Resurrection - Leo Tolstoy (me reader TXT) 📗

had a baby every year, and, as often happens among the village people, each one of these undesired babies, after it had been carefully baptised, was neglected by its mother, whom it hindered at her work, and left to starve. Five children had died in this way. They had all been baptised and then not sufficiently fed, and just left to die. The sixth baby, whose father was a gipsy tramp, would have shared the same fate, had it not so happened that one of the maiden ladies came into the farmyard to scold the dairymaids for sending up cream that smelt of the cow. The young woman was lying in the cowshed with a fine, healthy, newborn baby. The old maiden lady scolded the maids again for allowing the woman (who had just been confined) to lie in the cowshed, and was about to go away, but seeing the baby her heart was touched, and she offered to stand godmother to the little girl, and pity for her little goddaughter induced her to give milk and a little money to the mother, so that she should feed the baby; and the little girl lived. The old ladies spoke of her as “the saved one.” When the child was three years old, her mother fell ill and died, and the maiden ladies took the child from her old grandmother, to whom she was nothing but a burden.

The little black-eyed maiden grew to be extremely pretty, and so full of spirits that the ladies found her very entertaining.

The younger of the ladies, Sophia2 Ivánovna, who had stood godmother to the girl, had the kinder heart of the two sisters; Maria Ivánovna, the elder, was rather hard. Sophia Ivánovna dressed the little girl in nice clothes, and taught her to read and write, meaning to educate her like a lady. Maria Ivánovna thought the child should be brought up to work, and trained her to be a good servant. She was exacting; she punished, and, when in a bad temper, even struck the little girl. Growing up under these two different influences, the girl turned out half servant, half young lady. They called her Katúsha, which sounds less refined than Kátinka, but is not quite so common as Kátka. She used to sew, tidy up the rooms, polish the metal cases of the icons and do other light work, and sometimes she sat and read to the ladies.

Though she had more than one offer, she would not marry. She felt that life as the wife of any of the working men who were courting her would be too hard; spoilt as she was by a life of ease.

She lived in this manner till she was sixteen, when the nephew of the old ladies, a rich young prince, and a university student, came to stay with his aunts, and Katúsha, not daring to acknowledge it even to herself, fell in love with him.

Then two years later this same nephew stayed four days with his aunts before proceeding to join his regiment, and the night before he left he seduced Katúsha, and, after giving her a one hundred rouble note, went away. Five months later she knew for certain that she was to be a mother. After that everything seemed repugnant to her, her only thought being how to escape from the shame that awaited her. She began not only to serve the ladies in a halfhearted and negligent way, but once, without knowing how it happened, was very rude to them, and gave them notice, a thing she repented of later, and the ladies let her go, noticing something wrong and very dissatisfied with her. Then she got a housemaid’s place in a police-officer’s house, but stayed there only three months, for the police officer, a man of fifty, began to torment her, and once, when he was in a specially enterprising mood, she fired up, called him “a fool and old devil,” and gave him such a knock in the chest that he fell. She was turned out for her rudeness. It was useless to look for another situation, for the time of her confinement was drawing near, so she went to the house of a village midwife, who also sold wine. The confinement was easy; but the midwife, who had a case of fever in the village, infected Katúsha, and her baby boy had to be sent to the foundlings’ hospital, where, according to the words of the old woman who took him there, he at once died. When Katúsha went to the midwife she had one hundred and twenty-seven roubles in all, twenty-seven which she had earned and one hundred given her by her seducer. When she left she had but six roubles; she did not know how to keep money, but spent it on herself, and gave to all who asked. The midwife took forty roubles for two months’ board and attendance, twenty-five went to get the baby into the foundlings’ hospital, and forty the midwife borrowed to buy a cow with. Twenty roubles went just for clothes and dainties. Having nothing left to live on, Katúsha had to look out for a place again, and found one in the house of a forester. The forester was a married man, but he, too, began to beset her from the first day. He disgusted her, and she tried to avoid him. But he, more experienced and cunning, besides being her master, who could send her wherever he liked, managed to violate her. His wife found it out, and, catching Katúsha and her husband in a room all by themselves, began beating her. Katúsha defended herself, and they had a fight, and Katúsha got turned out of the house without being paid her wages.

Then Katúsha went to live with her aunt in town. The aunt’s husband, a bookbinder, had once been comfortably off, but had lost all his customers, and had taken to drink, and spent all he