War and Peace (221 page)

“Yes, I have noticed that,” said Countess Marya.

“When I told him that duty and sworn allegiance come before everything, he began arguing God knows what. It was a pity you were not there. What would you have said?”

“To my thinking, you were quite right. I told Natasha so. Pierre says that every one is suffering, and being ill-treated and corrupted, and that it’s our duty to help our neighbours. Of course, he is right,” said Countess Marya; “but he forgets that we have other nearer duties, which God Himself has marked out for us, and that we may run risks for ourselves, but not for our children.”

“Yes, yes, that’s just what I told him,” cried Nikolay, who actually fancied he had said just that. “And they had all their say out about loving one’s neighbour, and Christianity, and all the rest of it, before Nikolinka, who had slipped in there, and was pulling all my things to pieces.”

“Ah, do you know, Nikolay, I am so often worried about Nikolinka,” said Countess Marya. “He is such an exceptional boy. And I am afraid I neglect him for my own. All of us have our children; we all have our own ties; while he has nobody. He is always alone with his thoughts.”

“Well, I don’t think you have anything to reproach yourself with on his account. Everything the fondest mother could do for her son you have done, and are doing, for him. And of course I am glad you do. He is a splendid boy, splendid! This evening he was lost in a sort of dream listening to Pierre. And only fancy, we got up to go in to supper. I look; and there he has broken everything on my table to fragments, and he told me of it at once. I have never known him to tell a fib. He’s a splendid boy!” repeated Nikolay, who did not in his heart like Nikolinka, but always felt moved to acknowledge that he was a splendid fellow.

“Still I am not the same as a mother,” said Countess Marya. “I feel that it’s not the same, and it worries me. He’s a wonderful boy; but I am awfully afraid for him. Companionship will be good for him.”

“Oh, well, it’s not for long; next summer I shall take him to Petersburg,” said Nikolay. “Yes, Pierre always was, and always will be, a dreamer,” he went on, returning to the discussion in the study, which had evidently worked on his feelings. “Why, what concern is all that of mine—Araktcheev’s misdoings, and all the rest of it—what concern was it of mine, when at the time of our marriage I had so many debts that they were going to put me in prison, and a mother who couldn’t see it or understand it. And then you, and the children, and my work. It’s not for my own pleasure I am from morning to night looking after the men, or in the counting-house. No, I know I must work to comfort my mother, repay you, and not leave my children in beggary, as I was left myself.”

Countess Marya wanted to tell him that man does not live by bread alone; that he attached too much importance to this
work
. But she knew that she must not say this, and that it would be useless. She only took his hand and kissed it. He accepted this gesture on his wife’s part as a sign of assent and approval of his words, and after a few moments of silent thought he went on thinking aloud.

“Do you know, Marie,” he said, “Ilya Mitrofanitch” (this was a steward of his) “was here to-day from the Tambov estate, and he tells me they will give eighty thousand for the forest.” And with an eager face Nikolay began talking of the possibility of buying Otradnoe back within a very short time. “Another ten years of life, and I shall leave the children … in a capital position.”

Countess Marya listened to her husband, and understood all he said to her. She knew that when he was thus thinking aloud, he would sometimes ask what he had been saying, and was vexed when he noticed she had been thinking of something else. But she had to make a great effort to attend, because she did not feel the slightest interest in what he was saying to her. She looked at him, and though she would not exactly think of other things, her feelings were elsewhere. She felt a submissive, tender love for this man, who could never understand all that she understood; and she seemed, for that very reason, to love him the more, with a shade of passionate tenderness. Apart from that feeling, which absorbed her entirely, and prevented her from following the details of her husband’s plans, thoughts kept floating through her brain that had nothing in common with what he was saying. She thought of her nephew (what her husband had said of his excitement over Pierre’s talk had made a great impression on her), and various traits of his tender, sensitive character rose to her mind; and while she thought of her
nephew, she thought, too, of her own children. She did not compare her nephew with her own children, but she compared her own feeling for him, and her feeling for her children, and felt, with sorrow, that in her feeling for Nikolinka there was something wanting.

