The Awakening: (The Resurrection)Tolstoy, Leo, graf
General
The Awakening: (The Resurrection)
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Forgiveness -- Fiction; Russia -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Besides these seven women, there were four others who stood near the
open windows, their hands resting on the iron gratings, and conversing
by signs and shouts with the prisoners whom Maslova had met in the
passageway. One of these, who was serving a sentence for theft, was a
flabby, large, heavy, red-haired woman with white-yellow freckles over
her face, and a stout neck which was exposed by the open waist collar.
In a hoarse voice she shouted indecent words through the window.
Beside her stood a woman of the size of a ten-year-old girl, very
dark, with a long back and very short legs. Her face was red and
blotched; her black eyes wide open, and her short, thick lips failed
to hide her white, protruding teeth. She laughed in shrill tones at
the antics of the prisoners. This prisoner, who was nicknamed Miss
Dandy, because of her stylishness, was under indictment for theft and
incendiarism. Behind them, in a very dirty, gray shirt, stood a
wretched-looking woman, big with child, who was charged with
concealing stolen property. This woman was silent, but she approvingly
smiled at the actions of the prisoners without. The fourth of the
women who stood at the window, and was undergoing sentence for illicit
trading in spirits, was a squat little country woman with bulging eyes
and kindly face. She was the mother of the boy who was playing with
the old woman, and of another seven-year-old girl, both of whom were
in jail with her, because they had no one else to take care of them.
Knitting a stocking, she was looking through the window and
disapprovingly frowned and closed her eyes at the language used by the
passing prisoners. The girl who stood near the red-haired woman, with
only a shirt on her back, and clinging with one hand to the woman's
skirt, attentively listened to the abusive words the men were
exchanging with the women, and repeated them in a whisper, as if
committing them to memory. The twelfth was the daughter of a church
clerk and chanter who had drowned her child in a well. She was a tall
and stately girl, with large eyes and tangled hair sticking out of her
short, thick, flaxen braid. She paid no attention to what was going on
around her, but paced, bare-footed, and in a dirty gray shirt, over
the floor of the cell, making sharp and quick turns when she reached
the wall.
CHAPTER XXXI.
When with a rattling of chains the cell door was unlocked and Maslova
admitted, all eyes were turned toward her. Even the chanter's daughter
stopped for a moment and looked at her with raised eyebrows, but
immediately resumed walking with long, resolute strides. Korableva
stuck her needle into the sack she was sewing and gazed inquiringly
through her glasses at Maslova.
"Ah me! So she has returned," she said in a hoarse basso voice. "And I
was sure she would be set right. She must have got it."
She removed her glasses and placed them with her sewing beside her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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