and freedom.

He did not sleep all night, and as it happens to many and many a man who reads the Gospels he understood for the first time the full meaning of the words read so often before but passed by unnoticed. He imbibed all these necessary, important and joyful revelations as a sponge imbibes water. And all he read seemed so familiar and seemed to confirm, to form into a conception, what he had known long ago, but had never realised and never quite believed. Now he realised and believed it, and not only realised and believed that if men would obey these laws they would obtain the highest blessing they can attain to, he also realised and believed that the only duty of every man is to fulfil these laws; that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life, that every stepping aside from these laws is a mistake which is immediately followed by retribution. This flowed from the whole of the teaching, and was most strongly and clearly illustrated in the parable of the vineyard.

The husbandman imagined that the vineyard in which they were sent to work for their master was their own, that all that was in was made for them, and that their business was to enjoy life in this vineyard, forgetting the Master and killing all those who reminded them of his existence. “Are we not doing the same,” Nekhludoff thought, “when we imagine ourselves to be masters of our lives, and that life is given us for enjoyment? This evidently is an incongruity. We were sent here by some one’s will and for some reason. And we have concluded that we live only for our own joy, and of course we feel unhappy as labourers do when not fulfilling their Master’s orders. The Master’s will is expressed in these commandments. If men will only fulfil these laws, the Kingdom of Heaven will be established on earth, and men will receive the greatest good that they can attain to.

“‘Seek ye first the Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.’

“And so here it is, the business of my life. Scarcely have I finished one and another has commenced.” And a perfectly new life dawned that night for Nekhludoff, not because he had entered into new conditions of life, but because everything he did after that night had a new and quite different significance than before. How this new period of his life will end time alone will prove.