BOOK THREE

CHAPTER I

THE gang of prisoners to which Maslova belonged had gone about three thousand miles. She and the other prisoners condemned for criminal offences had travelled by rail and steamboat as far as the town of Perm. It was only here that Nekhlyudov succeeded in obtaining permission for her to travel with the political prisoners, as Vera Bogodukhovskaya, who was among the latter, had advised.

The journey to Perm had been very trying to Maslova, both physically and morally: physically, because of the overcrowding, the dirt, and the disgusting vermin which gave her no peace; morally, because of the equally disgusting men. The men, like the vermin, though they changed at each halting-place, were everywhere alike importunate. They swarmed round her, giving her no rest. Among the women prisoners and the men prisoners, jailers, and convoy soldiers, the habit of a kind of cynical debauchery was so firmly established that unless a female prisoner was willing to utilize her womanhood she had to be constantly on her guard. To be continually in a state of fear and strife was very trying, and Maslova was specially exposed to attacks, her appearance being attractive and her past known to everyone. The resolute resistance with which she now met the importunities of all the men seemed offensive to them, and awakened another feeling, that of ill-will, towards her. But her position was made a little easier by her intimacy with Theodosia and with Taras, who, having heard of the molestations his wife was subject to, had been arrested at his own desire in Nizhny Novgorod in order to be able to protect her, and was now travelling with the gang as a prisoner.

Maslova’s position became much more bearable in every way when she was allowed to join the political prisoners. Besides that political prisoners were provided with better accommodation and better food, and were treated less rudely, Maslova’s condition was much improved by her being no longer molested by the men, and being able to live without being reminded of that past which she was so anxious to forget. But the chief advantage of the change lay in the fact that she made the acquaintance of several persons who exercised a decided and most beneficial influence on her character.

Maslova was allowed to be with the political prisoners at all the halting-places; but, being a strong and healthy woman, she was obliged to march with the criminal convicts. In this way she walked all the way from Tomsk. Two political prisoners also marched with the gang: Mary Pavlovna Shchetinina, the beautiful girl with the hazel eyes who had attracted Nekhlyudov’s attention when he visited Bogodukhovskaya in prison, and one Simonson, the dishevelled, dark young fellow with deep-set eyes whom Nekhlyudov had also noticed during the same visit, and who was now on his way to exile in the Yakutsk district. Mary Pavlovna was walking because she had given up her place on the cart to a woman criminal who was pregnant; and Simonson because he did not think it right to avail himself of a class privilege. These three used to start with the criminals early in the morning, before the rest of the political prisoners, who came on in the carts later; and this was the arrangement followed on the last march before reaching a certain big town, where a fresh convoy officer took charge of the gang.

It was early on a wet September morning. A cold wind blew in sudden gusts, and rain and snow kept falling by turns. The whole gang of prisoners (some four hundred men and fifty women) was already assembled in the court of the halting-place. Some of them were crowding round the chief of the convoy, who was giving to specially appointed prisoners money for two days’ keep to distribute among the rest; while others were purchasing food from women hawkers who had been let into the courtyard. One could hear the voices of the prisoners counting their money and making their purchases, and the shrill voices of the women selling the food.

Katusha and Mary Pavlovna, both wearing high boots and short fur cloaks and with shawls tied round their heads, came out of the building into the courtyard, where the saleswomen sat sheltered from the wind by the northern wall of the yard and vied with one another in offering their goods: hot meat-pies, fish, vermicelli, buckwheat porridge, liver, beef, eggs, milk—one had even a roast pig to offer.

Simonson, in his rubber jacket and wearing rubber overshoes fastened with string over his worsted stockings (he was a vegetarian and did not use the skins of slaughtered animals), was also in the courtyard waiting for the gang to start. He stood by the porch jotting down in his notebook a thought that had occurred to him. This was what he wrote: ‘If a bacterium observed and examined a human nail, it would pronounce it inorganic matter; and thus we, with reference to the globe, examine its crust and pronounce it inorganic. This is incorrect.’

Having bought eggs, bread, fish, and rusks, Maslova was putting them into her bag while Mary Pavlovna was paying the women, when a movement occurred among the convicts. All became silent, and began taking their places. The officer came out and gave the final orders before starting.

Everything was done as usual. The prisoners were counted, and the chains on their legs examined, and those who were to march in couples were linked together with manacles. But suddenly the angry authoritative voice of the officer shouting something was heard, and the sound of a blow as well as the crying of a child. All were silent for a moment, and then came a hollow murmur from the crowd. Maslova and Mary Pavlovna went towards the spot whence the noise came.

CHAPTER II

THIS is what Mary Pavlovna and Katusha saw when they reached the scene. The officer, a sturdy fellow with fair moustaches, frowning, and uttering words of coarse abuse, stood rubbing the palm of his right hand, which he had hurt by striking a prisoner in the face. Before him stood a tall thin convict with half his head shaven, and dressed in a cloak too short for him and trousers much too short, wiping his bleeding face with one hand and holding a shrieking little girl wrapped in a shawl with the other.

‘I’ll give it you [foul abuse]. I’ll teach you to argue [more abuse]. You’re to give her to the women!’ shouted the officer. ‘Now then, on with them!’

The convict (who was exiled by his village commune) had been carrying his little daughter all the way from Tomsk, where his wife had died of typhus. The officer had now ordered him to be manacled. The exile’s explanations that he could not carry the child if he were manacled irritated the officer, who happened to be in a bad temper, and he gave the troublesome prisoner a beating for not obeying at once.*

A convoy soldier stood near the injured convict, together with a black-bearded prisoner with manacles on one hand, who looked gloomily from under his brows, now at the officer, now at the injured prisoner with the little girl. The officer repeated his order to the soldier to take away the girl. The murmur among the prisoners grew louder.

‘All the way from Tomsk they were not put on’, came a hoarse voice from someone in the rear. ‘It’s a child, and not a puppy.’

‘What’s he to do with the lassie? That’s not the law’, said someone else.

‘Who’s that?’ shouted the officer, as if he had been stung, and rushed into the crowd. ‘I’ll teach you the law. Who spoke? You? You?’

‘Everybody says so, because——’, said a short, broad-faced prisoner.

Before he had finished speaking the officer hit him in the face with both hands. ‘Mutiny is it? I’ll show you what mutiny means. I’ll have you all shot like dogs, and the authorities will be only too thankful. Take the girl.’

The crowd was silent. One convoy soldier pulled away the girl, who was screaming desperately, while another manacled the prisoner, now submissively holding out his hand.

‘Take her to the women’, shouted the officer, arranging his sword-belt.

The little girl, whose face had turned quite red, was trying to disengage her arms from under the shawl and screamed unceasingly. Mary Pavlovna stepped out from among the crowd and came up to the officer.

‘Will you allow me to carry the little girl?’ she said.

‘Who are you?’ asked the officer.

‘A political prisoner.’

Mary Pavlovna’s handsome face with the beautiful prominent eyes (he had noticed her before, when the prisoners were given into his charge) evidently produced an effect on the officer. He looked at her in silence as if considering, then said: ‘I don’t mind; carry her if you like. It is easy for you to show pity! But if he escaped, who would answer for it?’

‘How could he run away with the child in his arms?’ said Mary Pavlovna.

‘I have no time to talk with you. Take her if you like.’

‘Shall I give her up?’ asked the soldier.

‘Yes, give her up.’

‘Come to me’, said Mary Pavlovna, trying to coax the child to come to her.

But the child in the soldier’s arms stretched herself towards her father and continued to scream, and would not go to Mary Pavlovna.

‘Wait a bit, Mary Pavlovna’, said Maslova, getting a rusk out of her bag, ‘she will come to me.’

The little girl knew Maslova, and when she saw her face and the rusk she let herself be taken by her.

All became quiet. The gates were opened, and the gang went outside and formed in rows. The convoy counted the prisoners over again. The sacks were packed on the carts, and the weak prisoners seated on the top. Maslova, with the child in her arms, took her place next to Theodosia among the women. Simonson, who had all the time been watching what was going on, stepped with long determined strides up to the officer—who having given his orders was just getting into a trap—and said:

‘You have behaved badly.’

‘Get to your place; it is no business of yours.’

‘It is my business to tell you that you have behaved badly, and I have told you’, said Simonson, looking intently into the officer’s face from under his bushy eyebrows.

‘Ready? March!’ the officer called out, paying no heed to Simonson; and, taking hold of his driver’s shoulder, he got into the trap. The gang started, spreading out as it came on to the muddy high-road with ditches on each side, which led through a dense forest.

CHAPTER III

IN spite of their hard conditions, life among the political prisoners seemed very good to Katusha after the six years of depraved, luxurious, and effeminate life she had led in town, and after the several months’ imprisonment with criminal prisoners. The fifteen to twenty miles covered each day, with good food and one day’s rest after two days’ marching, strengthened her physically; and the fellowship with her new companions opened out a life full of interests such as she had never dreamt of. People so wonderful (so she expressed it) as those whom she was now with, she had not only never met but could not even have imagined.

‘There now! And I cried when I was sentenced’, she said. ‘Why, I must thank God for it all the days of my life. I have learnt to know what I never should have found out otherwise.’

She understood easily and without effort the motives that guided these people, and being of the people herself fully sympathized with them. She understood that they were for the people and against the upper classes, and, though themselves belonging to the upper classes, had sacrificed their privileges, their liberty, and their lives for the people. This especially made her value and admire them.

She was delighted with all her new companions, but particularly with Mary Pavlovna; whom she was not only delighted with, but loved with a peculiar, respectful, and devoted love. She was struck by the fact that this beautiful girl, who could speak three languages, the daughter of a rich general, gave away all that her rich brother sent her, lived like the simplest working girl, and dressed not only simply but poorly, paying no heed to her appearance. This trait, a complete absence of coquetry, was particularly surprising and therefore attractive to Maslova.

Maslova could see that Mary Pavlovna knew, and was even pleased to know, that she was beautiful, yet the effect her appearance had on men was not at all pleasing to her: she was even afraid of it, and had an absolute disgust and fear of all falling in love. Her men companions knew this, and never fell in love with her—or, at any rate, concealed it if they did—and behaved to her as they would to a man; but with strangers, who often molested her, the great physical strength on which she prided herself stood her in good stead.

‘It happened once’, she told Katusha, laughing, ‘that a man followed me in the street and would not leave me on any account. At last I gave him such a shaking that he was frightened and ran away!’

She became a revolutionist, as she said, because she had felt a dislike for the life of the well-to-do from childhood up, and loved the life of common people. She was always being scolded for spending her time in the servants’ hall, in the kitchen or the stables, instead of in the drawing-room.

‘But I found it amusing to be with the cooks and coachmen, and very dull with the ladies and gentlemen’, she said. ‘Then, when I came to understand things, I saw that our life was altogether wrong. I had no mother and was not fond of my father, so I left home when I was 19, and went to work as a factory-hand with a girl-friend.’

After she left the factory she lived in a village, then returned to town and lived in a lodging where they had a secret printing press. There she was arrested, and she was sentenced to hard labour. She said nothing about it herself, but Katusha heard from others that Mary Pavlovna was sentenced because, after the lodging was searched by the police and one of the revolutionists fired a shot in the dark, she pleaded guilty to the shot.

As soon as she had learned to know Mary Pavlovna, Katusha noticed that, whatever conditions she found herself in, Mary Pavlovna never thought of herself, but was always anxious to serve: to help someone, in things small or great. One of her present companions, Novodvorov, said of her that she devoted herself to the sport of philanthropy. And this was true. The interest of her whole life lay in searching for opportunities to serve others just as the sportsman searches for game. And the sport had become the habit, the business, of her life, and she did it all so naturally that those who knew her were no longer grateful, but simply expected it of her.

When Maslova first came among them, Mary Pavlovna felt repelled and disgusted. Katusha noticed this; but she also noticed that, having made an effort to overcome these feelings, Mary Pavlovna became particularly tender and kind to her. The tenderness and kindness of so uncommon a being touched Maslova so much that she gave her whole heart to her; and, unconsciously accepting her views, could not help imitating her in everything. And Mary Pavlovna was in her turn moved by this devoted love of Katusha’s, and learned to reciprocate it. They were also united by the repulsion both felt from sexual love. The one loathed that love, having experienced all its horrors; the other, never having experienced it, looked on it as something incomprehensible, and at the same time as something repugnant and offensive to human dignity.

CHAPTER IV

MARY PAVLOVNA’S influence was one of the influences to which Maslova submitted herself. It arose from the fact that Maslova loved Mary Pavlovna. Another influence was that of Simonson. This influence arose from the fact that Simonson loved Maslova.

All men live and act partly according to their own, partly according to other people’s ideas. The extent to which they do the one or the other is one of the chief things that differentiate men. To some, thinking is a kind of mental game: they treat their reason, in most cases, as if it were a driving-wheel without a connecting strap, and are guided in their actions by other people’s ideas, by custom, by tradition, or by law. Some consider their own ideas the chief motive power of all their actions, listen to the dictates of their own reason and submit to it, only accepting other people’s opinions occasionally and after weighing them critically. Simonson was such a man; he settled and verified everything according to his own reason, and acted on the decisions thus arrived at.

Having come to the conclusion, when a schoolboy, that his father’s income as paymaster in a Government office was dishonestly earned, he told his father that it ought to be given to the people. When his father instead of listening to him gave him a scolding, he left the house and would no longer avail himself of his father’s means. Having come to the conclusion that all existing evils resulted from the people’s ignorance, he joined up with the narodniki* as soon as he left the University, took a post as a village schoolmaster, and boldly taught and explained to his pupils and to the peasants what he considered to be just, and openly repudiated what he considered unjust.

He was arrested and tried.

During his trial he came to the conclusion that his judges had no right to judge him, and told them so. When the judges paid no heed to his words but went on with the trial, he decided not to answer them, and remained resolutely silent when they questioned him.

He was exiled to the Government of Archangel. There he formulated a religious teaching which governed all his activity. This teaching was founded on the theory that everything in the universe lives, that nothing is dead, and that all the objects we consider lifeless, or inorganic, are but parts of an enormous organic body which we cannot compass, and that the task of man, as part of that huge organism, is to sustain its life and that of all its living parts. And therefore he considered it a crime to destroy life, and was against wars, capital punishment, and every kind of killing, not only of human beings but also of animals. Concerning marriage, too, he had his own theory: he thought that procreation was a lower function of man, the higher function being to serve already existing lives. He found support for this theory in the fact that there exist phagocytes in the blood. Celibates, according to his opinion, were like phagocytes, whose mission it is to help the weak and sick parts of the organism. From the moment he came to this conclusion he lived accordingly, though in his youth he had been dissipated; and he considered himself, and Mary Pavlovna as well, to be human phagocytes.

His love for Katusha did not infringe this conception, because he loved her platonically, and such love, he considered, could not hinder his activity as a phagocyte, but, on the contrary, acted as an inspiration.

He decided in his own way not only moral questions but also the most practical ones. He had a theory of his own about all practical matters: had rules respecting how many hours to work, how many to rest, as to the kind of food to eat, how best to dress, and to heat and light houses.

With all this Simonson was very shy and modest; but, when he had once made up his mind, nothing could shake him.

And this man, through his love for her, had a decided influence on Maslova. With a woman’s instinct Maslova very soon found out that he loved her, and the fact that she could awaken love in such a man raised her in her own esteem. Nekhlyudov offered to marry her from magnanimity and because of what had happened in the past, but Simonson loved her as she was now, and simply because he loved her. And she felt that Simonson considered her to be an exceptional woman, having peculiarly high moral qualities. She was not quite sure what the qualities were he attributed to her, but in order to be on the safe side and that he should not be disappointed in her, she tried with all her might to awaken in herself all the highest qualities she could conceive, and to be as good as possible.

This had begun while they were still in prison, when, one general visiting day, she had noticed his kindly dark-blue eyes gazing fixedly at her from under his projecting brows. Even then she had noticed too that this was a peculiar man and that he was looking at her in a peculiar manner; and she had also noticed the striking combination of sternness, which the unruly hair and the frowning forehead gave to his appearance, with the childlike kindness and innocence of his look. She saw him again in Tomsk, where she joined the political prisoners. And though not a word had passed between them, the look they exchanged was an admission of remembrance and of their importance to each other. Even after that there were no serious conversations between them, but Maslova felt that when he spoke in her presence his words were addressed to her, and that he spoke for her sake, trying to express himself as clearly as possible. But it was when he started walking with the criminal prisoners that they grew specially near to one another.

CHAPTER V

UNTIL they left Perm, Nekhlyudov managed to see Katusha only twice—once in Nizhny Novgorod, before the prisoners were embarked on a barge on which they were caged in with wire netting, and again in Perm in the prison office. At both these interviews he found her reserved and unkind. His questions whether she was in want of anything and whether she was comfortable, she answered evasively and bashfully, and, as he thought, with the same feeling of hostile reproach which she had shown several times before. Her depressed state of mind—which was only the result of the molestations she was undergoing at the time from the men—tormented Nekhlyudov. He feared lest, influenced by the hard and degrading circumstances in which she was placed during the journey, she should again fall into that state of despair and discord with herself which formerly made her irritable with him, and which had caused her to drink and smoke to gain oblivion. But he was unable to help her in any way during this part of the journey, for he could never see her. It was only when she joined the political prisoners that he saw how unfounded his fears were, and at each interview he noticed that inner change he so strongly desired to see in her becoming more and more definite. The first time they met in Tomsk she was again just as she had been when leaving Moscow. She did not frown or become confused when she saw him, but met him joyfully and simply, thanking him for what he had done for her, especially for bringing her among the people with whom she now was.

After two months’ march with the gang the change that had taken place within her became apparent in her appearance. She grew sunburnt and thinner, and seemed older; wrinkles appeared on her temples and round her mouth. She had no ringlets on her forehead now, and her hair was covered by her kerchief. In the way it was arranged, as well as in her dress and manner, there was no trace of coquetry left. And this change which had taken place and was still unceasingly going on in her made Nekhlyudov very happy.

