War and Peace (8 page)

“Why, what did they do?” asked the countess.

“They’re perfect ruffians, especially Dolohov,” said the visitor. “He’s the son of Marya Ivanovna Dolohov, such a worthy woman, you know, but there! Only fancy, the three of them had got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage with them, and were taking it to some actress’s. The police ran up to stop them. They took the police officer, tied him back to back to the bear, and dropped the bear into the Moika: the bear swam with the police offficer on him.”

“A pretty figure he must have looked,
ma chère
,” cried the count, helpless with laughter.

“Ah, such a horror! What is there to laugh at in it, count?”

But the ladies could not help laughing at it themselves.

“It was all they could do to rescue the unlucky man,” the visitor went on. “And that’s the intellectual sort of amusement the son of Count Kirill Vladimirovitch Bezuhov indulges in!” she added. “And people said he was so well educated and clever. That’s how foreign education turns out. I hope no one will receive him here, in spite of his great wealth. They tried to introduce him to me. I gave an absolute refusal: I have daughters.”

“What makes you say the young man is so wealthy?” asked the countess, turning away from the girls, who at once looked as though they did not hear. “He has none but illegitimate children. I believe that … Pierre too is illegitimate.”

The visitor waved her hand. “He has a score of them, I suppose.”

Princess Anna Mihalovna interposed, obviously wishing to show her connections and intimate knowledge with every detail in society.

“This is how the matter stands,” she said meaningly, speaking in a half whisper. “Count Kirill Vladimirovitch’s reputation we all know.… He has lost count of his own children, indeed, but this Pierre was his favourite.”

“How handsome the old man was,” said the countess, “only last year! A finer-looking man I have never seen.”

“Now he’s very much altered,” said Anna Mihalovna. “Well, I was just saying,” she went on, “the direct heir to all the property is Prince Vassily through his wife, but the father is very fond of Pierre, has taken trouble over his education, and he has written to the Emperor … so that no one can tell, if he dies (he’s so ill that it’s expected any moment, and Lorrain has come from Petersburg), whom that immense property will come to, Pierre or Prince Vassily. Forty thousand serfs and millions of money. I know this for a fact, for Prince Vassily himself told me so. And indeed Kirill Vladimirovitch happens to be a third cousin of mine on my mother’s side, and he’s Boris’s godfather too,” she added, apparently attaching no importance to this circumstance.

“Prince Vassily arrived in Moscow yesterday. He’s coming on some inspection business, so I was told,” said the visitor.

“Yes, between ourselves,” said the princess, “that’s a pretext; he has come simply to see Prince Kirill Vladimirovitch, hearing he was in such a serious state.”

“But, really,
ma chère
, that was a capital piece of fun,” said the count; and seeing that the elder visitor did not hear him, he turned to the young ladies. “A funny figure the police officer must have looked; I can just fancy him.”

And showing how the police officer waved his arms about, he went off again into his rich bass laugh, his sides shaking with mirth, as people do laugh who always eat and, still more, drink well. “Then do, please, come to dinner with us,” he said.

A silence followed. The countess looked at her guest, smiling affably, but still not disguising the fact that she would not take it at all amiss now if the guest were to get up and go. The daughter was already fingering at the
folds of her gown and looking interrogatively at her mother, when suddenly they heard in the next room several girls and boys running to the door, and the grating sound of a chair knocked over and a girl of thirteen ran in, hiding something in her short muslin petticoat, and stopped short in the middle of the room. She had evidently bounded so far by mistake, unable to stop in her flight. At the same instant there appeared in the doorway a student with a crimson band on his collar, a young officer in the Guards, a girl of fifteen, and a fat, rosy-cheeked boy in a child’s smock.

The prince jumped up, and swaying from side to side, held his arms out wide round the little girl.

“Ah, here she is!” he cried, laughing. “Our little darling on her fête day!”

“My dear, there is a time for everything,” said the countess, affecting severity. “You’re always spoiling her,
Elie
,” she added to her husband.

“
Bonjour, ma chère, je vous félicite
,” said the visitor. “
Quelle délicieuse enfant!
” she added, turning to her mother.

