3

AT the time Maslova, exhausted after the long walk with her guards, was nearing the court-house, Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, the nephew of her patronesses and the man who had seduced her, was still lying on his high crumpled bed with its springs and down mattress. He had unbuttoned the collar of his fine white linen night-shirt with the well-pressed pleats over the chest, and was smoking. His eyes gazed vacantly into space while he considered what he had to do that day and what had happened the day before.

He sighed as he thought of the previous evening spent at the Korchagins – people of some wealth and social importance whose daughter everyone expected he would marry – and throwing away the butt of his cigarette was about to take another from his silver case but changed his mind, put down his smooth white legs, felt for his slippers with his feet, threw his silk dressing-gown over his broad shoulders and, stepping heavily, hurried into his dressing-room, where the air was oppressive with the artificial odours of elixirs, eau de Cologne, pomatum and perfumes. There, with a special powder, he cleaned his teeth, many of which had gold fillings, rinsed his mouth with scented water and then began to wash his body all over, drying himself with various different towels. Having washed his hands with scented soap, he carefully cleaned his long nails with a nail-brush and rinsed his face and stout neck at the large marble wash-stand. Then he walked into a third room off the bedroom where a shower-bath awaited him. Here he bathed his muscular, plump white body in cold water and dried it with a rough bath-sheet, put on clean freshly ironed linen and boots which shone like glass, and finally seated himself at the dressing-table with a brush in each hand to brush his short curly black beard and the curling hair on his head which was beginning to thin at the temples.

Everything he used – all the appurtenances of his toilet – his linen, his clothes, boots, neckties, tie-pins, cuff-links were of the best and most expensive kind: unobtrusive, simple, durable and costly.

Picking up from among a dozen neckties and tie-pins the first that came to hand – at one time choosing what to wear had been novel and amusing but now it was a matter of complete indifference to him – Nekhlyudov put on the carefully brushed clothes lying ready on a chair, and, clean now and perfumed if not feeling altogether refreshed, he proceeded to the long dining-room, where three men had laboured the day before to polish the parquetry. The room was furnished with a huge oak sideboard and an equally large extension-table to which widely spaced legs carved in the shape of lions’ paws gave an imposing air. On this table, which was covered with a fine starched cloth with large monograms, stood a silver coffee-pot of fragrant coffee, a silver sugar-bowl, a cream-jug with hot cream, and a bread-basket filled with freshly baked rolls, rusks and biscuits. Beside his plate lay the morning post – letters, newspapers and the latest number of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Nekhlyudov was on the point of taking up his letters when the door from the dining-room to the passage outside opened and a stout middle-aged woman in mourning, a lace cap over the widening parting of her hair, glided into the room. This was Agrafena Petrovna, formerly lady’s maid to Nekhlyudov’s mother, who had died quite recently in this very apartment: she had stayed on with the son as his housekeeper.

Agrafena Petrovna had at different times spent some ten years abroad with Nekhlyudov’s mother, and had the appearance and manners of a lady. She had lived with the Nekhlyudovs ever since she was a child and had known Dmitri Ivanovich when he was a little boy and they called him Mitenka.

‘Good morning, Dmitri Ivanovich.’

‘Good morning, Agrafena Petrovna. What’s the latest news?’ asked Nekhlyudov jocularly.

‘A letter from the princess – or from the young lady, maybe. A maid brought it some time ago and is waiting in my room,’ said Agrafena Petrovna, handing him the letter with a significant smile.

‘Very well, I will attend to it,’ said Nekhlyudov, taking the letter and frowning as he noticed Agrafena Petrovna’s smile.

Agrafena Petrovna’s smile meant that the letter was from the young Princess Korchagina whom Agrafena Petrovna believed he had made up his mind to marry. This supposition of hers expressed by a smile annoyed Nekhlyudov.

‘Then I will tell her to wait,’ and Agrafena Petrovna restored to its proper place a crumb-brush, and sailed out of the dining-room.

Nekhlyudov broke the seal of the perfumed note which Agrafena Petrovna had given him, and began to read.

Having taken it upon myself to be your memory –

so ran the letter which was written on thick grey deckle-edged paper in a pointed but sprawling hand –

I remind you that today, the 28th of April, you have to appear at the court-house to serve on a jury and therefore you can on no account accompany Kolossov and us to the picture-gallery as in your usual reckless fashion you promised last night; à moins que vous ne soyez disposé à payer à la cour d’assises les 300 roubles d’amende, que vous vous refusez pour votre cheval,1 for not appearing at the appointed time. I thought of it yesterday, the moment you left. So now don’t forget.