He felt for her something he had never experienced before. This feeling had nothing in common with his first poetic love for her, still less with the sensual love that had followed, or even with the satisfaction of a duty fulfilled (not unmixed with self-admiration) with which, after the trial, he decided to marry her. The present feeling was simply one of pity and tenderness.* He had felt it when he met her in prison for the first time, and again when, after conquering his repugnance, he forgave her the imagined intrigue with the medical assistant in the hospital (the injustice done her had since been discovered). It was the same feeling he now had, only with this difference: that whereas formerly it was momentary, now it became permanent. Whatever he thought of now, whatever he did, a feeling of pity and tenderness dwelt with him, and pity and tenderness not only for her but for everyone. This feeling seemed to have opened the floodgates of love which had found no outlet in Nekhlyudov’s soul, and the love now flowed out to everyone he met.

During the journey Nekhlyudov’s feelings were so stimulated that he could not help being attentive and considerate to everybody from the coachmen and the convoy soldiers to the prison inspectors and governors with whom he had to deal.

Now that Maslova was among the political prisoners Nekhlyudov naturally became acquainted with many of them; first in Ekaterinburg where they had a good deal of freedom and were kept all together in a large cell, and then on the road with the five men and four women to whose company she was transferred. Coming into contact in this way with political exiles caused Nekhlyudov to change his mind completely about them.

From the very beginning of the revolutionary movement in Russia, but especially since that 1st of March (O.S.) when Alexander II was murdered, Nekhlyudov had regarded the revolutionists with dislike and contempt. He was revolted by the cruelty and secrecy of the methods they employed in their struggles against the Government, especially by the cruelty of the murders they committed; he also disliked the air of self-importance which was a prominent characteristic of theirs. But having come to know them more intimately, and learned all they had suffered at the hands of the Government, he saw that they could not be other than they were.

Terrible and senseless as were the torments inflicted on the so-called criminal prisoners, there was at least some semblance of justice shown them before and after they were sentenced; but in the case of the political prisoners there was not even that semblance, as Nekhlyudov saw in the case of Shustova and of many of his new acquaintances. These people were dealt with like fish caught in a net; everything that gets into the net is pulled ashore, and then the big fish which are required are sorted out, and the little ones are left to perish unheeded on the shore. Having captured hundreds who were evidently guiltless, and who could not be dangerous, the Government kept them in prison for years, where they became consumptive, went out of their minds, or committed suicide; keeping them only because the officials had no inducement to set them free, but thought that safe in prison they might possibly be of use to elucidate some question at a judicial inquiry. The fate of these persons, often innocent even from the Government point of view, depended on the whim, leisure, or humour of some police officer, or spy, or public prosecutor, or magistrate, or governor, or minister. Some one of these officials feels dull, or inclined to make himself prominent, and orders a number of arrests, and imprisons or sets free, according to his own fancy or that of the higher authorities. And the higher official for like motives, or influenced by his relations to a minister, exiles men to the other side of the world, keeps them in solitary confinement, condemns them to Siberia, to hard labour, to death, or sets them free at the request of some lady.

They were dealt with as in war, and they naturally employed the same means as were used against them. And just as military men live in an atmosphere of public opinion that not only conceals from them the guilt of their actions but represents these actions as feats of heroism, so these political offenders were also constantly surrounded by an atmosphere of public opinion which made the cruel actions they committed in the face of danger and at the risk of liberty and life and all that is dear to men, seem not wicked but glorious. Nekhlyudov found in this the explanation of the surprising phenomenon that men of the mildest character who seemed incapable of witnessing the suffering of any living creature, much more of inflicting pain, should be quietly prepared to murder men; almost all of them considering murder lawful and just on certain occasions: as a means of self-defence, for the attainment of high aims, or for the general welfare. The importance the revolutionists attributed to their cause, and consequently to themselves, flowed naturally from the importance the Government attached to their actions, and the cruelty of the punishments it inflicted on them. They had to have a high opinion of themselves to be able to bear what they were made to suffer.

When Nekhlyudov came to know them better he became convinced that they were neither the downright villains that some imagined them to be, nor the complete heroes that others thought them, but quite ordinary people, among whom, as everywhere, there were some good, some bad, and some middling.

Some among them had turned revolutionists because they honestly considered it their duty to fight existing evils, but there were also some who chose this activity from selfish ambitious motives. The majority, however, were attracted to the revolutionary idea by the thirst for danger, for risk, and the enjoyment of playing with one’s life: feelings which, as Nekhlyudov knew from his own military experience, are quite common to the most ordinary people while they are young and full of energy. But they differed from ordinary people favourably in that their conception of morality was higher. They considered not only self-control, hard living, truthfulness, and disinterestedness as their duty, but held it their duty even to be ready to sacrifice everything, including life itself, for the common cause. Therefore the best of them stood on a moral level that is not often reached, while the worst were far below the ordinary level, many of them being untruthful and hypocritical and at the same time self-confident and proud. So that Nekhlyudov learned to respect some of his new acquaintances, and even to love them with all his heart, while to others he remained more antipathetic than indifferent.

CHAPTER VI

NEKHLYUDOV grew especially fond of Kriltsov, a consumptive young man condemned to hard labour, and belonging to the same party as Katusha. Nekhlyudov made his acquaintance in Ekaterinburg, and after that talked with him several times on the road. Once during the summer Nekhlyudov spent almost a whole day with him at a halting-station, and Kriltsov, having started talking, told him his story and explained how he had become a revolutionist. His story up to the time of his imprisonment was soon told. He lost his father, a rich landed proprietor in the south of Russia, when still a child. He was the only son, and his mother brought him up. He learnt easily both at school and at the university, and was first in the mathematical set of his year. He had the offer of a scholarship from the university to enable him to study abroad. But he delayed coming to a decision. He was in love, and had thoughts of marriage, and of taking part in the rural administration. He wanted to do everything, and could not decide which course to take. At this juncture some fellow-students at the university asked him for money for a popular cause. He knew that this cause was the revolutionary cause, a thing he was not interested in at that time, but he gave the money from a sense of comradeship and vanity, and lest it should be thought he was afraid. Those who received the money were caught, and a note was found which proved that the money had been given by Kriltsov. He was arrested, taken first to the police station, then imprisoned.

‘They were not specially strict in that prison’, Kriltsov went on (he was sitting on the high bed-shelf, his elbows on his knees, with sunken chest, the beautiful eyes with which he looked at Nekhlyudov glistening feverishly). ‘We managed to converse—in other ways besides tapping the walls—and we could walk about the corridors, share our provisions and our tobacco, and in the evenings we even sang in chorus. I had a fine voice. Yes; if it had not been for mother—she was terribly grieved—it would have been all right, even pleasant and interesting. There I made the acquaintance of the famous Petrov, who afterwards killed himself with a piece of glass in the fortress, and of others. But I was not yet a revolutionist. I also became acquainted with two neighbours in cells near mine. They had both been caught in the same affair, and arrested with Polish proclamations in their possession, and were tried for attempting to escape from the convoy on their way to the railway station. One was a Pole, Lozinsky, the other a Jew, Rozovsky. Yes. Well, this Rozovsky was quite a boy. He said he was 17, but he looked 15. Thin, small, active, with black sparkling eyes, and, like most Jews, very musical. His voice was still breaking, and yet he sang beautifully. Yes. I saw them both taken to be tried. They were taken in the morning. They returned in the evening, and said they were condemned to death. No one had expected it. Their case was so unimportant; they only tried to get away from the convoy and did not even wound anyone. And then it was so unnatural to execute such a child as Rozovsky. And we in prison all came to the conclusion that it was only done to frighten them, and would not be confirmed. At first we were excited, and then we comforted ourselves, and life went on as before. Yes. Well, one evening the watchman comes to my door and tells me mysteriously that the carpenters had come and were putting up the gallows. At first I did not understand. What’s that? What gallows? But the old watchman was so excited that I saw at once it was for our two. I wished to tap and communicate with my comrades, but was afraid those two would hear. The comrades were also silent. Evidently everybody knew. In the corridor and in the cells everything was as still as death all that evening. We did not tap the walls nor sing. At ten the watchman came again and announced that a hangman had arrived from Moscow. He said this and went away. I began calling him back. Suddenly I hear Rozovsky shouting to me across the corridor, “What’s the matter? Why do you call him?” I answered something about his bringing me some tobacco, but he seemed to guess, and asked me, “Why did we not sing tonight; why did we not tap the walls?” I do not remember what I said, but I stepped back so as not to speak to him. Yes; it was a terrible night. I listened to every sound all night. Suddenly, towards morning, I heard doors opening and somebody walking—many persons. I went up to the slot in my door. There was a lamp burning in the corridor. The first to pass was the inspector. He was a stout man, and usually seemed resolute and self-confident, but now he was ghastly pale, downcast, and seemed frightened; then came his assistant, gloomy, but resolute: and, behind all, the watchman. They passed my door and stopped at the next, and I heard the assistant calling out in a strange voice, “Lozinsky, get up, and put on clean linen!” Yes. Then I heard the creaking of the door. They entered his cell. Then I heard Lozinsky’s steps going to the opposite side of the corridor. I could only see the inspector. He stood quite pale, and buttoned and unbuttoned his coat, shrugging his shoulders. Yes. Then as if frightened of something he moved out of the way. It was Lozinsky, who passed him and came up to my door. A handsome young fellow he was, you know, of that nice Polish type: broad-shouldered, his head covered with fair, fine curly hair as with a cap, and with beautiful blue eyes. So blooming, so fresh, so healthy. He stopped in front of my slot, so that I could see the whole of his face. A dreadful, gaunt, livid face. “Kriltsov, have you any cigarettes?” I wished to pass him some, but the assistant hurriedly pulled out his cigarette case and passed it to him. He took one, the assistant struck a match; he lit the cigarette and began to smoke, and seemed to be thinking. Then, as if he had remembered something, he began to speak. “It is cruel and unjust. I have committed no crime. I––” I saw something quiver in his white young throat, from which I could not take my eyes, and he stopped. Yes. At that moment I heard Rozovsky shouting in his high-pitched Jewish voice. Lozinsky threw away the cigarette, and stepped from the door. And Rozovsky appeared at my slot. His childish face, with the limpid black eyes, was red and moist. He also had clean linen on. The trousers were too wide, and he kept pulling them up, and was trembling all over. He approached his pitiful face to my slot. “Kriltsov, it’s true that the doctor has prescribed cough mixture for me, is it not? I am not well. I’ll take some more of the mixture.” No one answered, and he looked inquiringly, now at me, now at the inspector. What he meant to say I never made out. Yes. Suddenly the assistant put on a stern expression, and called out, again in a kind of squeaking tone. “Now then, what jokes are these? Let us go.” Rozovsky seemed incapable of understanding what awaited him, and hurried, almost ran, in front of all along the corridor. But then he drew back, and I could hear his shrill voice and his cries. Then the tramping of feet and general hubbub. He was shrieking and sobbing. The sounds came fainter and fainter, and at last the door rattled, and all was quiet … Yes. They were hanged. Both throttled with a rope. A watchman, another one, saw it done, and told me that Lozinsky did not resist; but Rozovsky struggled for a long time, so that they had to pull him on to the scaffold and to force his head into the noose. Yes. This watchman was a rather stupid fellow. He said: “They told me, sir, that it would be frightful: but it was not at all frightful. When they were hanging they only shrugged their shoulders twice—like this”—he showed how the shoulders convulsively rose and fell—“then the hangman pulled a bit, so as to tighten the noose, and it was all up, and they never budged.”’

And Kriltsov repeated the watchman’s words, ‘Not at all frightful’, and tried to smile, but burst into sobs instead.

For a long time after that he remained silent, breathing heavily, and repressing the sobs that were choking him.

‘From that time I became a revolutionist. Yes’, he said when he was quieter, and he finished his story in a few words.

He belonged to the Narodovolstvo, and was even at the head of the ‘Disorganizing Group’ whose object was to terrorize the Government so that it should resign its power of its own accord. In connection with this object he travelled to Petersburg, to Kiev, to Odessa, and abroad, and was everywhere successful. A man in whom he had full confidence betrayed him. He was arrested, tried, and, after being kept in prison for two years, was condemned to death, but the sentence was mitigated to one of hard labour for life.

He fell into consumption while in prison, and in the conditions in which he was now placed he could scarcely live more than a few months. This he knew, but did not repent, saying that if he had another life he would use it in the same way, to destroy the conditions which made possible such things as he had witnessed.

This man’s story, and intimacy with him, explained much to Nekhlyudov that he had not understood before.

CHAPTER VII

ON the day when the convoy officer had the encounter about the child with the prisoners at the halting-station, Nekhlyudov, who had spent the night at the village inn, awoke late, and was some time writing letters to post at the next Government town; so that he left the inn later than usual and did not overtake the gang on the road as he had done on previous occasions, but reached the village where the next halting-station was when it was growing dusk.

Having dried himself at the inn, which was kept by an elderly woman with an extraordinarily fat white neck, he had his tea in a clean room, decorated with a great number of icons and pictures, and then hurried away to ask the officer for an interview with Katusha. At the last six halting-stations he could not get this permission from any of the officers. Though they had been changed several times, not one of them would allow Nekhlyudov inside the stations, so that he had not seen Katusha for more than a week. This strictness was occasioned by the fact that an important prison official was expected to pass that way. Now that this official had passed by without looking at the gang after all, Nekhlyudov hoped that the officer who had taken charge of the gang that morning would allow him an interview with the prisoners, as former officers had done.

The landlady offered Nekhlyudov a trap to drive to the halting-place situated at the farther end of the village, but Nekhlyudov preferred to walk. A labourer, a broad-shouldered young Hercules with enormous high boots freshly blackened with strongly smelling tar, offered himself as a guide.

A dense mist obscured the sky, and it was so dark that when the young fellow was three steps in advance Nekhlyudov could not see him unless the light of some window happened to fall on him, but he could hear the heavy boots squelching through the deep, sticky slush. After passing the open space in front of the church and the long street with its rows of windows shining brightly in the darkness, Nekhlyudov followed his guide to the outskirts of the village, where it was pitch dark. But here, too, rays of light, streaming through the mist from the lamps in front of the halting-station, soon became discernible in the darkness. The reddish spots of light grew bigger and bigger. At last the stakes of the palisade, the moving figure of the sentry, a post painted with white and black stripes, and the sentry-box, became visible.

The sentry called his usual, ‘Who goes there?’ as they approached, and seeing they were strangers was so strict that he would not even allow them to wait by the palisade. But Nekhlyudov’s guide was not abashed by this strictness.

‘Halloo, lad! Why so fierce? You go and rouse your boss while we wait here.’

The sentry gave no answer, but shouted something in at the gate and stood looking at the broad-shouldered young labourer scraping the mud off Nekhlyudov’s boots with a chip of wood by the light of the lamp. From behind the palisade came the hum of male and female voices. In about three minutes something rattled, the gate opened, and a sergeant with his cloak thrown over his shoulders stepped out of the darkness into the lamplight.

The sergeant was not as strict as the sentry, but he was extremely inquisitive. He insisted on knowing what Nekhlyudov wanted the officer for, and who he was, evidently scenting a tip and anxious not to let it escape. Nekhlyudov said he had come on special business, and would show his gratitude; and would the sergeant take a note for him to the officer? The sergeant took the note, nodded, and went away.

Some time after, the gate rattled again, and women, carrying baskets, boxes, jugs, and sacks, came out, loudly chattering in their peculiar Siberian dialect as they stepped over the threshold of the gate. None of them wore peasant costumes; all were dressed in town fashion, with jackets and fur-lined cloaks. Their skirts were tucked up high, and their heads were wrapped in shawls. They examined Nekhlyudov and his guide curiously by the light of the lamp. One of them showed evident pleasure at the sight of the broad-shouldered fellow, and affectionately administered to him a dose of Siberian abuse.

‘You demon, what are you doing here? The devil take you!’ she said, addressing him.

‘I’ve been showing this traveller here the way’, answered the young fellow. ‘And what have you been bringing here?’

‘Dairy stuff, and I am to bring more in the morning.’

‘They didn’t want to keep you for the night, eh?’ asked the young fellow.

‘You be damned, you liar!’ she called out, laughing. ‘Eh, but come along with us as far as the village.’

The guide said something in answer that made not only the women but also the sentry laugh; then, turning to Nekhlyudov, he said:—

‘You’ll find your way alone? Won’t get lost, will you?’

‘I shall find it all right.’

‘When you have passed the church it’s the second from the two-storeyed house. Oh, and here, take my stick,’ he said, handing Nekhlyudov the staff he was carrying, which was longer than himself; and splashing through the mud with his enormous boots he disappeared in the darkness together with the women.

His voice, mingling with the voices of the women, was still to be heard through the mist, when the gate again rattled and the sergeant appeared and invited Nekhlyudov to follow him to the officer.

CHAPTER VIII

THIS halting-station, like all such stations along the Siberian road, was surrounded by a courtyard fenced round with a palisade of sharp-pointed stakes, and consisted of three one-storeyed houses. One of them, the largest, with grated windows, was for the prisoners; another for the convoy soldiers; and the third, in which was the office, for the officer. There were lights in the windows of all the three houses, and, like all such lights, they promised (here in a specially deceptive manner) something cosy within. Lamps were burning before the porches of the houses, and along the walls about five more lamps lit up the yard. Leading Nekhlyudov along a plank which lay across the yard, the sergeant went up to the porch of the smallest of the houses. When he had gone up the three steps of the porch he let Nekhlyudov pass before him into the ante-room, in which a small lamp was burning, and which was filled with smoky fumes. By the stove a soldier in a coarse shirt, with a necktie and black trousers, and with one top-boot on, stood blowing the charcoal in a samovar, using the other boot as a bellows.* When he saw Nekhlyudov, the soldier left the samovar, helped Nekhlyudov off with his leather coat, and then went into an inner room.

‘He has come, your honour.’

‘Well, ask him in’, came an angry voice.

‘Go in at the door’, said the soldier, and busied himself at the samovar again.

In the next room, which was lighted by a hanging lamp, the officer, with fair moustaches and a very red face, dressed in an Austrian jacket that closely fitted his broad chest and shoulders, sat at a covered table on which were the remains of his dinner and two bottles. There was a strong smell of tobacco and of some very strong, cheap scent in the warm room. On seeing Nekhlyudov the officer rose and gazed ironically and suspiciously, as it seemed, at the newcomer.

‘What is it you want?’ he asked; and not waiting for a reply he shouted through the open door, ‘Bernov! The samovar! What are you about?’

