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

knew, and, as if the performance over and she were drawing the curtain, she dropped the veil over her face again. “All right,” and she again touched the coachman.

Nekhlúdoff raised his hat, and the well-bred bays, slightly snorting, set off, their shoes clattering on the pavement, and the carriage rolled quickly and smoothly on its new rubber tyres, giving a jump only now and then over some unevenness of the road.

XVI

When Nekhlúdoff remembered the smiles that had passed between him and Mariette, he shook his head.

“You have hardly time to turn round before you are again drawn into this life,” he thought, feeling that discord and those doubts which the necessity to curry favour from people he did not esteem caused.

After considering where to go first, so as not to have to retrace his steps, Nekhlúdoff set off for the Senate. There he was shown into the office where he found a great many very polite and very clean officials in the midst of a magnificent apartment. Máslova’s petition was received and handed on to that Wolff, to whom Nekhlúdoff had a letter from his uncle, to be examined and reported on.

“There will be a meeting of the Senate this week,” the official said to Nekhlúdoff, “but Máslova’s case will hardly come before that meeting.”

“It might come before the meeting on Wednesday, by special request,” one of the officials remarked.

During the time Nekhlúdoff waited in the office, while some information was being taken, he heard that the conversation in the Senate was all about the duel, and he heard a detailed account of how a young man, Kámenski, had been killed. It was here he first heard all the facts of the case which was exciting the interest of all Petersburg. The story was this: Some officers were eating oysters and, as usual, drinking very much, when one of them said something ill-natured about the regiment to which Kámenski belonged, and Kámenski called him a liar. The other hit Kámenski. The next day they fought. Kámenski was wounded in the stomach and died two hours later. The murderer and the seconds were arrested, but it was said that though they were arrested and in the guardhouse they would be set free in a fortnight.

From the Senate Nekhlúdoff drove to see an influential member of the petition Committee, Baron Vorobióff, who lived in a splendid house belonging to the Crown. The doorkeeper told Nekhlúdoff in a severe tone that the Baron could not be seen except on his reception days; that he was with His Majesty the Emperor today, and the next day he would again have to deliver a report. Nekhlúdoff left his uncle’s letter with the doorkeeper and went on to see the Senator Wolff. Wolff had just had his lunch, and was as usual helping digestion by smoking a cigar and pacing up and down the room, when Nekhlúdoff came in. Vladímir Vasílievitch Wolff was certainly un homme très comme il faut, and prized this quality very highly, and from that elevation he looked down at everybody else. He could not but esteem this quality of his very highly, because it was thanks to it alone that he had made a brilliant career, the very career he desired, i.e., by marriage he obtained a fortune which brought him in 18,000 roubles a year, and by his own exertions the post of a Senator. He considered himself not only un homme très comme il faut, but also a man of knightly honour. By honour he understood not accepting secret bribes from private persons. But he did not consider it dishonest to beg money for payment of fares and all sorts of travelling expenses from the Crown, and to do anything the Government might require of him in return. To ruin hundreds of innocent people, to cause them to be imprisoned, to be exiled because of their love for their people and the religion of their fathers, as he had done in one of the governments of Poland when he was governor there. He did not consider it dishonourable, but even thought it a noble, manly and patriotic action. Nor did he consider it dishonest to rob his wife and sister-in-law, as he had done, but thought it a wise way of arranging his family life. His family consisted of his commonplace wife, his sister-in-law, whose fortune he had appropriated by selling her estate and putting the money to his account, and his meek, frightened, plain daughter, who lived a lonely, weary life, from which she had lately begun to look for relaxation in evangelicism, attending meetings at Aline’s, and the Countess Katerína Ivánovna. Wolff’s son, who had grown a beard at the age of fifteen, and had at that age begun to drink and lead a depraved life, which he continued to do till the age of twenty, when he was turned out by his father because he never finished his studies, moved in a low set and made debts which committed the father. The father had once paid a debt of 250 roubles for his son, then another of 600 roubles, but warned the son that he did it for the last time, and that if the son did not reform he would be turned out of the house and all further intercourse between him and his family would he put a stop to. The son did not reform, but made a debt of 1,000 roubles, and took the liberty of telling his father that life at home was a torment anyhow. Then Wolff declared to his son that he might go where he pleased⁠—that he was no son of his any longer. Since then Wolff pretended he had no son, and no one at home dared speak to him about his son, and Vladímir Vasílievitch Wolff was firmly convinced that he had arranged his family life in the best way. Wolff stopped pacing up and down his study,