Resurrection - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (interesting novels in english .TXT) 📗
- Author: Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
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and ran to the station.
It was a warm, rainy, and windy autumn night. The rain now pelted
down in warm, heavy drops, now stopped again. It was too dark to
see the path across the field, and in the wood it was pitch
black, so that although Katusha knew the way well, she got off
the path, and got to the little station where the train stopped
for three minutes, not before, as she had hoped, but after the
second bell had been rung. Hurrying up the platform, Katusha saw
him at once at the windows of a first-class carriage. Two
officers sat opposite each other on the velvet-covered seats,
playing cards. This carriage was very brightly lit up; on the
little table between the seats stood two thick, dripping candles.
He sat in his closefitting breeches on the arm of the seat,
leaning against the back, and laughed. As soon as she recognised
him she knocked at the carriage window with her benumbed hand,
but at that moment the last bell rang, and the train first gave a
backward jerk, and then gradually the carriages began to move
forward. One of the players rose with the cards in his hand, and
looked out. She knocked again, and pressed her face to the
window, but the carriage moved on, and she went alongside looking
in. The officer tried to lower the window, but could not.
Nekhludoff pushed him aside and began lowering it himself. The
train went faster, so that she had to walk quickly. The train
went on still faster and the window opened. The guard pushed her
aside, and jumped in. Katusha ran on, along the wet boards of the
platform, and when she came to the end she could hardly stop
herself from falling as she ran down the steps of the platform.
She was running by the side of the railway, though the
first-class carriage had long passed her, and the second-class
carriages were gliding by faster, and at last the third-class
carriages still faster. But she ran on, and when the last
carriage with the lamps at the back had gone by, she had already
reached the tank which fed the engines, and was unsheltered from
the wind, which was blowing her shawl about and making her skirt
cling round her legs. The shawl flew off her head, but still she
ran on.
“Katerina Michaelovna, you’ve lost your shawl!” screamed the
little girl, who was trying to keep up with her.
Katusha stopped, threw back her head, and catching hold of it
with both hands sobbed aloud. “Gone!” she screamed.
“He is sitting in a velvet armchair and joking and drinking, in
a brightly lit carriage, and I, out here in the mud, in the
darkness, in the wind and the rain, am standing and weeping,” she
thought to herself; and sat down on the ground, sobbing so loud
that the little girl got frightened, and put her arms round her,
wet as she was.
“Come home, dear,” she said.
“When a train passes—then under a carriage, and there will be an
end,” Katusha was thinking, without heeding the girl.
And she made up her mind to do it, when, as it always happens,
when a moment of quiet follows great excitement, he, the
child—his child—made himself known within her. Suddenly all
that a moment before had been tormenting her, so that it had
seemed impossible to live, all her bitterness towards him, and
the wish to revenge herself, even by dying, passed away; she grew
quieter, got up, put the shawl on her head, and went home.
Wet, muddy, and quite exhausted, she returned, and from that day
the change which brought her where she now was began to operate
in her soul. Beginning from that dreadful night, she ceased
believing in God and in goodness. She had herself believed in
God, and believed that other people also believed in Him; but
after that night she became convinced that no one believed, and
that all that was said about God and His laws was deception and
untruth. He whom she loved, and who had loved her—yes, she knew
that—had thrown her away; had abused her love. Yet he was the
best of all the people she knew. All the rest were still worse.
All that afterwards happened to her strengthened her in this
belief at every step. His aunts, the pious old ladies, turned her
out when she could no longer serve them as she used to. And of
all those she met, the women used her as a means of getting
money, the men, from the old police officer down to the warders
of the prison, looked at her as on an object for pleasure. And no
one in the world cared for aught but pleasure. In this belief the
old author with whom she had come together in the second year of
her life of independence had strengthened her. He had told her
outright that it was this that constituted the happiness of life,
and he called it poetical and aesthetic.
Everybody lived for himself only, for his pleasure, and all the
talk concerning God and righteousness was deception. And if
sometimes doubts arose in her mind and she wondered why
everything was so ill-arranged in the world that all hurt each
other, and made each other suffer, she thought it best not to
dwell on it, and if she felt melancholy she could smoke, or,
better still, drink, and it would pass.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
SUNDAY IN PRISON—PREPARING FOR MASS.
On Sunday morning at five o’clock, when a whistle sounded in the
corridor of the women’s ward of the prison, Korableva, who was
already awake, called Maslova.
