War and Peace (218 page)

The whole household was ruled by the supposed directions of the master, that is, by the wishes of Pierre, which Natasha tried to guess. Their manner of life and place of residence, their acquaintances and ties, Natasha’s pursuits, and the bringing up of the children—all followed, not only Pierre’s expressed wishes, but even the deductions Natasha strove to draw from the ideas he explained in conversation with her. And
she guessed very correctly what was the essential point of Pierre’s wishes, and having once guessed it she was steadfast in adhering to it: even when Pierre himself would have veered round she opposed him with his own weapons.

In the troubled days that Pierre could never forget, after the birth of their first child, they had tried three wet nurses, one after another, for the delicate baby, and Natasha had fallen ill with anxiety. At the time Pierre had explained to her Rousseau’s views on the unnaturalness and harmfulness of a child being suckled by any woman but its own mother and told her he fully agreed with those views. When the next baby was born, in spite of the opposition of her mother, the doctors, and even of her husband himself, who had looked on it as something unheard of, and injurious, she insisted on having her own way, and from that day had nursed all her children herself. It happened very often in moments of irritability that the husband and wife quarrelled; but long after their dispute Pierre had, to his own delight and surprise, found in his wife’s actions, as well as words, that very idea of his with which she had quarrelled. And he not only found his own idea, but found it purified of all that was superfluous, and had been evoked by the heat of argument in his own expression of the idea.

After seven years of married life, Pierre had a firm and joyful consciousness that he was not a bad fellow, and he felt this because he saw himself reflected in his wife. In himself he felt all the good and bad mingled together, and obscuring one another. But in his wife he saw reflected only what was really good; everything not quite good was left out. And this result was not reached by the way of logical thought, but by way of a mysterious, direct reflection of himself.

Two months previously, Pierre was already settled at the Rostovs’ when he received a letter from a certain Prince Fyodor, urging him to come to Petersburg for the discussion of various important questions that were agitating the Petersburg members of a society, of which Pierre had been one of the chief founders.

Natasha read this letter, as she did indeed all her husband’s letters, and bitterly as she always felt his absence, she urged him herself to go to Petersburg. To everything appertaining to her husband’s intellectual,
abstract pursuits, she ascribed immense consequence, though she had no understanding of them, and she was always in dread of being a hindrance to her husband in such matters. To Pierre’s timid glance of inquiry after reading the letter, she replied by begging him to go, and all she asked was that he would fix an absolutely certain date for his return. And leave of absence was given him for four weeks.

Ever since the day fixed for his return, a fortnight before, Natasha had been in a continual condition of alarm, depression, and irritability.

Denisov, a general on the retired list, very much dissatisfied at the present position of public affairs, had arrived during that fortnight, and he looked at Natasha with melancholy wonder, as at a bad likeness of a person once loved. A bored, dejected glance, random replies, and incessant talk of the nursery was all he saw and heard of his enchantress of old days.

All that fortnight Natasha had been melancholy and irritable, especially when her mother, her brother, Sonya, or Countess Marya tried to console her by excusing Pierre, and inventing good reasons for his delay in returning.

“It’s all nonsense, all idiocy,” Natasha would say; “all his projects that never lead to anything, and all those fools of societies,” she would declare of the very matters in the immense importance of which she firmly believed. And she would march off to the nursery to nurse her only boy, the baby Petya.

No one could give her such sensible and soothing consolation as that little three months’ old creature, when it lay at her breast, and she felt the movement of its lips and the snuffling of its nose. That little creature said to her: “You are angry, you are jealous, you would like to punish him, you are afraid, but here am I—I am he. Here, I am he …” And there was no answering that. It was more than true.

Natasha had so often during that fortnight had recourse to her baby for comfort, that she had over-nursed him, and he had fallen ill. She was terrified at his illness, but still this was just what she needed. In looking after him, she was able to bear her uneasiness about her husband better.

She was nursing the baby when Pierre’s carriage drove noisily up to the entrance, and the nurse, knowing how to please her mistress, came inaudibly but quickly to the door with a beaming face.