‘Coming at once’

‘I’ll give you “at once” so that you’ll remember it’, shouted the officer, and his eyes flashed.

‘I’m coming’, shouted the soldier, and brought in the samovar.

Nekhlyudov waited while the soldier placed the samovar on the table. When the officer had followed the soldier out of the room with his cruel little eyes, which looked as if they were aiming where best to hit him, he made tea and got a square decanter and some Albert biscuits out of his travelling case. Having placed all this on the cloth he again turned to Nekhlyudov.

‘Well, how can I be of service to you?’

‘I should like to be allowed to visit a prisoner’, said Nekhlyudov, without sitting down.

‘A political one? That’s forbidden by law’, said the officer.

‘The woman I mean is not a political prisoner’, said Nekhlyudov.

‘Yes; but pray take a seat’, said the officer.

Nekhlyudov sat down.

‘She is not a political one, but at my request she has been allowed by the higher authorities to join the political prisoners——’

‘Oh yes, I know’, interrupted the officer. ‘A little dark one! Well, yes, that can be managed. Won’t you smoke?’

He moved a box of cigarettes towards Nekhlyudov, and having carefully poured out two tumblers of tea he passed one to Nekhlyudov, and said, ‘Allow me.’

‘Thank you, I should like to see——’

‘The night is long. You’ll have plenty of time. I shall order her to be sent out to you.’

‘But could I not see her where she is? Why need she be sent for?’ Nekhlyudov said.

‘In to the political prisoners? It is against the law.’

‘I have been allowed to go in several times. If there is any danger of my passing anything in to them, I could do it just as well through her.’

‘Oh no, she would be searched’, said the officer, and laughed in an unpleasant manner.

‘Well, why not search me?’

‘All right, we’ll manage without that’, said the officer, opening the decanter and holding it out towards Nekhlyudov’s tumbler of tea. ‘May I give you some? No? Well, just as you like. When one is living here in Siberia, one is only too glad to meet an educated person. Ours is very sad work, as you know, and when one is used to better things it is very hard. The idea people have of us is that convoy officers are coarse, uneducated men, and no one seems to remember that we may have been born for a very different position.’

This officer’s red face, his scent, his rings, and especially his unpleasant laughter, disgusted Nekhlyudov very much; but today, as during the whole of his journey, he was in that serious, attentive state which did not allow him to behave slightingly or disdainfully towards any man, but made him feel the necessity of speaking to everyone ‘entirely’, as he expressed to himself this relation to men. When he had heard the officer and understood his state of mind, he said in a serious manner:

‘I think that in your position, too, some comfort could be found in helping the suffering people.’

‘What are their sufferings? You don’t know what those people are.’

‘They are not special people’, said Nekhlyudov. ‘They are just such people as others, and some of them are quite innocent.’

‘Of course, there are all sorts among them, and naturally one pities them. Some of us won’t relax anything, but I try to lighten their condition where I can. Rather let me suffer than they. Others keep to the law in every detail, even as far as to shoot; but I show pity … Allow me—have another’, he said, pouring out another tumbler of tea for Nekhlyudov. ‘And who is she, this woman that you want to see?’ he asked.

‘She is an unfortunate woman who got into a brothel and was there falsely accused of poisoning, but she is a very good woman’, Nekhlyudov answered.

The officer shook his head.

‘Yes, it happens. I can tell you about a certain Emma who lived in Kazan. She was a Hungarian by birth, but she had quite Persian eyes’, he continued, unable to restrain a smile at the recollection. ‘There was so much chic about her that she might have been a countess——’

Nekhlyudov interrupted the officer and returned to the former topic of conversation.

‘I think that you could lighten the conditions of the people while they are in your charge, and in acting that way I am sure you would find great joy’, said Nekhlyudov, trying to pronounce the words as distinctly as possible, as if talking to a foreigner or a child.

The officer looked at Nekhlyudov with sparkling eyes, impatiently waiting for him to stop, so that he might continue the tale about the Hungarian with Persian eyes, who evidently presented herself very vividly to his imagination and quite absorbed his attention.

‘Yes, of course, this is all quite true’, he said, ‘and I do pity them; but I should like to tell you about this Emma. What do you think she did——’

‘It does not interest me,’ said Nekhlyudov, ‘and I must tell you frankly that though I was myself very different at one time, I now hate that kind of relation to women.’

The officer gave Nekhlyudov a frightened look.

‘Won’t you take some more tea?’ he said.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Bernov!’ the officer called, ‘take the gentleman to Vakulov. Tell him to let him into the separate political room; he may remain there till the inspection.’

CHAPTER IX

ACCOMPANIED by the orderly, Nekhlyudov went out into the courtyard dimly lit up by the red light of the lamps.

‘Where to?’ asked a convoy soldier, addressing the orderly.

‘Into the separate one, No. 5.’

‘You can’t pass here, it’s locked. You must go the other way round.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘The boss has gone to the village and taken the key with him.’

‘Well then, come this way.’

The soldier led Nekhlyudov along some boards to another entrance. While still in the yard Nekhlyudov could hear the din of voices and the general commotion going on inside, as in a beehive when the bees are preparing to swarm; but when he came nearer and the door opened, the din grew louder and changed into distinct sounds of shouting, abuse, and laughter. He heard the clatter of chains and smelt the well-known foul air.

As always, this din of voices, the clatter of chains, and the close smell, flowed into one tormenting sensation and produced in Nekhlyudov a feeling of moral nausea which grew into physical nausea, the two feelings mingling with and heightening each other.

The first thing Nekhlyudov saw on entering was a large, stinking tub, on the edge of which sat a woman, while in front of her stood a man, with his pancake-shaped cap on the side of his shaved head. They were talking about something. When he saw Nekhlyudov the man winked and remarked:

‘The Tsar himself cannot hold back the water.’

But the woman pulled down the skirts of her cloak and seemed abashed.

From the entrance ran a corridor into which several doors opened. The first was the family room, then came the bachelors’ room, and at the very end two small rooms were set apart for the political prisoners.

The building, which was arranged to hold one hundred and fifty prisoners, was so crowded now that there were four hundred and fifty there, so that the prisoners could not all get into the rooms, but filled the passage also. Some were sitting or lying on the floor, some were going out with empty teapots or bringing them back filled with boiling water. Among the latter was Taras. He overtook Nekhlyudov and greeted him affectionately. The kind face of Taras was disfigured by dark bruises on his nose and under his eye.

‘What has happened to you?’ asked Nekhlyudov.

‘Well, something has happened’, Taras said with a smile.

‘Yes, they’re always fighting’, said the convoy soldier.

‘All because of the woman,’ added a prisoner, who followed Taras. ‘He’s had a row with blind Fedka.’

‘And how’s Theodosia?’

‘She’s all right. I’m bringing the water for her tea now’, Taras answered, and went into the family room.

Nekhlyudov looked in at the door. The room was crowded with women and men, some of whom were on, and some under, the bed-shelves; it was full of steam from the wet clothes that were drying, and the chatter of women’s voices was unceasing. The next door led into the bachelors’ room. This room was still more crowded; even the doorway and the passage in front of it were blocked by a noisy crowd of men in wet garments, busy doing or deciding something or other. The convoy sergeant explained that the prisoner appointed to buy the provisions was paying out of the food-money what was owing to a sharper (who had won from, or lent money to, the prisoners), and receiving back little tickets made of playing-cards. When they saw the convoy soldier and a gentleman, those who were nearest became silent and followed them with looks of ill-will. Among them Nekhlyudov noticed the criminal Fyodorov, whom he knew, and who always kept beside him a miserable lad with a swollen appearance and raised eyebrows; and also a disgusting, noseless, pock-marked tramp, who was notorious among the prisoners because he had killed a comrade in the marshes while trying to escape, and had, it was said, fed on his flesh. The tramp stood in the passage with his wet cloak thrown over one shoulder, looking mockingly and boldly at Nekhlyudov, and did not move out of the way. Nekhlyudov passed him by.

Though this kind of scene had become quite familiar to him, though during the last three months he had seen these four hundred criminal prisoners over and over again in many different circumstances—in the heat, enveloped in clouds of dust raised by the dragging of their chained feet along the road; at the resting-places by the way; inside the halting-stations; and out in the courtyards in warm weather, where the most horrible scenes of barefaced debauchery had occurred—yet every time he came among them and felt their attention fixed on him as it was now, shame and the consciousness of his sin against them tormented him. To this sense of shame and guilt was added an unconquerable feeling of loathing and horror. He knew that, placed in a position such as theirs, they could not be other than they were, and yet he was unable to stifle his disgust.

‘It’s well for them grub-suckers’, Nekhlyudov heard someone say in a hoarse voice, as he approached the room of the political prisoners. The speaker added some words of obscene abuse, and a roar of spiteful, mocking laughter followed.

CHAPTER X

WHEN they had passed the bachelors’ room the sergeant who had accompanied Nekhlyudov left him, promising to come for him before the inspection. As soon as the sergeant was gone, a prisoner, quickly stepping with his bare feet and holding up his chains, came close to Nekhlyudov, enveloping him in a strong acid smell of perspiration, and said in a mysterious whisper:

‘Take the case in hand, sir. They have quite befooled the lad; they’ve made him drunk, and today at the inspection he’s already given his name as Karmanov. Stop it, sir; we dare not, or they’ll kill us’, and looking uneasily round, he turned away.

This is what had happened. The criminal Karmanov had persuaded a young fellow, who was sentenced to exile and who resembled him in appearance, to change names with him and go to the mines in his place, letting him (Karmanov) go to exile instead.

Nekhlyudov knew about this intended exchange. Some convict had told him of it the week before. He nodded as a sign that he understood and would do what he could, and continued his way without looking round.

Nekhlyudov knew the convict who spoke to him, and was surprised by his action. When in Ekaterinburg this convict had asked Nekhlyudov to get permission for his wife to follow him. He was a man of the most ordinary peasant type, of medium size, about 30 years old, and was condemned to hard labour for an attempt to murder and rob. His name was Makar Devkin. His crime was a very curious one. In the account he gave of it to Nekhlyudov, he said it was not his own (Makar’s), but his, the devil’s, doing. He said that a traveller had come to his father’s house and hired a sleigh to drive to a village twenty-six miles off. Makar’s father told him to drive the stranger. Makar harnessed the horse, dressed, and sat down to drink tea with the stranger. The stranger related at the tea-table that he was going to be married, and that he had with him five hundred roubles which he had earned in Moscow. When he had heard this, Makar went out into the yard and put an axe into the sleigh under the straw.

‘And I did not myself know why I was taking the axe’, he said. ‘“Take the axe”, says he, and I took it. We got in and started. We drove along all right. I even forgot about the axe. Well, we were getting near the village—only about four miles more to go. The way from the crossroad to the highroad was uphill, and I got out. I walked behind the sleigh, and he whispers to me, “What are you thinking about? When you get to the top of the hill you will meet people along the highway, and then there’s the village. He will carry the money away; if you mean to do it, now’s the time.” I stooped over the sleigh as if to arrange the straw, and the axe seemed to jump into my hand of itself. The man turned round, “What are you doing?” I lifted the axe and tried to knock him down, but he was quick, jumped out, and took hold of my hands. “What arc you doing, you villain?” He threw me down into the snow, and I did not even struggle, but gave in at once. He bound my arms with his sash, threw me into the sleigh, and took me straight to the police station. I was imprisoned and tried. The commune gave me a good character: said I was a good man, and that nothing wrong had been noticed about me. The masters for whom I had worked also spoke well of me, but we had no money to engage a lawyer, and so I was condemned to four years’ hard labour.’

It was this man who, wishing to save a fellow-villager, though he knew that by speaking he risked his own life, nevertheless revealed a prisoners’ secret to Nekhlyudov, for which, if they discovered what he had done, they would certainly strangle him.

CHAPTER XI

THE political prisoners were kept in two small rooms, the doors of which opened into a part of the passage partitioned off from the rest. On entering this part of the passage Nekhlyudov saw Simonson in his rubber jacket and with a log of pinewood in his hands crouching in front of a stove, the door of which trembled, drawn by the heat inside.

When he saw Nekhlyudov he looked up at him from under his protruding brow, and gave him his hand without rising.

‘I am glad you have come. I want to speak to you’, he said, looking Nekhlyudov straight in the eyes with a significant expression.

‘Yes. What is it?’ Nekhlyudov asked.

‘It will do later on. I am busy just now.’ And Simonson turned again towards the stove, which he was heating according to a theory of his own so as to lose as little heat-energy as possible.

Nekhlyudov was about to enter at the first door, when Maslova, stooping, and pushing a large heap of rubbish and dust towards the stove with a birch-broom with no handle, came out of the other. She had a white jacket on, her skirt was tucked up, and a kerchief drawn down to her eyebrows protected her hair from the dust. When she saw Nekhlyudov she drew herself up, flushing and animated, let go the broom, wiped her hands on her skirt, and stopped just in front of him.

‘You are tidying up the premises, I see’, said Nekhlyudov, shaking hands.

‘Yes, my old occupation’, and she smiled: ‘but the dust! You can’t imagine what it is. We have been cleaning and cleaning! Well, is the plaid dry?’ she asked, turning to Simonson.

‘Almost’, Simonson answered, giving her a peculiar look which Nekhlyudov noticed.

‘All right, I’ll come for it, and bring the cloaks to dry … Our people arc all in there,’ she said to Nekhlyudov, pointing to the first door as she went in at the second.

Nekhlyudov opened the door and entered a little room dimly lit by a small tin lamp which was standing low down on a shelf affixed to the wall to serve as a bedstead. It was cold in the room, and there was a smell of dust (which had not had time to settle), of damp, and of tobacco smoke. The little tin lamp threw a bright light on those near it, but the beds were in the shade, and dark shadows flickered on the walls.

Two men appointed as caterers, who had gone to fetch boiling water and provisions, were away, but most of the political prisoners were gathered together in this small room. Here was Nckhlyudov’s old acquaintance, Vera Bogodukhovskaya, thinner and yellower than ever, with her large, frightened eyes, short hair, and a swollen vein on her forehead. She was wearing a grey jacket, and with a newspaper spread out in front of her sat rolling cigarettes with a jerky movement of her hands.

Emily Rantseva, whom Nekhlyudov considered the pleasantest of the political prisoners, was also here. She looked after the housekeeping and managed to spread a feeling of home comfort and attractiveness even in the midst of the most trying surroundings. She sat beside the lamp with her sleeves rolled up, wiping cups and mugs, and placing them, with her deft, red, sunburnt hands, on a cloth that was spread on the bed-shelf. Rantseva was a plain-looking young woman with a clever and mild expression of face, which when she smiled had a way of suddenly becoming merry, animated, and captivating. It was with such a smile that she now welcomed Nekhlyudov.

‘Why, we thought you had gone back to Russia’, she said.

Here in a dark corner was also Mary Pavlovna, busy with a little fair-haired girl who kept prattling in her sweet childish accents.

‘How nice that you have come’, Mary Pavlovna said to Nekhlyudov. ‘Have you seen Katusha? We have a visitor here’, and she pointed to the little girl.

Here also was Anatole Kriltsov, with felt boots on, sitting doubled up and shivering in a far corner with his feet under him, his arms folded in the sleeves of his cloak, and looking at Nekhlyudov with feverish eyes. Nekhlyudov was going up to him, but to the right of the door a man with spectacles and reddish curls, dressed in a rubber jacket, sat talking to the pretty smiling Grabets. This was the celebrated revolutionist, Novodvorov. Nekhlyudov hastened to greet him; he was in a particular hurry about it because this man was the only one among all the political prisoners whom he disliked. Novodvorov’s blue eyes glistened through his spectacles as he looked frowningly at Nekhlyudov and held out his narrow hand to him.

‘Well, are you having a pleasant journey?’ he asked with evident irony.

‘Yes, there is much that is interesting’, Nekhlyudov answered, as if he did not notice the irony but took the question for politeness, and he passed on to Kriltsov.

Though Nekhlyudov appeared indifferent, he was really far from being so, and these words of Novodvorov, showing his evident desire to say or do something unpleasant, interfered with the state of kindliness in which Nekhlyudov found himself, and he felt depressed and sad.

‘Well, how are you?’ he asked, pressing Kriltsov’s cold and trembling hand.

‘Pretty well, only I cannot get warm; I got wet through’, Kriltsov answered, quickly replacing his hands in the sleeves of his cloak. ‘And here it’s also beastly cold. There, look, the window panes are broken’, and he pointed to the broken panes behind the iron bars. ‘And how are you? Why have you not been to see us?’

‘I was not allowed to come, the authorities were so strict; but today the officer is lenient.’

‘Lenient, indeed!’ Kriltsov remarked. ‘Ask Mary what he did this morning.’

Mary Pavlovna, from her place in the corner, related what had happened about the little girl when they left the halting-station that morning.

‘I think it is absolutely necessary to make a collective protest’, said Vera Bogodukhovskaya in a determined tone, and yet glancing now at one now at another, with a frightened, undecided look. ‘Vladimir Simonson did protest, but that is not sufficient.’

‘What protest do you want?’ muttered Kriltsov, cross and frowning. Her lack of simplicity, her artificial manner, and her nervousness, had evidently long been irritating him.

‘Are you looking for Katusha?’ he asked, addressing Nekhlyudov. ‘She is working all the time. She has cleaned this—the men’s room—and now she has gone to clean the women’s. Only it is not possible to clean away the fleas—they eat one alive. And what is Mary doing there?’ he asked, nodding towards the corner where Mary Pavlovna sat.

‘She is combing out her adopted daughter’s hair’, replied Rantseva.

‘But won’t she let the insects loose on us?’ asked Kriltsov.

‘Oh no; I am very careful. She is a clean little girl now. You take her’, said Mary, turning to Rantseva, ‘while I go and help Katusha, and I will also bring him his plaid.’

Rantseva took the little girl on her lap, pressing the plump, bare little arms to her bosom with a mother’s tenderness, and gave her a bit of sugar.

As Mary Pavlovna left the room, two men came in with boiling water and provisions.

CHAPTER XII

ONE of the newcomers was a short, thin young man, wearing a cloth-covered sheepskin coat and high boots. He stepped lightly and quickly, carrying two steaming teapots, and holding under his arm a loaf wrapped in a cloth.

