War and Peace (136 page)

“Darling!” … or “dear one!” … Princess Marya could not distinguish
the word; but from the expression of his eyes she had no doubt what was said was a word of caressing tenderness such as he had never used to her before. “Why didn’t you come?”

“And I was wishing, wishing for his death!” thought Princess Marya.

He paused.

“Thanks … to you … child, dear one! for all, for all … forgive … thanks!… forgive!… thanks!…” And tears flowed from his eyes. “Call Andryusha,” he said suddenly, and a look of childish and deprecating misgiving came into his face at the question. He seemed to be himself aware that his question had no meaning. So at least it seemed to Princess Marya.

“I have had a letter from him,” answered Princess Marya.

He looked at her with timid wonder.

“Where is he?”

“He is with the army, father, at Smolensk.”

He was silent for a long while, closing his eyes. Then, as though to answer his doubts, and to assert that now he understood it all and remembered, he nodded his head and opened his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, softly and distinctly. “Russia is lost! They have lost her!”

And again he broke into sobs, and tears flowed from his eyes. Princess Marya could restrain herself no more, and wept too as she looked at his face.

He closed his eyes again. His sobs ceased. He pointed to his eyes; and Tihon, understanding him, wiped away his tears.

Then he opened his eyes, and said something, which, for a long while, no one could understand; and at last Tihon understood and interpreted.

Princess Marya looked for the drift of his words in the direction in which he had been speaking a minute before. She supposed he was speaking of Russia; then of Prince Andrey, of herself, of his grandson, then of his own death. And this was just why she could not understand his words.

“Put on your white dress. I like it,” he had said.

When she understood those words Princess Marya sobbed louder than ever, and the doctor, taking her on his arm, led her out of the room on to the terrace, trying to persuade her to calm herself, and to devote herself to preparations for the journey. After Princess Marya had left the prince, he began talking again of his son, of the war, of the Tsar, twitched his eyebrows angrily, began to raise his hoarse voice, and was seized by a second and final stroke.

Princess Marya stayed on the terrace. The day had become brilliantly fine, sunny, and warm. She could grasp nothing, could think of nothing, and feel nothing but her passionate love for her father, of which it seemed to her that she had not been aware till that minute. She ran out into the garden, and ran sobbing towards the pond along the paths planted with young lime-trees by Prince Andrey.

“Yes … I … I … I longed for his death! Yes, I wanted it soon to be over … I wanted to be at peace … And what will become of me? What use will peace be to me when he is gone?” Princess Marya muttered aloud, walking with rapid steps through the garden, and pressing her hands to her bosom, which heaved with convulsive sobs. Going round the garden in a circle, which brought her back again to the house, she saw coming towards her Mademoiselle Bourienne (who was remaining at Bogutcharovo, preferring not to move away), and with her an unknown gentleman. It was the district marshal, who had come to call on the princess, to urge upon her the necessity of her immediate departure. Princess Marya listened and did not take in what he said. She took him into the house, offered him lunch, and sat down with him. Then asking him to excuse her, she went to the old prince’s door. The doctor came out with a perturbed face and told her she could not go in.

“Go away, princess; go away!”

Princess Marya went out again into the garden, and by the pond at the bottom of the hill she sat down on the grass, in a place where no one could see her. She could not have said how long she was there. A woman’s footsteps running along the path made her look round. She got up and saw Dunyasha, her maid, evidently running to look for her, stop short, as though in alarm, on seeing her mistress.

“Come, please, princess … the prince …” said Dunyasha, in a breaking voice.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” the princess cried hurriedly, not letting Dunyasha have time to say what she meant to; and trying to avoid seeing her, she ran into the house.

“Princess, it is God’s will! You must be prepared for the worst,” said the marshal, meeting her at the door into the house.

“Let me be; it’s not true!” she cried angrily at him.

