These disquisitions reminded him of the answer he once got from a little boy whom he met coming home from school. Nekhlúdoff asked him if he had learned his spelling.
“I have,” answered the boy.
“Well, then, tell me, how do you spell ‘leg’?”
“A dog’s leg, or what kind of leg?” the boy answered, with a sly look.
Answers in the form of new questions, like the boy’s, was all Nekhlúdoff got in reply to his one primary question. He found much that was clever, learned much that was interesting, but what he did not find was an answer to the principal question: By what right some people punish others?
Not only did he not find any answer, but all the arguments were brought forward in order to explain and vindicate punishment, the necessity of which was taken as an axiom.
Nekhlúdoff read much, but only in snatches, and putting down his failure to this superficial way of reading, hoped to find the answer later on. He would not allow himself to believe in the truth of the answer which began, more and more often, to present itself to him.
XXXI
The gang of prisoners, with Máslova among them, was to start on the 5th July. Nekhlúdoff arranged to start on the same day.
The day before, Nekhlúdoff’s sister and her husband came to town to see him.
Nekhlúdoff’s sister, Nathalie Ivánovna Rogózhinsky, was ten years older than her brother. She had been very fond of him when he was a boy, and later on, just before her marriage, they grew very close to each other, as if they were equals, she being a young woman of twenty-five, he a lad of fifteen. At that time she was in love with his friend, Nikólenka Irténieff, since dead. They both loved Nikólenka, and loved in him and in themselves that which is good, and which unites all men. Since then they had both been depraved, he by military service and a vicious life, she by marriage with a man whom she loved with a sensual love, who did not care for the things that had once been so dear and holy to her and to her brother, nor even understand the meaning of those aspirations towards moral perfection and the service of mankind, which once constituted her life, and put them down to ambition and the wish to show off; that being the only explanation comprehensible to him.
Nathalie’s husband had been a man without a name and without means, but cleverly steering towards Liberalism or Conservatism, according to which best suited his purpose, he managed to make a comparatively brilliant judicial career. Some peculiarity which made him attractive to women assisted him when he was no longer in his first youth. While travelling abroad he made Nekhlúdoff’s acquaintance, and managed to make Nathalie, who was also no longer a girl, fall in love with him, rather against her mother’s wishes who considered a marriage with him to be a misalliance for her daughter. Nekhlúdoff, though he tried to hide it from himself, though he fought against it, hated his brother-in-law.
Nekhlúdoff had a strong antipathy towards him because of the vulgarity of his feelings, his assurance and narrowness, but chiefly because of Nathalie, who managed to love him in spite of the narrowness of his nature, and loved him so selfishly, so sensually, and stifled for his sake all the good that had been in her.
It always hurt Nekhlúdoff to think of Nathalie as the wife of that hairy, self-assured man with the shiny, bald patch on his head. He could not even master a feeling of revulsion towards their children, and when he heard that she was again going to have a baby, he felt something like sorrow that she had once more been infected with something bad by this man who was so foreign to him. The Rogózhinskys had come to Moscow alone, having left their two children—a boy and a girl—at home, and stopped in the best rooms of the best hotel. Nathalie at once went to her mother’s old house, but hearing from Agraphéna Petróvna that her brother had left, and was living in a lodging-house, she drove there. The dirty servant met her in the stuffy passage, dark but for a lamp which burnt there all day. He told her that the Prince was not in.
Nathalie asked to be shown into his rooms, as she wished to leave a note for him, and the man took her up.
Nathalie carefully examined her brother’s two little rooms. She noticed in everything the love of cleanliness and order she knew so well in him, and was struck by the novel simplicity of the surroundings. On his writing-table she saw the paperweight with the bronze dog on the top which she remembered; the tidy way in which his different portfolios and writing utensils were placed on the table was also familiar, and so was the large, crooked ivory paper knife which marked the place in a French book by Tard, which lay with other volumes on punishment and a book in English by Henry George. She sat down at the table and wrote a
