Resurrection
from dying out.
All of them were not only kind and attentive to Nekhludoff, but
evidently pleased to see him, as a new and interesting acquaintance. The
General, who came in to dinner in uniform and with a white cross round
his neck, greeted Nekhludoff as a friend, and asked the visitors to
the side table to take a glass of vodka and something to whet their
appetites. The General asked Nekhludoff what he had been doing since
he left that morning, and Nekhludoff told him he had been to the
post-office and received the news of the mitigation of that person’s
sentence that he had spoken of in the morning, and again asked for a
permission to visit the prison.
The General, apparently displeased that business should be mentioned at
dinner, frowned and said nothing.
“Have a glass of vodka,” he said, addressing the Englishman, who had
just come up to the table. The Englishman drank a glass, and said he had
been to see the cathedral and the factory, but would like to visit the
great transportation prison.
“Oh, that will just fit in,” said the General to Nekhludoff. “You will
be able to go together. Give them a pass,” he added, turning to his
aide-de-camp.
“When would you like to go?” Nekhludoff asked.
“I prefer visiting the prisons in the evening,” the Englishman answered.
“All are indoors and there is no preparation; you find them all as they
are.”
“Ah, he would like to see it in all its glory! Let him do so. I have
written about it and no attention has been paid to it. Let him find out
from foreign publications,” the General said, and went up to the dinner
table, where the mistress of the house was showing the visitors their
places. Nekhludoff sat between his hostess and the Englishman. In front
of him sat the General’s daughter and the ex-director of the Government
department in Petersburg. The conversation at dinner was carried on by
fits and starts, now it was India that the Englishman talked about, now
the Tonkin expedition that the General strongly disapproved of, now the
universal bribery and corruption in Siberia. All these topics did not
interest Nekhludoff much.
But after dinner, over their coffee, Nekhludoff and the Englishman began
a very interesting conversation about Gladstone, and Nekhludoff thought
he had said many clever things which were noticed by his interlocutor.
And Nekhludoff felt it more and more pleasant to be sipping his coffee
seated in an easy-chair among amiable, well-bred people. And when at
the Englishman’s request the hostess went up to the piano with the
ex-director of the Government department, and they began to play in
well-practised style Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Nekhludoff fell into
a mental state of perfect self-satisfaction to which he had long been
a stranger, as though he had only just found out what a good fellow he
was.
The grand piano was a splendid instrument, the symphony was well
performed. At least, so it seemed to Nekhludoff, who knew and liked that
symphony. Listening to the beautiful andante, he felt a tickling in his
nose, he was so touched by his many virtues.
Nekhludoff thanked his hostess for the enjoyment that he had been
deprived of for so long, and was about to say goodbye and go when the
daughter of the house came up to him with a determined look and said,
with a blush, “You asked about my children. Would you like to see them?”
“She thinks that everybody wants to see her children,” said her mother,
smiling at her daughter’s winning tactlessness. “The Prince is not at
all interested.”
“On the contrary, I am very much interested,” said Nekhludoff, touched
by this overflowing, happy mother-love. “Please let me see them.”
“She’s taking the Prince to see her babies,” the General shouted,
laughing from the card-table, where he sat with his son-in-law, the mine
owner and the aide-de-camp. “Go, go, pay your tribute.”
The young woman, visibly excited by the thought that judgment was about
to be passed on her children, went quickly towards the inner apartments,
followed by Nekhludoff. In the third, a lofty room, papered with white
and lit up by a shaded lamp, stood two small cots, and a nurse with a
white cape on her shoulders sat between the cots. She had a kindly, true
Siberian face, with its high cheek-bones.
The nurse rose and bowed. The mother stooped over the first cot, in
which a two-year-old little girl lay peacefully sleeping with her little
mouth open and her long, curly hair tumbled over the pillow.
“This is Katie,” said the mother, straightening the white and blue
crochet coverlet, from under which a little white foot pushed itself
languidly out.
“Is she not pretty? She’s only two years old, you know.”
“Lovely.”
“And this is Vasiuk, as ‘grandpapa’ calls him. Quite a different type. A
Siberian, is he not?”
“A splendid boy,” said Nekhludoff, as he looked at the little fatty
lying asleep on his stomach.
“Yes,” said the mother, with a smile full of meaning.
Nekhludoff recalled to his mind chains, shaved heads, fighting
debauchery, the dying Kryltzoff, Katusha and the whole of her past, and
he began to feel envious and to wish for what he saw here, which now
seemed to him pure and refined happiness.
After having repeatedly expressed his admiration of the children,
thereby at least partially satisfying their mother, who eagerly drank
in this praise, he followed her back to the drawing-room, where the
Englishman was waiting for him to go and visit the prison, as they had
arranged. Having taken leave of their hosts, the old and the young ones,
the Englishman and Nekhludoff went out into the porch of the General’s
house.
The weather had changed. It was snowing, and the snow fell densely in
large flakes, and already covered the road, the roof and the trees in
the garden, the steps of the porch, the roof of the trap and the back of
the horse.
