28

NEKHLYUDOV would have left Petersburg that same evening but he had promised Mariette to join her at the theatre, and, though he knew that he ought not to do so, he went, stretching a point with his conscience and telling himself that he must keep his word.

‘Am I able to withstand such temptations?’ he asked himself, somewhat insincerely. ‘I will try for the last time.’

Changing into a tail-coat, he arrived at the theatre in time for the second act of the perennial Dame aux Camélias, in which a foreign actress was demonstrating in a novel manner how consumptive women the.

The house was crowded and Nekhlyudov was at once, and with the deference due to anyone with such a destination, shown to Mariette’s box.

A footman in livery stood in the corridor outside. He bowed to Nekhlyudov as to a familiar personage, and opened the door of the box.

All the people sitting in the rows of boxes opposite, those standing behind them, the backs of those near by, the grey, grizzled, bald, balding, pomaded and curled heads of those in the orchestra stalls – the entire audience was absorbed in watching the contortions of a thin bony actress elegantly attired in silks and lace, who was reciting her monologue in an unnatural voice. Someone called ‘Sssh!’ as the door opened, and two currents of air, one cool, the other hot, swept over Nekhlyudov’s face.

In the box were Mariette, a lady in a red cloak and a large massive coiffure whom he did not know, and two men: Mariette’s husband, the general, a tall handsome man with an aquiline nose and a severe inscrutable expression – he wore a uniform padded across the chest – and a light-complexioned balding man with a clean-shaven dimpled chin between pompous side-whiskers. Mariette, slim and graceful in a low-necked gown that exposed her firm shapely sloping shoulders and a tiny black mole on one side at the base of her neck, turned to look round the moment Nekhlyudov entered and with her fan motioned him to a chair behind her, welcoming him with gratitude and, as he thought, a significant smile. Her husband glanced at him in the quiet way in which he did everything, and bowed. His attitude, the look he exchanged with his wife, evinced the master, the owner of a beautiful woman.

When the monologue ended, the theatre resounded with applause. Mariette rose and, holding her rustling silk skirt, went to the back of the box and introduced Nekhlyudov to her husband. Smiling all the time with his eyes, the general said that he was ‘delighted’ and then relapsed into his impenetrable silence.

‘I ought to have left today but I promised you I would come,’ said Nekhlyudov, turning to Mariette.

‘If you don’t want to see me, at least you will see a wonderful actress,’ said Mariette, answering the implication of his words. ‘Don’t you think she was splendid in that last scene?’ she asked, turning to her husband.

The husband nodded his head.

‘This sort of thing leaves me unmoved,’ said Nekhlyudov. ‘I have seen so much real suffering today that –’

‘Do sit down and tell us about it.’

The husband listened, his eyes smiling more and more ironically.

‘I went to see that woman who has been released after being kept in prison for such a long time. She is completely crushed.’

‘That was the woman I spoke to you about,’ said Mariette to her husband.

‘Yes, I was very glad she could be released,’ he said quietly, nodding, and now smiling with open irony under his moustaches, so it seemed to Nekhlyudov. ‘I am going outside for a smoke.’

Nekhlyudov sat, expecting that Mariette would tell him the ‘something’ which she had said she wanted to tell him, but she said nothing and did not even try to say anything, but made a joke or two and talked about the play, which she thought should have a special appeal for Nekhlyudov.

Nekhlyudov saw that she had nothing to tell him but only wished to show herself to him in all the splendour of her evening toilette, and to display her shoulders and the little mole, and he felt both pleased and disgusted at the same time.

The veil of enchantment which had lain over all this before was not exactly removed for Nekhlyudov but he now saw what was underneath it. Looking at Mariette, he admired her beauty but he knew that she was a fraud, living with a husband who was making his way in the world by means of the tears and lives of hundreds and hundreds of people, and this was a matter of complete indifference to her, and that everything she had said the day before was untrue, and that she wanted – neither he nor she knew why – to make him fall in love with her. And he felt both attracted and repelled. Several times he took up his hat, meaning to go, but still stayed on. But finally, when her husband returned to the box with a strong smell of tobacco on his thick moustaches and looked at Nekhlyudov with a patronizing contemptuous air, as though not recognizing him, Nekhlyudov walked out into the corridor before the door closed, and finding his overcoat left the theatre.

On his way home along the Nevsky Prospect he could not help noticing a tall, very well-built, conspicuously dressed woman walking slowly along the wide pavement in front of him, the consciousness of her detestable power apparent in her face and in her whole figure. Everyone who came towards her or caught up with her turned to look at her. Nekhlyudov quickened his step to pass her and he, too, involuntarily looked into her face, which, though no doubt painted, was handsome. The woman smiled at Nekhlyudov, flashing her eyes at him. And strangely enough, Nekhlyudov was immediately reminded of Mariette, because he experienced the same feeling of attraction and disgust as he had at the theatre. Walking hurriedly past her, Nekhlyudov, vexed with himself, turned into the Morskaya and then on to the embankment, where, to the surprise of a policeman, he began pacing up and down.

‘The other one in the theatre smiled at me just like that when I entered the box,’ he thought, ‘and both smiles held the same meaning. The only difference is that this one says simply and directly: “If you want me, take me. If not, go on your way,” while the other pretends that she has no such thought in her mind but lives in some lofty world of refined sentiments, whereas at bottom they’re the same. This one at least is truthful : the other one lies. Besides, this woman here has been driven to these straits by necessity, while the other amuses herself playing with that enchanting, revolting and dreadful passion. This street-walker is like filthy stinking water to be offered only to those whose thirst overcomes their aversion; but the woman in the theatre is like a virus imperceptibly poisoning everything it touches.’

Nekhlyudov thought of his liaison with the wife of the Marshal of the Nobility, and shameful recollections flooded his mind.

‘The animal nature of man is abominable,’ he thought, ‘but so long as it remains undisguised you can look down on it from the heights of your spiritual life and despise it, and whether you succumb or resist, you remain what you were before; but when this animality is concealed under a pseudo-aesthetic, poetic veil and demands adulation – then in worshipping the animal you become engulfed in it and can no longer distinguish good from evil. Then it is awful.’

Nekhlyudov saw 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 no soothing restful darkness hung over the land, but only a dismal dreary unnatural light coming from an invisible source, so there was no longer the comfortable darkness of ignorance in Nekhlyudov’s soul. Everything was clear. It was clear that all the things which are commonly considered good and important are actually worthless or wicked, and all this glitter, all this luxury serve but to conceal old familiar crimes which not only go unpunished but rise triumphant, adorned with all the fascination the human imagination can devise.

Nekhlyudov would have liked to forget this, to close his eyes to it, but he could no longer help seeing it. Although he did not see the source of the light which revealed all this to him, any more than he could see the source of the light which lay over Petersburg that night, and although the light itself seemed dim, cheerless and unnatural, he could not help seeing what that light revealed, and he felt at one and the same time both happy and disturbed.