War and Peace (59 page)

“So good-bye till to-morrow, at Sokolniky,” said Dolohov, as he parted from Rostov at the club steps.

“And do you feel quite calm?” asked Rostov.

Dolohov stopped.

“Well, do you see, in a couple of words I’ll let you into the whole secret of duelling. If, when you go to a duel, you make your will and write long letters to your parents, if you think that you may be killed, you’re a fool and certain to be done for. But go with the firm intention of killing your man, as quickly and as surely as may be, then everything will be all right. As our bear-killer from Kostroma used to say to me: ‘A bear,’ he’d say, ‘why, who’s not afraid of one? but come to see one and your fear’s all gone, all you hope is he won’t get away!’ Well, that’s just how I feel.
A demain, mon cher
.”

Next day at eight o’clock in the morning, Pierre and Nesvitsky reached the Sokolniky copse, and found Dolohov, Denisov, and Rostov already there. Pierre had the air of a man absorbed in reflections in no way connected with the matter in hand. His face looked hollow and yellow. He had not slept all night. He looked about him absent-mindedly, and screwed up his eyes, as though in glaring sunshine. He was exclusively absorbed by two considerations: the guilt of his wife, of which after a sleepless night he had not a vestige of doubt, and the guiltlessness of Dolohov, who was in no way bound to guard the honour of a man, who was nothing to him. “Maybe I should have done the same in his place,” thought Pierre. “For certain, indeed, I should have done the same; then why this duel, this murder? Either I shall kill him, or he will shoot me in the head, in the elbow, or the knee. To get away from here,
to run, to bury myself somewhere,” was the longing that came into his mind. But precisely at the moments when such ideas were in his mind, he would turn with a peculiarly calm and unconcerned face, which inspired respect in the seconds looking at him, and ask: “Will it be soon?” or “Aren’t we ready?”

When everything was ready, the swords stuck in the snow to mark the barrier, and the pistols loaded, Nesvitsky went up to Pierre.

“I should not be doing my duty, count,” he said in a timid voice, “nor justifying the confidence and the honour you have done me in choosing me for your second, if at this grave moment, this very grave moment, I did not speak the whole truth to you. I consider that the quarrel has not sufficient grounds and is not worth shedding blood over.… You were not right, not quite in the right; you lost your temper.…”

“Oh, yes, it was awfully stupid,” said Pierre.

“Then allow me to express your regret, and I am convinced that our opponents will agree to accept your apology,” said Nesvitsky (who, like the others assisting in the affair, and every one at such affairs, was unable to believe that the quarrel would come to an actual duel). “You know, count, it is far nobler to acknowledge one’s mistake than to push things to the irrevocable. There was no great offence on either side. Permit me to convey …”

“No, what are you talking about?” said Pierre; “it doesn’t matter.… Ready then?” he added. “Only tell me how and where I am to go, and what to shoot at?” he said with a smile unnaturally gentle. He took up a pistol, and began inquiring how to let it off, as he had never had a pistol in his hand before, a fact he did not care to confess. “Oh, yes, of course, I know, I had only forgotten,” he said.

“No apologies, absolutely nothing,” Dolohov was saying to Denisov, who for his part was also making an attempt at reconciliation, and he too went up to the appointed spot.

The place chosen for the duel was some eighty paces from the road, on which their sledges had been left, in a small clearing in the pine wood, covered with snow that had thawed in the warmer weather of the last few days. The antagonists stood forty paces from each other at the further edge of the clearing. The seconds, in measuring the paces, left tracks in the deep, wet snow from the spot where they had been standing to the swords of Nesvitsky and Denisov, which had been thrust in the ground ten paces from one another to mark the barrier. The thaw
and mist persisted; forty paces away nothing could be seen. In three minutes everything was ready, but still they delayed beginning. Every one was silent.

“Well, let us begin,” said Dolohov.

“To be sure,” said Pierre, still with the same smile.

A feeling of dread was in the air. It was obvious that the affair that had begun so lightly could not now be in any way turned back, that it was going forward of itself, independently of men’s will, and must run its course. Denisov was the first to come forward to the barrier and pronounce the words:

“Since the antagonists refuse all reconciliation, would it not be as well to begin? Take your pistols, and at the word ‘three’ begin to advance together. O … one! Two! Three!…” Denisov shouted angrily, and he walked away from the barrier. Both walked along the trodden tracks closer and closer together, beginning to recognise one another in the mist. The combatants had the right to fire when they chose as they approached the barrier. Dolohov walked slowly, not lifting his pistol, and looking intently with his clear, shining eyes into the face of his antagonist. His mouth wore, as always, the semblance of a smile.