The dark-eyed little girl, plain, but full of life, with her wide mouth, her childish bare shoulders, which shrugged and panted in her bodice from her rapid motion, her black hair brushed back, her slender bare arms and little legs in lace-edged long drawers and open slippers, was at that charming stage when the girl is no longer a child, while the child is not yet a young girl. Wriggling away from her father, she ran up to her mother, and taking no notice whatever of her severe remarks, she hid her flushed face in her mother’s lace kerchief and broke into laughter. As she laughed she uttered some incoherent phrases about the doll, which was poking out from her petticoat.

“Do you see?… My doll … Mimi … you see …” And Natasha could say no more, it all seemed to her so funny. She sank on her mother’s lap, and went off into such a loud peal of laughter that every one, even the prim visitor, could not help laughing too.

“Come, run along, run along with your monstrosity!” said her mother, pushing her daughter off with a pretence of anger. “This is my younger girl,” she said to the visitor. Natasha, pulling her face away from her mother’s lace kerchief for a minute, peeped down at her through tears of laughter, and hid her face again.

The visitor, forced to admire this domestic scene, thought it suitable to take some part in it.

“Tell me, my dear,” she said, addressing Natasha, “how did you come by your Mimi? Your daughter, I suppose?”

Natasha did not like the tone of condescension to childish things with which the visitor had spoken to her. She made no answer, but stared solemnly at her.

Meanwhile all the younger generation, Boris, the officer, Anna Milhalovna’s son; Nikolay, the student, the count’s elder son; Sonya, the count’s niece; and little Petya, his younger son, had all placed themselves about the drawing-room, and were obviously trying to restrain within the bounds of decorum the excitement and mirth which was brimming over in their faces. Clearly in the back part of the house, from which they had dashed out so impetuously, the conversation had been more amusing than the small-talk in the drawing-room of the scandal of the town, the weather, and Countess Apraxin. Now and then they glanced at one another and could hardly suppress their laughter.

The two young men, the student and the officer, friends from childhood, were of the same age, and both good-looking, but not like each other. Boris was a tall, fair-haired lad with delicate, regular features, and a look of composure on his handsome face. Nikolay was a curly-headed youth, not tall, with an open expression. On his upper lip there were already signs of a black moustache coming, and his whole face expressed impulsiveness and enthusiasm. Nikolay flushed red as he came into the drawing-room. He was unmistakably trying to find something to say, and unable to find anything. Boris, on the contrary, was at home immediately and talked easily and playfully of the doll Mimi, saying that he had known her as a young girl before her nose was broken, and she had grown older during the five years he remembered her, and how her head was cracked right across the skull. As he said this he looked at Natasha. Natasha turned away from him, glanced at her younger brother, who, with a scowl on his face, was shaking with noiseless laughter, and unable to restrain herself, she skipped up and flew out of the room as quickly as her swift little legs could carry her. Boris did not laugh.

“You were meaning to go out, mamma, weren’t you? Do you want the carriage?” he said, addressing his mother with a smile.

“Yes, go along and tell them to get it ready,” she said, smiling. Boris walked slowly to the door and went after Natasha. The stout boy ran wrathfully after them, as though resenting the interruption of his pursuits.

Of the young people, not reckoning the countess’s elder daughter (who was four years older than her sister and behaved quite like a grown-up person) and the young lady visitor, there were left in the drawing-room Nikolay and Sonya, the niece. Sonya was a slender, miniature brunette, with soft eyes shaded by long lashes, thick black hair twisted in two coils round her head, and a skin of a somewhat sallow tint, particularly marked on her bare, thin, but shapely, muscular arms and neck. The smoothness of her movements, the softness and flexibility of her little limbs, and something of slyness and reserve in her manner, suggested a lovely half-grown kitten, which would one day be a charming cat. Apparently she thought it only proper to show an interest in the general conversation and to smile. But against her own will, her eyes turned under their thick, long lashes to her cousin, who was going away into the army, with such girlish, passionate adoration, that her smile could not for one moment impose upon any one, and it was clear that the kitten had only perched there to skip off more energetically than ever and to play with her cousin as soon as they could, like Boris and Natasha, get out of the drawing-room.

