War and Peace (60 page)

In the night he called for his valet and bade him pack up to go to Petersburg. He could not conceive how he was going to speak to her now. He resolved that next day he would go away, leaving her a letter, in which he would announce his intention of parting from her for ever.

In the morning when the valet came into the study with his coffee, Pierre was lying on an ottoman asleep with an open book in his hand.

He woke up and looked about him for a long while in alarm, unable to grasp where he was.

“The countess sent to inquire if your excellency were at home,” said the valet.

But before Pierre had time to make up his mind what answer he would send, the countess herself walked calmly and majestically into the room. She was wearing a white satin dressing-gown embroidered with silver, and had her hair in two immense coils wound like a coronet round her exquisite head. In spite of her calm, there was a wrathful line on her rather prominent, marble brow. With her accustomed self-control and composure she did not begin to speak till the valet had left the room. She knew of the duel and had come to talk of it. She waited till the valet had set the coffee and gone out. Pierre looked timidly at her over his spectacles, and as the hare, hemmed in by dogs, goes on lying with its ears back in sight of its foes, so he tried to go on reading. But he felt that this was senseless and impossible, and again he glanced timidly at her. She did not sit down, but stood looking at him with a disdainful smile, waiting for the valet to be gone.

“What’s this about now? What have you been up to? I’m asking you,” she said sternly.

“I? I? what?” said Pierre.

“You going in for deeds of valour! Now, answer me, what does this duel mean? What did you want to prove by it? Eh! I ask you the question.” Pierre turned heavily on the sofa, opened his mouth but could not answer.

“If you won’t answer, I’ll tell you …” Ellen went on. “You believe everything you’re told. You were told …” Ellen laughed, “that Dolohov was my lover,” she said in French, with her coarse plainness of speech, uttering the word “
amant
” like any other word, “and you believed it! But what have you proved by this? What have you proved by this duel? That you’re a fool; but every one knew that as it was. What does it lead to? Why, that I’m made a laughing-stock to all Moscow; that every one’s saying that when you were drunk and didn’t know what you were doing, you challenged a man of whom you were jealous without grounds,” Ellen raised her voice and grew more and more passionate; “who’s a better man than you in every respect.…”

“Hem … hem …” Pierre growled, wrinkling up his face, and neither looking at her nor stirring a muscle.

“And how came you to believe that he’s my lover?… Eh? Because I like his society? If you were cleverer and more agreeable, I should prefer yours.”

“Don’t speak to me … I beseech you,” Pierre muttered huskily.

“Why shouldn’t I speak? I can speak as I like, and I tell you boldly that it’s not many a wife who with a husband like you wouldn’t have taken a lover, but I haven’t done it,” she said. Pierre tried to say something, glanced at her with strange eyes, whose meaning she did not comprehend, and lay down again. He was in physical agony at that moment; he felt a weight on his chest so that he could not breathe. He knew that he must do something to put an end to this agony but what he wanted to do was too horrible.

“We had better part,” he articulated huskily.

“Part, by all means, only if you give me a fortune,” said Ellen.… “Part—that’s a threat to frighten me!”

Pierre leaped up from the couch and rushed staggering towards her.

“I’ll kill you!” he shouted, and snatching up a marble slab from a table with a strength he had not known in himself till then, he made a step towards her and waved it at her.

Ellen’s face was terrible to see; she shrieked and darted away from him. His father’s nature showed itself in him. Pierre felt the abandonment and the fascination of frenzy. He flung down the slab, shivering it into fragments, and with open arms swooping down upon Ellen, screamed “Go!” in a voice so terrible that they heard it all over the house with horror. God knows what Pierre would have done at that moment if Ellen had not run out of the room.

A week later Pierre had made over to his wife the revenue from all his estates in Great Russia, which made up the larger half of his property, and had gone away alone to Petersburg.

