41

NEKHLYUDOV left home early. There was still a peasant from the country driving along a side street and calling out ‘Milk-o, milk-o, milk-o!’ in the voice peculiar to his trade.

The first warm spring rain had fallen the day before, and now, wherever the ground was not paved, green grass sprouted. The birch-trees in the gardens looked as if they were covered with green fluff; the wild cherry and the poplars were unfolding their long fragrant leaves, and in shops and houses the double window-frames were being removed and the windows cleaned. In the second-hand market, which Nekhlyudov had to pass on his way, a dense crowd was surging along the row of booths, and tattered men walked about with boots under their arms and smoothly ironed trousers and waistcoats hanging over their shoulders.

Men in clean coats and shining boots, having the Sunday off from their factories, and women with bright silk kerchiefs on their heads and jackets embroidered with glass beads, were already crowding round the doors of the taverns. Policemen, with the yellow cords of their pistols, stood on their beats, on the look-out for a scrimmage which might help to dispel the boredom that oppressed them. Along the paths of the boulevard and on the fresh green grass children and dogs ran about playing, while the old women sat on the benches gossiping happily to each other.

In the streets, still cool and damp on the shady side on the left, and dried up in the middle, heavy carts rumbled over the carriageway, cabs rattled and tramcars rang their bells. On all sides the air vibrated with the pealing and clanging of church bells calling people to a service like the one that was now taking place in the prison. And the people, dressed in their Sunday best, were making their way to their different parish churches.

The cabby drove Nekhlyudov not up to the prison itself but to the turning that led to the prison.

A number of people, men and women, most of them with small bundles, stood at this turning, about a hundred yards from the prison. On the right there were some low wooden buildings; and on the left a two-storied house with some sort of sign outside. The huge brick building, the prison proper, was just in front, but the visitors were not allowed to go near it. An armed sentry paced backwards and forwards, shouting roughly at anyone who tried to pass him.

At the gate to the wooden buildings on the right, opposite the sentry, a warder in a uniform with gold lace was sitting on a bench, a notebook in his hand. The visitors went up to him and said whom they wanted to see, and he wrote the names down. Nekhlyudov also went up, and gave the name of Katerina Maslova. The warder with the gold lace made a note of it.

‘Why are we not allowed in?’ asked Nekhlyudov.

‘The service is still going on. When the service is over you’ll be let in.’

Nekhlyudov went over and joined the waiting crowd. A man in ragged clothes and a battered hat, with tattered shoes on his bare feet and red streaks all over his face, detached himself from the crowd and started towards the prison.

‘Where d’you think you’re going?’ the soldier with the gun shouted at him.

‘Shut your mouth,’ answered the tramp, not in the least intimidated, and turned back. ‘If you won’t let me in, I can wait. To ’ear ’im shout, anyone’d think ’e was a general.’

The crowd laughed approvingly. The visitors were mostly poorly clad people, some in rags even, but there were some to outward appearances respectable men and women. Next to Nekhlyudov stood a stout well-dressed man with a clean-shaven red face, carrying a bundle which looked as if it might contain underclothing. Nekhlyudov asked him if this was his first visit The man with the bundle replied that he came every Sunday, and they got into conversation. He was a commissionaire at a bank; he came to see his brother, who was to be tried for forgery. The amiable fellow told Nekhlyudov the whole story of his life, and was on the point of asking him for his when their attention was distracted by the arrival of a student and a veiled lady, who drove up in a trap with rubber tyres drawn by a big black thoroughbred. The student held a large bundle in his hands. He went up to Nekhlyudov and asked him whether it was permitted, and what must he do, to give the prisoners alms – rolls of bread – he had brought.

‘I am doing it at the request of my betrothed. This is my betrothed. Her parents advised us to bring the bread to the convicts.’

‘Myself I am here for the first time and I don’t know,’ said Nekhlyudov, ‘but I think you had better ask that man,’ and he indicated the warder with the gold lace and the notebook, sitting on the right.

