Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy [top 5 books to read .txt] 📗

and what she had been, and brought back all the horrors of that life, which she had felt but dimly, and not allowed herself to realise.

It was only now that the memory of all those terrible nights came vividly back to her, especially one during the carnival when she was expecting a student who had promised to buy her out. She remembered how she⁠—wearing her low-necked silk dress stained with wine, a red bow in her untidy hair, wearied, weak, half tipsy, having seen her visitors off, sat down during an interval in the dancing by the piano beside the bony pianiste with the blotchy face, who played the accompaniments to the violin, and began complaining of her hard fate; and how this pianiste said that she, too, was feeling how heavy her position was and would like to change it; and how Clara suddenly came up to them; and how they all three decided to change their life. They thought that the night was over, and were about to go away, when suddenly the noise of tipsy voices was heard in the anteroom. The violinist played a tune and the pianiste began hammering the first figure of a quadrille on the piano, to the tune of a most merry Russian song. A small, perspiring man, smelling of spirits, with a white tie and swallowtail coat, which he took off after the first figure, came up to her, hiccuping, and caught her up, while another fat man, with a beard, and also wearing a dress-coat (they had come straight from a ball) caught Clara up, and for a long time they turned, danced, screamed, drank.⁠ ⁠… And so it went on for another year, and another, and a third. How could she help changing? And he was the cause of it all. And, suddenly, all her former bitterness against him reawoke; she wished to scold, to reproach him. She regretted having neglected the opportunity of repeating to him once more that she knew him, and would not give in to him⁠—would not let him make use of her spiritually as he had done physically.

And she longed for drink in order to stifle the feeling of pity to herself and the useless feeling of reproach to him. And she would have broken her word if she had been inside the prison. Here she could not get any spirits except by applying to the medical assistant, and she was afraid of him because he made up to her, and intimate relations with men were disgusting to her now. After sitting a while on a form in the passage she returned to her little room, and without paying any heed to her companion’s words, she wept for a long time over her wrecked life.

XIV

Nekhlúdoff had four matters to attend to in Petersburg. The first was the appeal to the Senate in Máslova’s case; the second, to hand in Theodosia Birukóff’s petition to the committee; the third, to comply with Véra Doúkhova’s requests⁠—i.e., try to get her friend Shoústova released from prison, and get permission for a mother to visit her son in prison. Véra Doúkhova had written to him about this, and he was going to the Gendarmerie Office to attend to these two matters, which he counted as one.

The fourth matter he meant to attend to was the case of some sectarians who had been separated from their families and exiled to the Caucasus because they read and discussed the Gospels. It was not so much to them as to himself he had promised to do all he could to clear up this affair.

Since his last visit to Máslennikoff, and especially since he had been in the country, Nekhlúdoff had not exactly formed a resolution but felt with his whole nature a loathing for that society in which he had lived till then, that society which so carefully hides the sufferings of millions in order to assure ease and pleasure to a small number of people, that the people belonging to this society do not and cannot see these sufferings, nor the cruelty and wickedness of their life. Nekhlúdoff could no longer move in this society without feeling ill at ease and reproaching himself. And yet all the ties of relationship and friendship, and his own habits, were drawing him back into this society. Besides, that which alone interested him now, his desire to help Máslova and the other sufferers, made it necessary to ask for help and service from persons belonging to that society, persons whom he not only could not respect, but who often aroused in him indignation and a feeling of contempt.

When he came to Petersburg and stopped at his aunt’s⁠—his mother’s sister, the Countess Tchársky, wife of a former minister⁠—Nekhlúdoff at once found himself in the very midst of that aristocratic circle which had grown so foreign to him. This was very unpleasant, but there was no possibility of getting out of it. To put up at an hotel instead of at his aunt’s house would have been to offend his aunt, and, besides, his aunt had important connections and might be extremely useful in all these matters he meant to attend to.

“What is this I hear about you? All sorts of marvels,” said the Countess Katerína Ivánovna Tchársky, as she gave him his coffee immediately after his arrival. “Vous posez pour un Howard. Helping criminals, going the round of prisons, setting things right.”

“Oh, no. I never thought of it.”

“Why not? It is a good thing, only there seems to be some romantic story connected with it. Let us hear all about it.”

Nekhlúdoff told her the whole truth about his relations to Máslova.

“Yes, yes, I remember your poor mother telling me about it. That was when you were staying with those old women. I believe they wished to marry you to their ward” (the Countess Katerína Ivánovna had always despised Nekhlúdoff’s aunts on his father’s side). “So it’s she. Elle