Two months had passed since the news of the defeat of Austerlitz and the loss of Prince Andrey had reached Bleak Hills. In spite of all researches and letters through the Russian embassy, his body had not been found, nor was he among the prisoners. What made it worst of all for his father and sister was the fact that there was still hope that he might have been picked up on the battlefield by the people of the country, and might perhaps be lying, recovering, or dying somewhere alone, among strangers, incapable of giving any account of himself. The newspapers,
from which the old prince had first heard of the defeat at Austerlitz, had, as always, given very brief and vague accounts of how the Russians had been obliged after brilliant victories to retreat and had made their withdrawal in perfect order. The old prince saw from this official account that our army had been defeated. A week after the newspaper that had brought news of the defeat of Austerlitz, came a letter from Kutuzov, who described to the old prince the part taken in it by his son.

“Before my eyes,” wrote Kutuzov, “your son with the flag in his hands, at the head of a regiment, fell like a hero, worthy of his father and his fatherland. To my regret and the general regret of the whole army it has not been ascertained up to now whether he is alive or dead. I comfort myself and you with the hope that your son is living, as, otherwise, he would have been mentioned among the officers found on the field of battle, a list of whom has been given me under flag of truce.”

After receiving this letter, late in the evening when he was alone in his study, the old prince went for his morning walk as usual next day. But he was silent with the bailiff, the gardener, and the architect, and though he looked wrathful, said nothing to them. When Princess Marya went in to him at the usual hour, he was standing at the lathe and went on turning as usual, without looking round at her. “Ah? Princess Marya!” he said suddenly in an unnatural voice, and he let the lathe go. (The wheel swung round from the impetus. Long after, Princess Marya remembered the dying creak of the wheel, which was associated for her with what followed.)

Princess Marya went up to him; she caught sight of his face, and something seemed suddenly to give way within her. Her eyes could not see clearly. From her father’s face—not sad nor crushed, but vindictive and full of unnatural conflict—she saw that there was hanging over her, coming to crush her, a terrible calamity, the worst in life, a calamity she had not known till then, a calamity irrevocable, irremediable, the death of one beloved.

“Father! Andrey?…” said the ungainly, awkward princess with such unutterable beauty of sorrow and self-forgetfulness that her father could not bear to meet her eyes and turned away sobbing.

“I have had news. Not among the prisoners, not among the killed, Kutuzov writes,” he screamed shrilly, as though he would drive his daughter away with that shriek. “Killed!”

The princess did not swoon, she did not fall into a faint. She was pale, but when she heard those words her face was transformed, and there was
a radiance of something in her beautiful, luminous eyes. Something like joy, an exalted joy, apart from the sorrows and joys of this world, flooded the bitter grief she felt within her. She forgot all her terror of her father, went up to him, took him by the hand, drew him to her, and put her arm about his withered, sinewy neck.

“Father,” she said, “do not turn away from me, let us weep for him together.”

“Blackguards, scoundrels!” screamed the old man, turning his face away from her. “Destroying the army, destroying men! What for? Go, go and tell Liza.”

Princess Marya sank helplessly into an armchair beside her father and burst into tears. She could see her brother now at the moment when he parted from her and from Liza with his tender and at the same time haughty expression. She saw him at the moment when tenderly and ironically he had put the image on. “Did he believe now? Had he repented of his unbelief? Was he there now? There in the realm of eternal peace and blessedness?” she wondered. “Father, tell me how it was,” she asked through her tears.

“Go away, go,—killed in a defeat into which they led the best men of Russia and the glory of Russia to ruin. Go away, Princess Marya. Go and tell Liza. I will come.” When Princess Marya went back from her father, the little princess was sitting at her work, and she looked up with that special inward look of happy calm that is peculiar to women with child. It was clear that her eyes were not seeing Princess Marya, but looking deep within herself, at some happy mystery that was being accomplished within her.

“Marie,” she said, moving away from the embroidery frame and leaning back, “give me your hand.” She took her sister-in-law’s hand and laid it below her waist. Her eyes smiled, expectant, her little dewy lip was lifted and stayed so in childlike rapture. Princess Marya knelt down before her, and hid her face in the folds of her sister-in-law’s dress. “There—there—do you feel it? I feel so strange. And do you know, Marie, I am going to love him very much,” said Liza, looking at her sister-in-law with shining, happy eyes. Princess Marya could not lift her head; she was crying.

“What’s the matter with you, Marie?”

