53

WALKING back along the wide corridor (it was dinner-time and the cells were open) past the men dressed in light yellow cloaks, short wide trousers and prison shoes who looked avidly at him, Nekhlyudov felt a strange mixture of sympathy for them, and horror and perplexity at the conduct of those who had thrown them into prison and kept them there, and shame on his own account, though he did not know why, for calmly investigating it all.

In one corridor a man ran to a cell, his shoes clattering, and some men came out and barred Nekhlyudov’s way, bowing to him.

‘Please, your honour – we don’t know what to call you – get our case settled somehow.’

‘I am not an official. I know nothing about it.’

‘It doesn’t matter, tell somebody, you can tell the authorities,’ said an indignant voice. ‘We haven’t done anything, and here we’ve been up against it for nearly two months.’

‘How is that? Why?’ asked Nekhlyudov.

‘They just locked us up. This is the second month we’re in gaol, and we don’t know why.’

‘That is so, it was a kind of accident,’ said the superintendent’s assistant. ‘These people were arrested because they had no identity papers, and they ought to have been sent back to their own province, but the prison there was burnt down and the local authorities appealed to us not to send them on. We dispatched all the others to their respective provinces, but these we are keeping.’

‘What, is that the only reason?’ Nekhlyudov exclaimed, stopping at the door.

A crowd of some forty men, all in prison clothes, surrounded Nekhlyudov and the assistant. Several voices began to speak at the same time. The assistant checked them.

‘Let one of you speak.’

A tall good-looking peasant of about fifty stood out from the rest. He explained to Nekhlyudov that they had all been ordered back to their homes and were now in prison for not having passports. But they had passports all right, only they had expired about two weeks before they were arrested. It happened every year, passports expired and nobody had ever said anything, but this year they had been arrested and held in prison over a month now, as if they were criminals.

‘We are all stonemasons, and belong to the same artel.¹ They say the prison in our province is burnt down. But that is not our fault. For God’s sake help us.’

Nekhlyudov listened but he hardly took in what the handsome old man was saying, his attention being riveted by a large, dark grey, many-legged louse crawling through the hair on the nice-looking stonemason’s cheek.

‘Is it possible? Can there be no other reason?’ Nekhlyudov said, turning to the assistant.

‘Yes, the authorities have mismanaged it: they should have been sent off back to their homes,’ said the assistant.

Before the officer had finished speaking a little man, also in a prison cloak, detached himself from the crowd and with strange contortions of his mouth began to say that they were being treated rough and they’d done nothing.

‘Worse than dogs…’ he began.

‘Now then, enough of that. Hold your tongue, or you know….’

‘What do I know?’ the little man cried desperately. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong, have we?’

‘Shut up!’ shouted the assistant superintendent, and the little man was silent.

“What does all this mean?’ Nekhlyudov thought to himself as he left the cells, while he ran the gauntlet of a hundred eyes – eyes which watched him through the peep-holes in the doors, eyes which met his as he passed prisoners in the corridor.

‘Is it possible entirely innocent people are kept here?’ Nekhlyudov exclaimed when they left the corridor.

‘What would you have us do? Of course, they don’t all speak the truth. To hear them talk, they are all of them innocent,’ said the superintendent’s assistant.

‘But surely those men have done nothing wrong.’

‘Maybe not. But they are all a pretty bad lot. You have to be strict with them. There are some dare-devils among them, one has to be on one’s guard all the time. Only yesterday we were compelled to punish two of them.’

‘Punish them? In what way?’

‘Flog them, by order.’

‘But corporal punishment has been abolished.’

‘Not for those who have been deprived of civil rights. They are still Hable.’

Nekhlyudov remembered what he had seen the day before while waiting in the hall, and realized that the punishment was being inflicted even then, at the very time he was there; and he was swept to an especially overwhelming degree by a mixed feeling of curiosity, depression, bewilderment and moral – and very nearly physical – nausea, such as he had experienced before, but never so strongly as now.

No longer listening to the assistant superintendent, he walked as fast as he could, looking neither right nor left, until the corridors were behind him and he reached the office.

The superintendent, still in the corridor attending to some other business, had forgotten to summon Vera Bogodou-khovskaya. Only when Nekhlyudov entered the office did he remember to send for her.

‘I am having her brought at once. Please sit down,’ he said.