Resurrection - Leo Tolstoy (me reader TXT) 📗

When the judges had risen, the advocates, the jury, and the witnesses also rose, with the pleasant feeling that part of the business was finished, and began moving in different directions.

Nekhlúdoff went into the jury’s room, and sat down by the window.

“Yes, this was Katúsha.”

The relations between Nekhlúdoff and Katúsha had been the following:⁠—

Nekhlúdoff first saw Katúsha when he was a student in his third year at the University, and was preparing an essay on land tenure during the summer vacation, which he passed with his aunts. Until then he had always lived, in summer, with his mother and sister on his mother’s large estate near Moscow. But that year his sister had married, and his mother had gone abroad to a watering-place, and he, having his essay to write, resolved to spend the summer with his aunts. It was very quiet in their secluded estate and there was nothing to distract his mind; his aunts loved their nephew and heir very tenderly, and he, too, was fond of them and of their simple, old-fashioned life.

During that summer on his aunts’ estate, Nekhlúdoff passed through that blissful state of existence when a young man for the first time, without guidance from anyone outside, realises all the beauty and significance of life, and the importance of the task allotted in it to man; when he grasps the possibility of unlimited advance towards perfection for one’s self and for all the world, and gives himself to this task, not only hopefully, but with full conviction of attaining to the perfection he imagines. In that year, while still at the University, he had read Spencer’s Social Statics, and Spencer’s views on landholding especially impressed him, as he himself was heir to large estates. His father had not been rich, but his mother had received 10,000 acres of land for her dowry. At that time he fully realised all the cruelty and injustice of private property in land, and being one of those to whom a sacrifice to the demands of conscience gives the highest spiritual enjoyment, he decided not to retain property rights, but to give up to the peasant labourers the land he had inherited from his father. It was on this land question he wrote his essay.

He arranged his life on his aunts’ estate in the following manner. He got up very early, sometimes at three o’clock, and before sunrise went through the morning mists to bathe in the river, under the hill. He returned while the dew still lay on the grass and the flowers. Sometimes, having finished his coffee, he sat down with his books of reference and his papers to write his essay, but very often, instead of reading or writing, he left home again, and wandered through the fields and the woods. Before dinner he lay down and slept somewhere in the garden. At dinner he amused and entertained his aunts with his bright spirits, then he rode on horseback or went for a row on the river, and in the evening he again worked at his essay, or sat reading or playing patience with his aunts.

His joy in life was so great that it agitated him, and kept him awake many a night, especially when it was moonlight, so that instead of sleeping he wandered about in the garden till dawn, alone with his dreams and fancies.

And so, peacefully and happily, he lived through the first month of his stay with his aunts, taking no particular notice of their half-ward, half-servant, the black-eyed, quick-footed Katúsha. Then, at the age of nineteen, Nekhlúdoff, brought up under his mother’s wing, was still quite pure. If a woman figured in his dreams at all it was only as a wife. All the other women, who, according to his ideas he could not marry, were not women for him, but human beings.

But on Ascension Day that summer, a neighbour of his aunts’, and her family, consisting of two young daughters, a schoolboy, and a young artist of peasant origin who was staying with them, came to spend the day. After tea they all went to play in the meadow in front of the house, where the grass had already been mown. They played at the game of gorélki, and Katúsha joined them. Running about and changing partners several times, Nekhlúdoff caught Katúsha, and she became his partner. Up to this time he had liked Katúsha’s looks, but the possibility of any nearer relations with her had never entered his mind.

“Impossible to catch those two,” said the merry young artist, whose turn it was to catch, and who could run very fast with his short, muscular legs.

“You! And not catch us?” said Katúsha.

“One, two, three,” and the artist clapped his hands. Katúsha, hardly restraining her laughter, changed places with Nekhlúdoff, behind the artist’s back, and pressing his large hand with her little rough one, and rustling with her starched petticoat, ran to the left. Nekhlúdoff ran fast to the right, trying to escape from the artist, but when he looked round he saw the artist running after Katúsha, who kept well ahead, her firm young legs moving rapidly. There was a lilac bush in front of them, and Katúsha made a sign with her head to Nekhlúdoff to join her behind it, for if they once clasped hands again they were safe from their pursuer, that being a rule of the game. He understood the sign, and ran behind the bush, but he did not know that there was a small ditch overgrown with nettles there. He stumbled and fell into the nettles, already wet with dew, stinging his bands, but rose immediately, laughing at his mishap.

Katúsha, with her eyes black as sloes, her face radiant with joy, was flying towards him, and they caught hold of each other’s hands.

“Got stung, I daresay?” she said, arranging her hair with her free hand, breathing fast and looking straight up at him with a