13

THE fire had burnt up and the stove was warm; the tea was made and poured out into mugs and tumblers, and milk added; and cracknel biscuits, fresh rye- and wheat-bread, hard-boiled eggs, butter and calves-head and calves-feet were spread out. Everyone moved towards the bunk which was used as a table, and began eating, drinking and talking. Rantseva sat on a wooden box pouring out the tea. The others all crowded round her, except Kryltsov, who had taken off his wet coat and was lying on his bunk wrapped in the rug which had dried, talking to Nekhlyudov.

After the cold damp march, and the dirt and mess they had found here, and the efforts they had spent to tidy up the place, the hot tea and the food put them in the best and happiest of spirits.

The tread of feet, the shouting and cursing that came from the convicts on the other side of the wall, reminding them, as it were, of their surroundings, only increased their sensation of personal comfort. As though they were on a tiny island in the middle of the sea, these people for a brief space no longer felt themselves submerged under the humiliations and misery surrounding them, and consequently they were elated and excited. They talked about everything except their own predicament and what awaited them. Moreover, as always happens with young men and women, especially when forced together by circumstances as all these people were, currents of sympathy or antipathy, curiously blended, had sprung up between them. Nearly all of them were in love. Novodvorov was in love with the pretty, smiling Grabetz, a young woman student very little given to reflection and completely in-different to revolutionary ideas. But, swayed by the influences of the time, she had in some way compromised herself and been sentenced to exile. When she was free her chief interest in life had been her success with men, and it was the same through her trial, in prison and in exile. Now, on the journey, she found consolation in Novodvorov’s infatuation for her, and herself fell in love with him. Vera Bogodoukhovskaya, who fell in love very easily and did not so easily arouse love in others but was always hopeful of reciprocation, loved Nabatov and Novodvorov alternately. Kryltsov could be said to have lost his heart to Marya Pavlovna. He loved her as men love women, but knowing her ideas about love he cleverly concealed his feeling under the guise of friendship and gratitude for her exceptionally tender care of him. Nabatov and Rantseva were united by a very complex bond of affection. Just as Marya Pavlovna was a perfectly chaste virgin, so Rantseva was the most chaste of wives.

She was still a schoolgirl of sixteen when she fell in love with Rantsev, who was studying at Petersburg University, and at nineteen, while he was still a student, she married him. In his fourth year at the university her husband got mixed up in some student disturbances, was sent away from Petersburg, and turned revolutionary. She abandoned the medical course she was attending, followed him and herself became a revolutionary. If she had not considered her husband to be the cleverest and best man in the world she would not have fallen in love with him, and, not loving him, she would not have married him. But once having fallen in love with and married – as she was quite convinced – the best and cleverest man in the world she naturally saw life and its purpose through the eyes of the best and cleverest man in the world. At first he believed that life was for studying, and she thought so too. He became a revolutionary, and so she became a revolutionary. She could argue very capably that the existing order of things was impossible, and that it was everyone’s duty to fight it and endeavour to establish a political and economic structure in which the individual should be free to develop, and so on. And it seemed to her that those actually were her ideas and feelings, whereas in point of fact she was merely sure that everything her husband thought – was the absolute truth. She had but one desire – perfect concord, perfect identification of her own soul with his, which alone could give her full moral satisfaction.

The parting from her husband and their child (whom her mother took) had been unspeakably painful. But she bore the separation bravely and without a murmur, knowing it was for her husband’s sake and for a cause which was unquestionably the true one, since he served it. She was always with her husband in thought, and could not love anyone else now, any more than she could when with him. But Nabatov’s pure and devoted love touched and disturbed her. Being an upright man of strong character and a friend of her husband’s, he tried to treat her like a sister, but something more kept creeping into his relations with her, and this something more alarmed them both and at the same time lent colour to their life of hardship.

Marya Pavlovna and Kondratyev were thus the only ones in the group not involved in any love affair.