War and Peace (6 page)

“What are you afraid of, Liza? I don’t understand,” he said.

“See what egoists all men are; they are all, all egoists! Of his own accord, for his own whim, for no reason whatever, he is deserting me, shutting me up alone in the country.”

“With my father and sister, remember,” said Prince Andrey quietly.

“It’s just the same as alone, without my friends.… And he doesn’t expect me to be afraid.” Her tone was querulous now, her upper lip was lifted, giving her face not a joyous expression, but a wild-animal look, like a squirrel. She paused as though feeling it indecorous to speak of her condition before Pierre, though the whole gist of the matter lay in that.

“I still don’t understand what you are afraid of,” Prince Andrey said deliberately, not taking his eyes off his wife. The princess flushed red, and waved her hands despairingly.

“No, André, I say you are so changed, so changed …”

“Your doctor’s orders were that you were to go to bed earlier,” said Prince Andrey. “It’s time you were asleep.”

The princess said nothing, and suddenly her short, downy lip began to quiver; Prince Andrey got up and walked about the room, shrugging his shoulders.

Pierre looked over his spectacles in naïve wonder from him to the
princess, and stirred uneasily as though he too meant to get up, but had changed his mind.

“What do I care if Monsieur Pierre is here,” the little princess said suddenly, her pretty face contorted into a tearful grimace; “I have long wanted to say to you, Andrey, why are you so changed to me? What have I done? You go away to the war, you don’t feel for me. Why is it?”

“Liza!” was all Prince Andrey said, but in that one word there was entreaty and menace, and, most of all, conviction that she would herself regret her words; but she went on hurriedly.

“You treat me as though I were ill, or a child. I see it all. You weren’t like this six months ago.”

“Liza, I beg you to be silent,” said Prince Andrey, still more expressively.

Pierre, who had been growing more and more agitated during this conversation, got up and went to the princess. He seemed unable to endure the sight of her tears, and was ready to weep himself.

“Please don’t distress yourself, princess. You only fancy that because … I assure you, I’ve felt so myself … because … through … oh, excuse me, an outsider has no business … Oh, don’t distress yourself … good-bye.”

Prince Andrey held his hand and stopped him.

“No, stay a little, Pierre. The princess is so good, she would not wish to deprive me of the pleasure of spending an evening with you.”

“No, he thinks of nothing but himself,” the princess declared, not attempting to check her tears of anger.

“Liza,” said Prince Andrey drily, raising his voice to a pitch that showed his patience was exhausted.

All at once the angry squirrel expression of the princess’s lovely little face changed to an attractive look of terror that awakened sympathy. She glanced from under her brows with lovely eyes at her husband, and her face wore the timorous, deprecating look of a dog when it faintly but rapidly wags its tail in penitence.

“
Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!
” murmured the princess, and holding her gown with one hand, she went to her husband and kissed him on the forehead.

“Good-night, Liza,” said Prince Andrey, getting up and kissing her hand courteously, as though she were a stranger.

The friends were silent. Neither of them began to talk. Pierre looked
at Prince Andrey; Prince Andrey rubbed his forehead with his small hand.

“Let us go and have supper,” he said with a sigh, getting up and going to the door.

They went into the elegantly, newly and richly furnished dining-room. Everything from the dinner-napkins to the silver, the china and the glass, wore that peculiar stamp of newness that is seen in the household belongings of newly married couples. In the middle of supper Prince Andrey leaned on his elbow, and like a man who has long had something on his mind, and suddenly resolves on giving it utterance, he began to speak with an expression of nervous irritation which Pierre had never seen in his friend before.

“Never, never marry, my dear fellow; that’s my advice to you; don’t marry till you have faced the fact that you have done all you’re capable of doing, and till you cease to love the woman you have chosen, till you see her plainly, or else you will make a cruel mistake that can never be set right. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing … Or else everything good and lofty in you will be done for. It will all be frittered away over trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Don’t look at me with such surprise. If you expect anything of yourself in the future you will feel at every step that for you all is over, all is closed up except the drawing-room, where you will stand on the same level with the court lackey and the idiot … And why!” … He made a vigorous gesture.

