War and Peace (10 page)

And with the air of a Petersburg lady, used to business, and knowing how to make use of every moment, Anna Mihalovna sent for her son, and with him went out into the hall.

“Good-bye, my dear,” she said to the countess, who accompanied her to the door. “Wish me good-luck,” she added in a whisper unheard by her son.

“You’re going to Prince Kirill Vladimirovich’s,
ma chère
?” said the count, coming out of the dining-room into the hall. “If he’s better, invite Pierre to dine with us. He has been here; used to dance with the children. Be sure you invite him,
ma chère
. Now do come and look how Taras has surpassed himself to-day. He says Count Orlov never had such a dinner as we’re going to have to-day.”

“
Mon cher Boris
,” said Anna Mihalovna as the Countess Rostov’s carriage drove along the street strewn with straw and into the wide courtyard of Count Kirill Vladimirovitch Bezuhov’s house. “
Mon cher Boris
,” said the mother, putting her hand out from under her old mantle, and laying it on her son’s hand with a timid, caressing movement, “be nice, be attentive. Count Kirill Vladimirovitch is after all your godfather, and your future depends on him. Remember that,
mon cher
, be charming, as you know so well how to be.…”

“If I knew anything would come of it but humiliation,” her son answered coldly. “But I have promised, and I will do it for your sake.”

Although the carriage was standing at the entrance, the hall-porter, scanning the mother and son (they had not sent in their names, but had walked straight in through the glass doors between two rows of statues in niches), and looking significantly at the old mantle, inquired whom they wanted, the princesses or the count; and hearing that they wanted to see the count, said that his excellency was worse to-day, and his excellency could see no one.

“We may as well go away,” the son said in French.

“
Mon ami!
” said the mother in a voice of entreaty, again touching her son’s hand, as though the contact might soothe or rouse him. Boris said no more, but without taking off his overcoat, looked inquiringly at his mother.

“My good man,” Anna Mihalovna said ingratiatingly, addressing the hall-porter, “I know that Count Kirill Vladimirovitch is very ill … that is why I am here … I am a relation … I shall not disturb him, my good man … I need only see Prince Vassily Sergyevitch; he’s staying here, I know. Announce us, please.”

The hall-porter sullenly pulled the bell-rope that rang upstairs and turned away.

“Princess Drubetskoy to see Prince Vassily Sergyevitch,” he called to a footman in stockings, slippers and a frockcoat, who ran down from above, and looked down from the turn in the staircase.

The mother straightened out the folds of her dyed silk gown, looked at herself in the full-length Venetian looking-glass on the wall, and boldly walked up on the stair carpet in her shabby, shapeless shoes.

“My dear, you promised me,” she turned again to her son, rousing
him by a touch on his arm. The son, with his eyes on the door, walked submissively after her.

They went into a large room, from which a door led to the apartments that had been assigned to Prince Vassily.

At the moment when the mother and son reached the middle of the room and were about to ask their way of an old footman, who had darted out at their entrance, the bronze handle of one of the doors turned, and Prince Vassily, dressed in a house jacket of velvet, with one star, came out, accompanying a handsome, black-haired man. This man was the celebrated Petersburg doctor, Lorrain.

“It is positive, then?” said the Prince.

“Prince,
errare est humanum
,”answered the doctor, lisping, and pronouncing the Latin words with a French accent.

“Very well, very well …”

Perceiving Anna Mihalovna and her son, Prince Vassily dismissed the doctor with a bow, and in silence, with an air of inquiry, advanced to meet them. The son noticed how an expression of intense grief came at once into his mother’s eyes, and he smiled slightly.

“Yes, in what distressing circumstances we were destined to meet again, prince.… Tell me how is our dear patient?” she said, apparently not observing the frigid, offensive glance that was fixed on her. Prince Vassily stared at her, then at Boris with a look of inquiry that amounted to perplexity. Boris bowed politely. Prince Vassily, without acknowledging his bow, turned away to Anna Mihalovna, and to her question he replied by a movement of the head and lips, indicative of the worst fears for the patient.

“Is it possible?” cried Anna Mihalovna. “Ah, this is terrible! It is dreadful to think … This is my son,” she added, indicating Boris. “He wanted to thank you in person.”