Sometimes the idea had occurred to her that this difference was due to his age; but she felt guilty towards him, and in her soul vowed to amend, and to do the impossible, that is, in this life, to love her husband, and her children, and Nikolinka, and all her fellow-creatures, as Christ loved men. Countess Marya’s soul was always striving towards the infinite, the eternal, and the perfect, and so she could never be at peace. A stern expression came into her face from that hidden, lofty suffering of the spirit, weighed down by the flesh. Nikolay gazed at her. “My God! What will become of us, if she dies, as I dread, when she looks like that?” he thought, and standing before the holy images, he began to repeat his evening prayer.

Natasha, as soon as she was alone with her husband, had begun talking too, as only husband and wife can talk, that is, understanding and communicating their thoughts to each other, with extraordinary clearness and rapidity, by a quite peculiar method opposed to all the rules of logic, without the aid of premises, deductions, and conclusions. Natasha was so used to talking to her husband in this fashion that a logical sequence of thought on Pierre’s part was to her an infallible symptom of something being out of tune between them. When he began arguing, talking reasonably and calmly, and when she was led on by his example into doing the same, she knew it would infallibly lead to a quarrel.

From the moment they were alone together and Natasha, with wide-open, happy eyes, crept softly up to him and suddenly, swiftly seizing his head, pressed it to her bosom, saying, “Now you’re all mine, mine! You shan’t escape!” that conversation began that contravened every rule of logic, especially because they talked of several different subjects at once. This discussion of all sorts of things at once, far from hindering clearness of comprehension, was the surest token that they understood one another fully.

As in a dream everything is uncertain, meaningless, and contradictory except the feeling that directs the dream, so in this communion of ideas,
apart from every law of reason, what is clear and consecutive is not what is said, but the feeling that prompts the words.

Natasha talked to Pierre of the daily round of existence at her brother’s; told him how she had suffered and been half-dead without him; and that she was fonder of Marie than ever, and Marie was better in every way than she was. In saying this Natasha was quite sincere in acknowledging Marie’s superiority, but at the same time she expected Pierre to prefer her to Marie and all other women, and now, especially after he had been seeing a great many women in Petersburg, to tell her so anew. In response to Natasha’s words, Pierre told her how intolerable he had found the evening parties and dinners with ladies in Petersburg.

“I have quite lost the art of talking to ladies,” he said; “it was horribly tiresome. Especially as I was so busy.”

Natasha looked intently at him, and went on. “Marie, now she is wonderful!” she said. “The insight she has into children. She seems to see straight into their souls. Yesterday, for instance, Mitenka was naughty …”

“And isn’t he like his father?” Pierre put in.

Natasha knew why he made this remark about Mitenka’s likeness to Nikolay. He disliked the thought of his dispute with his brother-in-law, and was longing to hear what she thought about it.

“It’s a weakness of Nikolay’s, that if anything is not generally accepted, he will never agree with it. And I see that that’s just what you value to
ouvrir une carrière
,” she said, repeating a phrase Pierre had once uttered.

“No, the real thing is that to Nikolay,” said Pierre, “thoughts and ideas are an amusement, almost a pastime. Here he’s forming a library and has made it a rule not to buy a new book till he has read through the last he has bought—Sismondi and Rousseau and Montesquieu,” Pierre added with a smile. “You know how I—–,” he was beginning to soften his criticism; but Natasha interrupted, giving him thereby to understand that that was not necessary.

“So you say ideas to him are not serious …”

“Yes, and to me nothing else is serious. All the while I was in Petersburg, I seemed to be seeing every one in a dream. When I am absorbed by an idea, nothing else is serious.”

“Oh, what a pity I didn’t see your meeting with the children,” said Natasha. “Which was the most pleased? Liza, of course?”

“Yes,” said Pierre, and he went on with what interested him. “Nikolay says we ought not to think. But I can’t help it. To say nothing of the fact (I can say so to you) that in Petersburg I felt that the whole thing would go to pieces without me, every one pulled his own way. But I succeeded in bringing them all together; and then my idea is so clear and simple. I don’t say we ought to work against so and so. We may be mistaken. But I say let those join hands who care for the good cause, and let our one standard be energy and honesty. Prince Sergey is a capital fellow, and clever.”

