by Leo Tolstoy
'Oh, it's all right for you,' she said, 'you've got what you wanted.' She buried her face in her handkerchief and ran sobbing out of the room.
Then came Prince Vasily. He staggered as far as the sofa where Pierre was sitting and sank down on it, covering his eyes with one hand. Pierre noticed he was pale, and his jaw was quivering and twitching as if he was having a fit.
'Oh, my dear boy,' he said, taking Pierre by the elbow, his voice ringing with a sincerity and weakness that Pierre had never seen in him before, 'we sin, we cheat, and what's it all for? I'm over fifty, my friend . . . And I too . . . Everything ends in death, everything does. Death is so horrible . . .' And he burst into tears.
Anna Mikhaylovna was the last to emerge. She came over to Pierre with slow and quiet steps. 'Pierre,' she said. Pierre looked inquiringly at her. She kissed the young man on the forehead, wetting him with her tears. She did not speak for a while, but then she said, 'He's gone . . .'
Pierre gazed at her over his spectacles.
'Come on. I'll take you in again. Cry if you can. There is nothing like tears for the easing of pain.' She led him into the dark room, and Pierre was glad that in there no one could see his face. Anna Mikhaylovna left him alone, and when she came back he had put one arm under his head and was fast asleep.
In the morning Anna Mikhaylovna said to Pierre, 'Yes, my dear, it is a great loss for all of us. I cannot speak for you. But the Lord will keep you. You are still young, and now you are, I hope, at the head of an immense fortune. The will has not yet been opened. I know you well enough to be sure you won't let this go to your head, but it does impose certain duties, and you must be a man.'
Pierre said nothing.
'Perhaps, later, I may tell you, my dear, that if I had not been there . . . God knows what might have happened. You know my uncle promised me only the day before yesterday he wouldn't forget Boris. But he didn't have enough time. I do hope, my dear friend, that you will carry out your father's wishes.'
Pierre didn't understand a word she was saying. Blushing shyly, he looked at Anna Mikhaylovna and still said nothing. After her little talk with him, Anna Mikhaylovna drove home to the Rostovs, and went to bed. When she awoke the following morning, she told the Rostovs and all her acquaintances the details of Count Bezukhov's death. She said the count had died exactly as she would wish to die, his end had been more than touching, it had been truly inspiring, the last meeting between father and son had been so moving that she couldn't recall it without weeping, and she couldn't say who had behaved better in those dreadful moments - the father, who had remembered everything and everyone so well at the last and had said such moving things to his son, or Pierre, who made such a heartbreaking sight, so utterly distraught and yet struggling to hide his grief so as not to upset his dying father. 'It is hard to bear, but it does one good. It uplifts the soul to see such men as the old count and his worthy son,' she said. She whispered to them in the strictest confidence, sotto voce, about the machinations of the princess and Prince Vasily, of which she could not approve.
CHAPTER 22
At Bald Hills, the estate of Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky, the arrival of young Prince Andrey and his wife was expected daily, but this expectation did not disrupt the orderly system according to which life in the old prince's household was organized. Prince Nikolay, a former commander-in-chief (nicknamed 'The King of Prussia' in high society), had been exiled to his estate in the reign of Paul,36 and had remained at Bald Hills ever since with his daughter, Princess Marya, and her companion, Mademoiselle Bourienne. Under the new Tsar, even though he was now allowed to visit the capital cities, he had stayed on resolutely in the country, saying that anyone who needed him could travel the hundred miles from Moscow to Bald Hills, while he himself wanted nobody and needed nothing. He used to claim that there were only two sources of human depravity - idleness and superstition; and only two virtues - hard work and intelligence. He was educating his daughter and in order to inculcate these two cardinal virtues he was still teaching her algebra and geometry when she was nearly twenty, and had organized her whole life around one unending course of study. He himself had many occupations - writing his memoirs, solving mathematical problems, turning snuff-boxes on his lathe, working at his garden or supervising the building work which never stopped on his estate. Since the main prerequisite for hard work is good order, good order dictated his lifestyle to the last degree of exactitude. The details of his appearances at the meal-table were unvarying, timed to the minute rather than the hour. With those around him, from daughter to servant, the prince was brusque and always demanding so that without actually being cruel he inspired the kind of fear and respect that the cruellest of men would have found difficult to achieve. Although he was now retired and without political influence of any kind, every senior figure in the province where he lived felt obliged to call on him, and they were no different from the architect, the gardener or Princess Marya - they had to wait in the lofty antechamber until the precise time set for the prince's arrival. And in that room everyone felt the same kind of deference bordering on dread as the immensely tall door of the study swung open to reveal the small figure of an old man in a powdered wig, with tiny withered hands and bushy grey eyebrows that were prone to gather in a frown and thus hide the gleam in his shrewd, young man's eyes.