Boris once more made a polite bow.

“Believe me, prince, a mother’s heart will never forget what you have done for us.”

“I am glad I have been able to do you any service, my dear Anna Mihalovna,” said Prince Vassily, pulling his lace frill straight, and in voice and manner manifesting here in Moscow, before Anna Mihalovna, who was under obligation to him, an even greater sense of his own dignity than in Petersburg at Anna Pavlovna’s
soirée
.

“Try to do your duty in the service, and to be worthy of it,” he added,
turning severely to him. “I am glad … you are here on leave?” he asked in his expressionless voice.

“I am awaiting orders, your excellency, to join my new regiment,” answered Boris, showing no sign either of resentment at the prince’s abrupt manner, nor of desire to get into conversation, but speaking with such respectful composure that the prince looked at him attentively.

“You are living with your mother?”

“I am living at Countess Rostov’s,” said Boris, again adding: “your excellency.”

“The Ilya Rostov, who married Natalie Shinshin,” said Anna Mihalovna.

“I know, I know,” said Prince Vassily in his monotonous voice. “I have never been able to understand how Natalie Shinshin could make up her mind to marry that unlicked bear. A completely stupid and ridiculous person. And a gambler too, I am told.”

“But a very worthy man, prince,” observed Anna Mihalovna, with a pathetic smile, as though she too recognised that Count Rostov deserved this criticism, but begged him not to be too hard on the poor old fellow. “What do the doctors say?” asked the princess, after a brief pause, and again the expression of deep distress reappeared on her tear-worn face.

“There is little hope,” said the prince.

“And, I was so longing to thank uncle once more for all his kindness to me and to Boris. He is his godson,” she added in a tone that suggested that Prince Vassily would be highly delighted to hear this fact.

Prince Vassily pondered and frowned. Anna Mihalovna saw he was afraid of finding in her a rival with claims on Count Bezuhov’s will. She hastened to reassure him. “If it were not for my genuine love and devotion for uncle,” she said, uttering the last word with peculiar assurance and carelessness, “I know his character,—generous, upright; but with only the princesses about him.… They are young.…” She bent her head and added in a whisper: “Has he performed his last duties, prince? How priceless are these last moments! He is as bad as he could be, it seems; it is absolutely necessary to prepare him, if he is so ill. We women, prince,” she smiled tenderly, “always know how to say these things. I absolutely must see him. Hard as it will be for me, I am used to suffering.”

The prince evidently understood, and understood, too, as he had at Anna Pavlovna’s, that it was no easy task to get rid of Anna Mihalovna.

“Would not this interview be trying for him,
chère
Anna Mihalovna?” he said. “Let us wait till the evening; the doctors have predicted a crisis.”

“But waiting’s out of the question, prince, at such a moment. Think, it is a question of saving his soul. Ah! how terrible, the duties of a Christian.…”

The door from the inner rooms opened, and one of the count’s nieces entered with a cold and forbidding face, and a long waist strikingly out of proportion with the shortness of her legs.

Prince Vassily turned to her. “Well, how is he?”

“Still the same. What can you expect with this noise?…” said the princess, scanning Anna Mihalovna, as a stranger.

“Ah, dear, I did not recognise you,” said Anna Mihalovna, with a delighted smile, and she ambled lightly up to the count’s niece. “I have just come, and I am at your service to help in nursing my uncle. I imagine what you have been suffering,” she added, sympathetically turning her eyes up.

The princess made no reply, she did not even smile, but walked straight away. Anna Mihalovna took off her gloves, and entrenched herself as it were in an armchair, inviting Prince Vassily to sit down beside her.

“Boris!” she said to her son, and she smiled at him, “I am going in to the count, to poor uncle, and you can go to Pierre,
mon ami
, meanwhile, and don’t forget to give him the Rostovs’ invitation. They ask him to dinner. I suppose he won’t go?” she said to the prince.

“On the contrary,” said the prince, visibly cast down. “I should be very glad if you would take that young man off my hands.… He sticks on here. The count has not once asked for him.”

He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted the youth downstairs and up another staircase to the apartments of Pyotr Kirillovitch.

