NEKHLUDOFF ENDEAVOURS TO VISIT MASLOVA.
From the Procureur Nekhludoff went straight to the preliminary detention
prison. However, no Maslova was to be found there, and the inspector
explained to Nekhludoff that she would probably be in the old temporary
prison. Nekhludoff went there.
Yes, Katerina Maslova was there.
The distance between the two prisons was enormous, and Nekhludoff only
reached the old prison towards evening. He was going up to the door of
the large, gloomy building, but the sentinel stopped him and rang. A
warder came in answer to the bell. Nekhludoff showed him his order of
admittance, but the warder said he could not let him in without the
inspector’s permission. Nekhludoff went to see the inspector. As he was
going up the stairs he heard distant sounds of some complicated bravura,
played on the piano. When a cross servant girl, with a bandaged eye,
opened the door to him, those sounds seemed to escape from the room
and to strike his car. It was a rhapsody of Liszt’s, that everybody was
tired of, splendidly played but only to one point. When that point was
reached the same thing was repeated. Nekhludoff asked the bandaged maid
whether the inspector was in. She answered that he was not in.
“Will he return soon?”
The rhapsody again stopped and recommenced loudly and brilliantly again
up to the same charmed point.
“I will go and ask,” and the servant went away.
“Tell him he is not in and won’t be to-day; he is out visiting. What do
they come bothering for?” came the sound of a woman’s voice from behind
the door, and again the rhapsody rattled on and stopped, and the sound
of a chair pushed back was heard. It was plain the irritated pianist
meant to rebuke the tiresome visitor, who had come at an untimely hour.
“Papa is not in,” a pale girl with crimped hair said, crossly, coming
out into the ante-room, but, seeing a young man in a good coat, she
softened.
“Come in, please. . . . What is it you want?”
“I want to see a prisoner in this prison.”
“A political one, I suppose?”
“No, not a political one. I have a permission from the Procureur.”
“Well, I don’t know, and papa is out; but come in, please,” she said,
again, “or else speak to the assistant. He is in the office at present;
apply there. What is your name?”
“I thank you,” said Nekhludoff, without answering her question, and went
out.
The door was not yet closed after him when the same lively tones
recommenced. In the courtyard Nekhludoff met an officer with bristly
moustaches, and asked for the assistant-inspector. It was the assistant
himself. He looked at the order of admittance, but said that he could
not decide to let him in with a pass for the preliminary prison.
Besides, it was too late. “Please to come again to-morrow. To morrow, at
10, everybody is allowed to go in. Come then, and the inspector himself
will be at home. Then you can have the interview either in the common
room or, if the inspector allows it, in the office.”
And so Nekhludoff did not succeed in getting an interview that day,
and returned home. As he went along the streets, excited at the idea of
meeting her, he no longer thought about the Law Courts, but recalled his
conversations with the Procureur and the inspector’s assistant. The
fact that he had been seeking an interview with her, and had told the
Procureur, and had been in two prisons, so excited him that it was long
before he could calm down. When he got home he at once fetched out his
diary, that had long remained untouched, read a few sentences out of it,
and then wrote as follows:
“For two years I have not written anything in my diary, and thought I
never should return to this childishness. Yet it is not childishness,
but converse with my own self, with this real divine self which lives
in every man. All this time that I slept there was no one for me to
converse with. I was awakened by an extraordinary event on the 28th
of April, in the Law Court, when I was on the jury. I saw her in the
prisoners’ dock, the Katusha betrayed by me, in a prisoner’s cloak,
condemned to penal servitude through a strange mistake, and my own
fault. I have just been to the Procureur’s and to the prison, but I was
not admitted. I have resolved to do all I can to see her, to confess to
her, and to atone for my sin, even by a marriage. God help me. My soul
is at peace and I am full of joy.”