On the morning of the day when the young people were expected, Princess Marya went to the antechamber as usual at lesson time to wish her father good morning, crossing herself with dread in her heart and saying a silent prayer. Every day she went in like this to her father, and every day she prayed for a happy outcome to their daily encounter. The powdered old manservant rose smoothly from his seat there and whispered, 'Please go through.'
From the other side of the door came the steady hum of a lathe. The princess eased the door open timidly and stood in the doorway. The prince, busy at the lathe, glanced up once and went on with his work.
It was a vast work-room full of objects evidently in constant use. A huge table with books and plans laid out, tall glass-fronted bookcases with keys in the doors, a high desk for writing standing up, with an open note-book on top, the carpenter's lathe with a scattering of tools and shavings - all of this betokened constant, continually varied and systematic hard work. The motion of the prince's tiny foot in its silver-trimmed Tartar bootee and the firm pressure of his lean and sinewy hand spoke of resolute strength and indefatigable energy taken through to old age. A few more turns of the lathe and he took his foot off the pedal, wiped a chisel, dropped it into a leather pouch attached to the lathe, came to the table and called his daughter over. He was not one to bother with blessings for his children, and he simply offered her a bristly unshaven cheek before looking her over in a manner that somehow managed to mix strictness with care and tenderness. Then he spoke. 'You all right? Very well, sit down!'
He took out a geometry exercise-book with his writing in it, and dragged a chair over with one foot.
'For tomorrow,' he said, turning rapidly to a particular page and using his thick nail to mark out two paragraphs together. The princess bent over the table and the exercise-book. 'Wait, there's a letter for you,' said the old man suddenly, taking an envelope with a woman's handwriting on it from a pouch hanging above the table and tossing it down before her.
The princess coloured up blotchy red at the sight of the letter. She took it hurriedly and bent down to open it.
'From your Heloise?'37 asked the prince, with a cold smile, showing teeth that were yellowing but still strong.
'Yes, it's from Julie,' said the princess, with a timid glance and an equally timid smile.
'Two more letters I'll let through, but the third one I shall read,' said the prince severely. 'I'm afraid you must be writing a lot of nonsense. The third one I shall read.'
'Read this one, Father,' answered the princess, redder still, and she offered him the letter.
'The third one, I said the third one,' the prince cried brusquely, thrusting the letter away be
fore leaning his elbows on the table and bringing up the book with the geometrical figures in it.
'Now, madam,' began the old man, poring over the book close to his daughter and placing one arm along the back of the chair she was sitting on, so that the princess felt herself completely swamped by her father and his long-familiar acrid odour of tobacco and old age. 'Come along, madam, these triangles are equal. Be so good as to note that the angle ABC . . .'
The princess glanced in trepidation at her father's gleaming eyes so close beside her. More red blotches spread across her face, and she was obviously taking nothing in. So scared was she that fear itself prevented her from understanding any of the explanations her father went on to give, however clear they might have been. Whoever was to blame, teacher or pupil, every day the selfsame scene repeated itself. The princess's eyes glazed over, she could see and hear nothing, she could feel nothing but the close proximity of her strict father with his desiccated face, stale breath and body odour, and she could think of nothing but how to get away from there as soon as possible and somehow work out the problem in the freedom of her room. The old man would lose patience, scraping his chair backwards and forwards, then struggle to control himself, not to lose his temper, which he almost always did, and then he shouted at her, sometimes flinging the book across the room.
The princess got one of her answers wrong.
'How can you be so stupid?' he roared, pushing the book away, and turning from her sharply. But then he got up, paced up and down, laid a hand on the princess's hair and sat down again. He drew close to the table and went on with his explanations.