The doctor tried to stop her. She pushed him away and ran to the door. “What are these people with scared faces stopping me for? I don’t want any of them! What are they doing here?” she thought. She opened the door, and the bright daylight in the room, always hitherto darkened,
frightened her. Her old nurse and other women were in the room. They all drew back from the bed, making way for her. He was still lying on the bed as before; but the stern look on his calm face arrested Princess Marya on the threshold.

“No, he is not dead, it cannot be!” Princess Marya said to herself. She went up to him, and struggling with the terror that came upon her, she pressed her lips to his cheek. But she started back from him at once. Instantaneously all the tenderness she had been feeling for him vanished, and was followed by a feeling of horror for what lay before her. “No, no, he is no more! He is no more, and here in the place where he was, is something unfamiliar and sinister, some fearful, terrifying, and repulsive secret!” And hiding her face in her hands, Princess Marya sank into the arms of the doctor, who supported her.

In the presence of Tihon and the doctor, the women washed what had been the prince, bound a kerchief round the head that the mouth might not become rigidly open, and bound another kerchief round the limbs. Then the uniform with the decorations was put on, and the little dried-up body was laid on the table. There was no telling when or who took thought for all this; it all seemed to be done of itself. Towards night candles were lighted round the coffin, a pall was laid over it, juniper was strewn on the floor, a printed prayer was put under the dead withered head, and a deacon sat in the corner reading aloud the Psalter. Like horses crowding, snorting, and starting round a dead horse, numbers of familiar and unfamiliar figures crowded round the coffin—the marshal, and the village elder, and peasant women, and all with scared and fascinated eyes, crossed themselves, and bowed down and kissed the cold, stiff hand of the old prince.

Until Prince Andrey’s stay at Bogutcharovo, the estate had never had an owner in residence, and the Bogutcharovo peasants were of quite a different character from the peasants of Bleak Hills. They differed from them in speech, in dress, and in manners. They said they came from the steppes. The old prince praised them for their industry when they came to Bleak Hills for harvesting, or digging ponds and ditches; but he did not like them because of their savage manners.

Prince Andrey’s residence at Bogutcharovo, and his innovations—his
hospitals and schools and the lowering of their rent—had not softened their manners, but, on the contrary, had intensified their traits of character, which the old prince called their savagery.

Obscure rumours were always current among them: at one time a belief that they were all to be carried off to be made Cossacks, then that they were to be converted to some new religion, then rumours of some supposed proclamations of the Tsar, or of the oath to the Tsar Pavel Petrovitch in 1797 (which was said to have granted freedom to the peasants, and to have been withdrawn by the gentry later); then of the expected return of the Tsar Peter Fedorovitch, who was to rise again from the dead in seven years, and to bring perfect freedom, and to make an end of the existing order of things. Rumours of the war, and Bonaparte and his invasion, were connected in their minds with vague conceptions of Antichrist, of the end of the world, and perfect freedom.

In the vicinity of Bogutcharovo were large villages inhabited by Crown serfs, or peasants who paid rent to absentee owners. There were very few resident landowners in the neighbourhood, and consequently very few house-serfs or peasants able to read and write. And among the peasants of that part of the country there could be seen more distinctly and strongly marked than among others those mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian peasantry, which are so baffling to contemporaries. Twenty years before, there had been a movement among the peasants of the district to emigrate to certain supposedly warm rivers. Hundreds of peasants, among them those of Bogutcharovo, had suddenly begun selling their cattle and moving away with their families towards the south-west. Like birds flying to unknown realms over the ocean, these men with their wives and children turned towards the south-west, where no one of them had been. They set off in caravans, redeemed their freedom one by one, ran and drove and walked to the unknown region of the warm springs. Many were punished; some sent to Siberia; many died of cold and hunger on the road; many came back of their own accord; and the movement died down as it had begun without obvious cause. But the undercurrents still flowed among the people, and were gathering force for some new manifestation, destined to appear as strangely, unexpectedly, and at the same time simply, naturally, and forcibly. In 1812 any one living in close relations with the peasants might have observed that there was a violent ferment working below the surface, and an outbreak of some kind was at hand.

