Nekhludoff’s first feeling on rising the following morning was that he had committed something abominable the preceding evening.
He began to recall what had happened. There was nothing abominable; he had done nothing wrong. He had only thought that all his present intentions—that of marrying Katiousha, giving the land to the peasants—artificial, unnatural, and that he must continued to live as he had lived before.
He could recall no wrong act, but he remembered what was worse than a wrong act—there were the bad thoughts in which all bad acts have their origin. Bad acts may not be repeated; one may repent of them, while bad thoughts give birth to bad acts.
A bad act only smooths the way to other bad acts, while bad thoughts irresistibly lead toward them.
Recalling his thoughts of the day before, Nekhludoff wondered how he could have believed them. How so novel and difficult might be that which he intended to do, he knew that it was the only life possible to him now, and that, however easy it might be for him to return to his old mode of life, he knew that that was death, not life. This temptation of the day before was similar to that of a man who, after a night’s sound sleep, feels like taking his ease on the soft mattress for a while, although he knows that it is time to be up and away on an important affair.
* * * *
Nekhludoff would have left the same evening but for his promise to Mariette to visit her at the theatre. Though he knew that it was wrong to do it, he went there, contrary to the dictates of his own conscience, considering himself bound to keep his word. Besides his wish to see Mariette again, he also wished, as he thought, to measure himself against that world lately so near, but now so strange to him.
“Could I withstand these temptations?” he thought, but not with entire sincerity. “I will try it for the last time.”
Attired in a dress-coat, he arrived in the theatre where the eternal “Dame aux Camelias” was being played. A French actress was showing in a novel way how consumptive women die.
Nekhludoff was shown to the box occupied by Mariette. In the corridor a liveried servant bowed and opened the door for him.
All the spectators in the circle of boxes—sitting and standing, gray-haired, bald and pomaded heads—were intently following the movements of a slim actress making wry faces and in an unnatural voice reading a monologue. Some one hissed when the door was opened, and two streams of cold and warm air were wafted on Nekhludoff’s face.
In the box he found Mariette and a strange lady with a red mantle over her shoulders and high head-dress, and two men—a general, Mariette’s husband, a handsome, tall man with a high, artificial, military breast, and a flaxen haired, bald-headed man with shaved chin and solemn side-whiskers. Mariette, graceful, slim, elegant, decolette, with her strong, muscular shoulders sloping down from the neck, at the jointure of which was a darkening little mole, immediately turned around, and, pointing with her fan to a chair behind her, greeted him with a welcome, grateful, and, as it seemed to Nekhludoff, significant smile. Her husband calmly, as was his wont, looked at Nekhludoff and bowed his head. In the glance which he exchanged with his wife, as in everything else, he looked the master, the owner, of a beautiful woman.
There was a thunder of applause when the monologue ended. Mariette rose, and, holding in one hand her rustling silk skirt, walked to the rear of the box and introduced Nekhludoff to her husband. The general incessantly smiled with his eyes, said he was glad, and remained calm and mute.
“I had to leave to-day, but I promised you,” said Nekhludoff, turning to Mariette.
“If you don’t wish to see me, you will see a remarkable actress,” Mariette said, answering the meaning of his words. “Wasn’t she great in the last scene?” she turned to her husband.
The general bowed his head.
“That does not affect me,” said Nekhludoff. “I have seen so much real misfortune to-day that——”
“Sit down and tell us what you have seen.”
The husband listened, and ironically smiled with his eyes.
“I went to see that woman who has been released. She is entirely broken down.”
“That is the woman of whom I have spoken to you,” Mariette said to her husband.
“Yes; I was very glad that she could be released,” he calmly said, nodding his head and smiling ironically, as it seemed to Nekhludoff, under his mustache. “I will go to the smoking-room.”