'No, no, you can't do that,' he said, as Princess Marya took the exercise-book with the homework in it, closed it and made as if to leave the room. 'Mathematics is a great subject, madam. And you, being like the silly young ladies of today is something I do not want. Persevere and all will come clear.' He patted her on the cheek. 'This will drive the silliness out of your head.' She tried to get away, but he signalled for her to stop and took a new book with uncut pages38 down from the high desk.
'And here's a book from your Heloise. Hm . . . A Key to the Mystery . . .39 Something religious. Well, I don't interfere with anybody's religious faith . . . I've had a look at it. Here you are. Go on then, run along.'
He patted her on the shoulder, and went himself to close the door after her.
Princess Marya went back to her room with that gloomy, frightened look that rarely left her, making her sickly, plain face even plainer. She sat down at her desk with its miniature portraits and scattered books and writing paper. The princess was as untidy as her father was tidy. She put down the geometry exercise-book and eagerly tore open the letter. It was from her dearest childhood friend, the very Julie Karagin who had been at the Rostovs' name-day party, and was written in French: My dear and excellent friend,
What a terrible and awful thing absence is! I tell myself that half of my existence and happiness is in you, that for all the distance that divides us, our hearts are united by indissoluble bonds, yet my own rebels against destiny, and in spite of the pleasures and distractions that surround me, I cannot overcome a certain secret sadness which I have sensed at the bottom of my heart ever since our separation. Why are we not together as we were last summer in your huge study, on that blue sofa, the 'sofa of secrets'? Why can I not, as I did three months ago, draw new moral strength from those eyes of yours, so gentle, so calm, so penetrating, eyes that I have loved so well and seem to see before me even as I write.
At this point, Princess Marya sighed and looked around at the tall mirror to her right. The glass reflected a feeble, unattractive body and a skinny face. The ever-gloomy eyes looked at themselves more hopelessly than ever. 'She's flattering me,' thought the princess as she turned back to read on. But Julie was not flattering her friend; her eyes were large, deep and radiant (sometimes a warm light seemed to pour out of them), really so winsome that very often, in spite of the plainness of the face as a whole, her eyes held a greater appeal than mere beauty. But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression in her own eyes, an expression they assumed only when she wasn't thinking about herself. Like everyone else's, her face took on a strained, artificial and disagreeable expression the moment she looked at herself in the mirror.
She read on.
All Moscow talks only of war. One of my brothers is abroad and the other is in the guards, who are about to march to the frontier. Our dear Emperor has left Petersburg and he now intends, so it is said, to expose his precious person to the hazards of war. God grant that the Corsican monster who is destroying the peace of Europe may be brought down by the angel whom the Almighty in his mercy has given us as sovereign. Apart from my brothers, this war has deprived me of one of those dearest to my heart. I refer to young Nikolay Rostov, who with all his keenness could not endure inaction, and who has left university to enrol in the army. Well, dear Marie, I must admit that, for all his extreme youth, his departure for the army has caused me great pain. This young man, of whom I spoke to you last summer, has so much of that nobility and true youthfulness that is rarely encountered in our age among our men who are old by twenty. Above all, he has so much openness and emotion. He is so pure and poetic that my acquaintance with him, brief though it has been, has been one of the sweetest pleasures of my poor heart, which has already suffered so much. One day I will tell you about our farewells and all that was said between us as we parted. As yet, it is all too fresh in my mind. Ah, dear friend, you are fortunate in knowing none of these joys and these troubles which are so poignant. Fortunate, because the latter are usually the stronger! I know only too well that Count Nikolay is too young ever to become more than a friend to me, but our sweet friendship, our closeness, so poetic and so pure, these have satisfied my heart's need. But enough of this. The great news of the day, the talk of all Moscow, is the death of old Count Bezukhov, and his inheritance. Just imagine, the three princesses have got almost nothing, Prince Vasily nothing at all, and everything has gone to Monsieur Pierre, who - to crown it all - has been acknowledged as a legitimate son and therefore as Count Bezukhov, owner of the finest fortune in Russia. They do say Prince Vasily played a very nasty part in this story and he has returned to Petersburg all down in the mouth.
