Resurrection
something whispering, ‘Betrayed! betrayed Mitin! Mitin betrayed!’ I
know it is an hallucination, but cannot help listening. I wish to
fall asleep, I cannot. I wish not to think, and cannot cease. That is
terrible!” and as Shoustova spoke she got more and more excited, and
twisted and untwisted the lock of hair round her finger.
“Lydia, dear, be calm,” the mother said, touching her shoulder.
But Shoustova could not stop herself.
“It is all the more terrible--” she began again, but did not finish, and
jumping up with a cry rushed out of the room.
Her mother turned to follow her.
“They ought to be hanged, the rascals!” said the schoolboy who was
sitting on the window-sill.
“What’s that?” said the mother.
“I only said--Oh, it’s nothing,” the schoolboy answered, and taking a
cigarette that lay on the table, he began to smoke.
CHAPTER XXVI.
LYDIA’S AUNT.
“Yes, that solitary confinement is terrible for the young,” said the
aunt, shaking her head and also lighting a cigarette.
“I should say for every one,” Nekhludoff replied.
“No, not for all,” answered the aunt. “For the real revolutionists, I
have been told, it is rest and quiet. A man who is wanted by the police
lives in continual anxiety, material want, and fear for himself and
others, and for his cause, and at last, when he is taken up and it is
all over, and all responsibility is off his shoulders, he can sit and
rest. I have been told they actually feel joyful when taken up. But the
young and innocent (they always first arrest the innocent, like Lydia),
for them the first shock is terrible. It is not that they deprive you of
freedom; and the bad food and bad air--all that is nothing. Three times
as many privations would be easily borne if it were not for the moral
shock when one is first taken.”
“Have you experienced it?”
“I? I was twice in prison,” she answered, with a sad, gentle smile.
“When I was arrested for the first time I had done nothing. I was 22,
had a child, and was expecting another. Though the loss of freedom and
the parting with my child and husband were hard, they were nothing when
compared with what I felt when I found out that I had ceased being a
human creature and had become a thing. I wished to say good-bye to my
little daughter. I was told to go and get into the trap. I asked where I
was being taken to. The answer was that I should know when I got there.
I asked what I was accused of, but got no reply. After I had been
examined, and after they had undressed me and put numbered prison
clothes on me, they led me to a vault, opened a door, pushed me in, and
left me alone; a sentinel, with a loaded gun, paced up and down in front
of my door, and every now and then looked in through a crack--I felt
terribly depressed. What struck me most at the time was that the
gendarme officer who examined me offered me a cigarette. So he knew that
people liked smoking, and must know that they liked freedom and light;
and that mothers love their children, and children their mothers. Then
how could they tear me pitilessly from all that was dear to me, and
lock me up in prison like a wild animal? That sort of thing could not
be borne without evil effects. Any one who believes in God and men, and
believes that men love one another, will cease to believe it after all
that. I have ceased to believe in humanity since then, and have grown
embittered,” she finished, with a smile.
Shoustova’s mother came in at the door through which her daughter had
gone out, and said that Lydia was very much upset, and would not come in
again.
“And what has this young life been ruined for?” said the aunt. “What is
especially painful to me is that I am the involuntary cause of it.”
“She will recover in the country, with God’s help,” said the mother. “We
shall send her to her father.”
“Yes, if it were not for you she would have perished altogether,” said
the aunt. “Thank you. But what I wished to see you for is this: I wished
to ask you to take a letter to Vera Doukhova,” and she got the letter
out of her pocket.
“The letter is not closed; you may read and tear it up, or hand it to
her, according to how far it coincides with your principles,” she said.
“It contains nothing compromising.”
Nekhludoff took the letter, and, having promised to give it to Vera
Doukhova, he took his leave and went away. He sealed the letter without
reading it, meaning to take it to its destination.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE STATE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE.
The last thing that kept Nekhludoff in Petersburg was the case of the
sectarians, whose petition he intended to get his former fellow-officer,
Aide-de-camp Bogatyreff, to hand to the Tsar. He came to Bogatyreff in
the morning, and found him about to go out, though still at breakfast.
Bogatyreff was not tall, but firmly built and wonderfully strong (he
could bend a horseshoe), a kind, honest, straight, and even liberal man.
In spite of these qualities, he was intimate at Court, and very fond of
the Tsar and his family, and by some strange method he managed, while
living in that highest circle, to see nothing but the good in it and to
take no part in the evil and corruption. He never condemned anybody
nor any measure, and either kept silent or spoke in a bold, loud voice,
almost shouting what he had to say, and often laughing in the same
boisterous manner. And he did not do it for diplomatic reasons, but
because such was his character.
“Ah, that’s right that you have come. Would you like some breakfast?
Sit down, the beefsteaks are fine! I always begin with something
substantial--begin and finish, too. Ha! ha! ha! Well, then, have a glass
of wine,” he shouted, pointing to a decanter of claret. “I have been
thinking of you. I will hand on the petition. I shall put it into his
own hands. You may count on that, only it occurred to me that it would
be best for you to call on Toporoff.”
