28

‘DISGRACEFUL and disgusting, disgusting and disgraceful,’ Nekhlyudov was thinking meanwhile, as he walked home through familiar streets. The depression he had felt while talking to Missy would not leave him. He felt that formally, so to speak, he had not wronged her: he had said nothing to her that could be considered binding, had made no proposal to her; but he knew that in reality he had bound himself to her, had promised to be hers. And yet today he felt with his whole being that he could not marry her. ‘Disgraceful and disgusting, disgusting and disgraceful,’ he kept repeating to himself, not only about his relations with Missy but about everything. ‘Everything is disgusting and shameful,’ he repeated, as he entered the porch of his house.

‘I don’t want any supper,’ he said to Korney, who followed him into the dining-room where the table was laid ready for him. ‘You may go.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Korney, but instead of going he began to clear the table. Nekhlyudov looked at Korney with a feeling of ill-will. He wanted to be left alone and it seemed to him that everybody was being intentionally annoying in order to spite him. When Korney had gone with the supper things Nekhlyudov went up to the samovar and was going to make himself some tea, but hearing Agrafena Petrovna’s footsteps he hurried into the drawing-room to avoid her, and shut the door after him. This room – the drawing-room – was the one his mother had died in three months before. Now, going into the room, which was lit by two lamps with reflectors, one near his father’s portrait and the other near his mother’s, he recalled how he had felt about her at the last, and their relations seemed to him unnatural and repulsive. They, too, were disgraceful and disgusting. He remembered how, towards the end of her illness, he had positively wanted her to die. He had told himself he wanted her to die for her sake, that she might be released from her suffering, whereas in actual fact he had wanted it for his own sake, to be released from the sight of her sufferings.

Anxious to recall a pleasant memory of her he glanced up at her portrait, which had been painted by a famous artist for five thousand roubles. She was wearing a low-cut gown of black velvet. The artist had evidently taken great pains over the modelling of the bosom, and the shadow between the breasts, and the dazzlingly beautiful shoulders and neck. This was absolutely disgraceful and disgusting. There was some-thing revolting and profane in this representation of his mother as a half-naked beauty. It was all the more disgusting because three months ago, in this very room, this same woman had been lying there, dried up like a mummy but still filling not only the whole room but the whole house with a heavy sickening smell which nothing could smother. He thought he could smell it even now. And he remembered how the day before she died she had taken his strong white hand in her bony discoloured fingers, looked him in the eyes and said: ‘Do not judge me, Mitya, if I have not done what I should,’ and how the tears had come into her eyes, grown dull with suffering. ‘How disgusting!’ he said to himself again, looking up at the half-naked woman with her superb marble shoulders and arms, and the triumphant smile on her lips. The half-bared bosom of the portrait reminded him of another young woman whom he had seen décolletée a few days before. It was Missy, who had devised an excuse for calling him into her room one evening just as she was ready to start for a ball, so that he might see her in her ball dress. He thought with disgust now of her beautiful shoulders and arms. And that coarse animal father of hers, with his evil past and his cruelties, and that bel esprit, her mother, with her doubtful reputation. All of it disgusted him and at the same time made him feel ashamed. ‘Disgraceful and disgusting, disgusting and disgraceful.’

‘No, no,’ he thought ‘I must break away: I must break away from my false relationship with the Korchagins and Marya Vassilyevna and the inheritance and all the rest.… Oh, to breathe freely – to go abroad, to Rome, and work at my picture.…’ He remembered his doubts as to his talent for art. “Well, anyway, just to breathe freely. First to Constantinople, then Rome. Anything to be through with this jury business. And have the matter arranged with the lawyer.’

And suddenly there flashed into his mind an extraordinarily vivid picture of the prisoner with her black eyes and their slight cast. How she had wept when the prisoners had been allowed to say their last words! He hurriedly stabbed the butt of his cigarette in the ashtray, lit another and started pacing up and down the room. And one after another scenes from the times he had spent with her rose in his imagination. He remembered that last meeting with her, the animal passion that had seized him, and the sense of disappointment he had experienced when his passion had been satisfied. He remembered the white dress with the pale-blue ribbon, remembered the Easter service. ‘I really did love her, truly loved her with a good, pure love that night – loved her even before that. Yes, I loved her the first time when I was staying with the aunts and writing my thesis!’ And he remembered himself as he had been then. A breath of that early freshness, youth and fullness of life blew over him, and he felt painfully sad.

The difference between what he had been then and what he was now was enormous: as great, if not greater, than the difference between Katusha in church that night and the prostitute who had caroused with the merchant and whom they had tried this very morning. Then he had been free and fearless, with endless possibilities ready to open before him; now he felt caught in the meshes of a stupid, empty, purposeless, insignificant life from which he could see no means of extricating himself – indeed, for the most part he did not want to extricate himself. He remembered how proud he used to be of his straightforwardness; how he had made it a rule always to speak the truth, and really had been truthful; and now he was entangled in lies – in the most dreadful lies, lies which all the people who surrounded him accepted as the truth. And there was no way out of these lies, at least so far as he could see. And he was sunk deep in them, was used to them, revelled in them.