“So when I like, I can fire,” said Pierre, and at the word
three
, he walked with rapid steps forward, straying off the beaten track and stepping over the untrodden snow. Pierre held his pistol at full length in his right hand, obviously afraid of killing himself with that pistol. His left arm he studiously held behind him, because he felt inclined to use it to support his right arm, and he knew that was not allowed. After advancing six paces, and getting off the track into the snow, Pierre looked about under his feet, glancing rapidly again at Dolohov, and stretching out his finger, as he had been shown, fired. Not at all expecting so loud a report, Pierre started at his own shot, then smiled at his own sensation and stood still. The smoke, which was made thicker by the fog, hindered him from seeing for the first moment; but the other shot that he was expecting did not follow. All that could be heard were Dolohov’s rapid footsteps, and his figure came into view through the smoke. With one
hand he was clutching at his left side, the other was clenched on the lower pistol. His face was pale. Rostov was running up and saying something to him.

“N … no,” Dolohov muttered through his teeth, “no, it’s not over”; and struggling on a few sinking, staggering steps up to the sword, he sank on to the snow beside it. His left hand was covered with blood, he rubbed it on his coat and leaned upon it. His face was pale, frowning and trembling.

“Co …” Dolohov began, but he could not at once articulate the words: “come up,” he said, with an effort. Pierre, hardly able to restrain his sobs, ran towards Dolohov, and would have crossed the space that separated the barriers, when Dolohov cried: “To the barrier!” and Pierre, grasping what was wanted, stood still just at the sword. Only ten paces divided them. Dolohov putting his head down, greedily bit at the snow, lifted his head again, sat up, tried to get on his legs and sat down, trying to find a secure centre of gravity. He took a mouthful of the cold snow, and sucked it; his lips quivered, but still he smiled; his eyes glittered with the strain and exasperation of the struggle with his failing forces. He raised the pistol and began taking aim.

“Sideways, don’t expose yourself to the pistol,” said Nesvitsky.

“Don’t face it!” Denisov could not help shouting, though it was to an antagonist.

With his gentle smile of sympathy and remorse, Pierre stood with his legs and arms straddling helplessly, and his broad chest directly facing Dolohov, and looked at him mournfully. Denisov, Rostov, and Nesvitsky screwed up their eyes. At the same instant they heard a shot and Dolohov’s wrathful cry.

“Missed!” shouted Dolohov, and he dropped helplessly, face downwards, in the snow. Pierre clutched at his head, and turning back, walked into the wood, off the path in the snow, muttering aloud incoherent words.

“Stupid … stupid! Death … lies …” he kept repeating, scowling. Nesvitsky stopped him and took him home.

Rostov and Denisov got the wounded Dolohov away.

Dolohov lay in the sledge with closed eyes, in silence, and uttered not a word in reply to questions addressed to him. But as they were driving into Moscow, he suddenly came to himself, and lifting his head with an effort, he took the hand of Rostov, who was sitting near him. Rostov was
struck by the utterly transformed and unexpectedly passionately tender expression on Dolohov’s face.

“Well? How do you feel?” asked Rostov.

“Bad! but that’s not the point. My friend,” said Dolohov, in a breaking voice, “where are we? We are in Moscow, I know. I don’t matter, but I have killed her, killed her.… She won’t get over this. She can’t bear …”

“Who?” asked Rostov.

“My mother. My mother, my angel, my adored angel, my mother,” and squeezing Rostov’s hand, Dolohov burst into tears. When he was a little calmer, he explained to Rostov that he was living with his mother, that if his mother were to see him dying, she would not get over the shock. He besought Rostov to go to her and prepare her.

Rostov drove on ahead to carry out his wish, and to his immense astonishment he learned that Dolohov, this bully, this noted duellist Dolohov, lived at Moscow with his old mother and a hunchback sister, and was the tenderest son and brother.

Pierre had of late rarely seen his wife alone. Both at Petersburg and at Moscow their house had been constantly full of guests. On the night following the duel he did not go to his bedroom, but spent the night, as he often did, in his huge study, formerly his father’s room, the very room indeed in which Count Bezuhov had died.

