THE AWAKENING
“SHAMEFUL and stupid, horrid and shameful!” Nekhlyudov 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, not only about his relations with Missy, but about everything. “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 man-servant Korney, who followed him into the dining-room, where the cloth was laid for supper and tea. “You may go.”
“Yes, sir,” said Korney, yet he did not go, but began clearing the supper off the table. Nekhlyudov looked at Korney 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 Korney had gone away with the supper things Nekhlyudov went up to the samovar and was going to make himself some tea, but, hearing Agrafena Petrovna’s footsteps, he went hurriedly into the drawing-room so as not to be seen by her, and shut the door after him. It was in this 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 portrait and the other his mother’s, he remembered what his last relations with his mother had been. And they also seemed unnatural and disgusting. And this was also 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 for his own sake to be released from the sight of her sufferings.
Trying to recall a pleasant recollection of her, he went up to look at her portrait, painted by a celebrated artist for five thousand rubles. She was depicted in a low-necked black velvet dress, and the artist had evidently painted with particular care the outlines of the breasts, the space between them, the dazzlingly beautiful shoulders and the neck. This was quite revolting and horrid. 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, yet filling not only this room, but the whole of the house, with an unbearably disagreeable smell which nothing would overcome. He seemed to smell it even now. And he remembered how a few days before her death she had clasped his hand with her bony, discoloured fingers, looked into his eyes, and said, “Do not judge me, Mitya, 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. The half-bared bosom of the portrait reminded him of another 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 might see her in her ball dress. It was with disgust that he remembered her fine shoulders and arms. “And that coarse, animal 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 I must have: freedom from all these false relations with the Korchagins and Mary Vasilyevna and from the inheritance and all the rest. Oh, to breathe freely! – to go abroad, to Rome, and work at my picture.” He remembered his doubts as to his talent for art. “Well, never mind; only just to breathe freely. First Constantinople, then Rome. Only to get through with this jury business, and to arrange with the advocate first.”