‘Well, so our Prince has put in an appearance again’, he said, as he placed the teapots beside the cups and handed the bread to Rantseva. ‘We have bought wonderful things’, he continued, as he took off his sheepskin and flung it over the heads of the others on to the bed-shelf. ‘Markel has bought milk and eggs; why, we’ll have a regular ball tonight. And Rantseva is diffusing her aesthetic cleanliness’, he said, and looked with a smile at Rantseva; ‘and now she will make tea.’

The whole presence of this man: his movements, his voice, his look, seemed to breathe vigour and merriment. The other newcomer was just the reverse; he looked despondent and sad. He was short and bony and had very prominent cheek-bones, a sallow complexion, thin lips, and beautiful light hazel eyes, rather far apart. He wore an old wadded coat, long boots and galoshes, and was carrying two pots of milk and two round boxes made of birch bark, which he placed in front of Rantseva. He bowed to Nekhlyudov, bending only his neck and keeping his eyes fixed on him. Then having reluctantly given him his damp hand to shake he began to take out the provisions.

Both these political prisoners were of the people. The first was Nabatov, a peasant; the second, Markel Kondratyev, a factory hand. Markel did not get among the revolutionists till he was quite a man; Nabatov joined them when only 18. After leaving the village school Nabatov gained a place at the high school, owing to his exceptional talents, earned his living by giving lessons all the time he studied there, and on finishing won the gold medal. He did not go to the university because, while still in the top class of the high school, he made up his mind to go among the people and enlighten his neglected brethren. This he did, first getting a place as a Government clerk in a large village. He was soon arrested, because he read to the peasants and arranged a co-operative industrial association among them. The authorities kept him imprisoned for eight months, and then set him free, but he remained under police supervision. As soon as he was liberated he went to another village, got a place as schoolmaster, and did the same as he had done in the first village. He was again taken up, and kept fourteen months in prison, where his political convictions became yet stronger.

After that he was exiled to the Perm Government, from whence he escaped. Then he was put in prison for seven months, and after that he was exiled to Archangel. Again he tried to escape, but was re-arrested and condemned to be exiled to the Yakutsk Government; so that half his life since he reached manhood had been passed in prison and in exile. All these adventures did not embitter him and did not weaken his energy, but rather stimulated it. He was a lively young fellow, with a splendid digestion; always active, gay, and vigorous. He never repented of anything, never looked far ahead, and used all his powers, his cleverness, and his practical knowledge to act in the present. When free, he worked towards the aim he had set himself—the enlightening and the uniting of the working-men, especially the country labourers. When in prison he was just as energetic and practical in finding means to come in contact with the outer world, and in arranging his own life and the life of his group as comfortably as circumstances permitted. Above all things he was social—a member of a Commune. He wanted, as it seemed to him, nothing for himself, and contented himself with very little, but demanded very much for the group of his comrades, and could work for it either physically or mentally, day and night, without sleep or food. As a peasant he was industrious, observant, and clever at his work; he was also naturally self-controlled, polite without any effort, and attentive not only to the wishes but also to the opinions of others. His widowed mother, an illiterate, superstitious old peasant woman, was still living, and Nabatov helped her, and used to visit her while he was free. During the time he spent at home he entered into all the interests of his mother’s life, helped her in her work, continued his intercourse with former playfellows, smoked in their company cheap tobacco in ‘dog’s-foot cigarettes’,* took part in their fisticuffs, and explained to them how they were all being deceived by the State, and how they ought to disentangle themselves from the deception they were kept in. When he thought or spoke of what a revolution would do, he always imagined the people, from whom he had himself sprung, left in very nearly the same condition as before, only with sufficient land and without the gentry and officials. The revolution, according to him—and in this he differed from Novodvorov and Novodvorov’s follower, Markel Kondratyev—should not alter the fundamental forms of the life of the people, should not break down the whole edifice, but should only alter the inner walls of the beautiful, strong, colossal old structure he loved so dearly.

He was also a typical peasant in his views on religion: never thinking about metaphysical questions, about the origin of all origins, or about the future life. God was to him (as to Arago)* an hypothesis which he had as yet not needed. He was not concerned about the origin of the world, and did not care whether Moses or Darwin were right. Darwinism which seemed so important to his companions was to him only the same kind of plaything of the mind as the creation in six days.

The question how the world originated did not interest him, just because the question how best to live in this world was ever before him. He never thought about a future life, always bearing in the depth of his soul the firm and quiet conviction, inherited from his forefathers and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but each thing continually changes its form—the manure into grain, the grain into food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak—so man also does not perish, but only undergoes change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face and bravely bore the sufferings that led towards it, but did not care and did not know how to speak about it. He loved work and was always employed on some practical business, and he spurred on his comrades in the same direction.

The other political prisoner from among the people, Markel Kondratyev, was a very different kind of man. He began to work at the age of 15, and took to smoking and drinking in order to stifle a vague sense of being wronged. He first realized he was wronged one Christmas, when they (the factory children) were invited to a Christmas tree arranged by the employer’s wife. There he received a farthing whistle, an apple, a gilded walnut, and a fig, while the employer’s children had presents given them which seemed gifts from fairyland, and had cost, as he afterwards heard, more than fifty roubles. When he was 30, a noted revolutionist came to their factory to work as a factory girl, and noticing his superior abilities she began giving Kondratyev books and pamphlets, and talked to him, explaining his position and the remedy for it. When the possibility of freeing himself and others from oppression became clear in his mind, the injustice of the present state of things appeared more cruel and more terrible than ever, and he longed passionately, not only for freedom but also for the punishment of those who arranged and who maintain this cruel injustice. It was knowledge, he was told, that gave this possibility; and Kondratyev devoted himself passionately to the acquisition of knowledge. It was not clear to him how knowledge would bring about the realization of the socialist ideal, but he believed that the knowledge that had shown him the injustice of the conditions in which he lived would also abolish the injustice itself. Besides, knowledge would in his opinion raise him above others. Therefore he left off smoking and drinking, and devoted all his leisure time to study.

The revolutionist gave him lessons, and his thirst for every kind of knowledge, and the facility with which he absorbed it, surprised her. In two years he had mastered algebra, geometry, and history (of which he was specially fond), and had made acquaintance with poetry and fiction and critical, and especially socialistic, literature.

The revolutionist was arrested, and Kondratyev with her, forbidden books having been found in their possession, and they were imprisoned and then exiled to the Vologda Government. There Kondratyev became acquainted with Novodvorov, read a great deal more revolutionary matter, remembered it all, and became still firmer in his socialistic views. After his exile he became a leader in a large strike which ended in the destruction of a factory and the murder of the director. He was again arrested and condemned to Siberia.

His religious views were of the same negative nature as his views of existing economic conditions. Having seen the absurdity of the religion in which he was brought up, and having freed himself from it with great effort—at first with fear but later with rapture—he, as if wishing to revenge himself for the deception that had been practised on him and on his ancestors, was never tired of venomously and angrily ridiculing priests and religious dogmas.

He was ascetic by habit, contenting himself with very little, and, like all who have been used to work from childhood and whose muscles have been developed, he could work much and easily and was quick at any manual labour; but what he valued most was the leisure in prisons and at the halting-stations, which enabled him to continue his studies. He was now studying the first volume of Karl Marx, and carefully hid the book in his sack, as if it were a great treasure. He behaved with reserve and indifference to all his comrades except Novodvorov, to whom he was greatly attached, and whose arguments on all subjects he accepted as irrefutable truths.

He had an infinite contempt for women, whom he looked upon as a hindrance in all useful activity. But he pitied Maslova and was gentle with her, for he considered her an example of the way in which the lower are exploited by the upper classes. The same reason made him dislike Nekhlyudov, so that he talked little with him and never pressed his hand, but when greeting him only held out his own to be pressed.

CHAPTER XIII

THE fire had burnt up, and the stove was warm; the tea was made, poured out into cups and mugs, and milk was added to it; and rusks, fresh rye and wheaten bread, butter, hard-boiled eggs, and calf’s head and feet were placed on the cloth. Every one had moved towards the part of the bed-shelf which served as a table, and sat eating and talking. Rantseva sat on a box pouring out tea. The rest crowded round her except Kriltsov, who had taken off his wet cloak, wrapped himself in his dry plaid, and lay in his own place talking to Nekhlyudov.

After the cold damp march, and the dirt and disorder they had found here, after the pains they had taken to get things tidy, and after having eaten, and drunk hot tea, they were all in the best and brightest of spirits.

The fact that the tramp of feet and the screams and abuse of the criminals reached them through the wall, reminding them of their surroundings, seemed only to increase the sense of cosiness. As on an island in the midst of the sea these people felt themselves for a brief space not swamped by the degradation and sufferings which surrounded them. This raised their spirits and excited them. They talked about everything except about their present position and that which awaited them. As generally happens among young men and women—especially if they are forced to remain together as these people were—all sorts of agreements and disagreements and attractions (curiously blended) had sprung up among them. Almost all of them were in love. Novodvorov was in love with the pretty smiling Grabets. This was a young, thoughtless girl, who had gone in for a course of study, was perfectly indifferent to revolutionary questions, but, succumbing to the influence of the day, compromised herself in some way and was exiled. The chief interest of her life during the time of her trial and in prison and exile was her success with men, just as it had been when she was free. Now, on the journey, she consoled herself with the fact that Novodvorov had taken a fancy to her, and she too fell in love with him. Vera Bogodukhovskaya, who was very prone to fall in love herself but did not awaken love in others, though she was always hoping for mutual love, was sometimes drawn to Nabatov and sometimes to Novodvorov. Kriltsov felt something like love for Mary Pavlovna. He loved her with a man’s love, but knowing how she regarded this sort of love hid his feelings under the guise of friendship and gratitude for the tenderness with which she attended to his wants. Nabatov and Rantseva were attached to each other by very complicated ties. As Mary Pavlovna was a perfectly chaste maiden, so Rantseva was perfectly virtuous as her own husband’s wife.

When a schoolgirl of only 16 she fell in love with Rantsev, a student of the Petersburg University, and married him before he left the university, she being then 19 years old. During his fourth year at the university her husband became involved in some student disturbances, was exiled from Petersburg, and turned revolutionist. She gave up the medical courses she was attending and followed him, and she also turned revolutionist. If she had not considered her husband the cleverest and best of men she would not have fallen in love with him, and if she had not fallen in love she would not have married him; but having fallen in love and married him whom she thought the best and cleverest of men, she naturally looked upon life and its aims in the way that this best and cleverest man looked at them. At first he thought the aim of life was to learn, and she therefore looked upon study as the aim of life. He became a revolutionist and so did she. He could demonstrate very clearly that the existing state of things could not go on, and that it is everybody’s duty to combat this state and to try to bring about conditions in which the individual could develop freely, and so on; and she imagined that she really thought and felt all this, but in reality she only regarded everything her husband thought as absolute truth, and only sought for perfect agreement, perfect identification of her own soul with his, that being the only condition which could give her full moral satisfaction.

The parting with her husband and their child (whom her mother took) was very hard to bear, but she bore it firmly and quietly since it was for her husband’s sake, and for a cause which she had not the slightest doubt was good, since he served it. She was always with her husband in thought, and did not and could not love anyone else now, any more than she could when with him. But Nabatov’s devoted and pure love touched and excited her. This moral, firm man, her husband’s friend, tried to treat her as a sister, but something more appeared in his behaviour to her, and this rather frightened them both, yet gave colour to their life of hardship.

So that in all this circle only Mary Pavlovna and Kondratyev were quite free from love affairs.

CHAPTER XIV

EXPECTING to have a private talk with Katusha as usual after tea, Nekhlyudov sat by Kriltsov’s side conversing with him. Among other things he told him the story of Makar’s crime and about Makar’s request to him. Kriltsov listened attentively, gazing at Nekhlyudov with glistening eyes.

‘Yes’, he said suddenly, ‘I often think that here we are going side by side with them—and who are they? The very people for whose sake we are going, and yet we not only do not know them, but do not even wish to know them. And they are even worse, they hate us and look upon us enemies. Is it not terrible?’

‘There is nothing terrible about it’, broke in Novodvorov, overhearing the conversation. ‘The masses always worship power and power only. The Government has the power now, and they worship it and hate us. Tomorrow we shall have the power and they will worship us’, he said.

At that moment a volley of abuse and a rattle of chains sounded from behind the wall. Something was heard thumping against it, and screams and shrieks. Someone was being beaten, and some one was calling out, ‘Murder! help!’

‘Hear them, the beasts! What intercourse can there be between us and such as they?’ quietly remarked Novodvorov.

‘You call them beasts, and Nekhlyudov was just telling me about such an action’, irritably retorted Kriltsov; and went on to say how Makar was risking his life to save a fellow villager. ‘That is not the action of a beast: it is heroism.’

‘Sentimentality!’ Novodvorov ejaculated scornfully. ‘It is difficult for us to understand the emotions of these people and the motives on which they act. You see generosity, but it may be simply jealousy of that other criminal.’

‘How is it that you never wish to see anything good in another?’ Mary Pavlovna said, suddenly flaring up.

‘But how can one see what does not exist?’

‘Of course it exists when a man takes the risk of a terrible death.’

‘I think’, said Novodvorov, ‘that if we want to do something, the first condition is——’ (here Kondratyev put down the book he was reading by the lamplight and began to listen attentively to his teacher’s words) ‘that we should not give way to fantasy but look at things as they are. We should do all in our power for the masses, and expect nothing in return. The masses can only be the object of our activity, they cannot be our fellow-workers as long as they remain in the state of inertia they are in at present.’ He went on as if delivering a lecture. ‘Therefore to expect help from them before there has taken place the process of development—that process we are preparing them for—is delusive.’

‘What process of development?’ Kriltsov began, flushing up. ‘We say that we are against arbitrary despotism; and yet is not this the most awful despotism?’

‘No despotism whatever’, quietly rejoined Novodvorov. ‘I am only saying that I know the path that the people must travel, and can show them that path.’

‘But how can you be sure that the path you show is the true path? Is this not the same kind of despotism that lay at the bottom of the persecutions of the Inquisition and the French Revolution? They too knew the one true way by means of science.’

‘That they erred is no proof that I am going to err. Besides, there is a great difference between the ravings of ideologues and facts based on sound economic science.’

Novodvorov’s voice filled the room, he alone continued to speak, all the rest were silent.

‘They are always disputing’, Mary Pavlovna said when there was a moment’s silence.

‘And you yourself, what do you think about it?’ Nekhlyudov asked her.

‘I think Kriltsov is right when he says we should not force our views on the people.’

‘And you, Katusha?’ asked Nekhlyudov with a smile, and waited anxiously for her answer, fearing she would say something awkward.

‘I think the common people are wronged’, she said, and blushed scarlet; ‘I think they are dreadfully wronged.’

‘That’s right, Maslova, quite right’, cried Nabatov. ‘They are terribly wronged—the people—and they must not be wronged, and therein lies our whole task.’

‘A curious idea of the object of revolution’, Novodvorov remarked crossly, and began to smoke in silence.

‘I cannot talk with him’, said Kriltsov in a whisper, and was silent.

‘And it is much better not to’, said Nekhlyudov.

CHAPTER XV

ALTHOUGH Novodvorov was highly esteemed by all the revolutionists, and though he was very learned and considered very wise, Nekhlyudov reckoned him among those who being revolutionists and yet below the average moral level were much below it. The intellectual powers of the man—his numerator—were great; but his opinion of himself—his denominator —was immeasurably greater, and had far outgrown his intellectual powers.

He was a man of a nature just the contrary to that of Simonson. Simonson was one of those people, chiefly of a masculine type, whose actions follow the dictates of their reason and are determined by it. Novodvorov belonged, on the contrary, to the class of people of a feminine type, whose reason is directed partly towards the attainment of aims set by their feelings, partly to the justification of acts instigated by their feelings.

The whole of Novodvorov’s revolutionary activity, though he could explain it very eloquently and very convincingly, appeared to Nekhlyudov to be founded on nothing but ambition and the desire for supremacy. At first his capacity for assimilating the thoughts of others and expressing them correctly had given him a position of supremacy among the pupils and teachers in the high school and the university where qualities such as his are highly prized, and he was satisfied. But when he had finished his studies and received his diploma, and that supremacy was over, he suddenly altered his views in order (so Kriltsov, who did not like him, said) to gain supremacy in another sphere, and from being a moderate Liberal he became a rabid adherent of the Narodovolstvo.

Being devoid of those moral and aesthetic qualities which call forth doubts and hesitation, he very soon acquired a position in the revolutionary world which satisfied him—that of leader of a party. Having once chosen a direction, he never doubted or hesitated, and was therefore certain that he never made a mistake. Everything seemed quite simple, clear, and certain. And the narrowness and one-sidedness of his views did make everything seem simple and clear; one only had to be logical, as he said. His self-assurance was so great that it either repelled people or made them submit to him. As he carried on his activity among very young people who mistook his boundless self-assurance for depth and wisdom, the majority did submit to him and he had great success in revolutionary circles. His activity was directed to the preparation of a rising in which he was to usurp power and call together a council. A programme composed by him was to be put before this council, and he felt sure that this programme of his solved every problem, and that it would be inevitably carried out.

His comrades respected but did not love him. He did not love anyone, and looked upon all men of note as rivals, and could he have done it would willingly have treated them as old male monkeys treat young ones. He would have torn all mental power, all capacity, from other men, so that they should not interfere with the display of his talents. He behaved well only to those who bowed before him. Now, on the journey, he behaved well to Kondratyev (who was influenced by his propaganda), and to Vera Bogodukhovskaya and pretty little Grabets (who were both in love with him). Although in principle he was in favour of the women’s movement yet in the depths of his soul he considered all women stupid and insignificant except those with whom he was sentimentally in love (as he was now in love with Grabets), and such women he considered to be exceptional, he alone being capable of discerning their merits.

The question of the relation of the sexes also he looked upon as thoroughly solved by accepting free union.

He had one nominal wife, and one real wife from whom he was separated, having come to the conclusion that there was no real love between them, and he now thought of entering into a free union with Grabets. Novodvorov despised Nekhlyudov for ‘playing the fool’, as he termed it, with Maslova, but especially for the freedom Nekhlyudov took in considering the defects of the existing system and the methods of correcting those defects, not only not as Novodvorov viewed them but in a way that was Nekhlyudov’s own: a prince’s (that is, a fool’s) way. Nekhlyudov felt this relation of Novodvorov’s towards him, and knew to his sorrow that in spite of the general state of goodwill in which he found himself on this journey he could not help paying this man in his own coin, and could not stifle the strong antipathy he felt towards him.

