“I beg you. . .  I beg,” repeated Madame Azhogin, pursing up her lips in the shape of a heart on the syllable “you.”  “I beg you to take her home.”

XVIII

A little later my sister and I were walking along the street.  I covered her with the skirts of my coat; we hastened, choosing back streets where there were no street lamps, avoiding passers-by; it was as though we were running away.  She was no longer crying, but looked at me with dry eyes.  To Karpovna’s, where I took her, it was only twenty minutes’ walk, and, strange to say, in that short time we succeeded in thinking of our whole life; we talked over everything, considered our position, reflected. . . .

We decided we could not go on living in this town, and that when I had earned a little money we would move to some other place.  In some houses everyone was asleep, in others they were playing cards; we hated these houses; we were afraid of them.  We talked of the fanaticism, the coarseness of feeling, the insignificance of these respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we had so alarmed, and I kept asking in what way these stupid, cruel, lazy, and dishonest people were superior to the drunken and superstitious peasants of Kurilovka, or in what way they were better than animals, who in the same way are thrown into a panic when some incident disturbs the monotony of their life limited by their instincts.  What would have happened to my sister now if she had been left to live at home?

What moral agonies would she have experienced, talking with my father, meeting every day with acquaintances?  I imagined this to myself, and at once there came into my mind people, all people I knew, who had been slowly done to death by their nearest relations.  I remembered the tortured dogs, driven mad, the live sparrows plucked naked by boys and flung into the water, and a long, long series of obscure lingering miseries which I had looked on continually from early childhood in that town; and I could not understand what these sixty thousand people lived for, what they read the gospel for, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines.  What good had they gained from all that had been said and written hitherto if they were still possessed by the same spiritual darkness and hatred of liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred years ago?  A master carpenter spends his whole life building houses in the town, and always, to the day of his death, calls a “gallery” a “galdery.”  So these sixty thousand people have been reading and hearing of truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet from morning till night, till the day of their death, they are lying, and tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate it as a deadly foe.

“And so my fate is decided,” said my sister, as we arrived home.  “After what has happened I cannot go back there.  Heavens, how good that is!  My heart feels lighter.”