Resurrection - Leo Tolstoy (me reader TXT) 📗

could lay hands on at the public-house. The aunt kept a little laundry, and managed to support herself, her children, and her wretched husband. She offered Katúsha the place of an assistant laundress; but seeing what a life of misery and hardship her aunt’s assistants led, Katúsha hesitated, and applied to a registry office for a place. One was found for her with a lady who lived with her two sons, pupils at a public day school. A week after Katúsha had entered the house the elder, a big fellow with moustaches, threw up his studies and made love to her, continually following her about. His mother laid all the blame on Katúsha, and gave her notice.

It so happened that, after many fruitless attempts to find a situation, Katúsha again went to the registry office, and there met a woman with bracelets on her bare, plump arms and rings on most of her fingers. Hearing that Katúsha was badly in want of a place, the woman gave her her address, and invited her to come to her house. Katúsha went. The woman received her very kindly, set cake and sweet wine before her, then wrote a note and gave it to a servant to take to somebody. In the evening a tall man, with long, grey hair and a white beard, entered the room, and sat down at once near Katúsha, smiling and gazing at her with glistening eyes. He began joking with her. The hostess called him away into the next room, and Katúsha heard her say, “A fresh one from the country,” Then the hostess called Katúsha aside and told her that the man was an author, and that he had a great deal of money, and that if he liked her he would not grudge her anything. He did like her, and gave her twenty-five roubles, promising to see her often. The twenty-five roubles soon went; some she paid to her aunt for board and lodging; the rest was spent on a hat, ribbons, and suchlike. A few days later the author sent for her, and she went. He gave her another twenty-five roubles, and offered her a separate lodging.

Next door to the lodging rented for her by the author there lived a jolly young shopman, with whom Katúsha soon fell in love. She told the author, and moved to a little lodging of her own. The shopman, who promised to marry her, went to Níjni on business without mentioning it to her, having evidently thrown her up, and Katúsha remained alone. She meant to continue living in the lodging by herself, but was informed by the police that in this case she would have to get a red (prostitute’s) passport and be subjected to medical examinations. She returned to her aunt. Seeing her fine dress, her hat, and mantle, her aunt no longer offered her laundry work. As she understood things, her niece had risen above that sort of thing. The question as to whether she was to become a laundress or not did not occur to Katúsha, either. She looked with pity at the thin, hard-worked laundresses, some already in consumption, who stood washing or ironing with their thin arms in the fearfully hot front room, which was always full of soapy steam and draughts from the windows, and thought with horror that she might have shared the same fate. It was just at this time, while Katúsha was in very narrow straits, no “protector” appearing upon the scene, that a procuress found her out.

Katúsha had begun to smoke some time before, and since the young shopman had thrown her up she was getting more and more into the habit of drinking. It was not so much the flavour of wine that tempted her as the fact that it gave her a chance of forgetting the misery she suffered, making her feel more unrestrained and more confident of her own worth, which she was not when quite sober; without wine she felt sad and ashamed. The procuress brought all sorts of dainties, to which she treated the aunt, and also wine, and while Katúsha drank she offered to place her in one of the largest establishments in the city, explaining all the advantages and benefits of the situation. Katúsha had the choice before her of either going into service to be humiliated, probably annoyed by the attentions of the men and occasional secret sexual connection, or accepting an easy, secure position sanctioned by law, and open, well-paid, regular sexual connection⁠—and she chose the latter. Besides, it seemed to her as though, in this way, she could revenge herself on her seducer and the shopman and all those who had injured her. One of the things that tempted her, and was the cause of her decision, was the procuress telling her she might order her own dresses⁠—velvet, silk, satin, low-necked ball dresses, anything she liked. A mental picture of herself in a bright yellow silk trimmed with black velvet with low neck and short sleeves conquered her, and she gave up her passport. On the same evening the procuress took an isvóstchik and drove her to the notorious house kept by Carolina Albértovna Kitáeva.

From that day a life of chronic sin against human and divine laws commenced for Katúsha Máslova, a life which is led by hundreds of thousands of women, and which is not merely tolerated but sanctioned by the Government, anxious for the welfare of its subjects; a life which for nine women out of ten ends in painful disease, premature decrepitude, and death.

Heavy sleep until late in the afternoon followed the orgies of the night. Between three and four o’clock came the weary getting up from a dirty bed, soda water, coffee, listless pacing up and down the room in bedgowns and dressing-jackets, lazy gazing out of the windows from behind the drawn curtains, indolent disputes with one another; then washing, perfuming and annointing of the body and hair, trying on