Resurrection by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (i love reading .TXT) 📖
- Author: Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
- Performer: -
Book online «Resurrection by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (i love reading .TXT) 📖». Author Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
woman punished for the illicit sale of spirits, the boy for
theft, the tramp for tramping, the incendiary for setting a house
on fire, the banker for fraud, and that unfortunate Lydia
Shoustova imprisoned only because they hoped to get such
information as they required from her. Then he thought of the
sectarians punished for violating Orthodoxy, and Gourkevitch for
wanting constitutional government, and Nekhludoff clearly saw
that all these people were arrested, locked up, exiled, not
really because they transgressed against justice or behaved
unlawfully, but only because they were an obstacle hindering the
officials and the rich from enjoying the property they had taken
away from the people. And the woman who sold wine without having
a license, and the thief knocking about the town, and Lydia
Shoustova hiding proclamations, and the sectarians upsetting
superstitions, and Gourkevitch desiring a constitution, were a
real hindrance. It seemed perfectly clear to Nekhludoff that all
these officials, beginning with his aunt’s husband, the Senators,
and Toporoff, down to those clean and correct gentlemen who sat
at the tables in the Ministry Office, were not at all troubled by
the fact that that in such a state of things the innocent had to
suffer, but were only concerned how to get rid of the really
dangerous, so that the rule that ten guilty should escape rather
than that one innocent should be condemned was not observed, but,
on the contrary, for the sake of getting rid of one really
dangerous person, ten who seemed dangerous were punished, as,
when cutting a rotten piece out of anything, one has to cut away
some that is good.
This explanation seemed very simple and clear to Nekhludoff; but
its very simplicity and clearness made him hesitate to accept it.
Was it possible that so complicated a phenomenon could have so
simple and terrible an explanation? Was it possible that all
these words about justice, law, religion, and God, and so on,
were mere words, hiding the coarsest cupidity and cruelty?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE MEANING OF MARIETTE’S ATTRACTION.
Nekhludoff would have left Petersburg on the evening of the same
day, but he had promised Mariette to meet her at the theatre, and
though he knew that he ought not to keep that promise, he
deceived himself into the belief that it would not be right to
break his word.
“Am I capable of withstanding these temptations?” he asked
himself not quite honestly. “I shall try for the last time.”
He dressed in his evening clothes, and arrived at the theatre
during the second act of the eternal Dame aux Camelias, in which
a foreign actress once again, and in a novel manner, showed how
women die of consumption.
The theatre was quite full. Mariette’s box was at once, and with
great deference, shown to Nekhludoff at his request. A liveried
servant stood in the corridor outside; he bowed to Nekhludoff as
to one whom he knew, and opened the door of the box.
All the people who sat and stood in the boxes on the opposite
side, those who sat near and those who were in the parterre, with
their grey, grizzly, bald, or curly heads—all were absorbed in
watching the thin, bony actress who, dressed in silks and laces,
was wriggling before them, and speaking in an unnatural voice.
Some one called “Hush!” when the door opened, and two streams,
one of cool, the other of hot, air touched Nekhludoff’s face.
Mariette and a lady whom he did not know, with a red cape and a
big, heavy head-dress, were in the box, and two men also,
Mariette’s husband, the General, a tall, handsome man with a
severe, inscrutable countenance, a Roman nose, and a uniform
padded round the chest, and a fair man, with a bit of shaved chin
between pompous whiskers.
Mariette, graceful, slight, elegant, her low-necked dress showing
her firm, shapely, slanting shoulders, with a little black mole
where they joined her neck, immediately turned, and pointed with
her face to a chair behind her in an engaging manner, and smiled
a smile that seemed full of meaning to Nekhludoff.
The husband looked at him in the quiet way in which he did
everything, and bowed. In the look he exchanged with his wife,
the master, the owner of a beautiful woman, was to be seen at
once.
When the monologue was over the theatre resounded with the
clapping of hands. Mariette rose, and holding up her rustling
silk skirt, went into the back of the box and introduced
Nekhludoff to her husband.
The General, without ceasing to smile with his eyes, said he was
very pleased, and then sat inscrutably silent.
“I ought to have left to-day, had I not promised,” said
Nekhludoff to Mariette.
“If you do not care to see me,” said Mariette, in answer to what
his words implied, “you will see a wonderful actress. Was she not
splendid in the last scene?” she asked, turning to her husband.
The husband bowed his head.
“This sort of thing does not touch me,” said Nekhludoff. “I have
seen so much real suffering lately that—”
“Yes, sit down and tell me.”
The husband listened, his eyes smiling more and more ironically.
“I have been to see that woman whom they have set free, and who
has been kept in prison for so long; she is quite broken down.”
“That is the woman I spoke to you about,” Mariette said to her
husband.
