War and Peace (19 page)

“There you have him all over!” he said to Princess Marya as she came up to him.

Princess Marya looked at her brother in surprise. She did not know what he was smiling at. Everything her father did inspired in her reverence that did not admit of criticism.

“Every one has his weak spot,” Prince Andrey went on; “with his vast intellect to condescend to such triviality!”

Princess Marya could not understand the boldness of her brother’s criticism and was making ready to protest, when the step they were all listening for was heard coming from the study. The prince walked in with a quick, lively step, as he always walked, as though intentionally contrasting the elasticity of his movements with the rigidity of the routine of the house. At that instant the big clock struck two, and another clock in the drawing-room echoed it in thinner tones. The prince stood still; his keen, stern eyes gleaming under his bushy, overhanging brows scanned all the company and rested on the little princess. The little princess experienced at that moment the sensation that courtiers know on the entrance of the Tsar, that feeling of awe and veneration that this old man inspired in every one about him. He stroked the little princess on the head, and then with an awkward movement patted her on her neck.

“I’m glad, glad to see you,” he said, and looking intently into her eyes he walked away and sat down in his place. “Sit down, sit down, Mihail Ivanovitch, sit down.”

He pointed his daughter-in-law to a seat beside him. The footman moved a chair back for her.

“Ho, ho!” said the old man, looking at her rounded figure. “You’ve not lost time; that’s bad!” He laughed a dry, cold, unpleasant laugh, laughing as he always did with his lips, but not with his eyes. “You must have exercise, as much exercise as possible, as much as possible,” he said.

The little princess did not hear or did not care to hear his words. She sat dumb and seemed disconcerted. The prince asked after her father, and she began to talk and to smile. He asked her about common acquaintances; the princess became more and more animated, and began talking away, giving the prince greetings from various people and retailing the gossip of the town.

“Poor Countess Apraxin has lost her husband; she has quite cried her eyes out, poor dear,” she said, growing more and more lively.

As she became livelier, the prince looked more and more sternly at her, and all at once, as though he had studied her sufficiently and had formed a clear idea of her, he turned away and addressed Mihail Ivanovitch:

“Well, Mihail Ivanovitch, our friend Bonaparte is to have a bad time of it. Prince Andrey” (this was how he always spoke of his son) “has been telling me what forces are being massed against him! While you and I have always looked upon him as a very insignificant person.”

Mihail Ivanovitch, utterly at a loss to conjecture when “you and I” had said anything of the sort about Bonaparte, but grasping that he was wanted for the introduction of the prince’s favourite subject, glanced in wonder at the young prince, not knowing what was to come next.

“He’s a great tactician!” said the prince to his son, indicating the architect, and the conversation turned again on the war, on Bonaparte, and the generals and political personages of the day. The old prince was, it seemed, convinced that all the public men of the period were mere babes who had no idea of the A B C of military and political matters; while Bonaparte, according to him, was an insignificant Frenchman, who had met with success simply because there were no Potyomkins and Suvorovs to oppose him. He was even persuaded firmly that there were no political difficulties in Europe, that there was no war indeed, but only a sort of marionette show in which the men of the day took part, pretending to be doing the real thing. Prince Andrey received his father’s jeers at modern people gaily, and with obvious pleasure drew his father out and listened to him.

“Does everything seem good that was done in the past?” he said; “why, didn’t Suvorov himself fall into the trap Moreau laid for him, and wasn’t he unable to get out of it too?”

“Who told you that? Who said so?” cried the prince. “Suvorov!” And he flung away his plate, which Tihon very neatly caught. “Suvorov!… Think again, Prince Andrey. There were two men—Friedrich and Suvorov … Moreau! Moreau would have been a prisoner if Suvorov’s hands had been free, but his hands were tied by the Hofsskriegswurstschnappsrath; the devil himself would have been in a tight place. Ah, you’ll find out what these Hofskriegswurstschnappsraths are like! Suvorov couldn’t get the better of them, so how is Mihail Kutuzov going to do it? No, my dear,” he went on; “so you and your generals aren’t able to get round Bonaparte; you must needs call in Frenchmen—set a thief to catch a thief! The German, Pahlen, has been sent to New York in America to get the Frenchman Moreau,” he said, alluding to the invitation that had that year been made to Moreau to enter the Russian service. “A queer business!… Why the Potyomkins, the Suvorovs, the Orlovs, were they Germans? No, my lad, either you have all lost your wits, or I have outlived mine. God help you, and we shall see. Bonaparte’s become a great military leader among them! H’m!…”

