"Will he return soon?"
The rhapsody again stopped and recommenced loudly and brilliantly again up to the same charmed point.
"I will go and ask," and the servant went away.
"Tell him he is not in and won't be to-day; he is out visiting.
What do they come bothering for?" came the sound of a woman's voice from behind the door, and again the rhapsody rattled on and stopped, and the sound of a chair pushed back was heard.
It was plain the irritated pianist meant to rebuke the tiresome visitor, who had come at an untimely hour.
"Papa is not in," a pale girl with crimped hair said, crossly, coming out into the ante-room, but, seeing a young man in a good coat, she softened. "Come in, please. . . . What is it you want?"
"I want to see a prisoner in this prison."
"A political one, I suppose?"
"No, not a political one.
I have a permission from the Procureur."
"Well, I don't know, and papa is out; but come in, please," she said, again, "or else speak to the assistant. He is in the office at present; apply there.
What is your name?"
"I thank you," said Nekhludoff, without answering her question, and went out.
The door was not yet closed after him when the same lively tones recommenced.
In the courtyard Nekhludoff met an officer with bristly moustaches, and asked for the assistant-inspector.
It was the assistant himself.
He looked at the order of admittance, but said that he could not decide to let him in with a pass for the preliminary prison.
Besides, it was too late.
"Please to come again to-morrow.
To morrow, at 10, everybody is allowed to go in. Come then, and the inspector himself will be at home.
Then you can have the interview either in the common room or, if the inspector allows it, in the office."
And so Nekhludoff did not succeed in getting an interview that day, and returned home.
As he went along the streets, excited at the idea of meeting her, he no longer thought about the Law Courts, but recalled his conversations with the Procureur and the inspector's assistant.
The fact that he had been seeking an interview with her, and had told the Procureur, and had been in two prisons, so excited him that it was long before he could calm down.
When he got home he at once fetched out his diary, that had long remained untouched, read a few sentences out of it, and then wrote as follows:
"For two years I have not written anything in my diary, and thought I never should return to this childishness.
Yet it is not childishness, but converse with my own self, with this real divine self which lives in every man.
All this time that I slept there was no one for me to converse with.
I was awakened by an extraordinary event on the 28th of April, in the Law Court, when I was on the jury.
I saw her in the prisoners' dock, the Katusha betrayed by me, in a prisoner's cloak, condemned to penal servitude through a strange mistake, and my own fault.
I have just been to the Procureur's and to the prison, but I was not admitted. I have resolved to do all I can to see her, to confess to her, and to atone for my sin, even by a marriage.
God help me.
My soul is at peace and I am full of joy."
CHAPTER XXXVII. MASLOVA RECALLS THE PAST.
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.