25
NEKHLYUDOV’S first feeling on waking next morning was of having done something nasty the day before.
He tried to remember. No, there had been nothing nasty, he had done nothing wrong, but he had had thoughts, wrong thoughts, that all his present intentions – to marry Katusha and give his land to the peasants – were all an unrealizable dream, which he would not have the strength to fulfil; that it was all artificial and unnatural, and that it was his duty to go on living as he lived before.
He was not guilty of any evil act, but there was something far worse than an evil action: there were thoughts which give birth to bad deeds. An evil act need not be repeated and can be repented of, but evil thoughts engender evil acts.
A bad act only smoothes the path for other bad acts, whereas evil thoughts drag one irresistibly along that path.
Ruminating on his thoughts of the previous night, Nekhlyudov wondered how he could have accepted them for a single minute. However difficult and unfamiliar the course might be that he intended to take, he knew that it was the only possible way of life for him now, and however easy and natural it might be to return to his former state, he knew that state to be death. Yesterday’s temptation made him think of a man who wakes after a sound sleep and, though not sleepy any more, wants to wallow luxuriously in bed a little longer, in spite of knowing full well that it is time to get up and attend to the glad and important work that awaits him.
This was to be his last day in Petersburg, and in the morning he went to Vassilyevsky Island to see Lydia Shustova.
She lived on the second floor. The house porter directed him to the back entrance, and climbing a steep straight staircase he walked right into a hot kitchen smelling strongly of food. An elderly woman with her sleeves rolled up and wearing an apron and spectacles stood beside the stove, stirring something in a steaming saucepan.
‘Who do you want?’ she asked severely, peering at the stranger over her spectacles.
Nekhlyudov had hardly mentioned his name when an expression of alarm mingled with joy came over her face.
‘Oh, prince!’ she cried, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘But why did you come up the back staircase? You, our benefactor! I am her mother. They came near killing my girl. You are our saviour,’ she exclaimed, seizing Nekhlyudov’s hand and trying to kiss it. ’I went to see you yesterday. My sister kept asking me to. She is here. This way, this way, please, after me,’ said Lydia Shustova’s mother, leading the way through a narrow door and down a dark passage, all the while pulling at her skirt, which was tucked up, and smoothing her hair. ‘My sister’s name is Kornilova. I expect you’ve heard of her,’ she added in a whisper, pausing outside a door. ‘She has been mixed up in political affairs. A very clever woman – ’
Opening the door that led from the passage, she showed Nekhlyudov into a small room where a short plump girl in a striped cotton blouse was sitting on a sofa in front of a table. Fair wavy hair framed her round very pale face that resembled her mother’s. Opposite her in an arm-chair, leaning forward so that he was bent almost double, sat a young man with little black moustaches and a beard, wearing a Russian blouse with an embroidered band round the neck. Both of them were evidently so absorbed in their conversation that they only turned round when Nekhlyudov was inside the room.
‘Lydia, this is Prince Nekhlyudov, who, you know – ’
The pale-faced girl sprang nervously to her feet, pushing an unruly strand of hair behind her ear, and stared timidly at the stranger with her large grey eyes.
‘So you are the dangerous woman Vera Bogodoukhovskaya pleaded for?’ said Nekhlyudov, smiling and holding out his hand.
‘Yes, that’s me,’ said Lydia, with a broad sweet smile like a child’s, which displayed a row of beautiful teeth. ‘It’s my aunt who was so anxious to see you. Auntie!’ she called through the door in a pleasant gentle voice.
‘Vera Bogodoukhovskaya was very upset by your arrest,’ said Nekhlyudov.
‘Do sit down – no, you would be better here,’ said Lydia, pointing to the battered arm-chair from which the young man had just risen. ‘My cousin, Zakharov,’ she said, noticing Nekhlyudov glance at the young man.
The young man greeted the visitor with a smile as kindly as Lydia’s, and when Nekhlyudov sat down in his seat he brought himself a chair from the window and sat next to him. A fair-haired schoolboy of about sixteen also came into the room and silently perched himself on the window-sill.
‘Vera Bogodoukhovskaya is a great friend of my aunt’s, but I hardly know her,’ said Lydia.
