37

MASLOVA could not get to sleep for a long time that night but lay with wide-open eyes looking at the door, which the subdeacon’s daughter hid from view every time she paced to and fro, and listening to the red-haired woman’s sniffling.

She was thinking that not for anything would she marry a convict at Sakhalin but arrange matters differently somehow – with one of the prison officials, a clerk, even a warder, even an assistant warder. All men were susceptible to a woman. ‘Only I mustn’t get thin. That would be the end of me.’ And she remembered how her lawyer had looked at her, and also the judge, and the people she met at the court who had walked past her on purpose. She remembered what Berta, who paid her a visit at the gaol, had told her about the student she had been so fond of while she was at Madame Kitayeva’s. He had gone to them and inquired about her, and said he was very sorry for her. She thought of the fight with the red-haired woman and felt sorry for her; she thought of the baker, who had sent out an extra roll. She thought of many people but not Nekhlyudov. She never recalled to mind her childhood and youth, and least of all her love for Nekhlyudov. That would have been too painful. Those memories lay untouched somewhere deep in her soul. She never even dreamed about Nekhlyudov. She had not recognized him that day in the court, not so much because when she last saw him he was a beardless man in uniform, with a small moustache and hair which, though it was short, was thick and curly, whereas now he was approaching middle age and had a beard – it was simply because she never thought of him. She had buried all her memories of him on that terrible dark night when he had passed through the town on his way from the army without stopping to see his aunts.

Until that night, as long as she could hope that he would come, she did not feel oppressed by the child she carried beneath her heart – indeed, she was often moved to wonder by the gentle but sometimes sudden stirring inside her body. But with that night everything changed and the unborn child became nothing but an encumbrance.

His aunts had expected Nekhlyudov, and had asked him to come and see them in passing, but he had telegraphed that he could not because he had to be in Petersburg at a certain time. When Katusha heard this she decided to go to the station and see him. The train was due to pass through at two o’clock in the morning. After helping the old ladies to bed she put on a pair of old boots, threw a shawl over her head and, persuading the cook’s daughter, Masha, to come with her, gathered up her skirts and ran to the station.

It was a dark, rainy, windy night in autumn. The rain now splashed down in warm, heavy drops, now stopped again. In the field they could not see the path beneath their feet but in the wood it was black as pitch, and Katusha, though she knew the way, lost it in the woods and reached the little station where the train stopped for three minutes, not ahead of time, as she had hoped, but after the second bell. Hurrying on to the platform, Katusha saw him at once at the window of a first-class carriage. This carriage had a particularly bright light. Two officers without their tunics were sitting opposite each other on the velvet seats, playing cards. On the small table near the window two stout dripping candles were burning. In close-fitting breeches and a white shirt he sat on the arm of a seat, leaning against the back and laughing at something. As soon as she saw him she tapped at the carriage window with her benumbed hand. But at that very instant the last bell rang and the train, after a backward jerk, slowly began to move, and then one after another the carriages jolted forward. One of the players rose with the cards in his hand and looked out. She tapped again and pressed her face to the window. At that moment the carriage where she was standing gave a jerk and began to move. She went with it, looking through the window. The officer tried to lower the window but could not. Nekhlyudov got up and pushing the officer aside began lowering it himself. The train gathered speed. She quickened her step, keeping up with it, but the train went faster and faster, and just when the window was down the guard pushed her aside and jumped in. Katusha was left behind but she went on running along the wet boards of the platform; then the platform came to an end and it was all she could do to save herself from falling as she ran down the steps. She kept on running but the first-class carriage was far away in front. Now the second-class carriages were racing past her, then, faster still, those of the third class, but still she ran. When the last carriage with the lamp at the back had gone by she was beyond the water tank which fed the engines, out in the open with no protection, and the wind pounced on her, snatching her shawl from her head and making her skirts cling to her legs. The wind carried off her shawl but still she ran.

‘Auntie Mikhailovna!’ screamed the little girl, barely keeping up with her. ‘You’ve lost your shawl!’

Katusha stopped, threw back her head and clasping it with both hands sobbed aloud. ‘There he sits on a velvet chair in a lighted carriage, joking and drinking,’ she thought, ‘and I stand here in the mud and dark, in the rain and the wind, weeping.’

‘Gone!’ she cried.

The little girl was frightened and put her arms round Katusha’s wet dress.

‘Auntie, let’s go home.’

‘A train will come – I’ll throw myself under the wheels, and it’ll all be over,’ Katusha was thinking, not answering the little girl.

Yes, that was what she would do. But just then, as always happens in the first moment of quiet after great agitation, the child within her, his child, suddenly jerked, gave a push, softly stretched itself and again pushed with something thin, delicate and sharp. And suddenly all that a moment before had tortured her so, until it seemed impossible to go on living, all her bitterness against him and the desire to be revenged upon him if only by her own death – all this suddenly faded. She pulled herself together, smoothed her dress, put the shawl on her head and went home.

Exhausted, wet and muddy, she returned home, and that day saw the beginning of the change in her which had made her what she was now. After that dreadful night she ceased to believe in God and goodness. Before that she had believed in God and believed that other people did, too, but after that night she was convinced that no one believed in Him and that all they said about God and goodness was just in order to cheat people. He, the man she had loved and who had loved her – she knew he had – had deserted her, having had his pleasure of her and outraging her feelings. Yet he was the best man she had ever known. All the others were worse still. And everything which happened afterwards, at every turn, confirmed this. His aunts, who were pious old women, turned her out of the house when she could no longer serve them as she used to. The women she came in contact with all tried to make money out of her, and the men, from the old district police-officer to the prison warders, looked upon her as an instrument for pleasure. And no one in the world cared for anything else but pleasure, just this pleasure. The old writer with whom she lived during the second year of her life of independence had confirmed her still more in this belief. He used to tell her in so many words that all the happiness of life consisted in this – he called it poetry and aesthetics.

Everybody lived for himself only, for his own pleasure, and all the talk about God and righteousness was an illusion. And if sometimes doubts arose in her mind and she wondered why everything was so badly arranged in the world that everyone was so wicked to each other and hurt each other, it was better not to think of it. When you feel depressed – have a cigarette or a drink or, best of all, make love, and it will pass.