| THE GREY-HAIRED VALET was sitting in the waiting-room dozing and listening to the prince’s snoring in his immense study. From a far-off part of the house there came through closed doors the sound of difficult passages of a sonata of Dusseck’s repeated twenty times over. At that moment a carriage and a little cart drove up to the steps, and Prince Andrey got out of the carriage, helped his little wife out and let her pass into the house before him. Grey Tihon in his wig, popping out at the door of the waiting-room, informed him in a whisper that the prince was taking a nap and made haste to close the door. Tihon knew that no extraordinary event, not even the arrival of his son, would be permitted to break through the routine of the day. Prince Andrey was apparently as well aware of the fact as Tihon. He looked at his watch as though to ascertain whether his father’s habits had changed during the time he had not seen him, and satisfying himself that they were unchanged, he turned to his wife. “He will get up in twenty minutes. Let’s go to Marie,” he said. The little princess had grown stouter during this time, but her short upper lip, with a smile and the faint moustache on it, rose as gaily and charmingly as ever when she spoke. “Why, it is a palace,” she said to her husband, looking round her with exactly the expression with which people pay compliments to the host at a ball. “Come, quick, quick!” As she looked about her, she smiled at Tihon and at her husband, and at the footman who was showing them in. “It is Marie practising? Let us go quietly, we must surprise her.” Prince Andrey followed her with a courteous and depressed expression. “You’re looking older, Tihon,” he said as he passed to the old man, who was kissing his hand. Before they had reached the room, from which the sounds of the clavichord were coming, the pretty, fair-haired Frenchwoman emerged from a side-door. Mademoiselle Bourienne seemed overwhelmed with delight. “Ah, what a pleasure for the princess!” she exclaimed. “At last! I must tell her.” “No, no, please not” … said the little princess, kissing her. “You are Mademoiselle Bourienne; I know you already through my sister-in-law’s friendship for you. She does not expect us!” They went up to the door of the divan-room, from which came the sound of the same passage repeated over and over again. Prince Andrey stood still frowning as though in expectation of something unpleasant. The little princess went in. The passage broke off in the middle; he heard an exclamation, the heavy tread of Princess Marya, and the sound of kissing. When Prince Andrey went in, the two ladies, who had only seen each other once for a short time at Prince Andrey’s wedding, were clasped in each other’s arms, warmly pressing their lips to the first place each had chanced upon. Mademoiselle Bourienne was standing near them, her hands pressed to her heart; she was smiling devoutly, apparently equally ready to weep and to laugh. Prince Andrey shrugged his shoulders, and scowled as lovers of music scowl when they hear a false note. The two ladies let each other go; then hastened again, as though each afraid of being remiss, to hug each other, began kissing each other’s hands and pulling them away, and then fell to kissing each other on the face again. Then they quite astonished Prince Andrey by both suddenly bursting into tears and beginning the kissing over again. Mademoiselle Bourienne cried too. Prince Andrey was unmistakably ill at ease. But to the two women it seemed such a natural thing that they should weep; it seemed never to have occurred to them that their meeting could have taken place without tears. “Ah, ma chère!… Ah, Marie!” … both the ladies began talking at once, and they laughed. “I had a dream last night. Then you did not expect us? O Marie, you have got thinner.” “And you are looking better …” “I recognized the princess at once,” put in Mademoiselle Bourienne. “And I had no idea!” … cried Princess Marya. “Ah, Andrey, I did not see you.” Prince Andrey and his sister kissed each other’s hands, and he told her she was just as great a cry-baby as she always had been. Princess Marya turned to her brother, and through her tears, her great, luminous eyes, that were beautiful at that instant, rested with a loving, warm and gentle gaze on Prince Andrey’s face. The little princess talked incessantly. The short, downy upper lip was continually flying down to meet the rosy, lower lip when necessary, and parting again in a smile of gleaming teeth and eyes. The little princess described an incident that had occurred to them on Spasskoe hill, and might have been serious for her in her condition. And immediately after that she communicated the intelligence that she had left all her clothes in Petersburg, and God knew what she would have to go about in here, and that Andrey was quite changed, and that Kitty Odintsov had married an old man, and that a suitor had turned up for Princess Marya, “who was a suitor worth having,” but that they would talk about that later. Princess Marya was still gazing mutely at her brother, and her beautiful eyes were full of love and melancholy. It was clear that her thoughts were following a train of their own, apart from the chatter of her sister-in-law. In the middle of the latter’s description of the last fête-day at Petersburg, she addressed her brother. “And is it quite settled that you are going to the war, Andrey?” she said, sighing. Liza sighed too. “Yes, and to-morrow too,” answered her brother. “He is deserting me here, and Heaven knows why, when he might have had promotion …” Princess Marya did not listen to the end, but following her own train of thought, she turned to her