“Yes,
ma chère
,” said the old count, addressing the visitor and pointing to his Nikolay; “here his friend Boris has received his commission as an officer, and he’s so fond of him he doesn’t want to be left behind, and is giving up the university and his poor old father to go into the army,
ma chère
. And there was a place all ready for him in the archives department, and all. Isn’t that friendship now?” said the count interrogatively.

“But they do say that war has been declared, you know,” said the visitor.

“They’ve been saying so a long while,” said the count. “They’ll say so again and again, and so it will remain. There’s friendship for you,
ma chère
!” he repeated. “He’s going into the hussars.”

The visitor, not knowing what to say, shook her head.

“It’s not from friendship at all,” answered Nikolay, flushing hotly, and denying it as though it were some disgraceful imputation. “Not friendship at all, but simply I feel drawn to the military service.”

He looked round at his cousin and the young lady visitor; both looked at him with a smile of approval.

“Schubert’s dining with us to-night, the colonel of the Pavologradsky
regiment of hussars. He has been here on leave, and is taking him with him. There’s no help for it,” said the count, shrugging his shoulders and speaking playfully of what evidently was a source of much distress to him.

“I’ve told you already, papa,” said his son, “that if you’re unwilling to let me go, I’ll stay. But I know I’m no good for anything except in the army. I’m not a diplomatist, or a government clerk. I’m not clever at disguising my feelings,” he said, glancing repeatedly with the coquetry of handsome youth at Sonya and the young lady.

The kitten, her eyes riveted on him, seemed on the point of breaking into frolic, and showing her cat-like nature.

“Well, well, it’s all right!” said the old count; “he always gets so hot. Bonaparte’s turned all their heads; they’re all dreaming of how he rose from a lieutenant to be an emperor. Well, and so may it turn out again, please God,” he added, not noticing the visitor’s sarcastic smile.

While their elders began talking about Bonaparte, Julie, Madame Karagin’s daughter, turned to young Rostov.

“What a pity you weren’t at the Arharovs’ on Thursday. I was so dull without you,” she said, giving him a tender smile. The youth, highly flattered, moved with a coquettish smile nearer her, and entered into a conversation apart with the smiling Julie, entirely unaware that his unconscious smile had dealt a jealous stab to the heart of Sonya, who was flushing crimson and assuming a forced smile. In the middle of his talk with Julie he glanced round at her. Sonya gave him an intensely furious look, and, hardly able to restrain her tears, though there was still a constrained smile on her lips, she got up and went out of the room. All Nikolay’s animation was gone. He waited for the first break in the conversation, and, with a face of distress, walked out of the room to look for Sonya.

“How all the young things wear their hearts on their sleeves!” said Anna Mihalovna, pointing to Nikolay’s retreating figure. “
Cousinage, dangereux voisinage
,” she added.

“Yes,” said the countess, when the sunshine that had come into the drawing-room with the young people had vanished. She was, as it were, replying to a question which no one had put to her, but which was always in her thoughts: “What miseries, what anxieties one has gone through for the happiness one has in them now! And even now one feels really more dread than joy over them. One’s always in terror! At this age particularly when there are so many dangers both for girls and boys.”

“Everything depends on bringing up,” said the visitor.

“Yes, you are right,” the countess went on. “So far I have been, thank God, my children’s friend and have enjoyed their full confidence,” said the countess, repeating the error of so many parents, who imagine their children have no secrets from them. “I know I shall always be first in my children’s confidence, and that Nikolay, if, with his impulsive character, he does get into mischief (boys will be boys) it won’t be like these Petersburg young gentlemen.”

“Yes, they’re capital children, capital children,” assented the count, who always solved all perplexing questions by deciding that everything was capital. “Fancy now, his taking it into his head to be an hussar! But what can one expect,
ma chère
?”

“What a sweet little thing your younger girl is!” said the visitor. “Full of fun and mischief!”