War and Peace (215 page)

“And why should she stroll in here? What does she want? I can’t endure these ladies and all these civilities!” he said aloud before Sonya, obviously unable to restrain his vexation, after the princess’s carriage had rolled away from the house.

“Oh, how can you talk like that,
Nicolas
,” said Sonya, hardly able to conceal her delight. “She is so kind, and
maman
is so fond of her.”

Nikolay made no reply, and would have liked to say no more about Princess Marya. But after her visit the old countess talked about her several times every day.

She sang her praises; insisted that her son should go and see her; expressed a wish to see more of her; and yet was always out of temper when she had been talking of her.

Nikolay tried to say nothing when his mother talked of Princess Marya, but his silence irritated her.

“She is a very good and conscientious girl,” she would say, “and you must go and call on her. Anyway, you will see some one; and it is dull for you, I expect, with us.”

“But I don’t at all wish to, mamma.”

“Why, you wanted to see people and now you don’t wish it. I really don’t understand you, my dear. At one minute you are dull, and the next you suddenly don’t care to see any one.”

“Why, I never said I was dull.”

“Why, you said yourself you did not even wish to see her. She is a very good girl, and you always liked her; and now all of a sudden you have some reasons or other. Everything is kept a secret from me.”

“Not at all, mamma.”

“If I were to beg you to do something unpleasant, but as it is, I simply beg you to drive over and return her call. Why, civility demands it, I should suppose … I have begged you to do so, and now I will meddle no further since you have secrets from your mother.”

“But I will go, if you wish it.”

“It’s nothing to me; it’s for your sake I wish it.”

Nikolay sighed, and bit his moustache, and dealt the cards, trying to draw his mother’s attention to another subject.

Next day, and the third, and the fourth, the same conversation was repeated again and again.

After her visit to the Rostovs, and the unexpectedly cold reception she had met with from Nikolay, Princess Marya acknowledged to herself that she had been right in not wanting to be the first to call.

“It was just what I expected,” she said to herself, summoning her pride to her aid. “I have no concern with him, and I only wanted to see the old lady, who was always kind to me, and to whom I am under obligation for many things.”

But she could not tranquillise herself with these reflections: a feeling akin to remorse fretted her, when she thought of her visit. Although she was firmly resolved not to call again on the Rostovs, and to forget all about it, she was continually feeling herself in an undefined position. And when she asked herself what it was that worried her, she was obliged to admit that it was her relation to Rostov. His cold, ceremonious tone did not proceed from his feeling for her (of that she was convinced), but that tone covered something. What that something was, she wanted to see clearly, and till then she felt that she could not be at peace.

In the middle of the winter she was sitting in the schoolroom, supervising her nephew’s lessons, when the servant announced that Rostov was below. With the firm determination not to betray her secret, and not to manifest any embarrassment, she summoned Mademoiselle Bourienne, and with her went into the drawing-room.

At the first glance at Nikolay’s face, she saw that he had come merely to perform the obligations of civility, and she determined to keep to the tone he adopted towards her.

They talked of the health of the countess, of common acquaintances, of the latest news of the war, and when the ten minutes required by propriety had elapsed, Nikolay got up to say good-bye.

With the aid of Mademoiselle Bourienne, Princess Marya had kept up the conversation very well. But at the very last moment, just when he was getting up, she was so weary of talking of what did not interest her, and she was so absorbed in wondering why to her alone so little joy had been vouchsafed in life, that in a fit of abstraction, she sat motionless gazing straight before her with her luminous eyes, and not noticing that he was getting up.

Nikolay looked at her, and anxious to appear not to notice her
abstraction, he said a few words to Mademoiselle Bourienne, and again glanced at the princess. She was sitting in the same immovable pose, and there was a look of suffering on her soft face. He felt suddenly sorry for her, and vaguely conscious that he might be the cause of the sadness he saw in her face. He longed to help her, to say something pleasant to her, but he could not think what to say to her.

“Good-bye, princess,” he said. She started, flushed, and sighed heavily.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said, as though waking from sleep. “You are going already, count; well, good-bye! Oh, the cushion for the countess?”