Just then a woman with an agreeable intelligent face, wearing a white blouse with a leather belt, came in from the next room.
‘How do you do? Thank you for coming,’ she began, when she had seated herself on the sofa beside Lydia. ‘Well, and how is my dear Vera? Have you seen her? How is she bearing up to the trouble she is in?’
‘She does not complain,’ said Nekhlyudov. ‘She says she is in Olympian spirits.’
‘Ah, that sounds just like Vera!’ said the aunt, nodding her head and smiling. ‘One has to know her. She is a wonderful character. Always thinking of others, never of herself.’
‘That’s quite true – she didn’t ask anything for herself, she was only concerned about your niece. She was particularly distressed because, she said, there was no cause for her arrest.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s a dreadful business. The truth of the matter is, she was really a scapegoat for me.’
‘Not at all, auntie,’ said Lydia. ’I should have taken care of the papers, anyway, without you.’
‘Allow me to know better,’ insisted the aunt. ‘You see,’ she went on to Nekhlyudov, ‘it all happened because a certain person asked me to keep his papers for a while, and as I had no apartment of my own I brought them to Lydia. But that very night the police searched her room and took the papers away and her too, and kept her in prison all this time, demanding that she should say who it was gave them to her.’
‘But I never told them,’ said Lydia quickly, pulling nervously at a lock of hair that was not really in her way.
‘I never said you did,’ her aunt retorted.
‘If they got hold of Mitin, it was certainly not through me,’ said Lydia, blushing and looking about her uneasily.
‘Don’t talk about it, Lydia dear,’ said her mother.
‘Why not? I should like to tell,’ said Lydia, no longer smiling or pulling at her hair but twisting a strand round her finger and reddening and all the time looking round the room.
‘You know what happened yesterday when you began talking about it.’
‘That’s all right.… Leave me alone, mamma. I did not tell, I kept my mouth shut. When he interrogated me twice about auntie and Mitin, I said nothing, and told him I would not answer. Then he – that man, Petrov…’
‘Petrov’s a spy, a gendarme and a great scoundrel,’ interrupted the aunt, explaining her niece’s words to Nekhlyudov.
‘Then,’ Lydia hurried on agitatedly, ‘he tried to persuade me. “Whatever you tell me,” he said, “will do no harm to anyone. On the contrary, if you make a clean breast of it you will be setting innocent people free, who may be suffering here for nothing.” But I still said I would not tell. Then he said: “All right, don’t say anything – just don’t deny what I’m going to say.” And he began going through names, and he said Mitin’s name.’
‘Don’t talk about it,’ said the aunt.
‘Please, auntie, don’t interrupt me….’ And she kept pulling at the lock of hair and looking about her. ‘And suddenly, think of it, next day I find out – we used to communicate to each other by tapping on the wall – that Mitin had been arrested. Well, I thought, I have betrayed him. And the idea tormented me so – it tormented me so that I nearly went out of my mind.’
‘And it turned out it was not at all because of you that he was picked up,’ said the aunt.
‘Yes, but I didn’t know that. I thought I had given him away. I walked up and down, from wall to wall, I couldn’t stop thinking. “I betrayed him,” I thought. I would lie down and cover my head, and a voice would keep whispering in my ear: “You betrayed him, you betrayed Mitin, Mitin was betrayed by you.” I knew it was a hallucination but I could not keep from listening. I used to try and go to sleep – I couldn’t. I tried not to think – I couldn’t do that either. Oh, it was terrible!’ said Lydia, growing more and more agitated, winding the lock of hair round her finger and unwinding it again, and looking about her all the time.
‘Lydia dear, calm yourself,’ repeated her mother, putting a hand on her shoulder.
But now Lydia could not stop.
‘It’s so terrible because…’ she began again, but broke off with a sob. Jumping up from the sofa and bumping into a chair, she ran from the room. Her mother went after her.
‘They ought to be hanged, the blackguards,’ said the school-boy sitting on the window-ledge.
‘What’s that?’ asked his mother.
‘Oh nothing… I was just…’ the boy replied, and picking up a cigarette from the table he began to smoke.