Resurrection - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (interesting novels in english .TXT) 📗

opinion of a new play. She asked it in a tone as if

Kolosoff’s opinion would decide all doubts, and each word of this

opinion be worthy of being immortalised. Kolosoff found fault

both with the play and its author, and that led him to express

his views on art. Princess Sophia Vasilievna, while trying at the

same time to defend the play, seemed impressed by the truth of

his arguments, either giving in at once, or at least modifying

her opinion. Nekhludoff looked and listened, but neither saw nor

heard what was going on before him.

 

Listening now to Sophia Vasilievna, now to Kolosoff, Nekhludoff

noticed that neither he nor she cared anything about the play or

each other, and that if they talked it was only to gratify the

physical desire to move the muscles of the throat and tongue

after having eaten; and that Kolosoff, having drunk vodka, wine

and liqueur, was a little tipsy. Not tipsy like the peasants who

drink seldom, but like people to whom drinking wine has become a

habit. He did not reel about or talk nonsense, but he was in a

state that was not normal; excited and self-satisfied.

Nekhludoff also noticed that during the conversation Princess

Sophia Vasilievna kept glancing uneasily at the window, through

which a slanting ray of sunshine, which might vividly light up

her aged face, was beginning to creep up.

 

“How true,” she said in reference to some remark of Kolosoff’s,

touching the button of an electric bell by the side of her couch.

The doctor rose, and, like one who is at home, left the room

without saying anything. Sophia Vasilievna followed him with her

eyes and continued the conversation.

 

“Please, Philip, draw these curtains,” she said, pointing to the

window, when the handsome footman came in answer to the bell.

“No; whatever you may say, there is some mysticism in him;

without mysticism there can be no poetry,” she said, with one of

her black eyes angrily following the footman’s movements as he

was drawing the curtains. “Without poetry, mysticism is

superstition; without mysticism, poetry is—prose,” she

continued, with a sorrowful smile, still not losing sight of the

footman and the curtains. “Philip, not that curtain; the one on

the large window,” she exclaimed, in a suffering tone. Sophia

Vasilievna was evidently pitying herself for having to make the

effort of saying these words; and, to soothe her feelings, she

raised to her lips a scented, smoking cigarette with her jewel-bedecked fingers.

 

The broad-chested, muscular, handsome Philip bowed slightly, as

if begging pardon; and stepping lightly across the carpet with

his broad-calved, strong, legs, obediently and silently went to

the other window, and, looking at the princess, carefully began

to arrange the curtain so that not a single ray dared fall on

her. But again he did not satisfy her, and again she had to

interrupt the conversation about mysticism, and correct in a

martyred tone the unintelligent Philip, who was tormenting her so

pitilessly. For a moment a light flashed in Philip’s eyes.

 

“‘The devil take you! What do you want?’ was probably what he

said to himself,” thought Nekhludoff, who had been observing all

this scene. But the strong, handsome Philip at once managed to

conceal the signs of his impatience, and went on quietly carrying

out the orders of the worn, weak, false Sophia Vasilievna.

 

“Of course, there is a good deal of truth in Lombroso’s

teaching,” said Kolosoff, lolling back in the low chair and

looking at Sophia Vasilievna with sleepy eyes; “but he

overstepped the mark. Oh, yes.”

 

“And you? Do you believe in heredity?” asked Sophia Vasilievna,

turning to Nekhludoff, whose silence annoyed her. “In heredity?”

he asked. “No, I don’t.” At this moment his whole mind was taken

up by strange images that in some unaccountable way rose up in

his imagination. By the side of this strong and handsome Philip

he seemed at this minute to see the nude figure of Kolosoff as an

artist’s model; with his stomach like a melon, his bald head, and

his arms without muscle, like pestles. In the same dim way the

limbs of Sophia Vasilievna, now covered with silks and velvets,

rose up in his mind as they must be in reality; but this mental

picture was too horrid and he tried to drive it away.

 

“Well, you know Missy is waiting for you,” she said. “Go and find

her. She wants to play a new piece by Grieg to you; it is most

interesting.”

 

“She did not mean to play anything; the woman is simply lying,

for some reason or other,” thought Nekhludoff, rising and

pressing Sophia Vasilievna’s transparent and bony, ringed hand.

 

Katerina Alexeevna met him in the drawing-room, and at once

began, in French, as usual:

 

“I see the duties of a juryman act depressingly upon you.”

 

“Yes; pardon me, I am in low spirits to-day, and have no right to

weary others by my presence,” said Nekhludoff.

 

“Why are you in low spirits?”

 

“Allow me not to speak about that,” he said, looking round for

his hat.

 

“Don’t you remember how you used to say that we must always tell

the truth? And what cruel truths you used to tell us all! Why do

you not wish to speak out now? Don’t you remember, Missy?” she

said, turning to Missy, who had just come in.

 

“We were playing a game then,” said Nekhludoff, seriously; “one

may tell the truth in a game, but in reality we are so bad—I

mean I am so bad—that I, at least, cannot tell the truth.”

