MASLOVA RECALLS THE PAST.
That night Maslova lay awake a long time with her eyes open looking at
the door, in front of which the deacon’s daughter kept passing. She was
thinking that nothing would induce her to go to the island of Sakhalin
and marry a convict, but would arrange matters somehow with one of the
prison officials, the secretary, a warder, or even a warder’s assistant.
“Aren’t they all given that way? Only I must not get thin, or else I am
lost.”
She thought of how the advocate had looked at her, and also the
president, and of the men she met, and those who came in on purpose at
the court. She recollected how her companion, Bertha, who came to see
her in prison, had told her about the student whom she had “loved” while
she was with Kitaeva, and who had inquired about her, and pitied her
very much. She recalled many to mind, only not Nekhludoff. She never
brought back to mind the days of her childhood and youth, and her love
to Nekhludoff. That would have been too painful. These memories lay
untouched somewhere deep in her soul; she had forgotten him, and never
recalled and never even dreamt of him. To-day, in the court, she did not
recognise him, not only because when she last saw him he was in uniform,
without a beard, and had only a small moustache and thick, curly, though
short hair, and now was bald and bearded, but because she never thought
about him. She had buried his memory on that terrible dark night when
he, returning from the army, had passed by on the railway without
stopping to call on his aunts. Katusha then knew her condition. Up to
that night she did not consider the child that lay beneath her heart
a burden. But on that night everything changed, and the child became
nothing but a weight.
His aunts had expected Nekhludoff, had asked him to come and see them in
passing, but he had telegraphed that he could not come, as he had to be
in Petersburg at an appointed time. When Katusha heard this she made up
her mind to go to the station and see him. The train was to pass by at
two o’clock in the night. Katusha having helped the old ladies to bed,
and persuaded a little girl, the cook’s daughter, Mashka, to come with
her, put on a pair of old boots, threw a shawl over her head, gathered
up her dress, and ran to the station.
It was a warm, rainy, and windy autumn night. The rain now pelted down
in warm, heavy drops, now stopped again. It was too dark to see the path
across the field, and in the wood it was pitch black, so that although
Katusha knew the way well, she got off the path, and got to the little
station where the train stopped for three minutes, not before, as she
had hoped, but after the second bell had been rung. Hurrying up the
platform, Katusha saw him at once at the windows of a first-class
carriage. Two officers sat opposite each other on the velvet-covered
seats, playing cards. This carriage was very brightly lit up; on the
little table between the seats stood two thick, dripping candles. He sat
in his closefitting breeches on the arm of the seat, leaning against
the back, and laughed. As soon as she recognised him she knocked at the
carriage window with her benumbed hand, but at that moment the last bell
rang, and the train first gave a backward jerk, and then gradually the
carriages began to move forward. One of the players rose with the cards
in his hand, and looked out. She knocked again, and pressed her face to
the window, but the carriage moved on, and she went alongside looking
in. The officer tried to lower the window, but could not. Nekhludoff
pushed him aside and began lowering it himself. The train went faster,
so that she had to walk quickly. The train went on still faster and the
window opened. The guard pushed her aside, and jumped in. Katusha ran
on, along the wet boards of the platform, and when she came to the end
she could hardly stop herself from falling as she ran down the steps
of the platform. She was running by the side of the railway, though the
first-class carriage had long passed her, and the second-class carriages
were gliding by faster, and at last the third-class carriages still
faster. But she ran on, and when the last carriage with the lamps at
the back had gone by, she had already reached the tank which fed the
engines, and was unsheltered from the wind, which was blowing her shawl
about and making her skirt cling round her legs. The shawl flew off her
head, but still she ran on.
“Katerina Michaelovna, you’ve lost your shawl!” screamed the little
girl, who was trying to keep up with her.
Katusha stopped, threw back her head, and catching hold of it with both
hands sobbed aloud. “Gone!” she screamed.
“He is sitting in a velvet arm-chair and joking and drinking, in a
brightly lit carriage, and I, out here in the mud, in the darkness, in
the wind and the rain, am standing and weeping,” she thought to herself;
and sat down on the ground, sobbing so loud that the little girl got
frightened, and put her arms round her, wet as she was.
“Come home, dear,” she said.
“When a train passes--then under a carriage, and there will be an end,”
Katusha was thinking, without heeding the girl.
And she made up her mind to do it, when, as it always happens, when a
moment of quiet follows great excitement, he, the child--his child--made
himself known within her. Suddenly all that a moment before had been
tormenting her, so that it had seemed impossible to live, all her
bitterness towards him, and the wish to revenge herself, even by dying,
passed away; she grew quieter, got up, put the shawl on her head, and
went home.
Wet, muddy, and quite exhausted, she returned, and from that day the
change which brought her where she now was began to operate in her soul.
Beginning from that dreadful night, she ceased believing in God and
in goodness. She had herself believed in God, and believed that other
people also believed in Him; but after that night she became convinced
that no one believed, and that all that was said about God and His
laws was deception and untruth. He whom she loved, and who had loved
her--yes, she knew that--had thrown her away; had abused her love. Yet
he was the best of all the people she knew. All the rest were still
worse. All that afterwards happened to her strengthened her in this
belief at every step. His aunts, the pious old ladies, turned her out
when she could no longer serve them as she used to. And of all those she
met, the women used her as a means of getting money, the men, from the
old police officer down to the warders of the prison, looked at her as
on an object for pleasure. And no one in the world cared for aught but
pleasure. In this belief the old author with whom she had come together
in the second year of her life of independence had strengthened her. He
had told her outright that it was this that constituted the happiness of
life, and he called it poetical and aesthetic.
Everybody lived for himself only, for his pleasure, and all the talk
concerning God and righteousness was deception. And if sometimes doubts
arose in her mind and she wondered why everything was so ill-arranged
in the world that all hurt each other, and made each other suffer, she
thought it best not to dwell on it, and if she felt melancholy she could
smoke, or, better still, drink, and it would pass.