“He has come?” asked Natasha in a rapid whisper, afraid to stir for fear of waking the baby, who was dropping asleep.

“He has come, ma’am,” whispered the nurse.

The blood rushed to Natasha’s face, and her feet involuntarily
moved, but to jump up and run was out of the question. The baby opened its little eyes again, glanced, as though to say, “You are here,” and gave another lazy smack with its lips.

Cautiously withdrawing her breast, Natasha dandled him, handed him to the nurse, and went with swift steps towards the door. But at the door she stopped as though her conscience pricked her for being in such haste and joy to leave the baby, and she looked back. The nurse, with her elbows raised, was lifting the baby over the rail of the cot.

“Yes, go along, go along, ma’am, don’t worry, run along,” whispered the nurse, smiling with the familiarity that was common between nurse and mistress.

With light steps Natasha ran to the vestibule. Denisov, coming out of the study into the hall with a pipe in his mouth, seemed to see Natasha again for the first time. A vivid radiance of joy shed streams of light from her transfigured countenance.

“He has come!” she called to him, as she flew by, and Denisov felt that he was thrilled to hear that Pierre had come, though he did not particularly care for him. Running into the vestibule, Natasha saw a tall figure in a fur cloak fumbling at his scarf.

“He! he! It’s true. Here he is,” she said to herself, and darting up to him, she hugged him, squeezing her head to his breast, and then drawing back, glanced at the frosty, red, and happy face of Pierre. “Yes, here he is; happy, satisfied …”

And all at once she remembered all the tortures of suspense she had passed through during the last fortnight. The joy beaming in her face vanished; she frowned, and a torrent of reproaches and angry words broke upon Pierre.

“Yes, you are all right, you have been happy, you have been enjoying yourself … But what about me! You might at least think of your children. I am nursing, my milk went wrong … Petya nearly died of it. And you have been enjoying yourself. Yes, enjoying yourself …”

Pierre knew he was not to blame, because he could not have come sooner. He knew this outburst on her part was unseemly, and would be all over in two minutes. Above all, he knew that he was himself happy and joyful. He would have liked to smile, but dared not even think of that. He made a piteous, dismayed face, and bowed before the storm.

“I could not, upon my word. But how is Petya?”

“He is all right now, come along. Aren’t you ashamed? If you could see what I am like without you, how wretched I am …”

“Are you quite well?”

“Come along, come along,” she said, not letting go of his hand. And they went off to their rooms. When Nikolay and his wife came to look for Pierre, they found him in the nursery, with his baby son awake in his arms, and he was dandling him. There was a gleeful smile on the baby’s broad face and open, toothless mouth. The storm had long blown over, and a bright, sunny radiance of joy flowed all over Natasha’s face, as she gazed tenderly at her husband and son.

“And did you have a good talk over everything with Prince Fyodor?” Natasha was saying.

“Yes, capital.”

“You see, he holds his head up” (Natasha meant the baby). “Oh, what a fright he gave me. And did you see the princess? Is it true that she is in love with that …”

“Yes, can you fancy …”

At that moment Nikolay came in with his wife. Pierre, not letting go of his son, stooped down, kissed them, and answered their inquiries. But it was obvious that in spite of the many interesting things they had to discuss, the baby, with the wobbling head in the little cap, was absorbing Pierre’s whole attention.

“How sweet he is!” said Countess Marya, looking at the baby and playing with him. “That’s a thing I can’t understand, Nikolay,” she said, turning to her husband, “how it is you don’t feel the charm of these exquisite little creatures?”

“Well, I don’t, I can’t,” said Nikolay, looking coldly at the baby. “Just a morsel of flesh. Come along, Pierre.”

“The great thing is, that he is really a devoted father,” said Countess Marya, apologising for her husband, “but only after a year or so …”

“Oh, Pierre is a capital nurse,” said Natasha; “he says his hand is just made for a baby’s back. Just look.”

“Oh yes, but not for this,” Pierre cried laughing, and hurriedly snatching up the baby, he handed him back to his nurse.