The Englishman had a trap of his own, and Nekhludoff, having told the
coachman to drive to the prison, called his isvostchik and got in with
the heavy sense of having to fulfil an unpleasant duty, and followed
the Englishman over the soft snow, through which the wheels turned with
difficulty.
CHAPTER XXV.
MASLOVA’S DECISION.
The dismal prison house, with its sentinel and lamp burning under the
gateway, produced an even more dismal impression, with its long row of
lighted windows, than it had done in the morning, in spite of the white
covering that now lay over everything--the porch, the roof and the
walls.
The imposing inspector came up to the gate and read the pass that had
been given to Nekhludoff and the Englishman by the light of the lamp,
shrugged his fine shoulders in surprise, but, in obedience to the order,
asked the visitors to follow him in. He led them through the courtyard
and then in at a door to the right and up a staircase into the office.
He offered them a seat and asked what he could do for them, and when
he heard that Nekhludoff would like to see Maslova at once, he sent a
jailer to fetch her. Then he prepared himself to answer the questions
which the Englishman began to put to him, Nekhludoff acting as
interpreter.
“How many persons is the prison built to hold?” the Englishman asked.
“How many are confined in it? How many men? How many women? Children?
How many sentenced to the mines? How many exiles? How many sick
persons?”
Nekhludoff translated the Englishman’s and the inspector’s words without
paying any attention to their meaning, and felt an awkwardness he had
not in the least expected at the thought of the impending interview.
When, in the midst of a sentence he was translating for the Englishman,
he heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and the office door opened,
and, as had happened many times before, a jailer came in, followed by
Katusha, and he saw her with a kerchief tied round her head, and in a
prison jacket a heavy sensation came over him. “I wish to live, I want
a family, children, I want a human life.” These thoughts flashed through
his mind as she entered the room with rapid steps and blinking her eyes.
He rose and made a few steps to meet her, and her face appeared hard
and unpleasant to him. It was again as it had been at the time when
she reproached him. She flushed and turned pale, her fingers nervously
twisting a corner of her jacket. She looked up at him, then cast down
her eyes.
“You know that a mitigation has come?”
“Yes, the jailer told me.”
“So that as soon as the original document arrives you may come away and
settle where you like. We shall consider--”
She interrupted him hurriedly. “What have I to consider? Where Valdemar
Simonson goes, there I shall follow.” In spite of the excitement she
was in she raised her eyes to Nekhludoff’s and pronounced these words
quickly and distinctly, as if she had prepared what she had to say.
“Indeed!”
“Well, Dmitri Ivanovitch, you see he wishes me to live with him--” and
she stopped, quite frightened, and corrected herself. “He wishes me to
be near him. What more can I desire? I must look upon it as happiness.
What else is there for me--”
“One of two things,” thought he. “Either she loves Simonson and does not
in the least require the sacrifice I imagined I was bringing her, or she
still loves me and refuses me for my own sake, and is burning her ships
by uniting her fate with Simonson.” And Nekhludoff felt ashamed and knew
that he was blushing.
“And you yourself, do you love him?” he asked.
“Loving or not loving, what does it matter? I have given up all that.
And then Valdemar Simonson is quite an exceptional man.”
“Yes, of course,” Nekhludoff began. “He is a splendid man, and I
think--”
But she again interrupted him, as if afraid that he might say too much
or that she should not say all. “No, Dmitri Ivanovitch, you must forgive
me if I am not doing what you wish,” and she looked at him with those
unfathomable, squinting eyes of hers. “Yes, it evidently must be so. You
must live, too.”
She said just what he had been telling himself a few moments before, but
he no longer thought so now and felt very differently. He was not only
ashamed, but felt sorry to lose all he was losing with her. “I did not
expect this,” he said.
“Why should you live here and suffer? You have suffered enough.”
“I have not suffered. It was good for me, and I should like to go on
serving you if I could.”
“We do not want anything,” she said, and looked at him.
“You have done so much for me as it is. If it had not been for you--”
She wished to say more, but her voice trembled.
“You certainly have no reason to thank me,” Nekhludoff said.
“Where is the use of our reckoning? God will make up our accounts,” she
said, and her black eyes began to glisten with the tears that filled
them.
“What a good woman you are,” he said.
“I good?” she said through her tears, and a pathetic smile lit up her
face.
“Are you ready?” the Englishman asked.
“Directly,” replied Nekhludoff and asked her about Kryltzoff.
She got over her emotion and quietly told him all she knew. Kryltzoff
was very weak and had been sent into the infirmary. Mary Pavlovna was
very anxious, and had asked to be allowed to go to the infirmary as a
nurse, but could not get the permission.
“Am I to go?” she asked, noticing that the Englishman was waiting.
“I will not say good-bye; I shall see you again,” said Nekhludoff,
holding out his hand.
“Forgive me,” she said so low that he could hardly hear her. Their eyes
met, and Nekhludoff knew by the strange look of her squinting eyes and
the pathetic smile with which she said not “Good-bye” but “Forgive
me,” that of the two reasons that might have led to her resolution,
the second was the real one. She loved him, and thought that by uniting
herself to him she would be spoiling his life. By going with Simonson