"My God! my God!" was Nekhliudof's mental exclamation, as with long strides
he hastened home through the shady alleys of his weed-grown garden, and,
absent-mindedly, snapped off the leaves and branches which fell in his way.
"Is it possible that my dreams about the ends and duties of my life are all
idle nonsense? Why is it hard for me, and mournful, as though I were
dissatisfied with myself because I imagined that having once begun this
course I should constantly experience the fulness of the morally pleasant
feeling which I had when, for the first time, these thoughts came to me?"
And with extraordinary vividness and distinctness he saw in his imagination
that happy moment which he had experienced a year before.
He had arisen very early, before every one else in the house, and feeling
painfully those secret, indescribable impulses of youth, he had gone
aimlessly out into the garden, and from there into the woods; and, amid the
energetic but tranquil nature pulsing with the new life of Maytime, he had
wandered long alone, without thought, and suffering from the exuberance of
some feeling, and not finding any expression for it.
Then, with all the allurement of what is unknown, his youthful imagination
brought up before him the voluptuous form of a woman; and it seemed to him
that was the object of his indescribable longing. But another, deeper
sentiment said, _Not that_, and impelled him to search and be disturbed in
mind.
Without thought or desire, as always happens after extra activity, he lay
on his back under a tree, and looked at the diaphanous morning-clouds
drifting over him across the deep, endless sky.
Suddenly, without any reason, the tears sprang to his eyes, and God knows
in what way the thought came to him with perfect clearness, filling all his
soul and giving him intense delight,--the thought that love and
righteousness are the same as truth and enjoyment, and that there is only
one truth, and only one possible happiness, in the world.
The deeper feeling this time did not say, _Not that_. He sat up, and began
to verify this thought.
"That is it, that is it," said he to himself, in a sort of ecstasy,
measuring all his former convictions, all the phenomena of his life, by the
truth just discovered to him, and as it seemed to him absolutely new.
"What stupidity! All that I knew, all that I believed in, all that I
loved," he had said to himself. "Love is self-denying; this is the only
true happiness independent of chance," he had said over and over again,
smiling and waving his hands.
Applying this thought on every side to life, and finding in it confirmation
both of life and that inner voice which told him that this was _it_, he had
experienced a new feeling of pleasant agitation and enthusiasm.
"And so I ought to do good if I would be happy," he thought; and all his
future vividly came up before him, not as an abstraction, but in images in
the form of the life of a proprietor.
He saw before him a huge field, conterminous with his whole life, which he
was to consecrate to the good, and in which really he should find
happiness. There was no need for him to search for a sphere of activity; it
was all ready. He had one out-and-out obligation: he had his serfs....
And what comfortable and beneficent labor lay before him! "To work for this
simple, impressionable, incorruptible class of people; to lift them from
poverty; to give them pleasure; to give them education which, fortunately,
I will turn to use in correcting their faults, which arise from ignorance
and superstition; to develop their morals; to induce them to love the
right.... What a brilliant, happy future! And besides all this, I, who am
going to do this for my own happiness, shall take delight in their
appreciation, shall see how every day I shall go farther and farther toward
my predestined end. A wonderful future! Why could I not have seen this
before?
"And besides," so he had thought at the same time, "who will hinder me from
being happy in love for a woman, in enjoyment of family?"
And his youthful imagination portrayed before him a still more bewitching
future.
"I and my wife, whom I shall love as no one ever loved a wife before in the
world, we shall always live amid this restful, poetical, rural nature, with
our children, maybe, and with my old aunt. We have our love for each other,
our love for our children; and we shall both know that our aim is the
right. We shall help each other in pressing on to this goal. I shall make
general arrangements; I shall give general aid when it is right; I shall
carry on the farm, the savings bank, the workshop. And she, with her dear
little head, and dressed in a simple white dress, which she lifts above
her dainty ankle as she steps through the mud, will go to the peasants'
school, to the hospital, to some unfortunate peasant who in truth does not
deserve help, and everywhere carry comfort and aid.... Children, old men,
women, will wait for her, and look on her as on some angel, as on
Providence. Then she will return, and hide from me the fact that she has
been to see the unfortunate peasant, and given him money; but I shall know
all, and give her a hearty hug, and rain kisses thick and fast on her
lovely eyes, her modestly-blushing cheeks, and her smiling, rosy lips."