CHAPTER XVI

THE voices of officials sounded from the next room. All the prisoners were silent, and a sergeant followed by two convoy soldiers entered. The time for the inspection had come. The sergeant counted everyone, and when Nekhlyudov’s turn came he addressed him with kindly familiarity.

‘You must not stay after the inspection, Prince. You must go now.’

Nekhlyudov knew what this meant, went up to the sergeant, and put a three-rouble note into his hand.

‘Ah, well; what is one to do with you? Stay a bit longer if you like.’ The sergeant was about to go when another sergeant, followed by a convict, a spare man with a thin beard and a bruise under his eye, came in.

‘It’s about the girl I have come’, said the convict.

‘Here’s daddy come!’ came a child’s ringing accents, and a flaxen head appeared from behind Rantseva, who with Katusha’s and Mary Pavlovna’s help was making a new garment for the child out of one of Rantseva’s own petticoats.

‘Yes, daughter, it’s me’, said the prisoner, Buzovkin, tenderly.

‘She is quite comfortable here’, said Mary Pavlovna, looking with pity at Buzovkin’s bruised face. ‘Let her stay with us.’

‘The ladies are making me new clothes’, said the girl, pointing to Rantseva’s sewing. ‘Ni-i-ice, re-ed ones!’ she went on prattling.

‘Do you wish to sleep with us!’ asked Rantseva, caressing the child.

‘Yes, I wish. And daddy too?’

A smile lit up Rantseva’s face.

‘No, daddy can’t. We’ll keep her then’, she said, turning to the father.

‘Yes, you may leave her,’ said the first sergeant, and went out with the other.

As soon as they were out of the room Nabatov went up to Buzovkin, slapped him on the shoulder, and said: ‘I say, old fellow, is it true that Karmanov wants to exchange?’

Buzovkin’s kindly, gentle face turned suddenly sad, and a veil seemed to dim his eyes.

‘We have heard … nothing’, he said slowly, and with the same dimness still over his eyes he turned to the child.

‘Well, Aksutka, it seems you’re to make yourself comfortable with the ladies’, he said, and hurried away.

‘It is true about the exchange, and he knows it very well’, said Nabatov. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I shall tell the authorities in the next town. I know both prisoners by sight’, said Nekhlyudov.

All were silent, fearing a recommencement of the dispute.

Simonson, who had been lying with his arms thrown behind his head and not speaking, rose and walked up to Nekhlyudov with decision, carefully passing round those who were sitting.

‘Could you listen to me now?’

‘Certainly,’ and Nekhlyudov rose and followed him.

Katusha looked up with an expression of surprise, and, meeting Nekhlyudov’s eyes she blushed and shook her head as if perplexed.

‘What I want to speak to you about is this’, Simonson began when they had come out into the passage. In the passage the din of the criminals’ voices and shouts sounded louder. Nekhlyudov made a face, but Simonson did not seem confused by it. ‘Knowing your relations to Katusha Maslova’, he began, seriously and frankly, with his kind eyes looking straight into Nekhlyudov’s face, ‘I consider it my duty——’ He was obliged to stop because two voices were heard disputing and shouting, both at once, close to the door.

‘I tell you, blockhead, they were not mine’, one voice shouted.

‘May you choke, you devil’, shouted the other.

At this moment Mary Pavlovna came out into the passage.

‘How can one talk here?’ she said. ‘Go in there; Vera is alone’, and she went in at the second door and entered a tiny room, evidently meant for a solitary cell, which was now placed at the disposal of the women political prisoners. Vera Bogodukhovskaya lay covered up, head and all, on the bed.

‘She has a headache, and is asleep, so she cannot hear you, and I will go away’, said Mary Pavlovna.

‘On the contrary, stay here’, said Simonson. ‘I have no secrets from anyone—certainly not from you.’

‘All right’, said Mary Pavlovna, and moving her whole body from side to side like a child, to get farther back on the bed-shelf, she settled down to listen, her beautiful hazel eyes seeming to look somewhere far away.

‘Well, then, this is my business’, Simonson repeated. ‘Knowing your relations to Katusha Maslova, I consider myself bound to explain to you my relations to her.’

Nekhlyudov could not help admiring the simplicity and frankness with which Simonson spoke to him.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘I mean that I should like to marry Katusha Maslova.’

‘How strange!’ said Mary Pavlovna, fixing her eyes on Simonson.

‘And so I made up my mind to ask her to be my wife’, Simonson continued.

‘What can I do? It depends on her’, said Nekhlyudov.

‘Yes, but she will not come to any decision without you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because as long as your relations with her are unsettled, she can’t make up her mind.’

‘As far as I am concerned it is finally settled. I want to do what I consider to be my duty, and also to lighten her fate; but on no account would I wish to put any restraint on her.’

‘Yes, but she does not wish to accept your sacrifice.’

‘It is no sacrifice.’

‘And I know that this decision of hers is final.’

‘Well, then, there is no need to speak to me’, said Nekhlyudov.

‘She wants you to acknowledge that you think as she does.’

‘How can I acknowledge that I must not do what I consider to be my duty? All I can say is that I am not free, but she is.’

Simonson was silent; then after thinking a little he said:

‘Very well then, I’ll tell her. You must not think I am in love with her’, he continued; ‘I love her as a splendid, unique human being who has suffered much. I want nothing from her. I have only a profound longing to help to lighten her——’

Nekhlyudov was surprised to hear a tremor in Simonson’s voice.

‘To lighten her position’, Simonson continued. ‘If she does not wish to accept your help, let her accept mine. If she consents I shall ask to be sent to the place where she will be imprisoned. Four years are not an eternity. I would live near her and perhaps might lighten her fate …’ and he again stopped, too agitated to continue.

‘What am I to say?’ said Nekhlyudov. ‘I am very glad she has found such a protector as you——’

‘That’s what I wanted to know’, Simonson interrupted. ‘I wanted to know if, loving her, wishing her happiness, you would consider it good for her to marry me?’

‘Oh yes’, Nekhlyudov said decidedly.

‘It all depends on her. I only wish that this suffering soul should find rest’, said Simonson, with a childlike tenderness no one could have expected from so morose-looking a man.

Simonson rose, went up to Nekhlyudov, smiled shyly, and kissed him.

‘So I shall tell her’, he said, and went away.

CHAPTER XVII

‘WHAT do you think of that?’ said Mary Pavlovna. ‘In love, quite in love! Now that’s a thing I never should have expected of him—that Vladimir Simonson should be in love, and in the silliest and most boyish way! It is strange and, to tell the truth, it is sad’, and she sighed.

‘But she—Katusha? How do you think she looks at it?’ Nekhlyudov asked.

‘She?’ Mary Pavlovna paused, evidently wishing to give as exact an answer as possible. ‘She? Well, you sec, in spite of her past, she has a most moral nature—and such fine feelings. She loves you, loves you rightly, and is happy to be able to do you even the negative good of not letting you get entangled with her. Marriage with you would be a terrible fall for her, worse than all that’s past; and therefore she will never consent to it. And yet your presence agitates her.’

‘Well, what am I to do? Ought I to vanish?’

Mary Pavlovna smiled her sweet, childlike smile, and said—

‘Yes, partly.’

‘How is one to vanish partly?’

‘I am talking nonsense. But as for her. I should like to tell you that she probably sees the silliness of his rapturous kind of love—he has not spoken to her—and is both flattered and afraid of it. I am not competent to judge in such affairs, you know; still, I believe that on his part it is the most ordinary man’s feeling, though it is masked. He says that this love arouses his energy, and is platonic, but I know that, even if it is exceptional, still at the bottom of it lies the same nastiness … the same as between Novodvorov and Grabets.’

Mary Pavlovna had wandered from the subject, having started on her pet theme.

‘Well, what am I to do?’ Nekhlyudov asked.

‘I think you should tell her everything. It is always best that everything should be clear. Have a talk with her. I will call her. Shall I?’ said Mary Pavlovna.

‘Yes, if you please’, said Nekhlyudov.

Mary Pavlovna went out.

A strange feeling came over Nekhlyudov when he was alone in the little room with the sleeping Vera Bogodukhovskaya, listening to her soft breathing, broken now and then by moans, and to the incessant din that came through the two doors that separated him from the criminals. What Simonson had told him freed him from the self-imposed duty which had seemed hard and strange to him in his weak moments, yet he now felt something that was not merely unpleasant but painful. He had a feeling that this offer of Simonson’s destroyed the exceptional character of his sacrifice, and therefore lessened its value in the eyes of himself and others. If so good a man who was not bound to her by any kind of tie wanted to join his fate to hers, then this sacrifice was not so great. There may have been an admixture of ordinary jealousy also. He had got so used to her love that he did not like to admit that she could love another.

Then it also upset the plans he had formed of living near her while she was serving her term. If she married Simonson his presence would be unnecessary and he would have to form new plans.

Before he had time to analyse his feelings the loud din of the prisoners’ voices came in with a rush (something special was going on among them today) as the door opened to admit Katusha.

She came close up to him, stepping briskly.

‘Mary Pavlovna has sent me’, she said.

‘Yes, I must have a talk with you. Sit down. Vladimir Simonson has been speaking to me.’

She had sat down, folding her hands in her lap, and seemed quite calm, but hardly had Nekhlyudov uttered Simonson’s name when she flushed crimson.

‘What did he say?’ she asked.

‘He told me he wanted to marry you.’

Her face suddenly puckered up with pain, but she said nothing, only cast down her eyes.

‘He is asking for my consent, or my advice. I told him it depends entirely on you—that you must decide.’

‘Oh, what does it all mean? Why?’ she muttered, and looked in his eyes with the peculiar squint that always strangely affected him. They sat silent for a few seconds, looking into each other’s eyes, and this look told much to both.

‘You must decide’, Nekhlyudov repeated.

‘What am I to decide? Everything has long been decided.’

‘No, you must decide whether you will accept Vladimir Simonson’s offer’, said Nekhlyudov.

‘What sort of a wife can I be—I, a convict? Why should I ruin Vladimir Simonson too?’ she said, with a frown.

‘Well, but if the sentence should be remitted?’

‘Oh, let me alone. There is nothing more to be said’, she said, and rose to leave the room.

CHAPTER XVIII

WHEN, following Katusha, Nekhlyudov returned to the men’s room he found everyone in a state of excitement. Nabatov, who went about everywhere, got to know everybody, and noticed everything, had just brought news which staggered them all. The news was that he had discovered, on one of the walls, a note written by the revolutionist Petlin, who had been sentenced to hard labour, and who everyone thought had long since reached the Kara; and now it turned out that he had passed this way quite recently, the only political prisoner among criminal convicts.

‘On the 17th of August’, so ran the note, ‘I was sent off alone with criminals. Neverov was with me, but hanged himself in the lunatic asylum in Kazan. I am well and in good spirits and hope for the best.’

All were discussing Petlin’s position and the possible reasons of Neverov’s suicide. Only Kriltsov sat silent and preoccupied, his glistening eyes gazing fixedly in front of him.

‘My husband told me that Neverov had a vision while still in the Petropavlovsky’, said Rantseva.

‘Yes, he was a poet, a dreamer; these people cannot stand solitary confinement’, said Novodvorov. ‘Now when I was in solitary confinement I never let my imagination run away with me, but arranged my days most systematically, and therefore always bore it very well.’

‘One can bear pretty nearly anything. Why! I used to be quite glad when they locked me up’, said Nabatov cheerfully, wishing to dispel the general depression. ‘A fellow’s afraid of everything: of being arrested himself and of entangling others and spoiling the whole business, and then he gets locked up, and all responsibility ends and he can rest—he can just sit and smoke.’

‘You knew him well?’ asked Mary Pavlovna, glancing anxiously at the altered, haggard expression of Kriltsov’s face.

‘Neverov a dreamer?’ Kriltsov suddenly began, panting for breath as if he had been shouting or singing for a long time. ‘Neverov was a man “such as the earth bears few of”, as our door-keeper used to express it. Yes … he had a nature like crystal; you could see right through him. He could not lie; he could not even dissemble. Not merely thin-skinned, but with all his nerves laid bare, as if he were flayed. Yes … his was a complex, rich nature, not such a … But what is the use of talking?’ He paused, and then added, with an angry frown: ‘We dispute whether we must first educate the people and then alter the forms of social life, or first alter the forms of life; and then we dispute how we are to struggle: by peaceful propaganda or by terrorism? We dispute. But they do not dispute, they know their business: they do not care whether dozens, hundreds of men perish. And what men! No, that the best should perish is just what they want. Yes, Herzen* said that when the Decembrists were withdrawn from circulation the average level of our society sank. I should think so, indeed. Then Herzen himself and his fellows were withdrawn, and now the Neverovs …’

‘They can’t all be got rid of’, said Nabatov in his cheerful tones. ‘There will always be enough left to continue the breed.’

‘No, there won’t, if we show any pity to them’, Kriltsov continued, raising his voice, and not letting himself be interrupted. ‘Give me a cigarette.’

‘Oh, Anatole, it is not good for you’, said Mary Pavlovna. ‘Please do not smoke.’

‘Ah, leave me alone’, he said angrily, and lit a cigarette, but at once began to cough and to retch as if he were going to be sick. Having expectorated he went on:

‘What we have been doing is not the thing at all. Not to argue, but all to unite … to destroy them.’

‘But they are also human beings’, said Nekhlyudov.

‘No, they are not human: men who can do what they are doing … No … It is said that some kind of bombs and balloons have been invented. Well, one ought to go up in a balloon, and sprinkle them with bombs, as if they were bugs, till they arc all exterminated … Yes. Because …’ He tried to continue, but turning red he began coughing worse than before, and a stream of blood rushed from his mouth. Nabatov ran to get some snow. Mary Pavlovna brought valerian drops and offered them to him, but, breathing quickly and heavily, he pushed her away with his thin white hand, and kept his eyes closed. When the snow and cold water had cased him a little, and he had been put to bed, Nekhlyudov having said goodnight to everybody, went out with the sergeant, who had been waiting for him some time.

The criminals were quiet now, and most of them asleep. Though the people were lying on and under the bedshelves and in the spaces between, they could not all be placed inside the rooms, and some of them lay in the passage with their sacks under their heads and covered with their wet cloaks. Snores, moans, and sleepy voices came through the open doors and sounded through the passage. Everywhere lay compact heaps of human beings covered with prison cloaks. The only persons awake were a few men who were sitting in the bachelors’ room by the light of a candle-end (which was put out when they noticed the sergeant), and an old man who sat naked under the lamp in the passage picking vermin off his shirt. The foul air in the political prisoners’ rooms seemed pure compared with the foul closeness here. The smoking lamp shone dimly as through a mist, and it was difficult to breathe. Stepping along the passage one had to look carefully for an empty space, and, having put down one foot, a place had to be found for the other. Three persons who had evidently found no room even in the passage lay in the anteroom close to the stinking and leaking tub. One of these was an old idiot, whom Nekhlyudov had often seen marching with the gang; another was a boy of about 12, who lay between the two other convicts, his head on the leg of one of them.

When he had passed out of the gate, Nekhlyudov took a deep breath, and long continued to breathe in deep draughts of the frosty air.

CHAPTER XIX

IT had cleared up and the stars were shining. Except in a few places the mud was frozen hard when Nekhlyudov returned to his inn and knocked at one of its dark windows. The broad-shouldered labourer came barefooted to open the door and let him in. Through a door on the right, leading to the back premises, came the gruff, loud snores of the carters who slept there, and from the yard came the sound of many horses chewing oats. The front room, where a red lamp was burning in front of the icons, smelt of wormwood and perspiration, and someone with mighty lungs was snoring behind a partition. Nekhlyudov undressed, put his leather travelling-pillow on the oilcloth sofa, and spreading out his rug lay down thinking over all he had heard and seen that day. The boy with his head on the convict’s leg, sleeping on the liquid that oozed from the stinking tub, seemed more dreadful than all else.

Unexpected and important as his conversation with Simonson and Katusha that evening had been, he did not dwell on it. His position in that matter was so complicated and indefinite that he drove the thought of it from his mind. But the picture of those unfortunate beings, inhaling the noisome air, and lying in liquid oozing from the foul tub, especially the innocent face of the boy asleep on the leg of a criminal, recurred all the more vividly to his mind, and he could not get rid of it.

Merely to know that somewhere, far away, there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradations and sufferings on them; and for three months constantly to look on while these defilements and tortures were being inflicted, are two very different things; and Nekhlyudov felt this. More than once during these three months he asked himself: ‘Am I mad that I see what others do not, or are they mad who do these things that I see?’ Yet they (and there were so many of them) did what seemed so astonishing and terrible to him, with such quiet assurance that what they were doing was necessary, and was important and useful work, that it was hard to believe they were mad; nor could he—conscious of the clearness of his thoughts—believe he was mad. This kept him in a continual state of perplexity.

This is how the things he saw during these three months impressed him:

From among all the people who were free, those who were the most nervous, the most hot-tempered, the most excitable, the most gifted, and the strongest, but the least careful and cunning, were selected by means of trials or by administrative orders. These people, not a whit more dangerous than many of those who remained free, were first locked up in prisons, and then transported to Siberia, where they were provided for and kept for months and years in complete idleness, away from nature, their families, and useful work—that is, from all conditions necessary for a natural and moral life. This, firstly.

Secondly, these people were subjected to all sorts of unnecessary indignities in these establishments: chains, shaven heads, and shameful clothing; that is, they were deprived of the chief motives that induce weak people to live good lives—regard for public opinion, a sense of shame, and the consciousness of human dignity.

Thirdly, their lives being in continual danger from the infectious diseases common in places of confinement, from exhaustion and from blows (not to mention exceptional cases of sunstroke, drowning, and fires), these people lived continually in a condition in which the best and most moral men are led by feelings of self-preservation to commit (and excuse others who commit) the most terribly cruel actions.

Fourthly, these people were forced to associate with others who were particularly depraved by life, and especially by these very institutions: with debauchees, murderers, and scoundrels, who acted on those not yet corrupted as leaven acts on dough.