Pierre had not succeeded in fixing upon a career in Petersburg, and really had been banished to Moscow for disorderly conduct. The story told about him at Count Rostov’s was true. Pierre had assisted in tying the police officer to the bear. He had arrived a few days previously, stopping as he always did at his father’s house. Though he had assumed that his story would be already known at Moscow, and that the ladies who
were about his father, always unfavourably disposed to him, would profit by this opportunity of turning the count against him, he went on the day of his arrival to his father’s part of the house. Going into the drawing-room, where the princesses usually sat, he greeted the ladies, two of whom were sitting at their embroidery frames, while one read aloud. There were three of them. The eldest, a trim, long-waisted, severe maiden-lady, the one who had come out to Anna Mihalovna, was reading. The younger ones, both rosy and pretty, were only to be distinguished by the fact that one of them had a little mole which made her much prettier. They were both working at their embroidery frames. Pierre was received like a man risen from the dead or stricken with plague. The eldest princess paused in her reading and stared at him in silence with dismay in her eyes. The second assumed precisely the same expression. The youngest, the one with the mole, who was of a mirthful and laughing disposition, bent over her frame, to conceal a smile, probably evoked by the amusing scene she foresaw coming. She pulled her embroidery wool out below, and bent down as though examining the pattern, hardly able to suppress her laughter.

“Good morning, cousin,” said Pierre. “You don’t know me?”

“I know you only too well, only too well.”

“How is the count? Can I see him?” Pierre asked, awkwardly as always, but not disconcerted.

“The count is suffering both physically and morally, and your only anxiety seems to be to occasion him as much suffering as possible.”

“Can I see the count?” repeated Pierre.

“Hm … if you want to kill him, to kill him outright, you can see him. Olga, go and see if uncle’s broth is ready—it will soon be time for it,” she added, to show Pierre they were busy, and busy in seeing after his father’s comfort, while he was obviously only busy in causing him discomfort.

Olga went out. Pierre stood still a moment, looked at the sisters and bowing said: “Then I will go to my room. When I can see him, you will tell me.” He went away and heard the ringing but not loud laugh of the sister with the mole behind him.

The next day Prince Vassily had come and settled in the count’s house. He sent for Pierre and said to him:

“My dear fellow, if you behave here as you did at Petersburg, you will come to a very bad end; that’s all I have to say to you. The count is very, very ill; you must not see him.”

Since then Pierre had not been disturbed, and he spent the whole day alone in his room upstairs.

At the moment when Boris came in, Pierre was walking up and down his room, stopping now and then in the corners, making menacing gestures at the wall, as though thrusting some invisible enemy through with a lance, then he gazed sternly over his spectacles, then pacing up and down again, murmuring indistinct words, shrugging his shoulders and gesticulating.

“England’s day is over!” he said, scowling and pointing at some one with his finger. “Mr. Pitt, as a traitor to the nation and to the rights of man, is condemned …” he had not time to deliver Pitt’s sentence, imagining himself at that moment Napoleon, and having in the person of his hero succeeded in the dangerous crossing of the Channel and in the conquest of London, when he saw a graceful, handsome young officer come in. He stood still. Pierre had seen Boris last as a boy of fourteen, and did not remember him in the least. But in spite of that he took his hand in his characteristically quick and warm-hearted manner, and smiled cordially at him.

“You remember me?” Boris said calmly with a pleasant smile. “I have come with my mother to see the count, but it seems he is not quite well.”

“Yes, he is ill, it seems. People are always bothering him,” answered Pierre, trying to recall who this youth might be.

Boris perceived that Pierre did not know him, but did not think fit to make himself known, and without the slightest embarrassment looked him straight in the face.

“Count Rostov asks you to come to dinner with him to-day,” he said, after a rather long silence somewhat disconcerting for Pierre.

“Ah, Count Rostov,” began Pierre, delighted. “So you are his son, Ilya? Can you believe it, for the first moment I did not recognise you. Do you remember how we used to slide on the Sparrow Hills with Madame Jacquot … long ago?”

“You are mistaken,” said Boris, deliberately, with a bold and rather sarcastic smile. “I am Boris, the son of Princess Anna Mihalovna Drubetskoy. It is the father of the Rostovs who is called Ilya, the son’s Nikolay. And I don’t know any Madame Jacquot.”