“Wait a minute, I will fetch it,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, and she left the room.

They were both silent, glancing at each other now and then.

“Yes, princess,” said Nikolay at last, with a mournful smile, “it seems not long ago, but how much has happened since the first time we met at Bogutcharovo. We all seemed in such trouble then, but I would give a great deal to have that time back … and there’s no bringing it back.”

Princess Marya was looking intently at him with her luminous eyes, as he said that. She seemed trying to divine the secret import of his words, which would make clear his feeling towards her.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “but you have no need to regret the past, count. As I conceive of your life now, you will always think of it with satisfaction, because the self-sacrifice in which you are now …”

“I cannot accept your praises,” he interrupted hurriedly; “on the contrary, I am always reproaching myself; but it is an uninteresting and cheerless subject.”

And again the stiff and cold expression came back into his face. But Princess Marya saw in him again now the man she had known and loved, and it was to that man only she was speaking now.

“I thought you would allow me to say that,” she said. “I have been such intimate friends with you … and with your family, and I thought you would not feel my sympathy intrusive; but I made a mistake,” she said. Her voice suddenly shook. “I don’t know why,” she went on, recovering herself, “you used to be different, and …”

“There are thousands of reasons
why
.” (He laid special stress on the word
why
.) “I thank you, princess,” he added softly. “It is sometimes hard …”

“So that is why! That is why!” an inner voice was saying in Princess
Marya’s soul. “Yes, it was not only that gay, kind, and frank gaze, not only that handsome exterior I loved in him; I divined his noble, firm, and self-sacrificing soul,” she said to herself.

“Yes, he is poor now, and I am rich … Yes, it is only that … Yes, if it were not for that …” And recalling all his former tenderness, and looking now at his kind and sad face, she suddenly understood the reason of his coldness.

“Why! count, why?” she almost cried all at once, involuntarily moving nearer to him. “Why, do tell me. You must tell me.” He was mute. “I do not know, count, your
why
,” she went on. “But I am sad, I … I will own that to you. You mean for some reason to deprive me of our old friendship. And that hurts me.” There were tears in her eyes and in her voice. “I have had so little happiness in my life that every loss is hard for me … Excuse me, good-bye,” she suddenly burst into tears, and was going out of the room.

“Princess! stay, for God’s sake,” he cried, trying to stop her. “Princess!”

She looked round. For a few seconds they gazed mutely in each other’s eyes, and the remote and impossible became all at once close at hand, possible and inevitable.

In the autumn of 1813, Nikolay married Princess Marya, and with his wife, and mother, and Sonya, took up his abode at Bleak Hills.

Within four years he had paid off the remainder of his debts without selling his wife’s estates, and coming into a small legacy on the death of a cousin, he repaid the loan he had borrowed from Pierre also.

In another three years, by 1820, Nikolay had so well managed his pecuniary affairs that he was able to buy a small estate adjoining Bleak Hills, and was opening negotiations for the repurchase of his ancestral estate of Otradnoe, which was his cherished dream.

Though he took up the management of the land at first from necessity, he soon acquired such a passion for agriculture, that it became his favourite and almost his exclusive interest. Nikolay was a plain farmer, who did not like innovations, especially English ones, just then coming into vogue, laughed at all theoretical treatises on agriculture, did not care
for factories, for raising expensive produce, or for expensive imported seed. He did not, in fact, make a hobby of any one part of the work, but kept the welfare of the
estate
as a whole always before his eyes. The object most prominent to his mind in the estate was not the azote nor the oxygen in the soil or the atmosphere, not a particular plough nor manure, but the principal agent by means of which the azote and the oxygen and the plough and the manure were all made effectual—that is, the labourer, the peasant. When Nikolay took up the management of the land, and began to go into its different branches, the peasant attracted his chief attention. He looked on the peasant, not merely as a tool, but also as an end in himself, and as his critic. At first he studied the peasant attentively, trying to understand what he wanted, what he thought good and bad; and he only made a pretence of making arrangements and giving orders, while he was in reality learning from the peasants their methods and their language and their views of what was good and bad. And it was only when he understood the tastes and impulses of the peasant, when he had learned to speak his speech and to grasp the hidden meaning behind his words, when he felt himself in alliance with him, that he began boldly to direct him—to perform, that is, towards him the office expected of him. And Nikolay’s management produced the most brilliant results.