And fifthly, the fact that all sorts of violence, cruelty, and inhumanity, are not only tolerated but even sanctioned by Government when it suits its purpose, was impressed on all these people most forcibly by the inhuman treatment they were subjected to: by the sufferings inflicted on children, women, and old men; by floggings with rods and whips; by rewards offered for bringing a fugitive back, dead or alive; by the separation of husbands and wives, and their union, for sexual intercourse, with the wives and husbands of others; and by shootings and hangings. Therefore acts of violence on the part of those who were deprived of their freedom, and who were in want and misery, could not help seeming even more permissible.

All these institutions seemed purposely devised for the production of depravity and vice, and for spreading this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population to an extent no other conditions could equal.

‘It is just as if a problem had been set: to find the best, the surest means of depraving the greatest number of people!’ thought Nekhlyudov, while getting an insight into the deeds that were being done in the prisons and halting-stations. Every year hundreds of thousands were brought to the highest pitch of depravity, and when completely depraved they were liberated to spread broadcast the moral disease they had caught in prison.

In the prisons of Tumcn, Ekaterinburg, Tomsk, and at the halting-stations, Nekhlyudov saw how successfully the object society seemed to have set itself was attained. Ordinary simple men holding the social and Christian morality of the ordinary Russian peasant, lost this conception, and formed a new prison-bred one, founded chiefly on the idea that any outrage to or violation of human beings is justifiable if it seems profitable. After living in prison those people became conscious with the whole of their being that, judging by what was happening to themselves, all those moral laws of respect and sympathy for others preached by the Church and by the moral teachers, were set aside in real life, and that therefore they, too, need not keep these laws. Nekhlyudov noticed this effect of prison life in all the prisoners he knew—in Fyodorov, in Makar, and even in Taras, who after two months among the convicts struck Nekhlyudov by a lack of morality in his arguments. He learnt during his journey that tramps who escape into the marshes will persuade comrades to escape with them, and will then kill them and feed on their flesh. (He saw a living man who was accused of this, and acknowledged the act.) And the most terrible thing was that this was not a solitary case of cannibalism, but that the thing was continually recurring.

Only by a special cultivation of vice such as was carried on in these establishments, could a Russian be brought to the state of these tramps, who excelled Nietzsche’s newest teaching, holding everything allowable and nothing forbidden, and spreading this teaching first among the convicts and then among the people in general.

The only explanation of what was being done was that it aimed at the prevention of crime, at inspiring awe, at correcting offenders, and at dealing out to them ‘lawful vengeance’ as the books said. But in reality nothing in the least resembling these results came to pass. Instead of vice being put a stop to, it only spread farther; instead of being frightened, the criminals were encouraged (many a tramp returned to prison of his own free will); instead of correction, every kind of vice was systematically instilled; while the desire for vengeance, far from being weakened by the measures of the Government, was instilled into the people, to whom it was not natural.

‘Then why is it done?’ Nekhlyudov asked himself, and could find no answer.

And what seemed most surprising was that all this was not being done accidentally, nor by mistake, nor only once, but had been done continuously for centuries, with only this difference, that at first people’s nostrils used to be slit and their ears cropped; then a time came when they were branded and fastened to iron bars; and now they were manacled, and transported by steam instead of on carts.

The arguments brought forward by those in Government service who said that the things which aroused his indignation were simply due to the imperfect arrangements of the places of confinement, and that they would all be put to rights if prisons of a modern type were built, did not satisfy Nekhlyudov, because he knew that what revolted him was not a consequence of a better or worse arrangement of prisons. He had read of model prisons with electric bells, of executions by electricity as recommended by Tarde, and this refined violence revolted him yet more.

But what revolted him most of all was that there were men in the Law Courts and in the Ministry receiving large salaries taken from the people, for referring to books written by other officials like themselves, actuated by like motives, fitting to this or that statute actions that infringed the laws thus written, and then, in obedience to these statutes, sending those guilty of such actions to places where they saw them no more, but where those people were completely at the mercy of cruel, hardened inspectors, jailers, and convoy soldiers, and where millions of them perished, body and soul.

Now that he had a closer knowledge of prisons, Nekhlyudov found that all the vices which developed among the prisoners—drunkenness, gambling, cruelty, and terrible crimes, even cannibalism—were not casual, nor due to degeneration, nor to the existence of monstrosities of the criminal type (as dull scientists, backing up the Government, explained it), but were an inevitable consequence of the inconceivable delusion that men may punish one another. Nekhlyudov saw that cannibalism did not begin in the marshes, but in the Ministries, Committees, and State Departments, and only came to fruition in the marshes. He saw that his brother-in-law, for example, and in fact all the lawyers and officials from usher to minister, do not care in the least for justice, or the good of the people, about which they talked, but only for the roubles they were paid for doing the things that caused all this degradation and suffering. This was quite evident.

‘Can it be, then, that all this is simply due to a misunderstanding? Could it not be arranged that all these officials should have their salaries secured to them and a premium paid them besides, to leave off doing all that they are doing now?’ thought Nekhlyudov; and with these thoughts, when the cocks had already crowed the second time, in spite of the fleas that seemed to spring up round him, like water from a fountain, whenever he moved—he fell fast asleep.

CHAPTER XX

THE carters had left the inn long before Nekhlyudov awoke. The landlady had had her tea, and came in, wiping her fat, perspiring neck with her handkerchief, to say that a soldier had brought a note from the halting-station. The note was from Mary Pavlovna. She wrote that Kriltsov’s attack was more serious than they had supposed. ‘We first wished to let him remain here, and to get permission to stop with him, but this has not been allowed, so we shall take him on; but we fear the worst. Please arrange that if he should be left in the next town one of us may remain with him. If in order to get permission to stay I must marry him, I am of course ready to do so.’

Nekhlyudov sent the young labourer to the post-station to order horses, and began packing up hurriedly. Before he had drunk his second tumbler of tea the three-horsed post-cart drove up to the porch with ringing bells, the wheels rattling on the frozen mud as on stones. Nekhlyudov paid the fat-necked landlady, hurried out, got into the cart, and gave orders to the driver to go on as fast as possible to overtake the gang. Just past the gates of the communal pasture-ground they overtook the carts laden with sacks and sick prisoners, rattling over the frozen mud that was just beginning to be rolled smooth by the wheels. The officer was not there; he had gone on in front. The soldiers, who had evidently been drinking, followed, chatting merrily, by the side of the road. There were a great many carts. In each of the first carts sat six invalid criminal convicts, closely packed. On each of the last three were three political prisoners: Novodvorov, Grabets, and Kondratyev sat on one, Rantseva, Nabatov, and the woman to whom Mary Pavlovna had given up her own place, on another. On the third cart Kriltsov lay on a heap of hay, with a pillow under his head, Mary Pavlovna sitting by him on the edge of the cart. Nekhlyudov ordered his driver to stop, got out, and went up to Kriltsov. One of the tipsy soldiers waved his hand towards Nekhlyudov, but he paid no attention, and walked on near Kriltsov, holding on to the side of the cart with his hand. Dressed in a sheepskin coat, with a fur cap on his head, and his mouth bound up with a handkerchief, Kriltsov seemed paler and thinner than ever. His beautiful eyes looked very large and brilliant. Shaken from side to side by the jolting of the cart, he lay with his eyes fixed on Nekhlyudov; but when asked about his health he only closed his eyes and angrily shook his head; all his energy seemed to be needed to bear the jolting of the cart. Mary Pavlovna was on the other side. She exchanged a significant glance with Nekhlyudov, which expressed all her anxiety about Kriltsov’s state, and then she at once began to speak in a cheerful manner.

‘It seems the officer is ashamed of himself’, she shouted, so as to be heard above the rattle of the wheels. ‘Buzovkin’s manacles have been removed, and he is carrying his little girl himself. Katusha and Simonson are with him, and Vera too. She has taken my place.’

Kriltsov said something that could not be heard because of the noise, and frowning in the effort to repress his cough shook his head. Then Nekhlyudov stooped towards him so as to hear, and Kriltsov freeing his mouth from the handkerchief whispered: ‘Much better now. Only not to catch cold.’ Nekhlyudov nodded in acquiescence, and again exchanged a glance with Mary Pavlovna.

‘How about the problem of the three bodies?’ whispered Kriltsov, smiling with great effort. ‘The solution is difficult?’

Nekhlyudov did not understand, but Mary Pavlovna explained that he meant the well-known mathematical problem which defines the position of the sun, moon, and earth, to which Kriltsov compared the relations between Nekhlyudov, Katusha, and Simonson. Kriltsov nodded to show that Mary Pavlovna had explained his joke correctly.

‘The solution does not lie with me.’ Nekhlyudov said.

‘Did you get my note? Will you do it?’ Mary Pavlovna asked.

‘Certainly,’ answered Nekhlyudov; and noticing a look of displeasure on Kriltsov’s face, he returned to his conveyance, got in, and with both hands holding to the sides of the cart, which jolted him over the ruts of the rough road, he began passing the gang, which, with its grey cloaks and sheepskin coats, chains and manacles, stretched over three-quarters of a mile of the road. On the opposite side of the road Nekhlyudov noticed Katusha’s blue shawl, Vera Bogodukhovskaya’s black coat, and Simonson’s crocheted cap and white worsted stockings, with bands like those of sandals tied round them. Simonson was walking with the women and carrying on a heated discussion.

When they saw Nekhlyudov they bowed to him, and Simonson raised his hat in a solemn manner. Nekhlyudov, having nothing to say, did not check the driver, and was soon ahead of them. Having again got on to a smoother part of the road, the driver went along still faster; but had continually to turn off the beaten track to pass rows of carts that were moving along the road in both directions.

The road, which was cut up by deep ruts, lay through a thick forest of pines, mingled with birch trees and larches, bright with the yellow leaves they had not yet shed. By the time Nekhlyudov had passed about half the gang he reached the end of the forest. Fields now lay stretched along both sides of the road, and the crosses and cupolas of a monastery appeared in the distance. The clouds had dispersed; the weather had quite cleared up; the leaves, the frozen puddles, and the gilt crosses and cupolas of the monastery glittered brightly in the sun that had risen above the forest. A little to the right, mountains began to gleam white in the blue-grey distance. The vehicle entered a large village. The village street was full of people, both Russian and of other nationalities, wearing curious caps and cloaks. Drunk and sober men and women crowded and chattered round booths, public-houses, and carts. The nearness to a town was noticeable.

Giving a pull and a lash of the whip to the horse on his right, the driver sat down sideways on the right edge of the seat, so that the reins hung over that side, and with an evident desire to show off drove quickly down the river, which was crossed by a ferry. The raft was coming towards them and had reached the middle of the stream. About twenty carts were waiting to cross. Nekhlyudov had not long to wait. The raft, which had been pulled far up the stream, quickly approached the landing, carried by the swift current.

The tall, silent, broad-shouldered, muscular ferrymen, dressed in sheepskins, threw the ropes and moored the raft with practised hand, landed the carts that were on it, and put on board those that were waiting on the bank. The whole raft was filled with vehicles and with horses that fidgeted at the sight of the water. The broad, swift river splashed against the sides of the ferry boats, tightening the ropes. When the raft was full, and Nekhlyudov’s cart, with the horses taken out of it, stood closely surrounded by others on one side of the raft, the ferrymen barred the entrance, and paying no heed to the entreaties of those who had not found room on the raft, unfastened the ropes, and set off.

All was quiet on the raft; one could hear nothing but the tramp of the ferrymen’s boots, and the horses stepping from foot to foot.

CHAPTER XXI

NEKHLYUDOV stood at the edge of the raft, looking at the broad river. Two pictures kept rising in his mind. One was the shaking head of Kriltsov, who was dying in anger, the other, Katusha’s figure vigorously stepping along the road beside Simonson. The first impression, that of Kriltsov, dying unprepared for death, made a heavy, sorrowful impression on him. The other, that of Katusha, full of energy, having gained the love of such a man as Simonson and found a true and solid path towards righteousness, should have been pleasant, and yet it also created in Nekhlyudov’s mind a heavy impression he could not conquer.

The vibrating sounds of a big brass bell reached them from the town. Nekhlyudov’s driver, who stood by his side, and the other men on the raft, raised their caps and crossed themselves—all except a short, dishevelled old man who stood close to the railings and whom Nekhlyudov had not noticed before. He did not cross himself, but raised his head and looked at Nekhlyudov. The old man wore a patched coat, cloth trousers, and worn and patched shoes. He had a small wallet on his back and a high cap of much-worn fur on his head.

‘Why don’t you pray, old chap?’ asked Nekhlyudov’s driver, as he replaced and straightened his cap. ‘Aren’t you baptized?’

‘Who’s one to pray to?’ asked the tattered old man quickly in a determinedly aggressive tone, pronouncing each syllable.

‘To whom? To God of course’, said the driver witheringly.

‘And you just show me where He is—this God?’

There was something so serious and firm in the old man’s expression that the driver felt he had to do with a strong-minded man and was somewhat abashed; but, trying not to show it, and not to be silenced and put to shame before the crowd that was observing them, he answered quickly:

‘Where? In heaven of course.’

‘And have you been up there?’

‘Whether I’ve been or not, everyone knows that one must pray to God.’

‘No man has ever seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him’, said the old man in the same rapid manner, and with a stern frown.

‘It’s clear you are not a Christian, but a hole-worshipper. You pray to a hole’, said the driver, pushing the handle of his whip into his girdle, and straightening the harness on one of the horses.

Someone laughed.

‘What is your faith, dad?’ asked a middle-aged man, who stood by his cart on the same side of the raft.

‘I have no kind of faith, because I believe no one—no one but myself’, said the old man, as quickly and decidedly as before.

‘How can you believe yourself?’ Nekhlyudov asked, entering into conversation with him. ‘You might make a mistake.’

‘Never in my life’, the old man said decidedly, with a shake of his head.

‘Then why are there different faiths?’ Nekhlyudov asked.

‘It’s just because men believe others, and do not believe themselves, that there are different faiths. I also believed others, and lost myself as in a swamp—lost myself so that I had no hope of finding my way out. Old-Believers and New-Believers, and Judaisers and Hlysty, and Popovtsy and Bezpopovtsy and Avstriaks and Molokans and Skoptsy*—every faith praises itself only and so they all creep about like blind puppies. There are many faiths, but the spirit is one—in me, and in you, and in him. So that if everyone believes himself, all will be united; everyone be himself and all will be as one.’

The old man spoke loudly, and often looked round, evidently wishing that as many as possible should hear him.

‘And have you long held this faith?’

‘I? A long time. This is the twenty-third year that they persecute me.’

‘Persecute you! How?’

‘As they persecuted Christ so they persecute me. They seize me and take me before the courts, and before the priests, the Scribes, and the Pharisees. Once they put me into a madhouse; but they can do nothing, because I am free. They say “What is your name?” thinking I shall name myself. But I do not give myself a name. I have given up everything; I have no name, no place, no country, no anything. I am just myself. “What is your name?” “Man.” “How old are you?” I say, “I do not count my years, and cannot count them, because I always was, I always shall be.” “Who are your parents?” “I have no parents, except God and Mother Earth. God is my father.” “And the Tsar? Do you recognize the Tsar?” they say. I say, “Why not? He is his own Tsar, and I am my own Tsar.” “Where’s the good of talking to him?” say they: and I say, “I do not ask you to talk to me.” And then they begin tormenting me.’

‘And where are you going now?’ asked Nekhlyudov.

‘Where God may lead me. I work when I can find work, and when I can’t, I beg.’

The old man noticed that the raft was approaching the bank, and stopped, turning round to the bystanders with a look of triumph.

Nekhlyudov got out his purse, and offered some money to the old man, but he refused, saying:

‘I do not accept that sort of thing; bread I do accept.’

‘I beg your pardon, then.’

‘There is nothing to pardon, you have not offended me, and it is not possible to offend me’, and the old man replaced on his back the wallet he had taken off.

Meanwhile the post-cart had been landed and the horses harnessed.

‘I wonder you should care to talk to him, sir’, said the driver, when Nekhlyudov, having tipped the brawny ferrymen, got into the cart again. ‘He is just a worthless tramp.’

CHAPTER XXII

WHEN they got to the top of the bank the driver turned round to Nekhlyudov.

‘What hotel am I to drive to?’

‘Which is the best?’

‘Nothing could be better than the Siberian, but Dukhov’s is also good.’

‘Drive to whichever you like.’

The driver again seated himself sideways, and drove faster. The town was like all such towns. The same kind of houses, with attic windows and green roofs, the same kind of cathedral, the same kind of shops and stores in the principal street, and even the same kind of policemen. But almost all the houses were of wood, and the streets were not paved. In one of the chief streets the driver stopped at the door of an hotel, but no room could be had there, so he drove to another. And here Nekhlyudov, after two months, once again found himself in surroundings such as he had been accustomed to, as far as comfort and cleanliness went. Though the room he was shown to was simple enough, yet Nekhlyudov felt greatly relieved to be there, after two months of post-carts, country inns, and halting-stations. His first business was to clean himself from the lice, which he had never been able to get thoroughly rid of after visiting the halting-stations. When he had unpacked he went first to the Russian bath, and then, having put on town attire—a starched shirt, trousers that had got rather creased, a frock coat, and an overcoat—set out to visit the Governor of the district. The hotel-keeper called an izvozchik, whose well-fed Kirghiz horse and vibrating trap soon brought Nekhlyudov to the large porch of a big building in front of which stood sentries and a policeman. The house had a garden in front and at the back, where among the aspen and birch trees which spread out their bare branches grew thick, dark-green pines and firs. The General was not well and did not receive, but Nekhlyudov asked the footman to hand in his card all the same, and the footman came back with a favourable reply.

‘Will you please come in?’

The hall, the footman, the orderly, the staircase, the dancing-room with its well-polished floor, were very much the same as in Petersburg, but more imposing and rather dirtier.

Nekhlyudov was shown into the study.

The General, a bloated man of sanguine disposition, with a bulbous nose, large bumps on his forehead, puffs under his eyes, and a bald head, sat wrapped in a Tartar-silk dressing-gown, smoking a cigarette and sipping his tea out of a tumbler in a silver holder.