How was he to break off his relations with Marya Vassilyevna and her husband in such a way as to be able to look him and his children in the eyes? How disentangle himself from Missy without lying? How escape the contradiction between his recognition that the private ownership of land was not right and his retention of the land inherited from his mother? How atone for his sin against Katusha? This last, at any rate, could not be left as it was. ‘I cannot abandon a woman I have loved, and be satisfied with paying a lawyer to save her from hard labour in Siberia which she does not even deserve – I can’t atone for my fault with money, in the way I did years ago when I gave her money and thought I had done what was required of me.’

And he vividly remembered the moment when he had caught up with her in the passage, thrust some money into the bib of her apron and run away. ‘Oh, that money!’ he thought with the same horror and disgust as he had felt at the time. ‘Oh, dear, oh dear, how contemptible!’ he said aloud, just as he had done at the time. ‘Only a blackguard could have done that! And I – I am just such a blackguard!’ he went on aloud. ‘But am I really’ – he stopped and stood still – ‘am I really such a scoundrel? – Well, am I not?’ he answered himself. ‘And is this all?’ he continued to accuse himself. ‘Are not my relations with Marya Vassilyevna and her husband mean and contemptible? And my position with regard to riches? To make use of wealth which I believe in my heart to be morally wrong, on the excuse that it was inherited from my mother? And the whole of my idle, bad life. And to crown it all, my conduct towards Katusha. Scoundrel, blackguard! They (people) can judge me as they like: they are easily deceived, but I cannot deceive myself.’

And suddenly he realized that the aversion he had lately, and particularly today, felt for people – for the prince, and Sophia Vassilyevna, and Missy, and Korney – was aversion for himself. And strange to say, in this recognition of his own baseness there was something painful, and at the same time something pleasurable and soothing.

More than once in Nekhlyudov’s life there had been what he called a ‘purging of the soul’. This was the name he gave to a state of mind in which, sometimes after a long interval, he would suddenly recognize the slothfulness of his inner life, or even the total cessation of activity, and set to work to clean up all the dirt which had clogged his soul to the point of inaction.

After such awakenings Nekhlyudov would make rules for himself which he meant to follow for ever after: he would keep a diary and begin a new life, which he hoped never to go back on – turning over a new leaf, he called it to himself in English. But time after time the temptations of the world ensnared him, and before he knew it he had fallen – often lower than before.

Several times in his life he had thus purified and raised himself. The first time was during the summer he spent with his aunts. That had been his most vital, most rapturous awakening. And its effects had lasted for a considerable while. There was another such awakening when he gave up the civil service and entered the army during the war, with the idea of sacrificing his life for his country. But here the choking-up process occurred very quickly. Then there was the awakening when he resigned from the army and went abroad, devoting himself to painting.

From that day to this a long period had passed without any moral purging, and consequently he had never before sunk to such depths, and never had there been such discord between what his conscience called for and the life he was leading, and he was horrified when he saw the distance separating the two.

The distance was so great, the defilement so complete, that at first he despaired of the possibility of being cleansed. ‘Haven’t you tried before to improve and be better, and nothing came of it?’ whispered the voice of the tempter within. ‘So what is the use of trying any more? You are not the only one – everyone’s the same – life is like that,’ whispered the voice. But the free spiritual being, which alone is true, alone powerful, alone eternal, had already awakened in Nekhlyudov. And he could not but trust it. However vast the disparity between what he was and what he wished to be, everything appeared possible to this newly awakened spiritual being.

‘Whatever it costs me, I will shatter the lie which is binding me, and admit everything, and tell the truth to everybody, and act truthfully,’ he said aloud with resolution. ‘I will tell Missy the truth, that I am a libertine and cannot marry her, and have upset her life for nothing. I will tell Marya Vassilyevna’ – this was the wife of the Marshal of the Nobility – ‘no, there is nothing to tell her: I will tell her husband that I, blackguard that I am, have been deceiving him. I will dispose of the estate in such a way as to be consistent with the truth. I will tell her, Katusha, that I am a blackguard, that I have wronged her and will do all I can to ease her lot. Yes, I will see her and ask her to forgive me. Yes, I will beg her pardon, as children do.’ He stopped. ‘I will marry her if necessary.’

He stopped, crossed his hands over his breast as he used to do when he was a child, lifted his eyes and said, addressing someone:

‘O Lord, help me, instruct me, come and take Thine abode in me and cleanse me from all impurity.’

He prayed, asking God to help him, to enter into him and cleanse him; and in the meantime that which he asked had already happened. The God who dwelt within him had awakened in his conscience. He felt himself one with Him, and therefore he was conscious not only of the freedom, the courage and joy of life, but of all the power of righteousness. All, all the best a man could do, he now felt himself capable of doing.

His eyes filled with tears as he was saying all this to himself, good and bad tears: good because they were tears of joy at the awakening of the spiritual being within him, the being that had slumbered all these-years; and bad tears of tender emotion at his own goodness.

He felt hot. He went to the window – the double winter glazing had been removed – and opened it. The window looked on to the garden. It was a still, fresh moonlight night. Wheels rattled past in the street, and then all was silent. The shadow of a tall leafless poplar fell on the ground immediately beneath the window, the outline of its forked branches sharply defined on the newly swept gravel. On the left, the roof of the coach-house shone white in the bright moonlight. In front, the black shadow of the garden wall was visible through the interlacing branches of the trees. Nekhlyudov gazed at the moonlit garden, the roof and the shadow of the poplar, and drank in the fresh invigorating air.

‘How good, how good, O Lord, how good!’ he said of what was in his soul.