sister-in-law, letting her affectionate eyes rest on her waist. “Is it really true?” she said. The face of her sister-in-law changed. She sighed. “Yes, it’s true,” she said. “Oh! It’s very dreadful …” Liza’s lip drooped. She put her face close to her sister-in-law’s face, and again she unexpectedly began to cry. “She needs rest,” said Prince Andrey, frowning. “Don’t you, Liza? Take her to your room, while I go to father. How is he—just the same?” “The same, just the same; I don’t know what you will think,” Princess Marya answered joyfully. “And the same hours, and the walks about the avenues, and the lathe?” asked Prince Andrey with a scarcely perceptible smile, showing that, in spite of all his love and respect for his father, he recognised his weaknesses. “The same hours and the lathe, mathematics too, and my geometry lessons,” Princess Marya answered gaily, as though those lessons were one of the most delightful events of her life. When the twenty minutes had elapsed, and the time for the old prince to get up had come, Tihon came to call the young man to his father. The old man made a departure from his ordinary routine in honour of his son’s arrival. He directed that he should be admitted into his apartments during his time for dressing, before dinner. The old prince used to wear the old-fashioned dress, the kaftan and powder. And when Prince Andrey—not with the disdainful face and manners with which he walked into drawing-rooms, but with the eager face with which he had talked to Pierre—went in to his father’s room, the old gentleman was in his dressing-room sitting in a roomy morocco chair in a peignoir, with his head in the hands of Tihon. “Ah! the warrior! So you want to fight Bonaparte?” said the old man, shaking his powdered head as far as his plaited tail, which was in Tihon’s hands, would permit him. “Mind you look sharp after him, at any rate, or he’ll soon be putting us on the list of his subjects. How are you?” And he held out his cheek to him. The old gentleman was in excellent humour after his nap before dinner. (He used to say that sleep after dinner was silver, but before dinner it was golden.) He took delighted, sidelong glances at his son from under his thick, overhanging brows. Prince Andrey went up and kissed his father on the spot indicated for him. He made no reply on his father’s favourite topic—jesting banter at the military men of the period, and particularly at Bonaparte. “Yes, I have come to you, father, bringing a wife with child,” said Prince Andrey, with eager and reverential eyes watching every movement of his father’s face. “How is your health?” “None but fools, my lad, and profligates are unwell, and you know me; busy from morning till night and temperate, so of course I’m well.” “Thank God,” said his son, smiling. “God’s not much to do with the matter. Come, tell me,” the old man went on, going back to his favourite hobby, “how have the Germans trained you to fight with Bonaparte on their new scientific method—strategy as they call it?” Prince Andrey smiled. “Give me time to recover myself, father,” he said, with a smile that showed that his father’s failings did not prevent his respecting and loving him. “Why, I have only just got here.” “Nonsense, nonsense,” cried the old man, shaking his tail to try whether it were tightly plaited, and taking his son by the hand. “The house is ready for your wife. Marie will look after her and show her everything, and talk nineteen to the dozen with her too. That’s their feminine way. I’m glad to have her. Sit down, talk to me. Mihelson’s army, I understand, Tolstoy’s too … a simultaneous expedition … but what’s the army of the South going to do? Prussia, her neutrality … I know all that. What of Austria?” he said, getting up from his chair and walking about the room, with Tihon running after him, giving him various articles of his apparel. “What about Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?” Prince Andrey, seeing the urgency of his father’s questions, began explaining the plan of operations of the proposed campaign, speaking at first reluctantly, but becoming more interested as he went on, and unconsciously from habit passing from Russian into French. He told him how an army of ninety thousand troops was to threaten Prussia so as to drive her out of her neutrality and draw her into the war, how part of these troops were to join the Swedish troops at Strahlsund, how two hundred and twenty thousand Austrians were to combine with a hundred thousand Russians in Italy and on the Rhine, and how fifty thousand Russians and fifty thousand English troops were to meet at Naples, and how the army, forming a total of five hundred thousand, was to attack the French on different sides at once. The old prince did not manifest the slightest interest in what he told him. He went on dressing, as he walked about, apparently not listening, and three times he unexpectedly interrupted him. Once he stopped him and shouted: “the white one! the white one!” This meant that Tihon had not given him the waistcoat he wanted. Another time, he stood still, asked: “And will she be confined soon?” and shook his head reproachfully: “That’s bad! Go on, go on.” The third time was when Prince Andrey was just finishing his description. The old man hummed in French, in his falsetto old voice: “Malbrook goes off to battle, God knows when he’ll come back.” His son only smiled. “I don’t say that this is a plan I approve of,” he said; “I’m only telling you what it is. Napoleon has made a plan by now as good as this one.” “Well, you have told me nothing new.” And thoughtfully the old man repeated, speaking quickly to himself: “God knows when he’ll come back. Go into the dining-room.” |
