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 remembered the doubts
he had about his talent for art. "Well, never mind; only just to
breathe freely. First Constantinople, then Rome. Only just to get
through with this jury business, and arrange with the advocate
first."
Then suddenly there arose in his mind an extremely vivid picture
of a prisoner with black, slightly-squinting eyes, and how she
began to cry when the last words of the prisoners had been heard;
and he hurriedly put out his cigarette, pressing it into the
ash-pan, lit another, and began pacing up and down the room. One
after another the scenes he had lived through with her rose in
his mind. He recalled that last interview with her. He remembered
the white dress and blue sash, the early mass. "Why, I loved her,
really loved her with a good, pure love, that night; I loved her
even before: yes, I loved her when I lived with my aunts the
first time and was writing my composition." And he remembered
himself as he had been then. A breath of that freshness, youth
and fulness of life seemed to touch him, and he grew painfully
sad. The difference between what he had been then and what he was
now, was enormous--just as great, if not greater than the
difference between Katusha in church that night, and the
prostitute who had been carousing with the merchant and whom they
judged this morning. Then he was free and fearless, and
innumerable possibilities lay ready to open before him; now he
felt himself caught in the meshes of a stupid, empty, valueless,
frivolous life, out of which he saw no means of extricating
himself even if he wished to, which he hardly did. He remembered
how proud he was at one time of his straightforwardness, how he
had made a rule of always speaking the truth, and really had been
truthful; and how he was now sunk deep in lies: in the most
dreadful of lies--lies considered as the truth by all who
surrounded him. And, as far as he could see, there was no way out
of these lies. He had sunk in the mire, got used to it, indulged
himself in it.
How was he to break off his relations with Mary Vasilievna and
her husband in such a way as to be able to look him and his
children in the eyes? How disentangle himself from Missy? How
choose between the two opposites--the recognition that holding
land was unjust and the heritage from his mother? How atone for
his sin against Katusha? This last, at any rate, could not be
left as it was. He could not abandon a woman he had loved, and
satisfy himself by paying money to an advocate to save her from
hard labour in Siberia. She had not even deserved hard labour.
Atone for a fault by paying money? Had he not then, when he gave
her the money, thought he was atoning for his fault?
And he clearly recalled to mind that moment when, having caught
her up in the passage, he thrust the money into her bib and ran
away. "Oh, that money!" he thought with the same horror and
disgust he had then felt. "Oh, dear! oh, dear! how disgusting,"
he cried aloud as he had done then. "Only a scoundrel, a knave,
could do such a thing. And I am that knave, that scoundrel!" He
went on aloud: "But is it possible?"--he stopped and stood
still--"is it possible that I am really a scoundrel? . . .
Well, who but I?" he answered himself. "And then, is this the
only thing?" he went on, convicting himself. "Was not my conduct
towards Mary Vasilievna and her husband base and disgusting? And
my position with regard to money? To use riches considered by me
unlawful on the plea that they are inherited from my mother? And
the whole of my idle, detestable life? And my conduct towards
Katusha to crown all? Knave and scoundrel! Let men judge me as
they like, I can deceive them; but myself I cannot deceive."
And, suddenly, he understood that the aversion he had lately, and
particularly to-day, felt for everybody--the Prince and Sophia
Vasilievna and Corney and Missy--was an aversion for himself.
And, strange to say, in this acknowledgement of his baseness
there was something painful yet joyful and quieting.
More than once in Nekhludoff's life there had been what he called
a "cleansing of the soul." By "cleansing of the soul" he meant a
state of mind in which, after a long period of sluggish inner
life, a total cessation of its activity, he began to clear out
all the rubbish that had accumulated in his soul, and was the
cause of the cessation of the true life. His soul needed
cleansing as a watch does. After such an awakening Nekhludoff
always made some rules for himself which he meant to follow
forever after, wrote his diary, and began afresh a life which he
hoped never to change again. "Turning over a new leaf," he called
it to himself in English. But each time the temptations of the
world entrapped him, and without noticing it he fell again, often
lower than before.
Thus he had several times in his life raised and cleansed
himself. The first time this happened was during the summer he
spent with his aunts; that was his most vital and rapturous
awakening, and its effects had lasted some time. Another
awakening was when he gave up civil service and joined the army
at war time, ready to sacrifice his life. But here the choking-up
process was soon accomplished. Then an awakening came when he
left the army and went abroad, devoting himself to art.
From that time until this day a long period had elapsed without
any cleansing, and therefore the discord between the demands of
his conscience and the life he was leading was greater than it
had ever been before. He was horror-struck when he saw how great
the divergence was. It was so great and the defilement so
complete that he despaired of the possibility of getting
cleansed. "Have you not tried before to perfect yourself and
become better, and nothing has come of it?" whispered the voice
of the tempter within. "What is the use of trying any more? Are
you the only one?--All are alike, such is life," whispered the
voice. But the free spiritual being, which alone is true, alone
powerful, alone eternal, had already awakened in Nekhludoff, and
he could not but believe it. Enormous though the distance was
between what he wished to be and what he was, nothing appeared
insurmountable to the newly-awakened spiritual being.
"At any cost I will break this lie which binds me and confess
everything, and will tell everybody the truth, and act the truth,
"he said resolutely, aloud. "I shall tell Missy the truth, tell
her I am a profligate and cannot marry her, and have only
uselessly upset her. I shall tell Mary Vasilievna. . . Oh, there
is nothing to tell her. I shall tell her husband that I,
scoundrel that I am, have been deceiving him. I shall dispose of
the inheritance in such a way as to acknowledge the truth. I
shall tell her, Katusha, that I am a scoundrel and have sinned
towards her, and will do all I can to ease her lot. Yes, I will
see her, and will ask her to forgive me.
"Yes, I will beg her pardon, as children do." . . . He
stopped---"will marry her if necessary." He stopped again, folded
his hands in front of his breast as he used to do when a little
child, lifted his eyes, and said, addressing some one: "Lord,
help me, teach me, come enter within me and purify me of all this
abomination."
He prayed, asking God to help him, to enter into him and cleanse
him; and what he was praying for had happened already: the God
within him had awakened his consciousness. He felt himself one
with Him, and therefore felt not only the freedom, fulness and
joy of life, but all the power of righteousness. All, all the
best that a man could do he felt capable of doing.
His eyes filled with tears as he was saying all this to himself,
good and bad tears: good because they were tears of joy at the
awakening of the spiritual being within him, the being which had
been asleep all these years; and bad tears because they were
tears of tenderness to himself at his own goodness.
He felt hot, and went to the window and opened it. The window
opened into a garden. It was a moonlit, quiet, fresh night; a
vehicle rattled past, and then all was still. The shadow of a
tall poplar fell on the ground just opposite the window, and all
the intricate pattern of its bare branches was clearly defined on
the clean swept gravel. To the left the roof of a coach-house
shone white in the moonlight, in front the black shadow of the
garden wall was visible through the tangled branches of the
trees.
Nekhludoff gazed at the roof, the moonlit garden, and the shadows
of the poplar, and drank in the fresh, invigorating air.
"How delightful, how delightful; oh, God, how delightful" he
said, meaning that which was going on in his soul.