He lay down on the couch and tried to go to sleep, so as to forget all that had happened to him, but he could not do so. Such a tempest of feelings, thoughts, and reminiscences suddenly arose in his soul, that, far from going to sleep, he could not even sit still in one place, and was forced to leap up from the couch and pace with rapid steps about the room. At one moment he had a vision of his wife, as she was in the first days after their marriage, with her bare shoulders, and languid, passionate eyes; and then immediately by her side he saw the handsome, impudent, hard, and ironical face of Dolohov, as he had seen it at the banquet, and again the same face of Dolohov, pale, quivering, in agony, as it had been when he turned and sank in the snow.

“What has happened?” he asked himself; “I have killed
her lover
; yes, killed the lover of my wife. Yes, that has happened. Why was it? How
have I come to this?” “Because you married her,” answered an inner voice.

“But how am I to blame?” he asked. “For marrying without loving her, for deceiving yourself and her.” And vividly he recalled that minute after supper at Prince Vassily’s when he had said those words he found so difficult to utter: “I love you.” “It has all come from that. Even then I felt it,” he thought; “I felt at the time that it wasn’t the right thing, that I had no right to do it. And so it has turned out.” He recalled the honeymoon, and blushed at the recollection of it. Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the memory of how one day soon after his marriage he had come in his silk dressing-gown out of his bedroom into his study at twelve o’clock in the day, and in his study had found his head steward, who had bowed deferentially, and looking at Pierre’s face and his dressing-gown, had faintly smiled, as though to express by that smile his respectful sympathy with his patron’s happiness. “And how often I have been proud of her, proud of her majestic beauty, her social tact,” he thought; “proud of my house, in which she received all Petersburg, proud of her unapproachability and beauty. So this was what I prided myself on. I used to think then that I did not understand her. How often, reflecting on her character, I have told myself that I was to blame, that I did not understand her, did not understand that everlasting composure and complacency, and the absence of all preferences and desires, and the solution of the whole riddle lay in that fearful word, that she is a dissolute woman; I have found that fearful word, and all has become clear.

“Anatole used to come to borrow money of her, and used to kiss her on her bare shoulders. She didn’t give him money; but she let herself be kissed. Her father used to try in joke to rouse her jealousy; with a serene smile she used to say she was not fool enough to be jealous. Let him do as he likes, she used to say about me. I asked her once if she felt no symptoms of pregnancy. She laughed contemptuously, and said she was not such a fool as to want children, and that she would never have a child by me.”

Then he thought of the coarseness, the bluntness of her ideas, and the vulgarity of the expressions that were characteristic of her, although she had been brought up in the highest aristocratic circles. “Not quite such a fool … you just try it on … you clear out of this,” she would say. Often, watching the favourable impression she made on young and old, on men and women, Pierre could not understand why it was he did
not love her. “Yes; I never loved her,” Pierre said to himself; “I knew she was a dissolute woman,” he repeated to himself; “but I did not dare own it to myself.

“And now Dolohov: there he sits in the snow and forces himself to smile; and dies with maybe some swaggering affectation on his lips in answer to my remorse.”

Pierre was one of those people who in spite of external weakness of character—so-called—do not seek a confidant for their sorrows. He worked through his trouble alone.

“She, she alone is to blame for everything,” he said to himself; “but what of it? Why did I bind myself to her; why did I say to her that ‘I love you,’ which was a lie, and worse than a lie,” he said to himself; “I am to blame, and ought to bear … What? The disgrace to my name, the misery of my life? Oh, that’s all rubbish,” he thought, “disgrace to one’s name and honour, all that’s relative, all that’s apart from myself.

“Louis XVI was executed because
they
said he was dishonourable and a criminal” (the idea crossed Pierre’s mind), “and they were right from their point of view just as those were right too who died a martyr’s death for his sake, and canonised him as a saint. Then Robespierre was executed for being a tyrant. Who is right, who is wrong? No one. But live while you live, to-morrow you die, as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth worrying oneself, when life is only one second in comparison with eternity?” But at the moment when he believed himself soothed by reflections of that sort, he suddenly had a vision of
her
, and of her at those moments when he had most violently expressed his most insincere love to her, and he felt a rush of blood to his heart, and had to jump up again, and move about and break and tear to pieces anything that his hands came across. “Why did I say to her ‘I love you’?” he kept repeating to himself. And as he repeated the question for the tenth time the saying of Molière came into his head: “But what the devil was he doing in that galley?” and he laughed at himself.