Resurrection - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (interesting novels in english .TXT) 📗

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.

 

CHAPTER 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. [A fact

described by Lineff in his “Transportation”.] 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.

 

CHAPTER 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.