Nekhludoff made a wry face at the mention of Toporoff.
“It all depends on him. He will be consulted, anyhow. And perhaps he may
himself meet your wishes.”
“If you advise it I shall go.”
“That’s right. Well, and how does Petersburg agree with you?” shouted
Bogatyreff. “Tell me. Eh?”
“I feel myself getting hypnotised,” replied Nekhludoff.
“Hypnotised!” Bogatyreff repeated, and burst out laughing. “You won’t
have anything? Well, just as you please,” and he wiped his moustaches
with his napkin. “Then you’ll go? Eh? If he does not do it, give the
petition to me, and I shall hand it on to-morrow.” Shouting these words,
he rose, crossed himself just as naturally as he had wiped his mouth,
and began buckling on his sword.
“And now good-bye; I must go. We are both going out,” said Nekhludoff,
and shaking Bogatyreff’s strong, broad hand, and with the sense of
pleasure which the impression of something healthy and unconsciously
fresh always gave him, Nekhludoff parted from Bogatyreff on the
door-steps.
Though he expected no good result from his visit, still Nekhludoff,
following Bogatyreff’s advice, went to see Toporoff, on whom the
sectarians’ fate depended.
The position occupied by Toporoff, involving as it did an incongruity of
purpose, could only be held by a dull man devoid of moral sensibility.
Toporoff possessed both these negative qualities. The incongruity of the
position he occupied was this. It was his duty to keep up and to defend,
by external measures, not excluding violence, that Church which, by its
own declaration, was established by God Himself and could not be shaken
by the gates of hell nor by anything human. This divine and immutable
God-established institution had to be sustained and defended by a human
institution--the Holy Synod, managed by Toporoff and his officials.
Toporoff did not see this contradiction, nor did he wish to see it, and
he was therefore much concerned lest some Romish priest, some pastor, or
some sectarian should destroy that Church which the gates of hell could
not conquer.
Toporoff, like all those who are quite destitute of the fundamental
religious feeling that recognises the equality and brotherhood of men,
was fully convinced that the common people were creatures entirely
different from himself, and that the people needed what he could very
well do without, for at the bottom of his heart he believed in nothing,
and found such a state very convenient and pleasant. Yet he feared lest
the people might also come to such a state, and looked upon it as his
sacred duty, as he called it, to save the people therefrom.
A certain cookery book declares that some crabs like to be boiled alive.
In the same way he thought and spoke as if the people liked being kept
in superstition; only he meant this in a literal sense, whereas the
cookery book did not mean its words literally.
His feelings towards the religion he was keeping up were the same as
those of the poultry-keeper towards the carrion he fed his fowls on.
Carrion was very disgusting, but the fowls liked it; therefore it was
right to feed the fowls on carrion. Of course all this worship of the
images of the Iberian, Kasan and Smolensk Mothers of God was a gross
superstition, but the people liked it and believed in it, and therefore
the superstition must be kept up.
Thus thought Toporoff, not considering that the people only liked
superstition because there always have been, and still are, men like
himself who, being enlightened, instead of using their light to help
others to struggle out of their dark ignorance, use it to plunge them
still deeper into it.
When Nekhludoff entered the reception-room Toporoff was in his study
talking with an abbess, a lively and aristocratic lady, who was
spreading the Greek orthodox faith in Western Russia among the Uniates
(who acknowledge the Pope of Rome), and who have the Greek religion
enforced on them. An official who was in the reception-room inquired
what Nekhludoff wanted, and when he heard that Nekhludoff meant to
hand in a petition to the Emperor, he asked him if he would allow the
petition to be read first. Nekhludoff gave it him, and the official took
it into the study. The abbess, with her hood and flowing veil and her
long train trailing behind, left the study and went out, her white hands
(with their well-tended nails) holding a topaz rosary. Nekhludoff was
not immediately asked to come in. Toporoff was reading the petition
and shaking his head. He was unpleasantly surprised by the clear and
emphatic wording of it.
“If it gets into the hands of the Emperor it may cause
misunderstandings, and unpleasant questions may be asked,” he thought
as he read. Then he put the petition on the table, rang, and ordered
Nekhludoff to be asked in.
He remembered the case of the sectarians; he had had a petition from
them before. The case was this: These Christians, fallen away from the
Greek Orthodox Church, were first exhorted and then tried by law, but
were acquitted. Then the Archdeacon and the Governor arranged, on the
plea that their marriages were illegal, to exile these sectarians,
separating the husbands, wives, and children. These fathers and
wives were now petitioning that they should not be parted. Toporoff
recollected the first time the case came to his notice: he had at that
time hesitated whether he had not better put a stop to it. But then
he thought no harm could result from his confirming the decision to
separate and exile the different members of the sectarian families,
whereas allowing the peasant sect to remain where it was might have a
bad effect on the rest of the inhabitants of the place and cause them
to fall away from Orthodoxy. And then the affair also proved the zeal
of the Archdeacon, and so he let the case proceed along the lines it had
taken. But now that they had a defender such as Nekhludoff, who had some