Princess M. Korchagina     

On the other side was a postscript:

Maman vous fait dire que votre couvert vous attendra jusqu’à la nuit. Venez absolument à quelle heure que cela soit.2

Nekhlyudov frowned. The note was a continuation of the skilful campaign which the young princess had been waging for the past two months now, designed to bind him ever more tightly to her with invisible threads. But apart from the usual hesitation of men past their first youth about marrying when they are not passionately in love, there was another important reason to prevent Nekhlyudov from making an immediate offer of marriage, even if he did decide to do so. It was not that ten years previously he had seduced Katusha and deserted her – he had forgotten all about that, and he would not have regarded it as any impediment to marriage. The reason was a liaison with a married woman. So far as he was concerned the affair was at an end, but the lady had not yet recognized the fact.

Nekhlyudov was very shy with women, and it was this very shyness of his which had tempted the married woman to try and win him. She was the wife of the Marshal of the Nobility of the district where Nekhlyudov went for the elections. And she had drawn him into an intimacy which entangled him further every day and every day grew more distasteful. At first Nekhlyudov had not been able to resist the temptation; then, feeling guilty towards her, he could not bring himself to force a break against her will. And this was why he did not consider he had a right to propose to the young Princess Korchagina, even had he been so inclined.

There on the table at this moment lay a letter from the lady’s husband. Seeing the handwriting and the postmark, Nekhlyudov flushed and immediately felt an upsurge of energy, as always happened at the approach of danger. But his excitement was uncalled for: the husband, the Marshal of the Nobility of the district where Nekhlyudov’s largest estates were situated, wrote to inform him that a special assembly of the Zemstvo1 was to be held at the end of May, and asked him to be sure to come pour donner un coup d’épaule2 at the important debates on schools and local railways, as strong opposition from the reactionary party was expected at the meeting.

The Marshal was a liberal-minded man, and with others who shared his views struggled to oppose the current of reaction that ran so strongly under Alexander III; absorbed heart and soul in the struggle, he was quite unaware of his domestic misfortune.

Nekhlyudov remembered all the painful moments he had experienced in connexion with this man: he remembered how one day he had thought that her husband had found out, and how he had made arrangements for a duel with him and decided how he would fire in the air; and the terrible scene with her when she had rushed distraught into the garden to drown herself in the pond, and he had run out to look for her. ‘I can’t go and I can’t do anything until I hear from her,’ thought Nekhlyudov. A week ago he had written her a firm letter in which he acknowledged his guilt and declared himself ready to atone for it in any and every way, but at the same time, ‘for her own good’, he regarded their relations as ended for ever. It was to this letter that he was awaiting, and had not received, a reply. The fact that there was no answer was a good sign in a way. If she did not agree to break off their friendship she would have written days ago, or even come herself, as she had on previous occasions. Nekhlyudov had heard that a certain officer in the country was paying court to her now, and though this gave him twinges of jealousy, at the same time it filled him with hope of release from the deceit that oppressed him.

The other letter was from his chief steward, who wrote that it was essential for Nekhlyudov to visit his estates in order to take formal possession and also to decide on future policy: were they to continue to run the estates as they had been run during the lifetime of the late princess or were they to do as he had suggested to the deceased and now suggested to the young prince – increase the stock and themselves farm all the land now let out to the peasants? The steward wrote that this would be a far more profitable way of working the estate. He also apologized for being late with the three thousand roubles income due on the first of the month. These monies would be sent by the next post. The reason for the delay was that he had been quite unable to collect from the peasants, who had grown so irresponsible and unscrupulous that he had been obliged to appeal to the authorities. This letter Nekhlyudov found partly disagreeable and partly pleasant. It was gratifying to feel himself master of so large a property, but the letter made disagreeable reading because in the first flush of youth he had been an ardent admirer of Herbert Spencer, being particularly struck, as a large landed proprietor, by Spencer’s theory (in Social Statics) that the private ownership of land was wrong. With the unswerving determination of youth he had then not only argued that land could not form the object of private ownership, and written a thesis on the subject while at the university, but had actually surrendered to the peasants a small piece of land (which did not belong to his mother – he had inherited it personally from his father) since he did not wish to go against his convictions and own land. Now that he had become a great landed proprietor he had to choose one of two things: either to renounce his property, as he had done ten years before with the five hundred acres that had come to him from his father, or by tacit acceptance admit the error and falsity of his early ideas.

He could not do the former because the land was his sole means of existence. He did not want to go back into government service, and, moreover, he had acquired luxurious habits which he felt unable to give up. Nor was there any inducement to: the strong convictions, the determination, the ambition and the desire to startle people of his young days were gone. As to the second course – that of repudiating those clear and irrefutable arguments against the private ownership of land, which he had first discovered in Spencer’s Social Statics and the brilliant confirmation of which he had found later, much later, in the works of Henry George – it was out of the question.

And this was why the steward’s letter made disagreeable reading.

Resurrection
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