“I don’t say at all that all those plans are good,” said Prince Andrey;
“only I can’t understand how you can have such an opinion of Bonaparte. Laugh, if you like, but Bonaparte is any way a great general!”

“Mihail Ivanovitch!” the old prince cried to the architect, who, absorbed in the roast meat, hoped they had forgotten him. “Didn’t I tell you Bonaparte was a great tactician? Here he says so too.”

“To be sure, your excellency,” replied the architect. The prince laughed again his frigid laugh.

“Bonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has splendid soldiers. And he attacked the Germans first too. And any fool can beat the Germans. From the very beginning of the world every one has beaten the Germans. And they’ve never beaten any one. They only conquer each other. He made his reputation fighting against them.”

And the prince began analysing all the blunders that in his opinion Bonaparte had committed in his wars and even in politics. His son did not protest, but it was evident that whatever arguments were advanced against him, he was as little disposed to give up his opinion as the old prince himself. Prince Andrey listened and refrained from replying. He could not help wondering how this old man, living so many years alone and never leaving the country, could know all the military and political events in Europe of the last few years in such detail and with such accuracy, and form his own judgment on them.

“You think I’m an old man and don’t understand the actual position of affairs?” he wound up. “But I’ll tell you I’m taken up with it! I don’t sleep at nights. Come, where has this great general of yours proved himself to be such?”

“That would be a long story,” answered his son.

“You go along to your Bonaparte. Mademoiselle Bourienne, here is another admirer of your blackguard of an emperor!” he cried in excellent French.

“You know that I am not a Bonapartist, prince.”

“God knows when he’ll come back …” the prince hummed in falsetto, laughed still more falsetto, and got up from the table.

The little princess had sat silent during the whole discussion and the rest of the dinner, looking in alarm first at Princess Marya and then at her father-in-law. When they left the dinner-table, she took her sister-in-law’s arm and drew her into another room.

“What a clever man your father is,” she said; “perhaps that is why I am afraid of him.”

“Oh, he is so kind!” said Princess Marya.

Prince Andrey was leaving the following evening. The old prince, not departing from his regular routine, went away to his own room after dinner. The little princess was with her sister-in-law. Prince Andrey, having changed his dress and put on a traveling-coat without epaulettes, had been packing with his valet in the rooms set apart for him. After himself inspecting the coach and the packing of his trunks on it, he gave orders for the horses to be put to. Nothing was left in the room but the things that Prince Andrey always carried with him: a travelling-case, a big silver wine-case, two Turkish pistols and a sabre, a present from his father, brought back from his campaign under Otchakov. All Prince Andrey’s belongings for the journey were in good order; everything was new and clean, in cloth covers, carefully fastened with tape.

At moments of starting off and beginning a different life, persons given to deliberating on their actions are usually apt to be in a serious frame of mind. At such moments one reviews the past and forms plans for the future. The face of Prince Andrey was very dreamy and tender. Clasping his hands behind him, he walked rapidly up and down the room from corner to corner looking straight before him and dreamily shaking his head. Whether he felt dread at going to the war, or grief at forsaking his wife or possibly something of both—he evidently did not care to be seen in that mood, for, catching the sound of footsteps in the outer room, he hastily unclasped his hands, stood at the table, as though engaged in fastening the cover of the case, and assumed his habitual calm and impenetrable expression. It was the heavy step of Princess Marya.

“They told me you had ordered the horses to be put in,” she said, panting (she had evidently been running), “and I did so want to have a little more talk with you alone. God knows how long we shall be parted again. You’re not angry with me for coming? You’re very much changed, Andryusha,” she added, as though to explain the question.