While Nekhlyudov was talking with the student the heavy iron prison doors with a little window in the middle were opened and a uniformed officer accompanied by another warder came out, and the warder with the notebook announced that visitors would now be admitted. The sentry moved aside and all the visitors hurried to the doors, some walking briskly, others actually running as if afraid of being too late. One of the warders stood at the door and as the visitors passed him counted them in a loud voice: ‘Sixteen, seventeen,’ and so on. Another warder, inside the building, touching each one with his hand, counted them all over again as they went through the second door, so that when the time came for them to leave the numbers should tally, no visitors being left in the prison and no prisoner allowed to escape. This teller, not looking to see who it was filing past, slapped Nekhlyudov on the back, and for a moment Nekhlyudov felt outraged at the touch of the warder’s hand, but he immediately remembered the reason that brought him here and was ashamed of his feeling of annoyance and affront.

Immediately beyond the doors was a large vaulted hall with iron bars to the small windows. In this room, which was called the assembly hall, Nekhlyudov was startled to see a large picture of the Crucifixion, hanging in an alcove.

‘What’s that here for?’ he wondered, his mind involuntarily connecting the image of Christ with liberation and not with captivity.

Nekhlyudov walked slowly, allowing the hurrying visitors to go before him, with mixed feelings of horror at the evil-doers who were locked up in this building; of compassion for the innocent, like Katusha and the lad he had seen yesterday; and of shyness and tender emotion at the thought of the meeting before him. As he was leaving the first room he heard the warder at the other end saying something. But, absorbed in his thoughts, Nekhlyudov paid no attention and continued to go where the main stream of visitors were going – that is, to the men’s section instead of the women’s, where he should have gone.

Having let those who were in a hurry pass him, he was the last to enter the visiting-room. The first thing that struck him as he opened the door and went in was the deafening noise of a hundred voices merging into one roar. It was only when he drew nearer to the people who were clinging, like flies settled on sugar, to the wire-netting that divided the room into two, that he understood what it meant. The room with windows in the wall at the back, opposite the door, was divided not by one but by two screens of wire-netting reaching from the floor to the ceiling. In the space between the wire-netting warders patrolled up and down. Behind the nets on one side were the prisoners, and on the other side the visitors. Separating them were two sets of wire-netting and a distance of fully seven feet, so that not only was it impossible to pass anything over – it was almost out of the question, especially for a short-sighted person, to distinguish a face even. It was also difficult to talk – one had to shout at the top of one’s voice in order to be heard. On both sides wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, children pressed their faces against the nets, trying to see each other and to say what they wanted. But as each one tried to speak so as to be heard by the one he was talking to, and his neighbours did the same, and their voices interfered with other voices, they ended by trying to out-shout one another. This was the cause of the din, broken by shouts, which so struck Nekhlyudov when he first entered the room. It was quite impossible to make out what was being said. It was only by the faces that one could guess what they were saying and the relations between the speakers. Next to Nekhlyudov was an old woman with a kerchief on her head. She stood pressed to the wire, her chin trembling, and was shouting something to a pale young man, half of whose head was shaven. The prisoner, raising his eyebrows and puckering his forehead, was listening to her carefully. Next to the old woman was a young fellow in a peasant coat, listening with his hands to his ears and shaking his head to what a prisoner with a grizzled beard and a haggard face, who resembled him, was saying. A little farther off a man in rags was waving his arms, shouting something and laughing. And beside him a woman with a good woollen shawl on her shoulders sat on the floor with a baby in her lap, sobbing bitterly: apparently this was the first time she had seen the grey-haired man on the other side in prison clothes, in chains and with his head shaven. Beyond this woman was the commissionaire Nekhlyudov had talked to outside: he was shouting for all he was worth to a bald-headed convict with very bright eyes on the other side. When Nekhlyudov realized that he would have to talk in these conditions a feeling of indignation against the people who could invent and enforce such a system arose in him. He was astonished that such a dreadful state of affairs, this outrage to human feelings, should apparently offend no one. The soldiers, the warder, the visitors and the prisoners acted as though they thought all this was as it should be.

Nekhlyudov stayed in this room for about five minutes, conscious of a curious sort of depression, aware of how powerless he was, how at odds with the whole world. A moral sensation of nausea seized him, like sea-sickness on board ship.