| PIERRE was sitting opposite Dolohov and Nikolay Rostov. He ate greedily and drank heavily, as he always did. But those who knew him slightly could see that some great change was taking place in him that day. He was silent all through dinner, and blinking and screwing up his eyes, looked about him, or letting his eyes rest on something with an air of complete absent-mindedness, rubbed the bridge of his nose with his finger. His face was depressed and gloomy. He seemed not to be seeing or hearing what was passing about him and to be thinking of some one thing, something painful and unsettled. This unsettled question that worried him was due to the hints dropped by the princess, his cousin, at Moscow in regard to Dolohov’s close intimacy with his wife, and to an anonymous letter he had received that morning, which, with the vile jocoseness peculiar to all anonymous letters, had said that he didn’t seem to see clearly through his spectacles, and that his wife’s connection with Dolohov was a secret from no one but himself. Pierre did not absolutely believe either the princess’s hints, or the anonymous letter, but he was afraid now to look at Dolohov, who sat opposite him. Every time his glance casually met Dolohov’s handsome, insolent eyes, Pierre felt as though something awful, hideous was rising up in his soul, and he made haste to turn away. Involuntarily recalling all his wife’s past and her attitude to Dolohov, Pierre saw clearly that what was said in the letter might well be true, might at least appear to be the truth, if only it had not related to his wife. Pierre could not help recalling how Dolohov, who had been completely reinstated, had returned to Petersburg and come to see him. Dolohov had taken advantage of his friendly relations with Pierre in their old rowdy days, had come straight to his house, and Pierre had established him in it and lent him money. Pierre recalled how Ellen, smiling, had expressed her dissatisfaction at Dolohov’s staying in their house, and how cynically Dolohov had praised his wife’s beauty to him, and how he had never since left them up to the time of their coming to Moscow. “Yes, he is very handsome,” thought Pierre, “and I know him. There would be a particular charm for him in disgracing my name and turning me into ridicule, just because I have exerted myself in his behalf, have befriended him and helped him. I know, I understand what zest that would be sure to give to his betrayal of me, if it were true. Yes, if it were true, but I don’t believe it. I have no right to and I can’t believe it.” He recalled the expression on Dolohov’s face in his moments of cruelty, such as when he was tying the police officer on to the bear and dropping him into the water, or when he had utterly without provocation challenged a man to a duel or killed a sledge-driver’s horse with a shot from his pistol. That expression often came into Dolohov’s face when he was looking at him. “Yes, he’s a duelling bully,” thought Pierre; “to him it means nothing to kill a man, it must seem to him that every one’s afraid of him. He must like it. He must think I am afraid of him. And, in fact, I really am afraid of him,” Pierre mused; and again at these thoughts he felt as though something terrible and hideous were rising up in his soul. Dolohov, Denisov, and Rostov were sitting facing Pierre and seemed to be greatly enjoying themselves. Rostov talked away merrily to his two friends, of whom one was a dashing hussar, the other a notorious duellist and scapegrace, and now and then cast ironical glances at Pierre, whose appearance at the dinner was a striking one, with his preoccupied, absent-minded, massive figure. Rostov looked with disfavour upon Pierre. In the first place, because Pierre, in the eyes of the smart hussar, was a rich civilian, and husband of a beauty, was altogether, in fact, an old woman. And secondly, because Pierre in his preoccupation and absent-mindedness had not recognised Rostov and had failed to respond to his bow. When they got up to drink the health of the Tsar, Pierre, plunged in thought, did not rise nor take up his glass. “What are you about?” Rostov shouted to him, looking at him with enthusiastic and exasperated eyes. “Don’t you hear: the health of our sovereign the Emperor!” Pierre with a sigh obeyed, got up, emptied his glass, and waiting till all were seated again, he turned with his kindly smile to Rostov. “Why, I didn’t recognise you,” he said. But Rostov had no thoughts for him, he was shouting “Hurrah!” “Why don’t you renew the acquaintance?” said Dolohov to Rostov. “Oh, bother him, he’s a fool,” said Rostov. “One has to be sweet to the husbands of pretty women,” said Denisov. Pierre did not hear what they were saying, but he knew they were talking of him. He flushed and turned away. “Well, now to the health of pretty women,” said Dolohov, and with a serious expression, though a smile lurked in the corners of his mouth, he turned to Pierre. “To the health of pretty women, Petrusha, and their lovers too,” he said. Pierre, with downcast eyes, sipped his glass, without looking at Dolohov or answering him. The footman, distributing copies of Kutuzov’s cantata, laid a copy by Pierre, as one of the more honoured guests. He would have taken it, but Dolohov bent forward, snatched the paper out of his hands and began reading it. Pierre glanced at Dolohov, and his eyes dropped; something terrible and hideous, that had been torturing him all through the dinner, rose up and took possession of him. He bent the whole of his ungainly person across the table. “Don’t you dare to take it!” he shouted. Hearing that shout and seeing to whom it was addressed, Nesvitsky and his neighbour on the right side turned in haste and alarm to Bezuhov. “Hush, hush, what are you about?” whispered panic-stricken voices. Dolohov looked at Pierre with his clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, still with the same smile, as though he were saying: “Come now, this is what I like.” “I won’t give it up,” he said distinctly. Pale and with quivering lips, Pierre snatched the copy. “You…you…blackguard!…I challenge you,” he said, and moving back his chair, he got up from the table. At the second Pierre did this and uttered these words he felt that the question of his wife’s guilt, that had been torturing him for the last four and twenty hours, was finally and incontestably answered in the affirmative. He hated her and was severed from her for ever. In spite of Denisov’s entreaties that Rostov would have nothing to do with the affair, Rostov agreed to be Dolohov’s second, and after dinner he discussed with Nesvitsky, Bezuhov’s second, the arrangements for the duel. Pierre had gone home, but Rostov with Dolohov and Denisov stayed on at the club listening to the gypsies and the singers till late in the evening. “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. |