She smiled as she uttered the word “Andryusha.” It was obviously strange to her to think that this stern, handsome man was the same as the thin, mischievous boy, the Andryusha who had been the companion of her childhood.

“And where’s Liza?” he asked, only answering her question by a smile.

“She was so tired that she fell asleep on the sofa in my room. Oh Andrey, what a treasure of a wife you have,” she said, sitting down on
the sofa, facing her brother. “She is a perfect child; such a sweet, merry child. I like her so much.” Prince Andrey did not speak, but the princess noticed the ironical and contemptuous expression that came into his face.

“But one must be indulgent to little weaknesses. Who is free from them, Andrey? You mustn’t forget that she has grown up and been educated in society. And then her position is not a very cheerful one. One must put oneself in every one’s position. To understand everything is to forgive everything. Only think what it must be for her, poor girl, after the life she has been used to, to part from her husband and be left alone in the country, and in her condition too. It’s very hard.”

Prince Andrey smiled, looking at his sister as we smile listening to people whom we fancy we see through.

“You live in the country and think the life so awful?” he said.

“I—that’s a different matter. Why bring me in? I don’t wish for any other life, and indeed I can’t wish for anything different, for I know no other sort of life. But only think, Andrey, what it is for a young woman used to fashionable society to be buried for the best years of her life in the country, alone, because papa is always busy, and I … you know me … I am not a cheerful companion for women used to the best society. Mademoiselle Bourienne is the only person …”

“I don’t like her at all, your Bourienne,” said Prince Andrey.

“Oh, no! she’s a very good and sweet girl, and what’s more, she’s very much to be pitied. She has nobody, nobody. To tell the truth, she is of no use to me, but only in my way. I have always, you know, been a solitary creature, and now I’m getting more and more so. I like to be alone … 
Mon père
likes her very much. She and Mihail Ivanovitch are the two people he is always friendly and good-tempered with, because he has been a benefactor to both of them; as Sterne says: ‘We don’t love people so much for the good they have done us as for the good we have done them.’
Mon père
picked her up an orphan in the streets, and she’s very good-natured. And
mon père
likes her way of reading. She reads aloud to him in the evenings. She reads very well.”

“Come, tell me the truth, Marie, you suffer a good deal, I expect, sometimes from our father’s character?” Prince Andrey asked suddenly. Princess Marya was at first amazed, then aghast at the question.

“Me?… me?… me suffer!” she said.

“He was always harsh, but he’s growing very tedious, I should think,” said Prince Andrey, speaking so slightingly of his father with an unmistakable intention either of puzzling or of testing his sister.

“You are good in every way, Andrey, but you have a sort of pride of intellect,” said the princess, evidently following her own train of thought rather than the thread of the conversation, “and that’s a great sin. Do you think it right to judge our father? But if it were right, what feeling but
vénération
could be aroused by such a man as
mon père
? And I am so contented and happy with him. I could only wish you were all as happy as I am.”

Her brother shook his head incredulously.

“The only thing that troubles me,—I’ll tell you the truth, Andrey,—is our father’s way of thinking in religious matters. I can’t understand how a man of such immense intellect can fail to see what is as clear as day, and can fall into such error. That is the one thing that makes me unhappy. But even in this I see a slight change for the better of late. Lately his jeers have not been so bitter, and there is a monk whom he received and talked to a long time.”

“Well, my dear, I’m afraid you and your monk are wasting your powder and shot,” Prince Andrey said ironically but affectionately.

“Ah,
mon ami
! I can only pray to God and trust that He will hear me. Andrey,” she said timidly after a minute’s silence, “I have a great favour to ask of you.”

“What is it, dear?”

“No; promise me you won’t refuse. It will be no trouble to you, and there is nothing beneath you in it. Only it will be a comfort to me. Promise, Andryusha,” she said, putting her hand into her reticule and holding something in it, but not showing it yet, as though what she was holding was the object of her entreaty, and before she received a promise to grant it, she could not take that something out of her reticule. She looked timidly with imploring eyes at her brother.