31

THE party that was to include Maslova was due to set off on the 5th of July, and Nekhlyudov arranged to start the same day. On the day before his departure his sister and her husband came to town to see him.

Natalia Ivanovna Rogozhinskaya was ten years older than her brother, who had grown up partly under her influence. She had been very fond of him when he was a boy, and later on, before her marriage, they had become as intimate as though they were the same age – she being a woman of twenty-five, he a lad of fifteen. At that time she had been in love with his friend Nikolenka Irtenyev, who afterwards thed. They had both loved Nikolenka, loving in him and in themselves that which is good and which unites all men.

Since those days the characters of both had deteriorated: military service had corrupted him, together with a depraved life; and she had married a man whom she loved with a sensual love – a man who not only did not care for the things that she and Dmitri had once held sacred and precious but who could not even understand what such things were, and ascribed all her strivings after moral perfection and the service of mankind, which were the mainspring of her life, to ambition and a desire to show off (the only motives comprehensible to him).

Natalia’s husband was a man without name or fortune but he was smart and had carved out a comparatively brilliant career for himself in the law by manoeuvring artfully between liberalism and conservatism, utilizing whichever of the two trends best suited his purpose at the given time and for the given occasion, and, above all, by exploiting some personal quality which made women like him. He was past his first youth when he met the Nekhlyudovs abroad, succeeded in getting Natalia – not very young then either – to fall in love with him, and married her, rather against the wishes of her mother, who looked on the marriage as a mésalliance. Nekhlyudov, though he would not admit it to himself, and fought against the feeling, detested his brother-in-law. He loathed him for the vulgarity of his sentiments, his conceit and his mediocrity – but, above all, because his sister could bring herself to love this stunted creature so passionately, so egoistically and so sensually, for his sake stifling all the good there had been in her. It was always an agony for Nekhlyudov to think that Natalia was the wife of that hairy self-satisfied man with the shiny bald patch on his head. He could not even repress a feeling of revulsion for their children. And each time he heard she was pregnant he felt like condoling with her for again having been infected with something evil by this man whose nature was so foreign to theirs.

The Rogozhinskys came without their children (they had two, a boy and a girl) and occupied the best rooms in the best hotel. Natalia Ivanovna at once went to her mother’s old flat, but not finding her brother and hearing from Agrafena Petrovna that he had moved into furnished lodgings, she drove on there. A dirty servant who met her in the dark smelly passage, which required artificial light even in the day-time, told her that the prince was out.

Natalia Ivanovna asked to go to her brother’s rooms in order to leave a note for him. The man showed her in.

Natalia Ivanovna surveyed the two small rooms attentively. Everywhere she saw familiar signs of scrupulous neatness – but she was struck by the simplicity of the surroundings, quite unusual for him. On the writing-table she noticed the paper weight with the bronze dog on it which she remembered; equally familiar to her was the tidy way in which his different portfolios and writing materials were arranged, and some volumes on criminal law, a book in English by Henry George, and a French book by Tarde, with the place marked by a large crooked ivory paper-knife, which she recognized.

Seating herself at the table she wrote a note asking him to be sure to come and see her that very day; then, shaking her head in surprise at what she saw, she returned to her hotel.

Two things regarding her brother interested her just then: his proposed marriage to Katusha, which she had heard discussed in the town where she lived – everyone was talking about it – and his giving away the land to the peasants, which was also widely known and appeared to many to have a political and dangerous significance. In one way his proposal to Katusha pleased her: she admired his courage, which was so like him and herself as they had both been in the happy days before her marriage, but at the same time she was appalled at the idea of her brother marrying such a dreadful woman. This was the stronger feeling of the two, and she decided to use all her influence to dissuade him from such a step, although she knew how difficult it would be.

The other matter – giving the land to the peasants – did not concern her so much but her husband was very indignant about it and insisted that she should do all she could with her brother. Rogozhinsky declared that an act of that sort was the height of inconsistency, irresponsibility and arrogance; that the only possible explanation – if one could be found at all – was the desire to attract attention, to show off and be talked about.

‘What sense is there in giving land to the peasants and making them pay rent to themselves?’ he said. ‘If he wanted to do that, why didn’t he sell to them through the Peasants’ Bank? There might have been some sense in that. But taken all round what he has done verges on insanity,’ said Rogozhinsky, already beginning to think about putting Nekhlyudov under legal restraint, and he demanded that his wife should have a serious talk with her brother about his eccentric plan.