Alpatitch, who came to Bogutcharovo a little while before the old prince’s death, noticed that there was some excitement among the peasants; and noticed that, unlike Bleak Hills district, where within a radius of sixty versts all the peasants had moved away, abandoning their villages to be wasted by the Cossacks, in the Bogutcharovo steppe country the peasants had entered, it was said, into communication with the French, and were remaining in their homes, and there were some mysterious documents circulating among them. He learned through serfs who were attached to him that the peasant Karp, a man of great influence in the village, had a few days previously accompanied a government transport, and had returned with the news that the Cossacks were destroying the deserted villages, while the French would not touch them. He knew that another peasant had on the previous day even brought from the hamlet of Vislouhovo, where the French were encamped, a proclamation from the French general that no harm would be done to the inhabitants, and that everything taken from them would be paid for, if they would remain. In token of good faith, the peasant brought from Vislouhovo a hundred-rouble note (he did not know it was false), paid him in advance for hay.

And last, and most important of all, Alpatitch learned that on the day on which he had given the village elder orders to collect carts to move the princess’s luggage from Bogutcharovo, there had been a meeting in the village at which it was resolved to wait and not to move. Meanwhile, time was pressing. On the day of the prince’s death, the 15th of August, the marshal urged Princess Marya to move the same day, as it was becoming dangerous. He said that he could not answer for what might happen after the 16th. He drove away that evening, promising to return next morning for the funeral. But next day he could not come, as he received information of an expected advance of the French, and was only just in time to get his family and valuables moved away from his own estate.

For nearly thirty years Bogutcharovo had been under the direction of the village elder, Dron, called by the old prince, Dronushka.

Dron was one of those physically and morally vigorous peasants, who grow a thick beard as soon as they are grown up, and go on almost unchanged till sixty or seventy, without a grey hair or the loss of a tooth, as upright and vigorous at sixty as at thirty.

Shortly after the attempted migration to the warm rivers, in which he had taken part with the rest, Dron was made village elder and overseer
of Bogutcharovo, and had filled those positions irreproachably for twenty-three years. The peasants were more afraid of him than of their master. The old prince and the young one and the steward respected him, and called him in joke the minister. Dron had never once been drunk or ill since he had been appointed elder; he had never after sleepless nights or severe labour shown the slightest signs of fatigue; and though he could not read or write, he never forgot an account of the pounds of flour in the huge waggon-loads he sold, and of the money paid for them, nor missed a sheaf of wheat on an acre of the Bogutcharovo fields.

This peasant Dron it was for whom Alpatitch sent on coming from the plundered estate at Bleak Hills. He ordered him to get ready twelve horses for the princess’s carriages, and eighteen conveyances for the move which was to be made from Bogutcharovo. Though the peasants paid rent instead of working as serfs, Alpatitch expected to meet no difficulty on their part in carrying out this order, since there were two hundred and thirty efficient families in Bogutcharovo, and the peasants were well-to-do. But Dron, on receiving the order, dropped his eyes and made no reply. Alpatitch mentioned the names of peasants from whom he told him to take the carts.

Dron replied that the horses belonging to those peasants were away on hire. Alpatitch mentioned the names of other peasants. They too, according to Dron, had no horses available: some were employed in government transport, others had gone lame, and others had died through the shortness of forage. In Dron’s opinion, there was no hope of getting horses enough for the princess’s carriages, not to speak of the transport of baggage.

Alpatitch looked intently at Dron and scowled. Dron was a model village elder, but Alpatitch had not been twenty years managing the prince’s estates for nothing, and he too was a model steward. He possessed in the highest degree the faculty of divining the needs and instincts of the peasants, with whom he had to deal, and was consequently an excellent steward. Glancing at Dron, he saw at once that his answers were not the expression of his own ideas, but the expression of the general drift of opinion in the Bogutcharovo village, by which the elder had already been carried away. At the same time, he knew that Dron, who had saved money and was detested by the village, must be hesitating between two camps—the master’s and the peasants’. He detected the hesitation in his eyes, and so frowning he came closer to Dron.