‘How do you do, my dear sir? Excuse my dressing-gown; it is better so than if I had not received you at all’, he said, pulling his dressing-gown over his fat neck, with its deep folds at the nape. ‘I am not quite well, and do not go out. What has brought you to our remote regions?’

‘I am accompanying a gang of prisoners, among whom there is a person closely connected with me’, said Nekhlyudov. ‘And I have come to see your Excellency partly on behalf of this person and partly about another business.’

The General took another whiff and a sip of tea, put his cigarette into a malachite ashpan, and with his narrow eyes fixed on Nekhlyudov, sat listening seriously, only interrupting him once to offer him a cigarette.

The General belonged to the cultured type of military men who believe that liberal and humane views can be reconciled with their profession. But being by nature a kind and intelligent man he soon felt the impossibility of such a reconciliation. So, not to feel the inner discord in which he lived, he gave himself up more and more to the habit of drinking, so prevalent among military men, and became so addicted to it that after thirty-five years’ military service he had become what the doctors term an ‘alcoholic’. He was saturated with alcohol, and if he drank any kind of liquor he became drunk. Yet strong drink was an absolute necessity to him—he could not live without it—so he was quite drunk every evening, but had grown so used to this state that he did not reel or talk any special nonsense. And if he did talk nonsense, it was accepted as wisdom because of the important and high position which he occupied. Only in the morning, just at the time Nekhlyudov came to see him, was he like a reasonable being and able to understand what was said to him, exemplifying more or less aptly a proverb he was fond of repeating: ‘He’s tipsy but he’s wise, so he’s pleasant in two ways.’ The higher authorities knew he was a drunkard, but he was more educated than the rest—though his education had stopped at the point at which drunkenness had got hold of him—he was bold, adroit, of imposing appearance, showed tact even when drunk, and therefore was appointed to, and allowed to retain, so public and responsible a post.

Nekhlyudov told him that the person he was interested in was a woman, that she was wrongfully convicted, and that a petition had been sent to the Emperor on her behalf.

‘Yes, well?’ said the General.

‘I was promised in Petersburg that the news concerning her fate would be sent to me not later than this month, and to this place——’

The General stretched his hand with its stumpy fingers towards the table and rang a bell, still looking at Nekhlyudov, puffing at his cigarette, and coughing very loudly.

‘So I would like to ask that this woman might be allowed to remain here until the answer to her petition comes.’

The footman, an orderly in uniform, came in.

‘Ask if Anna Vasilyevna is up’, said the General to the orderly, ‘and bring some more tea.’ Then, turning to Nekhlyudov, ‘Yes, and what else?’

‘My other request concerns a political prisoner who is with the same gang.’

‘Is that so?’ said the General, with a significant shake of the head.

‘He is seriously ill—dying—and he will probably be left here in the hospital. So one of the political women prisoners would like to stay behind with him.’

‘She is no relation of his?’

‘No, but she is willing to marry him if that will enable her to remain.’

The General, looking fixedly with twinkling eyes at his interlocutor, and with an evident wish to discomfit him, listened in silence, smoking all the time.

When Nekhlyudov had finished, the General took a book from the table, and wetting his finger quickly turned over the pages and found the statute relating to marriages, and read it.

‘What is she sentenced to?’ he asked, looking up from the book.

‘She? To hard labour.’

‘Well then, the position of one sentenced to that cannot be bettered by marriage.’

‘Yes, but——’

‘Excuse me. Even if a free man should marry her, she would have to serve her term. The question in such cases is, whose is the heavier punishment, hers or his?’

‘They are both sentenced to hard labour.’

‘Very well; so they are quits’, said the General, with a laugh. ‘She’s got the same that he has, but as he is sick he may be left behind, and of course what can be done to lighten his fate shall be done. But as for her, even if she did marry him, she could not remain behind——’

‘Her Excellency is having coffee’, the footman announced.

The General nodded and continued:

‘However, I will think about it. What are their names? Put them down here.’

Nekhlyudov wrote down their names.

Nekhlyudov’s request to be allowed to see the dying man the General answered by saying:

‘Neither can I do that. Of course I do not suspect you; but you take an interest in him and in the others, and you have money, and here with us anything can be done with money. They tell me: “Put down bribery.” But how can I put down bribery when everybody takes bribes? And the lower their rank the more ready they are to be bribed. How can one find it out across more than three thousand miles? Out there any official is a little Tsar, just as I am here’, and he laughed. ‘You have probably been to see the political prisoners: you gave money and got permission, eh?’ he said with a smile. ‘Is it not so?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I quite understand that you had to do it. You pity a political prisoner and wish to see him. And the inspector or the convoy soldier accepts because he has a salary of a shilling a day, and a family, and he can’t help accepting it. In his place and in yours I should act in the same way as you and he did. But in my position I do not permit myself to swerve an inch from the letter of the law, just because I am a man and might be influenced by pity. I am a member of the executive and I have been placed in a position of trust on certain conditions, and those conditions I must carry out … Well, so that business is finished. And now let us hear what is going on in the metropolis’; and the General began questioning and relating, with an evident desire both to hear the news and to show off his own knowledge and humanity.

CHAPTER XXIII

‘BY the way, where are you staying?’ asked the General, as he was taking leave of Nekhlyudov. ‘At Dukhov’s? Well, it’s horrid enough there. Come and dine with us at five o’clock. You speak English?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘That’s good. You see an English traveller has just arrived here. He is studying the transportation question, and examining the prisons of Siberia. Well, he is dining with us tonight, so you must come and meet him. We dine at five, and my wife expects punctuality. Then I will also give you an answer about that woman and about the sick man. Perhaps it may be possible to leave someone behind with him.’

Having taken leave of the General, Nekhlyudov drove to the post-office, feeling himself in an extremely animated and energetic frame of mind.

The post-office was a low-vaulted room. Several officials sat behind a counter serving the people, of whom there was quite a crowd. One official sat with his head bent to one side, stamping the letters, which he slipped dexterously under the die. Nekhlyudov had not long to wait. As soon as he had given his name everything that had come for him by post was at once handed over. There was a good deal: several letters, and money and books, and the latest number of the European Messenger.* Nekhlyudov took all these things to a wooden bench on which a soldier with a book in his hand sat waiting, and sitting down by his side began to sort his letters. Among them was a registered letter in a very good envelope, with a distinctly stamped bright red seal. He broke the seal, and seeing a letter from Selenin enclosing some official paper he felt the blood rush to his face, and his heart stood still. It was the answer to Katusha’s petition. What would that answer be? Surely not a rejection? Nekhlyudov glanced hurriedly through the letter, written in an illegibly small, firm, and cramped hand, and breathed a sigh of relief. The answer was a favourable one.

‘Dear Friend,’ wrote Selenin, ‘our last talk made a profound impression on me. You were right concerning Maslova. I have looked carefully through the case and see that a shocking injustice has been done her. It could be remedied only by the Committee of Petitions, before which you laid it. I managed to assist at the examination of the case, and I enclose herewith a copy of the mitigation of the sentence. Your aunt, the Countess Catherine Ivanovna, gave me the address to which I am sending this. The original document has been sent to the place where she was imprisoned before her trial, and will from there probably be sent at once to the principal Government office in Siberia. I hasten to communicate this glad news to you, and warmly press your hand.—Yours, Selenin.’

The document ran thus: ‘His Majesty’s Office for the Reception of Petitions addressed to his Imperial Name’ (here followed the date and various official technicalities). ‘By order of the Chief of His Majesty’s Office for the Reception of Petitions addressed to His Imperial Name, the peasant woman Katerina Maslova is hereby informed that His Imperial Majesty, with reference to her most loyal petition, condescending to her request, deigns to order that her sentence to hard labour be commuted to one of exile to the less distant districts of Siberia.’

This was joyful and important news. All that Nekhlyudov could have hoped for Katusha, and for himself also, had happened. It was true that her new position brought new complications with it. While she was a convict, marriage with her could only be fictitious, and would have had no meaning except that he would be in a position to alleviate her condition. But now there was nothing to prevent their living together; and Nekhlyudov had not prepared himself for that. And besides, what of her relations with Simonson? What was the meaning of her words yesterday? And, if she consented to a union with Simonson, would it be good or bad? He could not unravel all these questions, and gave up thinking about them. ‘It will all clear itself up later on’, he thought. ‘I must not think about it now, but must convey the glad news to her as soon as possible, and set her free.’ He thought that the copy of the document he had received would suffice; so when he left the post-office he told the izvozchik to drive him to the prison.

Though he had received no order from the governor to visit the prison that morning he knew by experience that it was easy to get from the subordinates what the higher officials would not grant, and he meant now to try and get into the prison to give Katusha the joyful news, and perhaps to get her set free, and at the same time to inquire about Kriltsov’s health, and tell him and Mary Pavlovna what the General had said.

The prison inspector was a tall, imposing-looking man, with moustache and whiskers that turned towards the corners of his mouth. He received Nekhlyudov very sternly, and told him plainly that he could not grant an outsider permission to interview the prisoners without a special order from his chief. To Nekhlyudov’s remark that he had been allowed to visit the prisoners even in the capitals, he answered:

‘That may be so, but I do not allow it’, and his tone implied, ‘You city gentlemen may think to surprise and perplex us, but we in Eastern Siberia also know what the law is, and may even teach it you.’

Nor did the copy of a document straight from the Emperor’s own office have any effect on the prison inspector. He peremptorily refused to allow Nekhlyudov inside the prison walls. He only smiled contemptuously at Nekhlyudov’s naïve conclusion that the copy he had received would suffice to set Maslova free, and declared that a direct order from his own superior would be needed before anyone could be set at liberty. The only things he agreed to do were to communicate to Maslova that a mitigation had arrived for her, and to promise that he would not detain her an hour after the order arrived from his chief to liberate her. He would also give no news of Kriltsov, saying that he could not even tell if there were such a prisoner there. And so having accomplished next to nothing Nekhlyudov got into his trap and drove back to his hotel.

The strictness of the inspector was chiefly due to the fact that an epidemic of typhus had broken out in the prison, owing to twice the number of people it was intended for being crowded into it. The izvozchik who drove Nekhlyudov said, ‘Quite a lot of people are dying in the prison every day. Some kind of pest has attacked them. As many as twenty are buried in a day.’

CHAPTER XXIV

IN spite of his non-success at the prison, Nekhlyudov, still in the same vigorous, energetic frame of mind, went to the governor’s office to see if the original of the document had arrived for Maslova. It had not arrived, so Nekhlyudov went back to the hotel and wrote about it without delay to Selenin and to the advocate. When he had finished he looked at his watch and saw it was time to go to dinner at the General’s.

On the way he again began wondering how Katusha would receive the news of the mitigation of her sentence. Where would she have to live? How should he live with her? What about Simonson? What would his relations with her be? He remembered the change that had taken place in her, and this reminded him of her past.

‘I must forget it for the present’, he thought, and again hastened to drive her out of his mind. ‘When the time comes I shall see’, he said to himself, and began to think what he ought to say to the General.

The dinner at the General’s, given in the luxurious style to which Nekhlyudov had been accustomed, and which is usual among rich people and high officials, was extremely enjoyable after he had been so long deprived not only of luxury but even of the most ordinary comforts. The mistress of the house was a Petersburg grande dame of the old school, a maid of honour at the Court of Nicholas I, who spoke French quite naturally and Russian very unnaturally. She held herself very erect, and kept her elbows close to her waist when moving her hands. She was quietly and somewhat sadly considerate for her husband, and extremely kind to her visitors, though with shades of difference in her behaviour according to who they were. She received Nekhlyudov as if he were one of themselves; and her fine, almost imperceptible, flattery made him once again aware of his virtues, and gave him a sense of satisfaction. She made him feel that she knew of that honest though rather singular step of his which had brought him into Siberia, and that she held him to be an exceptional man. This refined flattery, and the elegance and luxury of the General’s house, had the effect of making Nekhlyudov succumb to the enjoyment of the handsome surroundings, the delicate dishes, and the ease and pleasure of intercourse with educated people of his own class, so that the surroundings amid which he had passed the last months seemed a dream from which he now awoke to reality.

Besides those of the household—the General’s daughter, her husband, and an aide-de-camp—there were present an Englishman, a merchant interested in the gold-mines, and the governor of a distant Siberian town. All these people seemed pleasant to Nekhlyudov.

The Englishman, a healthy man with rosy complexion, who spoke very bad French, but whose command of his own language was very good and oratorically impressive, had seen a great deal, and what he had to say about America, India, Japan, and Siberia was very interesting.

The young merchant interested in the gold-mines (the son of a peasant), in evening-dress made in London and with diamond studs in his shirt, possessing a fine library, contributing freely to philanthropic work, and holding liberal European views, seemed pleasant and interesting to Nekhlyudov as a sample of a quite new and good type of civilized and European culture grafted on a healthy, uncultivated peasant stock.

The governor of the distant Siberian town was that same ex-Director of a Government Department who had been so much talked about in Petersburg at the time Nekhlyudov was there. He was plump, with thin, curly hair, soft blue eyes, carefully tended white hands with rings on the fingers, and a pleasant smile; and he was very stout in the lower part of his body. The master of the house valued this governor, because, surrounded by bribe-takers, he alone took no bribes. The mistress of the house, who was very fond of music and a very good pianist herself, valued him because he was a good musician and played duets with her. Nekhlyudov was in such good humour that even this man was not unpleasant to him, in spite of what he knew of his vices.

The bright, energetic aide-de-camp, with his bluey-grey chin, who was continually offering his services, pleased Nekhlyudov by his good nature. But it was the charming young couple, the General’s daughter and her husband, who pleased him most. The daughter was a plain-looking, simple-minded young woman, wholly absorbed in her first two children. Her husband, whom she had fallen in love with and had married after a long struggle with her parents, was a Liberal who had taken honours at Moscow University, a modest and intellectual young man in Government service, occupied with statistics, and specially with the native tribes, whom he studied, liked, and tried to save from dying out.

All those people were not only kind and attentive to Nekhlyudov, but evidently pleased to meet him as a new and interesting acquaintance. The General, who came to dinner in uniform and wearing his white cross, greeted Nekhlyudov as he would 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 Nekhlyudov what he had been doing since he left that morning, and Nekhlyudov told him he had been to the post-office and had received news that the sentence of the person he had spoken about in the morning would be mitigated, and he again asked for leave to visit the prison.

The General, evidently displeased that business should be mentioned at dinner, frowned and said nothing.

‘Have a glass of vodka?’ he asked, 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 Nekhlyudov; ‘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?’ Nekhlyudov 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 wants to see it in all its glory? Let him do so. I have written about it—but they pay no attention. So let them find out from the foreign press’, said the General, and went up to the dinner-table, where the mistress of the house was showing the visitors their places.

Nekhlyudov sat between his hostess and the Englishman. Opposite him sat the General’s daughter and the ex-Director of a Department. 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 Nekhlyudov much.

But after dinner, over their coffee, Nekhlyudov, the Englishman, and the hostess began a very interesting conversation about Gladstone, and it seemed to Nekhlyudov that he was saying many clever things which were noticed by his interlocutor. And, after a good dinner, and good wine, he felt it more and more pleasant to be sipping his coffee 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 a Department, and they began to play in well-practised style Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Nekhlyudov fell into a state of perfect self-satisfaction, to which he had long been a stranger, as though he had only just found out what a good man he was.

The grand piano was a splendid instrument, the symphony was well executed. At least, so it seemed to Nekhlyudov, who knew and liked that symphony. Listening to the beautiful andante, he felt a tickling in his nose, so touched was he by his many virtues.

Nekhlyudov thanked his hostess for the enjoyment he had so long been deprived of, 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 Nekhlyudov, 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 gold-miner, and the aide-de-camp. ‘Go, go, pay your tribute.’

The young woman, visibly excited by the thought that judgement was about to be passed on her children, went quickly towards the inner apartments, followed by Nekhlyu-dov. In the third, a lofty room, papered white, and lit by a shaded lamp, stood two small cots, a nurse with a white cape on her shoulders sitting between; she had a kindly, typical Siberian face with high cheek-bones. She rose and bowed. The mother bent over the first cot, in which a 2-year-old 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 tiny white foot had pushed itself out.

‘Is she not pretty? She is only 2 years old, you know.’

‘Charming!’

‘And this is Vasuk, as grandpapa calls him. Quite a different type. A Siberian, is he not?’

‘A splendid boy’, said Nekhlyudov, as he looked at the little fatty lying asleep on his stomach.

‘Yes’, said his mother, with a proudly happy smile.

Nekhlyudov recalled to his mind chains, shaven heads, fighting and debauchery, the dying Kriltsov, 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, refined happiness.

After having repeatedly expressed his admiration of the children, thereby at least partially satisfying their mother who eagerly drank in this praise, Nekhlyudov followed her back to the drawing-room, where the Englishman was waiting for him to visit the prison as they had arranged. Having taken leave of their hosts, old and young, the Englishman and Nekhlyudov went out into the porch of the house.

The weather had changed. Snow was falling thickly in large flakes and had already covered the road, the roofs, the trees in the garden, the steps of the porch, the hood of the trap, and the back of the horse.

The Englishman had his own trap, and having told the coachman to drive to the prison, Nekhlyudov called his own izvozchik, got in alone with a 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

THE dismal prison building, with its sentry, and the lamp burning under the gateway, produced by its long row of lighted windows, in spite of the clean white covering that now lay over everything—the porch, the roof, and the walls—an even more dismal impression than in the morning.

The imposing inspector came out to the gate, read by the light of the lamp the pass that had been given to Nekhlyudov and the Englishman, and shrugged his fine shoulders in surprise; but in obedience to the order he 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 seats, and asked what he could do for them; and when he heard that Nekhlyudov 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, Nekhlyudov 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? …’

Nekhlyudov 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 in a prison jacket, with a kerchief tied round her head, a heavy sensation came over him.

‘I want 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 downcast 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 that time when she reproached him. She flushed and turned pale, her fingers nervously twisting a corner of her jacket; she looked up at him, and 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 decide where to settle. We shall consider——’

She interrupted him hurriedly.

‘What have I to consider? Where Vladimir Simonson goes, there I shall follow.’

In spite of her excitement she raised her eyes to him and pronounced these words quickly and distinctly, as if she had prepared what she had to say.

‘Really?’

