Resurrection by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

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