Resurrection

That night Maslova lay awake a long time with her eyes open

looking at the door, in front of which the deacon's daughter kept

passing. She was thinking that nothing would induce her to go to

the island of Sakhalin and marry a convict, but would arrange

matters somehow with one of the prison officials, the secretary,

a warder, or even a warder's assistant. "Aren't they all given

that way? Only I must not get thin, or else I am lost."

She thought of how the advocate had looked at her, and also the

president, and of the men she met, and those who came in on

purpose at the court. She recollected how her companion, Bertha,

who came to see her in prison, had told her about the student

whom she had "loved" while she was with Kitaeva, and who had

inquired about her, and pitied her very much. She recalled many

to mind, only not Nekhludoff. She never brought back to mind the

days of her childhood and youth, and her love to Nekhludoff.

That would have been too painful. These memories lay untouched

somewhere deep in her soul; she had forgotten him, and never

recalled and never even dreamt of him. To-day, in the court, she

did not recognise him, not only because when she last saw him he

was in uniform, without a beard, and had only a small moustache

and thick, curly, though short hair, and now was bald and

bearded, but because she never thought about him. She had buried

his memory on that terrible dark night when he, returning from

the army, had passed by on the railway without stopping to call

on his aunts. Katusha then knew her condition. Up to that night

she did not consider the child that lay beneath her heart a

burden. But on that night everything changed, and the child

became nothing but a weight.

His aunts had expected Nekhludoff, had asked him to come and see

them in passing, but he had telegraphed that he could not come,

as he had to be in Petersburg at an appointed time. When Katusha

heard this she made up her mind to go to the station and see him.

The train was to pass by at two o'clock in the night. Katusha

having helped the old ladies to bed, and persuaded a little girl,

the cook's daughter, Mashka, to come with her, put on a pair of

old boots, threw a shawl over her head, gathered up her dress,

and ran to the station.

It was a warm, rainy, and windy autumn night. The rain now pelted

down in warm, heavy drops, now stopped again. It was too dark to

see the path across the field, and in the wood it was pitch

black, so that although Katusha knew the way well, she got off

the path, and got to the little station where the train stopped

for three minutes, not before, as she had hoped, but after the

second bell had been rung. Hurrying up the platform, Katusha saw

him at once at the windows of a first-class carriage. Two

officers sat opposite each other on the velvet-covered seats,

playing cards. This carriage was very brightly lit up; on the

little table between the seats stood two thick, dripping candles.

He sat in his closefitting breeches on the arm of the seat,

leaning against the back, and laughed. As soon as she recognised

him she knocked at the carriage window with her benumbed hand,

but at that moment the last bell rang, and the train first gave a

backward jerk, and then gradually the carriages began to move

forward. One of the players rose with the cards in his hand, and

looked out. She knocked again, and pressed her face to the

window, but the carriage moved on, and she went alongside looking

in. The officer tried to lower the window, but could not.

Nekhludoff pushed him aside and began lowering it himself. The

train went faster, so that she had to walk quickly. The train

went on still faster and the window opened. The guard pushed her

aside, and jumped in. Katusha ran on, along the wet boards of the

platform, and when she came to the end she could hardly stop

herself from falling as she ran down the steps of the platform.

She was running by the side of the railway, though the

first-class carriage had long passed her, and the second-class

carriages were gliding by faster, and at last the third-class

carriages still faster. But she ran on, and when the last

carriage with the lamps at the back had gone by, she had already

reached the tank which fed the engines, and was unsheltered from

the wind, which was blowing her shawl about and making her skirt

cling round her legs. The shawl flew off her head, but still she

ran on.