Natasha would have had no doubt that Pierre’s idea was a grand idea, but that one thing troubled her. It was his being her husband. “Is it possible that a man of such value, of such importance to society, is at the same time my husband? How can it have happened?” She wanted to express this doubt to him. “Who are the persons who could decide positively whether he is so much cleverer than all of them?” she wondered, and she went over in imagination the people who were very much respected by Pierre. There was nobody whom, to judge by his own account, he had respected so much as Platon Karataev.

“Do you know what I am thinking about?” she said. “About Platon Karataev. What would he have said? Would he have approved of you now?”

Pierre was not in the least surprised at this question. He understood the connection of his wife’s ideas.

“Platon Karataev?” he said, and he pondered, evidently trying sincerely to picture what Karataev’s judgment would have been on the subject. “He would not have understood, and yet, perhaps, he would.”

“I like you awfully!” said Natasha all at once. “Awfully! awfully!”

“No, he wouldn’t have approved,” said Pierre, musing. “What he would have approved of is our home life. He did so like to see seemliness, happiness, peace in everything, and I could have shown him all of us with pride. You talk about separation. But you would not believe what a special feeling I have for you after separation …”

“And, besides,…” Natasha was beginning.

“No, not so. I never leave off loving you. And one couldn’t love more; but it’s something special.…” He did not finish, because their eyes meeting said the rest.

“What nonsense,” said Natasha suddenly, “it all is about the honeymoon and that the greatest happiness is at first. On the contrary, now is much the best. If only you wouldn’t go away. Do you remember how
we used to quarrel? And I was always in the wrong. It was always my doing. And what we quarrelled about—I don’t remember even.”

“Always the same thing,” said Pierre smiling. “Jea …”

“Don’t say it, I can’t bear it,” cried Natasha, and a cold, vindictive light gleamed in her eyes. “Did you see her?” she added after a pause.

“No; and if I had, I shouldn’t have known her.”

They were silent.

“Oh! do you know, when you were talking in the study, I was looking at you,” said Natasha, obviously trying to drive away the cloud that had come between them. “And do you know you are like him as two drops of water, like the boy.” That was what she called her baby son. “Ah, it’s time I went to him.… But I am sorry to go away.”

They were both silent for some seconds. Then all at once, at the same moment, they turned to each other and began talking. Pierre was beginning with self-satisfaction and enthusiasm, Natasha with a soft, happy smile. Interrupting each other, both stopped, waiting for the other to go on.

“No, what is it? Tell me, tell me.”

“No, you tell me, it wasn’t anything, only nonsense,” said Natasha.

Pierre said what he had been going to say. It was the sequel to his complacent reflections on his success in Petersburg. It seemed to him at that moment that he was destined to give a new direction to the progress of the whole of Russian society and of the whole world.

“I only meant to say that all ideas that have immense results are always simple. All my idea really is that if vicious people are united and form a power, honest men must do the same. It’s so simple, you see.”

“Yes.”

“But what were you going to say?”

“Oh, nothing, nonsense.”

“No, say it though.”

“Oh, nothing, only silly nonsense,” said Natasha, breaking into a more beaming smile than ever. “I was only going to tell you about Petya. Nurse came up to take him from me to-day, he laughed and puckered up his face and squeezed up to me—I suppose he thought he was hiding. He’s awfully sweet.… There he is crying. Well, good-bye!” and she ran out of the room.

Meanwhile, below in Nikolinka Bolkonsky’s bedroom a lamp was burning as usual (the boy was afraid of the dark and could not be cured of this weakness). Dessalle was asleep with his head high on his four pillows, and his Roman nose gave forth rhythmic sounds of snoring.
Nikolinka had just waked up in a cold sweat, and was sitting up in bed, gazing with wide-open eyes straight before him. He had been waked by a fearful dream. In his dream his Uncle Pierre and he in helmets, such as appeared in the illustrations in his Plutarch, were marching at the head of an immense army. This army was made up of slanting, white threads that filled the air like those spider-webs that float in autumn and that Dessalle used to call
le fil de la Vierge
. Ahead of them was glory, which was something like those threads too, only somewhat more opaque. They—he and Pierre—were flying lightly and happily nearer and nearer to their goal. All at once the threads that moved them seemed to grow weak and tangled; and it was all difficult. And Uncle Nikolay stood before them in a stern and menacing attitude.