As in every real family, there were several quite separate worlds living together in the Bleak Hills house, and while each of these preserved its own individuality, they made concessions to one another, and mixed
into one harmonious whole. Every event that occurred in the house was alike important and joyful or distressing to all those circles. But each circle had its own private grounds for rejoicing or mourning at every event quite apart from the rest.

So Pierre’s arrival was a joyful and important event, reflected as such in all the circles of the household.

The servants, the most infallible judges of their masters, because they judge them, not from their conversation and expression of their feelings, but from their actions and their manner of living, were delighted at Pierre’s return, because they knew that when he was there, the count, their master, would not go out every day to superintend the peasants on the estate, and would be in better temper and spirits, and also because they knew there would be valuable presents for all of them for the fête day.

The children and their governesses were delighted at Bezuhov’s return, because no one drew them into the general social life of the house as Pierre did. He it was who could play on the clavichord that écossaise (his one piece), to which, as he said, one could dance all possible dances; and he was quite sure, too, to have brought all of them presents.

Nikolinka Bolkonsky, who was now a thin, delicate, intelligent boy of fifteen, with curly light hair and beautiful eyes, was delighted because Uncle Pierre, as he called him, was the object of his passionate love and adoration. No one had instilled a particular affection for Pierre into Nikolinka, and he only rarely saw him. Countess Marya, who had brought him up, had done her utmost to make Nikolinka love her husband, as she loved him; and the boy did like his uncle, but there was a scarcely perceptible shade of contempt in his liking of him. Pierre he adored. He did not want to be an hussar or a Cavalier of St. George like his Uncle Nikolay; he wanted to be learned, clever, and kind like Pierre. In Pierre’s presence there was always a happy radiance on his face, and he blushed and was breathless when Pierre addressed him. He never missed a word that Pierre uttered, and afterwards alone or with Dessalle recalled every phrase, and pondered its exact significance. Pierre’s past life, his unhappiness before 1812 (of which, from the few words he had heard, he had made up a vague, romantic picture), his adventures in Moscow, and captivity with the French, Platon Karataev (of whom he had heard from Pierre), his love for Natasha (whom the boy loved too with quite a special feeling), and, above all, his friendship with his father,
whom Nikolinka did not remember, all made Pierre a hero and a saint in his eyes.

From the phrases he had heard dropped about his father and Natasha, from the emotion with which Pierre spoke of him, and the circumspect, reverent tenderness with which Natasha spoke of him, the boy, who was only just beginning to form his conceptions of love, had gathered the idea that his father had loved Natasha, and had bequeathed her at his death to his friend. That father, of whom the boy had no memory, seemed to him a divine being, of whom one could have no clear conception, and of whom he could not think without a throbbing heart and tears of sorrow and rapture.

And so the boy too was happy at Pierre’s arrival.

The guests in the house were glad to see Pierre, for he was a person who always enlivened every party, and made its different elements mix well together.

The grown-up members of the household were glad to see a friend who always made daily life run more smoothly and easily.

The old ladies were pleased both at the presents he brought them, and still more at Natasha’s being herself again.

Pierre felt the various views those different sets of people took of him, and made haste to satisfy the expectations of all of them.

Though he was the most absent-minded and forgetful of men, by the help of a list his wife made for him, he had bought everything, not forgetting a single commission from his mother-in-law or brother-in-law, nor the presents of a dress for Madame Byelov and toys for his nephews.

In the early days of his married life his wife’s expectation that he should forget nothing he had undertaken to buy had struck him as strange, and he had been impressed by her serious chagrin when after his first absence he had returned having forgotten everything. But in time he had grown used to this. Knowing that Natasha gave him no commissions on her own account, and for others only asked him to get things when he had himself offered to do so, he now took a childish pleasure, that was a surprise to himself, in those purchases of presents for all the household, and never forgot anything. If he incurred Natasha’s censure now, it was only for buying too much, and paying too much for his purchases. To her other defects in the eyes of the world—good qualities in Pierre’s eyes—her untidiness and negligence, Natasha added that of stinginess.