“Oh, dear! life again,” thought Maslova, with horror,
involuntarily breathing in the air that had become terribly
noisome towards the morning. She wished to fall asleep again, to
enter into the region of oblivion, but the habit of fear overcame
sleepiness, and she sat up and looked round, drawing her feet
under her. The women had all got up; only the elder children were
still asleep. The spirit-trader was carefully drawing a cloak
from under the children, so as not to wake them. The watchman’s
wife was hanging up the rags to dry that served the baby as
swaddling clothes, while the baby was screaming desperately in
Theodosia’s arms, who was trying to quiet it. The consumptive
woman was coughing with her hands pressed to her chest, while the
blood rushed to her face, and she sighed loudly, almost
screaming, in the intervals of coughing. The fat, redhaired
woman was lying on her back, with knees drawn up, and loudly
relating a dream. The old woman accused of incendiarism was
standing in front of the image, crossing herself and bowing, and
repeating the same words over and over again. The deacon’s
daughter sat on the bedstead, looking before her, with a dull,
sleepy face. Khoroshavka was twisting her black, oily, coarse
hair round her fingers. The sound of slipshod feet was heard in
the passage, and the door opened to let in two convicts, dressed
in jackets and grey trousers that did not reach to their ankles.
With serious, cross faces they lifted the stinking tub and
carried it out of the cell. The women went out to the taps in the
corridor to wash. There the redhaired woman again began a
quarrel with a woman from another cell.
“Is it the solitary cell you want?” shouted an old jailer,
slapping the redhaired woman on her bare, fat back, so that it
sounded through the corridor. “You be quiet.”
“Lawks! the old one’s playful,” said the woman, taking his action
for a caress.
“Now, then, be quick; get ready for the mass.” Maslova had hardly
time to do her hair and dress when the inspector came with his
assistants.
“Come out for inspection,” cried a jailer.
Some more prisoners came out of other cells and stood in two rows
along the corridor; each woman had to place her hand on the
shoulder of the woman in front of her. They were all counted.
After the inspection the woman warder led the prisoners to
church. Maslova and Theodosia were in the middle of a column of
over a hundred women, who had come out of different cells. All
were dressed in white skirts, white jackets, and wore white
kerchiefs on their heads, except a few who had their own coloured
clothes on. These were wives who, with their children, were
following their convict husbands to Siberia. The whole flight of
stairs was filled by the procession. The patter of softly-shod
feet mingled with the voices and now and then a laugh. When
turning, on the landing, Maslova saw her enemy, Botchkova, in
front, and pointed out her angry face to Theodosia. At the bottom
of the stairs the women stopped talking. Bowing and crossing
themselves, they entered the empty church, which glistened with
gilding. Crowding and pushing one another, they took their places
on the right.
After the women came the men condemned to banishment, those
serving their term in the prison, and those exiled by their
Communes; and, coughing loudly, they took their stand, crowding
the left side and the middle of the church.
On one side of the gallery above stood the men sentenced to penal
servitude in Siberia, who had been let into the church before the
others. Each of them had half his head shaved, and their presence
was indicated by the clanking of the chains on their feet. On the
other side of the gallery stood those in preliminary confinement,
without chains, their heads not shaved.
The prison church had been rebuilt and ornamented by a rich
merchant, who spent several tens of thousands of roubles on it,
and it glittered with gay colours and gold. For a time there was
silence in the church, and only coughing, blowing of noses, the
crying of babies, and now and then the rattling of chains, was
heard. But at last the convicts that stood in the middle moved,
pressed against each other, leaving a passage in the centre of
the church, down which the prison inspector passed to take his
place in front of every one in the nave.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE PRISON CHURCH—BLIND LEADERS OF THE BLIND.
The service began.
It consisted of the following. The priest, having dressed in a
strange and very inconvenient garb, made of gold cloth, cut and
arranged little bits of bread on a saucer, and then put them into
a cup with wine, repeating at the same time different names and
prayers. Meanwhile the deacon first read Slavonic prayers,
difficult to understand in themselves, and rendered still more
incomprehensible by being read very fast, and then sang them turn
and turn about with the convicts. The contents of the prayers
were chiefly the desire for the welfare of the Emperor and his
family. These petitions were repeated many times, separately and
together with other prayers, the people kneeling. Besides this,
several verses from the Acts of the Apostles were read by the
deacon in a peculiarly strained voice, which made it impossible
to understand what he read, and then the priest read very
distinctly a part of the Gospel according to St. Mark, in which
it said that Christ, having risen from the dead before flying up
to heaven to sit down at His Father’s right hand, first showed
Himself to Mary Magdalene, out of whom He had driven seven
devils, and then to eleven of His disciples, and ordered them to
preach the Gospel to the whole creation, and the priest added
that if any one did not believe this he would perish, but he that
believed it and was baptised should be saved, and
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