On taking over the control of the property, Nikolay had at once by some unerring gift of insight appointed as bailiff, as village elder, and as delegate the very men whom the peasants would have elected themselves had the choice been in their hands, and the authority once given them was never withdrawn. Before investigating the chemical constituents of manure, or going into “debit and credit” (as he liked sarcastically to call book-keeping), he found out the number of cattle the peasants possessed, and did his utmost to increase the number. He kept the peasants’ families together on a large scale, and would not allow them to split up into separate households. The indolent, the dissolute, and the feeble he was equally hard upon and tried to expel them from the community. At the sowing and the carrying of the hay and corn, he watched over his own and the peasants’ fields with absolutely equal care. And few landowners had fields so early and so well sown and cut, and few had such crops as Nikolay.

He did not like to have anything to do with the house-serfs, he called them
parasites
, and everybody said that he demoralised and spoiled them. When any order had to be given in regard to a house-serf, especially when one had to be punished, he was always in a state of indecision and
asked advice of every one in the house. But whenever it was possible to send a house-serf for a soldier in place of a peasant, he did so without the smallest compunction. In all his dealings with the peasants, he never experienced the slightest hesitation. Every order he gave would, he knew, be approved by the greater majority of them.

He never allowed himself either to punish a man by adding to his burdens, or to reward him by lightening his tasks simply at the prompting of his own wishes. He could not have said what his standard was of what he ought and ought not to do; but there was a standard firm and rigid in his soul.

Often talking of some failure or irregularity, he would complain of “our Russian peasantry,” and he imagined that he could not bear the peasants.

But with his whole soul he did really love “our Russian peasantry,” and their ways; and it was through that he had perceived and adopted the only method of managing the land which could be productive of good results.

Countess Marya was jealous of this passion of her husband’s for agriculture, and regretted she could not share it. But she was unable to comprehend the joys and disappointments he met with in that world apart that was so alien to her. She could not understand why he used to be so particularly eager and happy when after getting up at dawn and spending the whole morning in the fields or the threshing-floor he came back to tea with her from the sowing, the mowing, or the harvest. She could not understand why he was so delighted when he told her with enthusiasm of the well-to-do, thrifty peasant Matvey Ermishin, who had been up all night with his family, carting his sheaves, and had all harvested when no one else had begun carrying. She could not understand why, stepping out of the window on to the balcony, he smiled under his moustaches and winked so gleefully when a warm, fine rain began to fall on his young oats that were suffering from the drought, or why, when a menacing cloud blew over in mowing or harvest time, he would come in from the barn red, sunburnt, and perspiring, with the smell of wormwood in his hair, and rubbing his hands joyfully would say: “Come, another day of this and my lot, and the peasants’ too, will all be in the barn.”

Still less could she understand how it was that with his good heart and everlasting readiness to anticipate her wishes, he would be thrown almost into despair when she brought him petitions from peasants or
their wives who had appealed to her to be let off tasks, why it was that he, her good-natured Nikolay, obstinately refused her, angrily begging her not to meddle in his business. She felt that he had a world apart, that was intensely dear to him, governed by laws of its own which she did not understand.

Sometimes trying to understand him she would talk to him of the good work he was doing in striving for the good of his serfs; but at this he was angry and answered: “Not in the least; it never even entered my head; and for their good I would not lift my little finger. That’s all romantic nonsense and old wives’ cackle—all that doing good to one’s neighbour. I don’t want our children to be beggars; I want to build up our fortunes in my lifetime; that is all. And to do that one must have discipline, one must have strictness … So there!” he would declare, clenching his sanguine fist. “And justice too—of course,” he would add, “because if the peasant is naked and hungry, and has but one poor horse, he can do no good for himself or me.”