 

“Oh, do not correct yourself, but rather tell us why we are

so bad,” said Katerina Alexeevna, playing with her words and

pretending not to notice how serious Nekhludoff was.

 

“Nothing is worse than to confess to being in low spirits,” said

Missy. “I never do it, and therefore am always in good spirits.”

 

Nekhludoff felt as a horse must feel when it is being caressed to

make it submit to having the bit put in its mouth and be

harnessed, and to-day he felt less than ever inclined to draw.

 

“Well, are you coming into my room? We will try to cheer you up.”

 

He excused himself, saying he had to be at home, and began taking

leave. Missy kept his hand longer than usual.

 

“Remember that what is important to you is important to your

friends,” she said. “Are you coming tomorrow?”

 

“I hardly expect to,” said Nekhludoff; and feeling ashamed,

without knowing whether for her or for himself, he blushed and

went away.

 

“What is it? Comme cela m’intrigue,” said Katerina Alexeevna. “I

must find it out. I suppose it is some _affaire d’amour propre; il

est tres susceptible, notre cher Mitia_.”

 

“Plutot une affaire d’amour sale,” Missy was going to say, but

stopped and looked down with a face from which all the light had

gone—a very different face from the one with which she had

looked at him. She would not mention to Katerina Alexeevna even,

so vulgar a pun, but only said, “We all have our good and our bad

days.”

 

“Is it possible that he, too, will deceive?” she thought; “after

all that has happened it would be very bad of him.”

 

If Missy had had to explain what she meant by “after all that has

happened,” she could have said nothing definite, and yet she knew

that he had not only excited her hopes but had almost given her a

promise. No definite words had passed between them—only looks

and smiles and hints; and yet she considered him as her own, and

to lose him would be very hard.

 

CHAPTER XXVIII.

 

THE AWAKENING.

 

“Shameful and stupid, horrid and shameful!” Nekhludoff kept

saying to himself, as he walked home along the familiar streets.

The depression he had felt whilst speaking to Missy would not

leave him. He felt that, looking at it externally, as it were, he

was in the right, for he had never said anything to her that

could be considered binding, never made her an offer; but he knew

that in reality he had bound himself to her, had promised to be

hers. And yet to-day he felt with his whole being that he could

not marry her.

 

“Shameful and horrid, horrid and shameful!” he repeated to

himself, with reference not only to his relations with Missy but

also to the rest. “Everything is horrid and shameful,” he

muttered, as he stepped into the porch of his house. “I am not

going to have any supper,” he said to his manservant Corney, who

followed him into the dining-room, where the cloth was laid for

supper and tea. “You may go.”

 

“Yes, sir,” said Corney, yet he did not go, but began clearing

the supper off the table. Nekhludoff looked at Corney with a

feeling of ill-will. He wished to be left alone, and it seemed to

him that everybody was bothering him in order to spite him. When

Corney had gone away with the supper things, Nekhludoff moved to

the tea urn and was about to make himself some tea, but hearing

Agraphena Petrovna’s footsteps, he went hurriedly into the

drawing-room, to avoid being seen by her, and shut the door after

him. In this drawing-room his mother had died three months

before. On entering the room, in which two lamps with reflectors

were burning, one lighting up his father’s and the other his

mother’s portrait, he remembered what his last relations with his

mother had been. And they also seemed shameful and horrid. He

remembered how, during the latter period of her illness, he had

simply wished her to die. He had said to himself that he wished

it for her sake, that she might be released from her suffering,

but in reality he wished to be released from the sight of her

sufferings for his own sake.

 

Trying to recall a pleasant image of her, he went up to look at

her portrait, painted by a celebrated artist for 800 roubles. She

was depicted in a very low-necked black velvet dress. There was

something very revolting and blasphemous in this representation

of his mother as a half-nude beauty. It was all the more

disgusting because three months ago, in this very room, lay this

same woman, dried up to a mummy. And he remembered how a few days

before her death she clasped his hand with her bony, discoloured

fingers, looked into his eyes, and said: “Do not judge me, Mitia,

if I have not done what I should,” and how the tears came into

her eyes, grown pale with suffering.

 

“Ah, how horrid!” he said to himself, looking up once more at the

half-naked woman, with the splendid marble shoulders and arms,

and the triumphant smile on her lips. “Oh, how horrid!” The bared

shoulders of the portrait reminded him of another, a young woman,

whom he had seen exposed in the same way a few days before. It

was Missy, who had devised an excuse for calling him into her

room just as she was ready to go to a ball, so that he should see

her in her ball dress. It was with disgust that he remembered her

fine shoulders and arms. “And that father of hers, with his

doubtful past and his cruelties, and the bel-esprit her mother,

with her doubtful reputation.” All this disgusted him, and also

made him feel ashamed. “Shameful and horrid; horrid and shameful!”

 

“No, no,” he thought; “freedom from all these false relations

with the Korchagins and Mary Vasilievna and the inheritance and

from all the rest must be got. Oh, to breathe freely, to go

abroad, to Rome and work at my picture!” He