Resurrection
influence in Petersburg, the case might be specially pointed out to the
Emperor as something cruel, or it might get into the foreign papers.
Therefore he at once took an unexpected decision.
“How do you do?” he said, with the air of a very busy man, receiving
Nekhludoff standing, and at once starting on the business. “I know
this case. As soon as I saw the names I recollected this unfortunate
business,” he said, taking up the petition and showing it to Nekhludoff.
“And I am much indebted to you for reminding me of it. It is the
over-zealousness of the provincial authorities.”
Nekhludoff stood silent, looking with no kindly feelings at the
immovable, pale mask of a face before him.
“And I shall give orders that these measures should be revoked and the
people reinstated in their homes.”
“So that I need not make use of this petition?”
“I promise you most assuredly,” answered Toporoff, laying a stress on
the word I, as if quite convinced that his honesty, his word was the
best guarantee. “It will be best if I write at once. Take a seat,
please.”
He went up to the table and began to write. As Nekhludoff sat down he
looked at the narrow, bald skull, at the fat, blue-veined hand that was
swiftly guiding the pen, and wondered why this evidently indifferent man
was doing what he did and why he was doing it with such care.
“Well, here you are,” said Toporoff, sealing the envelope; “you may let
your clients know,” and he stretched his lips to imitate a smile.
“Then what did these people suffer for?” Nekhludoff asked, as he took
the envelope.
Toporoff raised his head and smiled, as if Nekhludoff’s question gave
him pleasure. “That I cannot tell. All I can say is that the interests
of the people guarded by us are so important that too great a zeal
in matters of religion is not so dangerous or so harmful as the
indifference which is now spreading--”
“But how is it that in the name of religion the very first demands of
righteousness are violated--families are separated?”
Toporoff continued to smile patronisingly, evidently thinking what
Nekhludoff said very pretty. Anything that Nekhludoff could say he would
have considered very pretty and very one-sided, from the height of what
he considered his far-reaching office in the State.
“It may seem so from the point of view of a private individual,” he
said, “but from an administrative point of view it appears in a rather
different light. However, I must bid you good-bye, now,” said Toporoff,
bowing his head and holding out his hand, which Nekhludoff pressed.
“The interests of the people! Your interests is what you mean!” thought
Nekhludoff as he went out. And he ran over in his mind the people in
whom is manifested the activity of the institutions that uphold religion
and educate the people. He began with the 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