44

BEFORE this meeting between them Nekhlyudov was expecting that when she saw him and heard that he had repented and meant to do everything he could for her Katusha would be touched and happy, and would again become the Katusha of old, but to his horror he found that Katusha existed no more – there was only Maslova. This shocked and horrified him.

What surprised him most was that she showed no sign of shame, except of being a convict – she was ashamed of that, but not of being a prostitute. On the contrary, she seemed rather pleased, almost proud of it. And yet, how could it be otherwise? Nobody can wholeheartedly do anything unless he believes that his activity is important and good. Therefore, whatever a man’s position may be, he is bound to take that view of human life in general that will make his own activity seem important and good. People usually imagine that a thief, a murderer, a spy, a prostitute, knowing their occupation to be evil, must be ashamed of it. But the very opposite is true. Men who have been placed by fate and their own sins or mistakes in a certain position, however irregular that position may be, adopt a view of life as a whole which makes their position appear to them good and respectable. In order to back up their view of life they instinctively mix only with those who accept their ideas of life and of their place in it. This surprises us when it is a case of thieves bragging of their skill, prostitutes flaunting their depravity or murderers boasting of their cruelty. But it surprises us only because their numbers are limited and – this is the point – we live in a different atmosphere. But can we not observe the same phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e. of robbery; when commanders of armies pride themselves on their victories, i.e. on murder; and when those in high places vaunt their power – their brute force? We do not see that their ideas of life and of good and evil are corrupt and inspired by a necessity to justify their position, only because the circle of people with such corrupt ideas is a larger one and we belong to it ourselves.

It was after this fashion that Maslova had formed her view of life and of her position in the world. She was a prostitute, condemned to penal servitude, yet she had formed a conception of life which allowed her to think well of herself and even take pride in her position.

According to her philosophy the highest good for all men without exception – old and young, schoolboys and generals, educated and uneducated – consisted in sexual intercourse with attractive women, and therefore all men, though they pretended to be occupied with other things, in reality cared for nothing else. She, now, was an attractive woman who had it in her power to satisfy, or not to satisfy, their desires, and this made her an important and necessary person. All her past and present life confirmed the truth of this attitude.

For the last ten years, wherever she had been, she had seen that men – starting with Nekhlyudov and the old police-officer down to the warders in the prison – needed her; she did not see and did not remark the men who had no need of her. Consequently, the whole world seemed to her to be made up of people possessed by lust, who watched her on all sides, trying by every means in their power – deception, violence, purchase, cunning – to get hold of her.

This, then, was how Maslova understood life, and with such a conception of the world it was natural that she should consider herself not the lowest but a very important person. And Maslova prized this view of life more than anything else on earth; nor could she help prizing it, because if she were to change her ideas of life she would lose the importance it accorded her. And in order not to lose her significance in life she instinctively clung to the kind of people who looked upon life in the same way as she did. Sensing that Nekhlyudov wanted to draw her into another world, she resisted him, foreseeing that in the world into which he would take her she would have to lose her place in life with the confidence and self-respect it gave her. It was for this reason that she warded off every recollection of both her girlhood and her early relations with Nekhlyudov. Those recollections did not go with her present conception of living and so they had been entirely obliterated from her memory, or, to be more accurate, they lay somewhere buried and untouched, closed up and plastered over, so that there should be no access to them, just as to protect the results of their labour, bees sometimes plaster up a nest of wax-worms. Therefore the present Nekhlyudov was for her not the man she had once loved with a pure love but only a rich gentleman who could and must be made use of, and with whom she might have only the same relations as with all other men.

‘No, I could not tell her the most important thing,’ thought Nekhlyudov, moving towards the exit with the rest of the visitors. ‘I did not tell her I would marry her. I did not say that, but I will,’ he thought.

The warders at the door let the visitors out, counting them over again, so that no extra person left and no one remained inside. This time the slap on the shoulder did not offend Nekhlyudov: he did not even notice it.