“Oh, yes, I was very pleased that she could be set free,” said
the husband quietly, nodding and smiling under his moustache with
evident irony, so it seemed to Nekhludoff. “I shall go and have a
smoke.”
Nekhludoff sat waiting to hear what the something was that
Mariette had to tell him. She said nothing, and did not even try
to say anything, but joked and spoke about the performance, which
she thought ought to touch Nekhludoff. Nekhludoff saw that she
had nothing to tell, but only wished to show herself to him in
all the splendour of her evening toilet, with her shoulders and
little mole; and this was pleasant and yet repulsive to him.
The charm that had veiled all this sort of thing from Nekhludoff
was not removed, but it was as if he could see what lay beneath.
Looking at Mariette, he admired her, and yet he knew that she was
a liar, living with a husband who was making his career by means
of the tears and lives of hundreds and hundreds of people, and
that she was quite indifferent about it, and that all she had
said the day before was untrue. What she wanted—neither he nor
she knew why—was to make him fall in love with her. This both
attracted and disgusted him. Several times, on the point of going
away, he took up his hat, and then stayed on.
But at last, when the husband returned with a strong smell of
tobacco in his thick moustache, and looked at Nekhludoff with a
patronising, contemptuous air, as if not recognising him,
Nekhludoff left the box before the door was closed again, found
his overcoat, and went out of the theatre. As he was walking home
along the Nevski, he could not help noticing a well-shaped and
aggressively finely-dressed woman, who was quietly walking in
front of him along the broad asphalt pavement. The consciousness
of her detestable power was noticeable in her face and the whole
of her figure. All who met or passed that woman looked at her.
Nekhludoff walked faster than she did and, involuntarily, also
looked her in the face. The face, which was probably painted, was
handsome, and the woman looked at him with a smile and her eyes
sparkled. And, curiously enough, Nekhludoff was suddenly reminded
of Mariette, because he again felt both attracted and disgusted
just as when in the theatre.
Having hurriedly passed her, Nekhludoff turned off on to the
Morskaya, and passed on to the embankment, where, to the surprise
of a policeman, he began pacing up and down the pavement.
“The other one gave me just such a smile when I entered the
theatre,” he thought, “and the meaning of the smile was the same.
The only difference is, that this one said plainly, ‘If you want
me, take me; if not, go your way,’ and the other one pretended
that she was not thinking of this, but living in some high and
refined state, while this was really at the root. Besides, this
one was driven to it by necessity, while the other amused herself
by playing with that enchanting, disgusting, frightful passion.
This woman of the street was like stagnant, smelling water
offered to those whose thirst was greater than their disgust;
that other one in the theatre was like the poison which,
unnoticed, poisons everything it gets into.”
Nekhludoff recalled his liaison with the Marechal’s wife, and
shameful memories rose before him.
“The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting,” thought
he, “but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it
from the height of our spiritual life and despise it;
and—whether one has fallen or resisted—one remains what one was
before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of
poetry and aesthetic feeling and demands our worship—then we are
swallowed up by it completely, and worship animalism, no longer
distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful.”
Nekhludoff perceived all this now as clearly as he saw the
palace, the sentinels, the fortress, the river, the boats, and
the Stock Exchange. And just as on this northern summer night
there was no restful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal,
dull light coming from an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff’s
soul there was no longer the restful darkness, ignorance.
Everything seemed clear. It was clear that everything considered
important and good was insignificant and repulsive, and that all
the glamour and luxury hid the old, well-known crimes, which not
only remained unpunished but were adorned with all the splendour
which men were capable of inventing.
Nekhludoff wished to forget all this, not to see it, but he could
no longer help seeing it. Though he could not see the source of
the light which revealed it to him any more than he could see the
source of the light which lay over Petersburg; and though the
light appeared to him dull, dismal, and unnatural, yet he could
not help seeing what it revealed, and he felt both joyful and
anxious.
CHAPTER XXIX.
FOR HER SAKE AND FOR GOD’S.
On his return to Moscow Nekhludoff went at once to the prison
hospital to bring Maslova the sad news that the Senate had
confirmed the decision of the Court, and that she must prepare to
go to Siberia. He had little hope of the success of his petition
to the Emperor, which the advocate had written for him, and which
he now brought with him for Maslova to sign. And, strange to say,
he did not at present even wish to succeed; he had got used to
the thought of going to Siberia and living among the exiled and
the convicts, and he could not easily picture to himself how his
life and Maslova’s would shape if she were acquitted. He
remembered the thought of the American writer, Thoreau, who at
the time when slavery existed in America said that “under a
government that imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just
man is also a prison.” Nekhludoff, especially after his visit to
Petersburg and all he discovered there, thought in the same way.
“Yes, the only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the
present time is a prison,” he thought,
Comments (0)