Resurrection

by Leo Tolstoy

  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 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 worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful."

  Nekhludoff perceived all 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 there was no restful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming from an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff's soul there was no longer the restful darkness, ignorance. Everything seemed clear. It was clear that everything considered important and good was insignificant and repulsive, and that all the glamour and luxury hid the old, well-known crimes, which not only remained unpunished but were adorned with all the splendour which men were capable of inventing.

  Nekhludoff wished to forget all this, not to see it, but he could no longer help seeing it. Though he could not see the source of the light which revealed it to him any more than he could see the source of the light which lay over Petersburg; and though the light appeared to him dull, dismal, and unnatural, yet he could not help seeing what it revealed, and he felt both joyful and anxious.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  FOR HER SAKE AND FOR GOD'S.

  On his return to Moscow Nekhludoff went at once to the prison hospital to bring Maslova the sad news that the Senate had confirmed the decision of the Court, and that she must prepare to go to Siberia. He had little hope of the success of his petition to the Emperor, which the advocate had written for him, and which he now brought with him for Maslova to sign. And, strange to say, he did not at present even wish to succeed; he had got used to the thought of going to Siberia and living among the exiled and the convicts, and he could not easily picture to himself how his life and Maslova's would shape if she were acquitted. He remembered the thought of the American writer, Thoreau, who at the time when slavery existed in America said that "under a government that imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison." Nekhludoff, especially after his visit to Petersburg and all he discovered there, thought in the same way.

  "Yes, the only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison," he thought, and even felt that this applied to him personally, when he drove up to the prison and entered its walls.

  The doorkeeper recognised Nekhludoff, and told him at once that

  Maslova was no longer there.

  "Where is she, then?"

  "In the cell again."

  "Why has she been removed?" Nekhludoff asked.

  "Oh, your excellency, what are such people?" said the doorkeeper, contemptuously. "She's been carrying on with the medical assistant, so the head doctor ordered her back."

  Nekhludoff had had no idea how near Maslova and the state of her mind were to him. He was stunned by the news.

  He felt as one feels at the news of a great and unforeseen misfortune, and his pain was very se
vere. His first feeling was one of shame. He, with his joyful idea of the change that he imagined was going on in her soul, now seemed ridiculous in his own eyes. He thought that all her pretence of not wishing to accept his sacrifice, all the reproaches and tears, were only the devices of a depraved woman, who wished to use him to the best advantage. He seemed to remember having seen signs of obduracy at his last interview with her. All this flashed through his mind as he instinctively put on his hat and left the hospital.

  "What am I to do now? Am I still bound to her? Has this action of hers not set me free?" And as he put these questions to himself he knew at once that if he considered himself free, and threw her up, he would be punishing himself, and not her, which was what he wished to do, and he was seized with fear.

  "No, what has happened cannot alter--it can only strengthen my resolve. Let her do what flows from the state her mind is in. If it is carrying on with the medical assistant, let her carry on with the medical assistant; that is her business. I must do what my conscience demands of me. And my conscience expects me to sacrifice my freedom. My resolution to marry her, if only in form, and to follow wherever she may be sent, remains unalterable." Nekhludoff said all this to himself with vicious obstinacy as he left the hospital and walked with resolute steps towards the big gates of the prison. He asked the warder on duty at the gate to inform the inspector that he wished to see Maslova. The warder knew Nekhludoff, and told him of an important change that had taken place in the prison. The old inspector had been discharged, and a new, very severe official appointed in his place.

  "They are so strict nowadays, it's just awful," said the jailer.

  "He is in here; they will let him know directly."

  The new inspector was in the prison and soon came to Nekhludoff. He was a tall, angular man, with high cheek bones, morose, and very slow in his movements.