‘Well, Dmitry Ivanich, you see he wants me to live with him …’, she stopped, quite frightened, and corrected herself, ‘he wants me to be near him. What more can I wish for? I must look on it as happiness. What else is there for me?…’

‘One of two things’, thought Nekhlyudov. ‘Either she has fallen in love with Simonson and does not in the least require the sacrifice I imagined I was making, or she still loves me and refuses me for my own sake, and is burning her ships by uniting her fate with Simonson.’ And he 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 Vladimir Simonson is quite an exceptional man.’

‘Yes, of course’, Nekhlyudov 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 would not say all.

‘No, Dmitry Ivanich, you must forgive me if I am not doing what you wish’, and she looked at him with her unfathomable squinting eyes. ‘Yes, evidently that’s how it must be. You, too, must live.’

She said just what he had been telling himself a few moments before. But he no longer thought so now, but thought 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’, she said, and smiled.

‘I have not suffered. It was good for me, and I should like to go on serving you if I could.’

‘We’—as she said we she looked at Nekhlyudov—’we do not want anything. 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, at any rate, have no reason to thank me’, Nekhlyudov said.

‘Where is the use of 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 Nekhlyudov, and asked her about Kriltsov.

She mastered her emotion, and quietly told him all she knew. Kriltsov was very weak, and had been sent into the infirmary; Mary Pavlovna was very anxious and had asked to be allowed to enter the infirmary as a nurse, but could not get permission.

‘Shall I go?’ she asked, noticing that the Englishman was waiting.

‘I will not say goodbye; I shall see you again’, said Nckhlyudov, holding out his hand.

‘Forgive me’, she said, so low that he could hardly hear her. Their eyes met, and Nekhlyudov knew by the strange look of her squinting eyes and the pathetic smile with which she said not ‘Goodbye’, 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 she thought she would be setting Nekhlyudov free, and she felt glad that she had done what she meant to do, and yet suffered at parting from him.

She pressed his hand, turned quickly, and left the room.

Nekhlyudov was ready to go, but seeing that the Englishman was noting something down, did not disturb him, but sat down on a wooden seat by the wall; and suddenly a feeling of terrible weariness came over him. It was not the sleepless night, not the journey, not the excitement, that had tired him, but he felt terribly tired of living. He leant against the back of the bench, shut his eyes, and in a moment fell into a deep, heavy sleep.

‘Well, would you like to see the cells now?’ the inspector asked.

Nekhlyudov looked up and was surprised to find himself where he was. The Englishman had finished his notes, and expressed a wish to see the cells.

Nekhlyudov, tired and indifferent, followed him.

CHAPTER XXVI

PASSING through the ante-room and the sickening, foul corridor, in which to their astonishment they saw two prisoners making water on the floor, the Englishman and Nekhlyudov accompanied by the inspector entered the first ward, where those sentenced to hard labour were confined. The prisoners were already lying on the bedshelves, which occupied the middle of the ward. They lay head to head and side by side. There were about seventy of them. When the visitors entered, all the prisoners jumped up and stood by the beds, excepting two: a young man in a state of high fever, and an old man who did nothing but groan.

The Englishman asked if the young man had been ill long. The inspector replied that he had been taken ill that morning, but that the old man had been suffering with pains in the stomach for a long time, but could not be removed as the infirmary was overfull. The Englishman shook his head disapprovingly, said he would like to say a few words to these people, and asked Nekhlyudov to interpret. It turned out that besides studying the places of exile and the prisons of Siberia, the Englishman had another object in view, that of preaching salvation by faith and the Redemption.

‘Tell them’, he said, ‘that Christ pitied and loved them and died for them. If they believe in this they will be saved.’ While he spoke all the prisoners stood silent with their arms at their sides. ‘This book, tell them,’ he continued, ‘tells all about it. Can any of them read?’

There were more than twenty who could.

The Englishman took several bound Testaments out of a hand-bag, and many strong hands, with their hard, black nails, stretched out towards him from beneath the coarse shirt sleeves, jostling one another. He gave away two Testaments in this ward.

The same thing happened in the second ward. There was the same foul air, the same iron hanging between the windows, the same tub to the left of the door; they were all lying side by side close to one another, and jumped up in the same manner and stood erect with their arms by their sides—all but three, two of whom sat up, while one remained lying and did not even look at the newcomers. These three were also ill. The Englishman made the same speech, and again gave away two Testaments.

In the third room four were ill. When the Englishman asked why the sick were not put all together into one ward, the inspector said that they did not wish it themselves, that their diseases were not infectious, and that the medical assistant looked after them and did what was necessary.

‘He has not set foot here for a fortnight’, muttered a voice.

The inspector did not reply, and led the way to the next ward. Again the door was unlocked and all got up and stood silent, and again the Englishman gave away Testaments; it was the same in the fifth and sixth wards, in those to the right, and those to the left.

From those sentenced to hard labour they went on to the exiles; from the exiles to those banished by their communes, and those who followed of their own free will. Everywhere men—cold, hungry, idle, diseased, degraded, and confined—were shown off like wild beasts.

The Englishman having given away the appointed number of Testaments stopped giving any more, and made no more speeches. The depressing sights, and especially the stifling atmosphere, quelled even his energy, and he went from cell to cell saying nothing but ‘AH right’ to the inspector’s report of the prisoners in each ward.

Nekhlyudov followed as in a dream, unable either to refuse to go on, or to go away, and with the same feelings of weariness and hopelessness.

CHAPTER XXVII

IN one of the exiles’ wards Nekhlyudov, to his surprise, recognized the strange old man he had seen crossing the ferry that morning. This tattered and wrinkled old man was sitting on the floor by the beds, barefooted, wearing only a dirty cinder-coloured shirt, torn on one shoulder, and similar trousers. He looked severely and inquiringly at the newcomers. His emaciated body, visible through the holes in his dirty shirt, looked miserably weak, but in his face was more concentrated seriousness and animation than even when Nekhlyudov saw him crossing the ferry. As in all the other wards, so here also the prisoners jumped up and stood erect when the official entered, but the old man remained sitting. His eyes glittered and his brow frowned wrathfully.

‘Get up!’ the inspector called out to him.

The old man did not rise, but only smiled contemptuously.

‘Thy servants are standing before thee. I am not thy servant. Thou bearest the seal …’, said the old man pointing to the inspector’s forehead.

‘Wha—a—t?’ said the inspector threateningly, and made a step towards him.

‘I know this man’, Nekhlyudov hastened to say; ‘what is he imprisoned for?’

‘The police have sent him here because he has no passport. We ask them not to send such, but they will do it’, said the inspector, casting an angry side-glance at the old man.

‘And so it seems thou, too, art one of Antichrist’s army?’ the old man said to Nekhlyudov.

‘No, I am a visitor’, said Nekhlyudov.

‘What, hast thou come to see how Antichrist tortures men? Here, see. He has locked them up in a cage, a whole army of them. Men should eat bread in the sweat of their brow. But he has locked them up with no work to do, and feeds them like swine, so that they should turn into beasts.’

‘What is he saying?’ asked the Englishman.

Nekhlyudov told him the old man was blaming the inspector for keeping men imprisoned.

‘Ask him how he thinks one should treat those who do not keep the laws’, said the Englishman.

Nekhlyudov translated the question.

The old man laughed strangely, showing his regular teeth.

‘The laws?’ he repeated with contempt. ‘First he robbed everybody, took all the earth, and all rights away from men—took them all for himself—killed all those who were against him, and then he wrote laws forbidding to rob and to kill. He should have written those laws sooner.’

Nekhlyudov translated. The Englishman smiled.

‘Well, anyhow, ask him how one should treat thieves and murderers now?’

Nekhlyudov again translated his question.

‘Tell him he should take the seal of Antichrist off from himself, the old man said, frowning sternly; ‘then he will know neither thieves nor murderers. Tell him so.’

‘He is crazy’, said the Englishman, when Nekhlyudov had translated the old man’s words; and shrugging his shoulders he left the cell.

‘Do thine own business and leave others alone. Everyone for himself. God knows whom to execute, whom to pardon, but we do not know’, said the old man. ‘Be your own chief, then chiefs will not be wanted. Go, go’, he added, frowning angrily, and looking with glittering eyes at Nekhlyudov, who lingered in the ward. ‘Hast thou not gazed enough on how the servants of Antichrist feed lice on men? Go! go!’

Nekhlyudov left the ward, and went up to the Englishman, who was standing with the inspector by an open door, asking what that cell was for.

‘It is the mortuary.’

‘Oh’, said the Englishman, and expressed a wish to go in.

The mortuary was an ordinary cell, not very large. A small lamp hung on the wall and dimly lit up some sacks and logs that were piled in one corner, and four dead bodies that lay in the bedshelves to the right. The first body had on a coarse linen shirt and drawers; it was that of a tall man with a small beard, and half his head shaved. The body was already quite rigid; the bluish hands that had evidently been folded on the breast had separated; the legs had also fallen apart, and the bare feet were sticking out. Next to him lay a barefooted and bareheaded old woman, in white petticoat and jacket, her thin plait of hair uncovered, and with a small, pinched, yellow face and a sharp nose. Beyond her was another man in a mauve-coloured garment. This colour reminded Nekhlyudov of something.

He came nearer and looked at the body.

The small pointed beard turned upward, the firm, well-shaped nose, the high, white forehead, the thin, curly hair—he recognized the familiar features, but could scarcely believe his eyes. Yesterday he had seen this face angry, excited, and full of suffering; now it was quiet, motionless and terribly beautiful. Yes, it was Kriltsov, or at any rate the trace of his material existence that remained. ‘Why had he suffered? Why had he lived? Has he now understood it?’ Nekhlyudov thought, and there seemed to be no answer, seemed to be nothing but death, and he felt faint. Without taking leave of the Englishman Nekhlyudov asked the inspector to lead him out into the yard, and feeling the absolute necessity of being alone to think over all that had happened that evening he drove back to his hotel.

CHAPTER XXVIII

NEKHLYUDOV did not go to bed but paced up and down his room for a long time. His business with Katusha was at an end. He was not wanted, and this made him sad and ashamed. His other business was not only unfinished, but troubled him more than ever and demanded his activity. All this horrible evil that he had seen and learnt to know lately, and especially today in that awful prison—this evil which had killed that dear Kriltsov—ruled and was triumphant, and he could see no possibility of conquering it or even of knowing how to conquer it. In his imagination rose up those hundreds and thousands of degraded human beings locked up in noisome prisons by indifferent generals, prosecutors, and inspectors; he recalled the strange, free old man accusing the officials, and therefore considered mad, and, among the corpses, the beautiful waxen face of Kriltsov, who had died in anger. And again the question whether it was he, Nekhlyudov, who was mad, or those who considered they were in their right minds while they committed all these deeds, came before him with renewed force, demanding an answer.

Tired of pacing up and down, tired of thinking, he sat down on the sofa near the lamp, and mechanically opened a Testament which the Englishman had given him as a remembrance and which he had thrown on the table when he emptied his pockets on coming in.

‘It is said one can find an answer to everything here’, he thought, and opening the Testament at random he began reading Matthew 18: 1–4: ‘In that hour came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And he called to him a little child, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’

‘Yes, yes, that is true’, he said, remembering that he had known the peace and joy of life only when he had humbled himself.

And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me: but whoso shall cause one of these little ones which believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the sea’(Matt. 18: 5, 6).

‘What is this for?—“Whoso shall receive.” Receive where? And what does “in my name” mean?’ he asked, feeling that these words did not tell him anything. ‘And why a millstone round his neck? And why the depth of the sea? No, that is not it; it is not exact, not clear’; and he remembered how more than once in his life he had taken to reading the Gospels, and how want of clearness in these passages had repulsed him. He went on to read the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth verses about occasions of stumbling, and that they must come, and about punishment by casting men into Gehenna, and some angels who see the face of the Father in heaven. ‘What a pity that this is so incoherent’, he thought; ‘yet one feels that there is something good in it.’

For the Son of man came to save that which was lost’, he went on reading. ‘How think ye? if any man have a hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and go unto the mountains, and seek that which goeth astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth over it more than over the ninety and nine which have not gone astray.

Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.’

‘Yes, it is not the will of the Father that they should perish and here they are perishing by hundreds and thousands. And there is no possibility of saving them’, thought he, and read farther on.

Then came Peter, and said to him, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.

Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would make a reckoning with his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him which owed him ten thousand talents. But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. And the lord of that servant, being moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out, and found one of his fellow-servants, which owed him a hundred pence: and he laid hold on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay what thou owest. So his fellow-servant fell down and besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee. And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay that which was due. So when his fellow-servants saw what was done, they were exceeding sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done. Then his lord called him unto him, and saith to him, Thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou besoughtest me: shouldest not thou also have had mercy on thy fellow-servant, even as I had mercy on thee?’ (ver., 21–33).

‘And is it only this?’ Nekhlyudov suddenly exclaimed aloud, and the inner voice of his whole being said, ‘Yes, this is all.’

And it happened to Nekhlyudov as it often happens to men who are living a spiritual life. The thought that at first seemed strange, paradoxical, or even only a jest, being confirmed more and more often by life’s experience, suddenly appeared as the simplest, truest certainty. In this way the idea that the only certain means of salvation from the terrible evil from which men are suffering is, that they should always acknowledge themselves to be guilty before God, and therefore unable to punish or reform others, became clear to him. It became clear to him that all the dreadful evil he had been witnessing in prisons and jails, and the quiet self-assurance of the perpetrators of this evil, resulted from men attempting what was impossible: to correct evil while themselves evil. Vicious men were trying to reform other vicious men, and thought they could do it by using mechanical means. And the result of all this was that needy and covetous men, having made a profession of this pretended punishment and reformation of others, themselves became utterly corrupt, and unceasingly corrupt also those whom they torment. Now he saw clearly whence came all the horrors he had seen, and what ought to be done to put an end to them. The answer he had been unable to find was the same that Christ gave to Peter. It was to forgive always, everyone, to forgive an infinite number of times, because there are none who are not themselves guilty, and therefore none who can punish or reform.

‘But surely it cannot be so simple’, thought Nekhlyudov; and yet he saw with certainty, strange as it had seemed at first that it was not only a theoretical but also a practical solution of the question. The usual objection, ‘What is one to do with the evil-doers? Surely not let them go unpunished?’ no longer confused him. This objection might have a meaning if it were proved that punishment lessened crime or improved the criminal; but since just the contrary is proved, and it is evident that it is not in the power of some to reform others, the only reasonable thing to do is to cease doing what is not only useless, but harmful, immoral, and cruel. For many centuries people considered to be criminals have been executed. Well, and have they been exterminated? Far from being exterminated, their numbers have been increased, both by criminals corrupted by punishments, and also by those lawful criminals—judges, prosecutors, magistrates, and jailers—who judge and punish men. Nekhlyudov now understood that society, and order in general, exist, not thanks to these lawful criminals who judge and punish others, but because notwithstanding their depraving influence men still pity and love one another.

Hoping to find a confirmation of this thought in the Gospel Nekhlyudov began reading it from the beginning. When he had read the Sermon on the Mount, which had always touched him, he saw in it today for the first time not beautiful abstract thoughts, setting forth for the most part exaggerated and impossible demands, but simple, clear, practical laws, which if carried out in practice (and this is quite possible) would establish perfectly new and surprising conditions of social life, in which the violence that filled Nekhlyudov with such indignation would not only cease of itself, but the greatest blessing attainable by men—the kingdom of heaven on earth—would be reached.

There were five of these laws.

The first law was (Matt. 5: 21–6) that man should not kill, and should not even be angry with his brother; should not consider any one ‘Raca’, worthless; and if he has quarrelled with any one should make it up with him before bringing his gift to God, i.e. before praying.

The second law was (Matt. 5: 27–32) that man should not commit adultery, and should not even seek for enjoyment in a woman’s beauty; and if he has once come together with a woman he should never be faithless to her.

The third law was (Matt. 5: 33–7) that man should never bind himself by oath.

The fourth law was (Matt. 5: 38–42) that man should not demand an eye for an eye, but when struck on one cheek should offer the other: should forgive an injury and bear it humbly, and never refuse anyone a service desired of him.

The fifth law was (Matt. 5: 43) that man should not hate his enemies nor fight them, but love them, help them, serve them.

Nekhlyudov sat staring at the lamp, and his heart stood still. Recalling the monstrous confusion of the life we lead, he distinctly saw what life could be if men were taught to obey these rules; and rapture such as he had long not felt filled his soul. It was as though after long days of weariness and suffering he had suddenly found ease and freedom.

He did not sleep all night, and as happens to many and many a man who reads the Gospels, he understood for the first time the full meaning of words read often before but passed by unnoticed. He drank in all these necessary, important, and joyful revelations as a sponge soaks up water. And all he read seemed quite familiar, and seemed to bring to consciousness and confirm what he had long known but had never fully realized and never quite believed. Now he realized and believed it. Not only did he realize and believe that if men would obey these laws they would attain the highest blessing possible to them, he also realized and believed that the sole duty of every man is to fulfil these laws, that in this lies the only reasonable meaning of life, and that every deviation from these laws is a mistake which is immediately followed by retribution. This flowed from the whole of the teaching, and was most strongly and clearly illustrated in the parable of the vineyard.

The husbandmen imagined that the vineyard in which they were sent to work for their Master was their own, that all that was in it was made for them, and that their business was to enjoy life in this vineyard, forgetting the Master and killing all those who reminded them of his existence.

‘Are we not doing the same’, Nekhlyudov thought, ‘when we imagine ourselves to be masters of our lives, and think that life is given us for enjoyment? For evidently, that is absurd. We were sent here by someone’s will and for some purpose. And we have made up our minds that we live only for our own enjoyment, and of course things go ill with us, as they do with labourers when they do not fulfil their master’s orders. The Master’s will is expressed in these laws. As soon as men fulfil these laws the kingdom of heaven will be established on earth, and men will reach the greatest good they can attain.

‘“Seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things shall he added unto you.” But we seek for these things and have evidently failed to obtain them.

‘And so here it is—the business of my life. Scarcely have I finished one task, and another has commenced.’

A perfectly new life dawned that night for Nekhlyudov; not because he had entered into new conditions of life, but because everything he did after that night had a new and quite different meaning for him.

How this new period of his life will end, time alone will prove.