Resurrection Leo Tolstoy (ebook reader for pc .txt) 📖

soul, and was acting as he did for its salvation. The alms which Nekhlúdoff had given away while in Panóvo made his explanation seem likely. The fact that Nekhlúdoff had never before been face to face with such great poverty and so bare a life as the peasants had come to in this place, and was so appalled by it, made him give away money in charity, though he knew that this was not reasonable. He could not help giving the money, of which he now had a great deal, having received a large sum for the forest he had sold the year before, and also the hand money for the implements and stock in Kousmínski. As soon as it was known that the master was giving money in charity, crowds of people, chiefly women, began to come to ask him for help. He did not in the least know how to deal with them, how to decide, how much, and whom to give to. He felt that to refuse to give money, of which he had a great deal, to poor people was impossible, yet to give casually to those who asked was not wise. The last day he spent in Panóvo, Nekhlúdoff looked over the things left in his aunts’ house, and in the bottom drawer of the mahogany wardrobe, with the brass lions’ heads with rings through them, he found many letters, and amongst them a photograph of a group, consisting of his aunts, Sophia Ivánovna and Mary Ivánovna, a student, and Katúsha. Of all the things in the house he took only the letters and the photograph. The rest he left to the miller who, at the smiling foreman’s recommendation, had bought the house and all it contained, to be taken down and carried away, at one-tenth of the real value.

Recalling the feeling of regret at the loss of his property which he had felt in Kousmínski, Nekhlúdoff was surprised how he could have felt this regret. Now he felt nothing but unceasing joy at the deliverance, and a sensation of newness something like that which a traveller must experience when discovering new countries.

X

The town struck Nekhlúdoff in a new and peculiar light on his return. He came back in the evening, when the gas was lit, and drove from the railway station to his house, where the rooms still smelt of naphthaline. Agraphéna Petróvna and Cornéy were both feeling tired and dissatisfied, and had even had a quarrel over those things that seemed made only to be aired and packed away. Nekhlúdoff’s room was empty, but not in order, and the way to it was blocked up with boxes, so that his arrival evidently hindered the business which, owing to a curious kind of inertia, was going on in this house. The evident folly of these proceedings, in which he had once taken part, was so distasteful to Nekhlúdoff after the impressions the misery of the life of the peasants had made on him, that he decided to go to a hotel the next day, leaving Agraphéna Petróvna to put away the things as she thought fit until his sister should come and finally dispose of everything in the house.

Nekhlúdoff left home early and chose a couple of rooms in a very modest and not particularly clean lodging-house within easy reach of the prison, and, having given orders that some of his things should be sent there, he went to see the advocate. It was cold out of doors. After some rainy and stormy weather it had turned out cold, as it often does in spring. It was so cold that Nekhlúdoff felt quite chilly in his light overcoat, and walked fast hoping to get warmer. His mind was filled with thoughts of the peasants, the women, children, old men, and all the poverty and weariness which he seemed to have seen for the first time, especially the smiling, old-faced infant writhing with his calfless little legs, and he could not help contrasting what was going on in the town. Passing by the butchers’, fishmongers’, and clothiers’ shops, he was struck, as if he saw them for the first time, by the appearance of the clean, well-fed shopkeepers, like whom you could not find one peasant in the country. These men were apparently convinced that the pains they took to deceive the people who did not know much about their goods was not a useless but rather an important business. The coachmen with their broad hips and rows of buttons down their sides, and the doorkeepers with gold cords on their caps, the servant-girls with their aprons and curly fringes, and especially the smart isvóstchiks with the nape of their necks clean shaved, as they sat lolling back in their traps, and examined the passersby with dissolute and contemptuous air, looked well fed. In all these people Nekhlúdoff could not now help seeing some of these very peasants who had been driven into the town by lack of land. Some of the peasants driven to the town had found means of profiting by the conditions of town life and had become like the gentlefolk and were pleased with their position; others were in a worse position than they had been in the country and were more to be pitied than the country people.

Such seemed the bootmakers Nekhlúdoff saw in the cellar, the pale, dishevelled washerwomen with their thin bare arms, ironing at an open window, out of which streamed soapy steam; such the two house-painters with their aprons, stockingless feet, all bespattered and smeared with paint, whom Nekhlúdoff met⁠—their weak, brown arms bared to above the elbows⁠—carrying a pailful of paint, and quarrelling with each other. Their faces looked haggard and cross. The dark faces of the carters jolting along in their carts bore the same expression, and so did the faces of the tattered men and women who stood begging at the street corners. The same kind of