I confess I understand very little about all these matters - legacies and wills - but I do know that ever since the young man whom we all used to know as plain Monsieur Pierre became Count Bezukhov and owner of one of the largest fortunes in Russia I have been greatly amused to observe certain changes in the tone and manner of mammas burdened with daughters who need to be married, and of the young ladies themselves, towards that person - who, incidentally, has always seemed to me a miserable specimen of manhood. As people have found it amusing to keep marrying me off for the last two years, usually to husbands I don't even know, the Moscow Marriage News is now making a Countess Bezukhov out of me. But I am sure you will appreciate that I have no desire whatsoever to become such. Speaking of marriage, by the way, did you know that Everybody's Auntie, Anna Mikhaylovna, has confided to me, under the seal of the strictest confidence, a marriage scheme for you. It is with none other than Prince Vasily's son, Anatole. They would like him to settle down and marry someone rich and distinguished, and his relatives' choice has fallen on you. I don't know how you will look on this matter, but, well, I considered it my duty to warn you in advance. He is said to be very handsome and very naughty, and that's all I have been able to find out about him.
That's enough gossiping. I'm coming to the end of my second sheet, and mamma has sent for me - we are dining with the Apraksins. Do read the mystical book which I am sending you - it is all the rage here. There are some things in this book which are difficult for our feeble human thinking to grasp, though it is an admirable book, and reading it is relaxing and spiritually uplifting. Goodbye for now. My respects to your father and my compliments to Mlle Bourienne.
I embrace you and continue to love you.
JULIE
P.S. Do send news of your brother and his charming little wife.
Princess Marya paused, pensive and smiling, her radiant eyes lighting up and utterly transforming her face, then she got up quickly and with her heavy tread went over to the table. She took out some paper and soon her hand was speeding across it. This is what she wrote, also in French: Dear and excellent friend,
Your letter of the 13th was a delight to read. So you do still love me, my poetic Julie, and absence, which you so roundly denounce, has not had its usual effect on you. You complain about absence - what would I say, if I could only dare to complain, deprived as I am of all who are dear to me? Oh, if we had no religion to console us, life would be so very sad. Why do you imagine I should look askance when you tell me of your affection for that young man? In these matters I am hard on myself and no one else. I understand such feelings in other people even if I have never had them myself, and if I cannot condone them, neither do I condemn them. Only it seems to me that Christian love, love for one's neighbour, love for one's enemies, is more deserving, sweeter, more beautiful than any feelings aroused by a young man's lovely eyes in a romantically inclined young girl like yourself.
News of Count Bezukhov's death reached us before your letter; my father was very moved by it. He says the count was the last but one representative of the Great Century40 and he'll be the next to go, but he will do his best to put this off as long as possible. God save us from that terrible misfortune. I cannot share your opinion of Pierre, whom I knew as a child. He always seemed to me to have an excellent heart, and this is the quality I value most in people. As to his inheritance and the part played in it by Prince Vasily, it is very sad for both of them. Oh, my dear friend, our divine Saviour's words, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,41 are terribly true. I pity Prince Vasily, but I am sorrier still for Pierre. So young and burdened with this wealth, what temptations will he have to resist! If anyone asked what I would like most in the world, it would be to be poorer than the poorest beggar. Many thanks, dear friend, for the work you have sent me which is all the rage where you are. However, since you tell me that amid several good things there are others which our feeble human thinking cannot grasp, it seems to me rather useless to spend time reading something unintelligible, which in the nature of things must turn out to be fruitless. I have never been able to understand the passion that some people have for befogging their thoughts by cleaving to the study of mystical books which can only awaken doubts in their minds, while inflaming the imagination and inclining them towards exaggeration, which goes right against Christian simplicity. Let us read the Apostles and the Gospel. Let us not seek to penetrate what they contain that is mysterious, for how dare we presume, miserable sinners that we are, to admit ourselves into the terrible and holy secrets of Providence while we still wear this mortal flesh that raises an impenetrable veil between us and the Eternal? Let us rather confine ourselves to the study of those sublime principles which our divine Saviour has left for our guidance here below; let us seek to obey and to follow them; let us persuade ourselves that the less scope we give to our feeble human minds the more pleasing this will be to God, who rejects all knowledge that cometh not from him and the less we seek to peruse that which he has been pleased to conceal from us, the sooner will he reveal it to us through his Holy Spirit.