Page:The Kingdom of God is within you, by Leo Tolstoy.pdf/325

 a cigarette; another is looking through some papers. Directly Sidorov comes in, a guard goes* up to him, places him under the measuring frame, raising him under his chin, and straightening his legs.

The man with the cigarette—he is the doctor—comes up, and without looking at the recruit's face, but somewhere beyond it, feels his body over with an air of disgust, measures him, tests him, tells the guard to open his mouth, tells him to breathe, to speak. Someone notes something down. At last without having once looked him in the face the doctor says, " Right. Next one" and with a weary air sits down again at the table. The soldiers again hustle and hurry the lad. He somehow gets into his trousers, wraps his feet in rags, puts on his boots, looks for his scarf and cap, and bundles his pelisse under his arm. Then they lead him into the main hall, shutting him off apart from the rest by a bench, behind which all the conscripts who have been passed for service are waiting. Another village lad like himself, but from a distant province, now a soldier armed with a gun with sharp-pointed bayonet at the end, keeps watch over him, ready to run him through the body he should think of trying to escape.

Meantime the crowd of fathers, mothers, and wives, hustled by the police, are pressing round the doors to hear whose lad has been taken, whose is let off. One of the rejected comes out and announces that Piotr is taken, and at once a shrill cry is heard from Piotr's young wife, for whom this word "taken" means separation for four or five years, the life of soldier's wife as a servant, often a prostitute.

But here comes man along the street with flowing hair and in a peculiar dress, who gets out of his droskhy and goes into the Zemsky Court-house. The police clear way for him through the crowd. It is the "reverend father" come to administer the oath. And this "father," who has