Pierre took off his spectacles, which transformed his face, making it look even more good-natured, and looked wonderingly at his friend.

“My wife,” pursued Prince Andrey, “is an excellent woman. She is one of those rare women with whom one can feel quite secure of one’s honour; but, my God! what wouldn’t I give now not to be married! You are the first and the only person I say this to, because I like you.”

As Prince Andrey said this he was less than ever like the Bolkonsky who had sat lolling in Anna Pavlovna’s drawing-room with half-closed eyelids, filtering French phrases through his teeth. His dry face was quivering with nervous excitement in every muscle; his eyes, which had seemed lustreless and lifeless, now gleamed with a full, vivid light. It seemed that the more lifeless he was at ordinary times, the more energetic he became at such moments of morbid irritability.

“You can’t understand why I say this,” he went on. “Why, the whole story of life lies in it. You talk of Bonaparte and his career,” he said, though Pierre had not talked of Bonaparte; “you talk of Bonaparte, but
Bonaparte when he was working his way up, going step by step straight to his aim, he was free; he had nothing except his aim and he attained it. But tie yourself up with a woman, and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom. And all the hope and strength there is in you is only a drag on you, torturing you with regret. Drawing-rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, frivolity—that’s the enchanted circle I can’t get out of. I am setting off now to the war, the greatest war there has ever been, and I know nothing, and am good for nothing. I am very agreeable and sarcastic,” pursued Prince Andrey, “and at Anna Pavlovna’s every one listens to me. And this imbecile society without which my wife can’t exist, and these women … If you only knew what these society women are, and, indeed, women generally! My father’s right. Egoism, vanity, silliness, triviality in everything—that’s what women are when they show themselves as they really are. Looking at them in society, one fancies there’s something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing. No, don’t marry, my dear fellow, don’t marry!” Prince Andrey concluded.

“It seems absurd to me,” said Pierre, “that
you, you
consider
yourself
a failure, your life wrecked. You have everything, everything before you. And
you
 …”

He did not say
why you
, but his tone showed how highly he thought of his friend, and how much he expected of him in the future.

“How can he say that?” Pierre thought.

Pierre regarded Prince Andrey as a model of all perfection, because Prince Andrey possessed in the highest degree just that combination of qualities in which Pierre was deficient, and which might be most nearly expressed by the idea of strength of will. Pierre always marvelled at Prince Andrey’s faculty for dealing with people of every sort with perfect composure, his exceptional memory, his wide knowledge (he had read everything, knew everything, had some notion of everything), and most of all at his capacity for working and learning. If Pierre were frequently struck in Andrey by his lack of capacity for dreaming and philosophising (to which Pierre was himself greatly given), he did not regard this as a defect but as a strong point. Even in the very warmest, friendliest, and simplest relations, flattery or praise is needed just as grease is needed to keep wheels going round.

“I am a man whose day is done,” said Prince Andrey. “Why talk of me? let’s talk about you,” he said after a brief pause, smiling at his own reassuring thoughts. The smile was instantly reflected on Pierre’s face.

“Why, what is there to say about me?” said Pierre, letting his face
relax into an easy-going, happy smile. “What am I? I am a bastard.” And he suddenly flushed crimson. Apparently it was a great effort to him to say this. “With no name, no fortune.… And after all, really …” He did not finish. “Meanwhile I am free though and I’m content. I don’t know in the least what to set about doing. I meant to ask your advice in earnest.”

Prince Andrey looked at him with kindly eyes. But in his eyes, friendly and kind as they were, there was yet a consciousness of his own superiority.

“You are dear to me just because you are the one live person in all our society. You’re lucky. Choose what you will, that’s all the same. You’ll always be all right, but there’s one thing: give up going about with the Kuragins and leading this sort of life. It’s not the right thing for you at all; all this riotous living and dissipation and all …”

“What would you have, my dear fellow?” said Pierre, shrugging his shoulders; “women, my dear fellow, women.”