“Nothing … only I felt sad … sad about Andrey,” she said, brushing away the tears on the folds of her sister-in-law’s dress. Several times in the course of the morning Princess Marya began trying to prepare her
sister-in-law’s mind, and every time she began to weep. These tears, which the little princess could not account for, agitated her, little as she was observant in general. She said nothing, but looked about her uneasily, as though seeking for something. Before dinner the old prince, of whom she was always afraid, came into her room, with a particularly restless and malignant expression, and went out without uttering a word. She looked at Princess Marya with that expression of attention concentrated within herself that is only seen in women with child, and suddenly she burst into tears.

“Have you heard news from Andrey?” she said.

“No; you know news could not come yet; but father is uneasy, and I feel frightened.”

“Then you have heard nothing?”

“Nothing,” said Princess Marya, looking resolutely at her with her luminous eyes. She had made up her mind not to tell her, and had persuaded her father to conceal the dreadful news from her till her confinement, which was expected before many days. Princess Marya and the old prince, in their different ways, bore and hid their grief. The old prince refused to hope; he made up his mind that Prince Andrey had been killed, and though he sent a clerk to Austria to seek for traces of his son, he ordered a monument for him in Moscow and intended to put it up in his garden, and he told every one that his son was dead. He tried to keep up his old manner of life unchanged, but his strength was failing him: he walked less, ate less, slept less, and every day he grew weaker. Princess Marya went on hoping. She prayed for her brother, as living, and every moment she expected news of his return.

“
Ma bonne amie
,” said the little princess, after breakfast, on the morning of the 19th of March, and her little downy lip was lifted as of old; but as in that house since the terrible news had come, smiles, tones of voice, movements even bore the stamp of mourning, so now the smile of the little princess, who was influenced by the general temper without knowing its cause, was such that more than all else it was eloquent of the common burden of sorrow.

“My dear, I am afraid that this morning’s
fruschtique
(as Foka calls it) has disagreed with me.”

“What is the matter with you, my darling? You look pale. Oh, you are very pale,” said Princess Marya in alarm, running with her soft, ponderous tread up to her sister-in-law.

“Shouldn’t we send for Marya Bogdanovna, your excellency?” said one of the maids who was present. Marya Bogdanovna was a midwife from a district town, who had been for the last fortnight at Bleak Hills.

“Yes, truly,” assented Princess Marya, “perhaps it is really that. I’ll go and get her. Courage, my angel.” She kissed Liza and was going out of the room.

“Oh, no, no!” And besides her pallor, the face of the little princess expressed a childish terror at the inevitable physical suffering before her.

“No, it is indigestion, say it is indigestion, say so, Marie, say so!” And the little princess began to cry, wringing her little hands with childish misery and capriciousness and affected exaggeration too. Princess Marya ran out of the room to fetch Marya Bogdanovna.

“
Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!
Oh!” she heard behind her. The midwife was already on her way to meet her, rubbing her plump, small white hands, with a face of significant composure.

“Marya Bogdanovna! I think it has begun,” said Princess Marya, looking with wide-open, frightened eyes at the midwife.

“Well, I thank God for it,” said Marya Bogdanovna, not hastening her step. “You young ladies have no need to know anything about it.”

“But how is it the doctor has not come from Moscow yet?” said the princess. (In accordance with the wishes of Liza and Prince Andrey, they had sent to Moscow for a doctor, and were expecting him every minute.)

“It’s no matter, princess, don’t be uneasy,” said Marya Bogdanovna; “we shall do very well without the doctor.”

Five minutes later the princess from her room heard something heavy being carried by. She peeped out; the footmen were for some reason moving into the bedroom the leather sofa which stood in Prince Andrey’s study. There was a solemn and subdued look on the men’s faces.

Princess Marya sat alone in her room, listening to the sounds of the house, now and then opening the door when any one passed by and looking at what was taking place in the corridor. Several women passed to and fro treading softly; they glanced at the princess and turned away from her. She did not venture to ask questions, and going back to her room closed the door and sat still in an armchair, or took up her prayer-book,
or knelt down before the shrine. To her distress and astonishment she felt that prayer did not soothe her emotion. All at once the door of her room was softly opened, and she saw on the threshold her old nurse, Praskovya Savvishna, with a kerchief over her head. The old woman hardly ever, owing to the old prince’s prohibition, came into her room.