Resurrection Leo Tolstoy (ebook reader for pc .txt) 📖

rising. A few began crying and taking leave of each other. The mother and her consumptive son seemed especially pathetic. The young fellow kept twisting his bit of paper and his face seemed angry, so great were his efforts not to be infected by his mother’s emotion. The mother, hearing that it was time to part, put her head on his shoulder and sobbed and sniffed aloud.

The girl with the prominent eyes⁠—Nekhlúdoff could not help watching her⁠—was standing opposite the sobbing mother, and was saying something to her in a soothing tone. The old man with the blue spectacles stood holding his daughter’s hand and nodding in answer to what she said. The young lovers rose, and, holding each other’s hands, looked silently into one another’s eyes.

“These are the only two who are merry,” said a young man with a short coat who stood by Nekhlúdoff’s side, also looking at those who were about to part, and pointed to the lovers. Feeling Nekhlúdoff’s and the young man’s eyes fixed on them, the lovers⁠—the young man with the rubber coat and the pretty girl⁠—stretched out their arms, and with their hands clasped in each other’s, danced round and round again. “Tonight they are going to be married here in prison, and she will follow him to Siberia,” said the young man.

“What is he?”

“A convict, condemned to penal servitude. Let those two at least have a little joy, or else it is too painful,” the young man added, listening to the sobs of the consumptive lad’s mother.

“Now, my good people! Please, please do not oblige me to have recourse to severe measures,” the inspector said, repeating the same words several times over. “Do, please,” he went on in a weak, hesitating manner. “It is high time. What do you mean by it? This sort of thing is quite impossible. I am now asking you for the last time,” he repeated wearily, now putting out his cigarette and then lighting another.

It was evident that, artful, old, and common as were the devices enabling men to do evil to others without feeling responsible for it, the inspector could not but feel conscious that he was one of those who were guilty of causing the sorrow which manifested itself in this room. And it was apparent that this troubled him sorely. At length the prisoners and their visitors began to go⁠—the first out of the inner, the latter out of the outer door. The man with the rubber jacket passed out among them, and the consumptive youth and the dishevelled man. Mary Pávlovna went out with the boy born in prison.

The visitors went out too. The old man with the blue spectacles, stepping heavily, went out, followed by Nekhlúdoff.

“Yes, a strange state of things this,” said the talkative young man, as if continuing an interrupted conversation, as he descended the stairs side by side with Nekhlúdoff. “Yet we have reason to be grateful to the inspector who does not keep strictly to the rules, kindhearted fellow. If they can get a talk it does relieve their hearts a bit, after all!”

While talking to the young man, who introduced himself as Medínzeff, Nekhlúdoff reached the hall. There the inspector came up to them with weary step.

“If you wish to see Máslova,” he said, apparently desiring to be polite to Nekhlúdoff, “please come tomorrow.”

“Very well,” answered Nekhlúdoff, and hurried away, experiencing more than ever that sensation of moral nausea which he always felt on entering the prison.

The sufferings of the evidently innocent Menshóff seemed terrible, and not so much his physical suffering as the perplexity, the distrust in the good and in God which he must feel, seeing the cruelty of the people who tormented him without any reason.

Terrible were the disgrace and sufferings cast on these hundreds of guiltless people simply because something was not written on paper as it should have been. Terrible were the brutalised jailers, whose occupation is to torment their brothers, and who were certain that they were fulfilling an important and useful duty; but most terrible of all seemed this sickly, elderly, kindhearted inspector, who was obliged to part mother and son, father and daughter, who were just the same sort of people as he and his own children.

“What is it all for?” Nekhlúdoff asked himself, and could not find an answer.

LVII

The next day Nekhlúdoff went to see the advocate, and spoke to him about the Menshóffs’ case, begging him to undertake their defence. The advocate promised to look into the case, and if it turned out to be as Nekhlúdoff said he would in all probability undertake the defence free of charge. Then Nekhlúdoff told him of the 130 men who were kept in prison owing to a mistake. “On whom did it depend? Whose fault was it?”

The advocate was silent for a moment, evidently anxious to give a correct reply.

“Whose fault is it? No one’s,” he said, decidedly. “Ask the Procureur, he’ll say it is the Governor’s; ask the Governor, he’ll say it is the Procureur’s fault. No one is in fault.”

“I am just going to see the Vice-Governor. I shall tell him.”

“Oh, that’s quite useless,” said the advocate, with a smile. “He is such a⁠—he is not a relation or friend of yours?⁠—such a blockhead, if I may say so, and yet a crafty animal at the same time.”

Nekhlúdoff remembered what Máslennikoff had said about the advocate, and did not answer, but took leave and went on to Máslennikoff’s. He had to ask Máslennikoff two things: about Máslova’s removal to the prison hospital, and about the 130 passportless men innocently imprisoned. Though it was very hard to petition a man whom he did not respect, and by whose orders men were flogged, yet it was the only means of gaining his end, and he had to go through with it.

As he drove up to Máslennikoff’s house Nekhlúdoff saw a number of different carriages by the front door, and remembered that it was Máslennikoff’s wife’s