“I can’t understand it,” answered Andrey. “Ladies, that’s another matter, but Kuragin’s women, women and wine, I can’t understand!”

Pierre was living at Prince Vassily Kuragin’s, and sharing in the dissipated mode of life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were proposing to marry to Prince Andrey’s sister to reform him.

“Do you know what,” said Pierre, as though a happy thought had suddenly occurred to him; “seriously, I have been thinking so for a long while. Leading this sort of life I can’t decide on anything, or consider anything properly. My head aches and my money’s all gone. He invited me to-night, but I won’t go.”

“Give me your word of honour that you will give up going.”

“On my honour!”

It was past one o’clock when Pierre left his friend’s house. It was a cloudless night, a typical Petersburg summer night. Pierre got into a hired coach, intending to drive home. But the nearer he got, the more he felt it impossible to go to bed on such a night, more like evening or morning. It was light enough to see a long way in the empty streets. On the way Pierre remembered that all the usual gambling set were to meet at Anatole Kuragin’s that evening, after which there usually followed a drinking-bout, winding up with one of Pierre’s favorite entertainments.

“It would be jolly to go to Kuragin’s,” he thought. But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrey not to go there again.

But, as so often happens with people of weak character, as it is called,
he was at once overcome with such a passionate desire to enjoy once more this sort of dissipation which had become so familiar to him, that he determined to go. And the idea at once occurred to him that his promise was of no consequence, since he had already promised Prince Anatole to go before making the promise to Andrey. Finally he reflected that all such promises were merely relative matters, having no sort of precise significance, especially if one considered that to-morrow one might be dead or something so extraordinary might happen that the distinction between honourable and dishonourable would have ceased to exist. Such reflections often occurred to Pierre, completely nullifying all his resolutions and intentions. He went to Kuragin’s.

Driving up to the steps of a big house in the Horse Guards’ barracks, where Anatole lived, he ran up the lighted steps and the staircase and went in at an open door. There was no one in the ante-room; empty bottles, cloaks, and over-shoes were lying about in disorder: there was a strong smell of spirits; in the distance he heard talking and shouting.

The card-playing and the supper were over, but the party had not broken up. Pierre flung off his cloak, and went into the first room, where there were the remnants of supper, and a footman who, thinking himself unobserved, was emptying the half-full glasses on the sly. In the third room there was a great uproar of laughter, familiar voices shouting, and a bear growling. Eight young men were crowding eagerly about the open window. Three others were busy with a young bear, one of them dragging at its chain and frightening the others with it.

“I bet a hundred on Stevens!” cried one.

“Mind there’s no holding him up!” shouted another.

“I’m for Dolohov!” shouted a third. “Hold the stakes, Kuragin.”

“I say, let Mishka be, we’re betting.”

“All at a go or the wager’s lost!” cried a fourth.

“Yakov, give us a bottle, Yakov!” shouted Anatole himself, a tall, handsome fellow, standing in the middle of the room, in nothing but a thin shirt, open over his chest. “Stop, gentlemen. Here he is, here’s Petrusha, the dear fellow.” He turned to Pierre.

A man of medium height with bright blue eyes, especially remarkable from looking sober in the midst of the drunken uproar, shouted from the window: “Come here. I’ll explain the bets!” This was Dolohov, an officer of the Semenov regiment, a notorious gambler and duellist, who was living with Anatole. Pierre smiled, looking good-humouredly about him.

“I don’t understand. What’s the point?”

“Wait a minute, he’s not drunk. A bottle here,” said Anatole; and taking a glass from the table he went up to Pierre.

“First of all, you must drink.”

Pierre began drinking off glass after glass, looking from under his brows at the drunken group, who had crowded about the window again, and listening to their talk. Anatole kept his glass filled and told him that Dolohov had made a bet with an Englishman, Stevens, a sailor who was staying here, that he, Dolohov, would drink a bottle of rum sitting in the third story window with his legs hanging down outside.

“Come, empty the bottle,” said Anatole, giving Pierre the last glass, “or I won’t let you go!”

“No, I don’t want to,” said Pierre, shoving Anatole away; and he went up to the window.