War and Peace (41 page)

After dinner he went to see his daughter-in-law. The little princess was sitting at a little table gossiping with Masha, her maid. She turned pale on seeing her father-in-law.

The little princess was greatly changed. She looked ugly rather than pretty now. Her cheeks were sunken, her lip was drawn up, and her eyes were hollow.

“Yes, a sort of heaviness,” she said in answer to the prince’s inquiry how she felt.

“Isn’t there anything you need?”

“Non, merci, mon père.”

“Oh, very well then, very well.”

He went out and into the waiting-room. Alpatitch was standing there with downcast head.

“Filled up the road again?”

“Yes, your excellency; for God’s sake, forgive me, it was simply a blunder.”

The prince cut him short with his unnatural laugh.

“Oh, very well, very well.” He held out his hand, which Alpatitch kissed, and then he went to his study.

In the evening Prince Vassily arrived. He was met on the way by the coachmen and footmen of the Bolkonskys, who with shouts dragged his carriages and sledge to the lodge, over the road, which had been purposely obstructed with snow again.

Prince Vassily and Anatole were conducted to separate apartments.

Taking off his tunic, Anatole sat with his elbows on the table, on a corner of which he fixed his handsome, large eyes with a smiling, unconcerned stare. All his life he had looked upon as an uninterrupted entertainment, which some one or other was, he felt, somehow bound to provide for him. In just the same spirit he had looked at his visit to the cross old gentleman and his rich and hideous daughter. It might all, according to his anticipations, turn out very jolly and amusing. “And why not get married, if she has such a lot of money? That never comes amiss,” thought Anatole.

He shaved and scented himself with the care and elegance that had become habitual with him, and with his characteristic expression of all-conquering good-humour, he walked into his father’s room, holding, his head high. Two valets were busily engaged in dressing Prince Vassily; he was looking about him eagerly, and nodded gaily to his son, as he entered with an air that said, “Yes, that’s just how I wanted to see you looking.”

“Come, joking apart, father, is she so hideous? Eh?” he asked in French, as though reverting to a subject more than once discussed on the journey.

“Nonsense! The great thing for you is to try and be respectful and sensible with the old prince.”

“If he gets nasty, I’m off,” said Anatole. “I can’t stand those old gentlemen. Eh?”

“Remember that for you everything depends on it.”

Meanwhile, in the feminine part of the household not only the arrival of the minister and his son was already known, but the appearance of both had been minutely described. Princess Marya was sitting alone in her room doing her utmost to control her inner emotion.

“Why did they write, why did Liza tell me about it? Why, it cannot be!” she thought, looking at herself in the glass. “How am I to go into the drawing-room? Even if I like him, I could never be myself with him now.” The mere thought of her father’s eyes reduced her to terror. The
little princess and Mademoiselle Bourienne had already obtained all necessary information from the maid, Masha; they had learned what a handsome fellow the minister’s son was, with rosy cheeks and black eyebrows; how his papa had dragged his legs upstairs with difficulty, while he, like a young eagle, had flown up after him three steps at a time. On receiving these items of information, the little princess and Mademoiselle Bourienne, whose eager voices were audible in the corridor, went into Princess Marya’s room.

“They are come, Marie, do you know?” said the little princess, waddling in and sinking heavily into an armchair. She was not wearing the gown in which she had been sitting in the morning, but had put on one of her best dresses. Her hair had been carefully arranged, and her face was full of an eager excitement, which did not, however, conceal its wasted and pallid look. In the smart clothes which she had been used to wear in Petersburg in society, the loss of her good looks was even more noticeable. Mademoiselle Bourienne, too, had put some hardly perceptible finishing touches to her costume, which made her fresh, pretty face even more attractive.

“What, and you are staying just as you are, dear princess. They will come in a minute to tell us the gentlemen are in the drawing-room,” she began. “We shall have to go down, and you are doing nothing at all to your dress.”

The little princess got up from her chair, rang for the maid, and hurriedly and eagerly began to arrange what Princess Marya was to wear, and to put her ideas into practice. Princess Marya’s sense of personal dignity was wounded by her own agitation at the arrival of her suitor, and still more was she mortified that her two companions should not even conceive that she ought not to be so agitated. To have told them how ashamed she was of herself and of them would have been to betray her own excitement. Besides, to refuse to be dressed up, as they suggested, would have been exposing herself to reiterated raillery and insistence. She flushed; her beautiful eyes grew dim; her face was suffused with patches of crimson; and with the unbeautiful, victimised expression which was the one most often seen on her face, she abandoned herself to Mademoiselle Bourienne and Liza. Both women exerted themselves with
perfect sincerity
to make her look well. She was so plain that the idea of rivalry with her could never have entered their heads. Consequently it was with perfect sincerity, in the naïve and unhesitating conviction women have that dress can make a face handsome, that they set to work to attire her.

“No, really,
ma bonne amie
, that dress isn’t pretty,” said Liza, looking sideways at Princess Marya from a distance; “tell her to put on you your maroon velvet there. Yes, really! Why, you know, it may be the turning-point in your whole life. That one’s too light, it’s not right, no, it’s not!”

It was not the dress that was wrong, but the face and the whole figure of the princess, but that was not felt by Mademoiselle Bourienne and the little princess. They still fancied that if they were to put a blue ribbon in her hair, and do it up high, and to put the blue sash lower on the maroon dress and so on, then all would be well. They forgot that the frightened face and figure of Princess Marya could not be changed, and therefore, however presentable they might make the setting and decoration of the face, the face itself would still look piteous and ugly. After two or three changes, to which Princess Marya submitted passively, when her hair had been done on the top of her head (which completely changed and utterly disfigured her), and the blue sash and best maroon velvet dress had been put on, the little princess walked twice round, and with her little hand stroked out a fold here and pulled down the sash there, and gazed at her with her head first on one side and then on the other.

“No, it won’t do,” she said resolutely, throwing up her hands. “No, Marie, decidedly that does not suit you. I like you better in your little grey everyday frock. No, please do that for me. Katya,” she said to the maid, “bring the princess her grey dress, and look, Mademoiselle Bourienne, how I’ll arrange it,” she said, smiling with a foretaste of artistic pleasure. But when Katya brought the dress, Princess Marya was still sitting motionless before the looking-glass, looking at her own face, and in the looking-glass she saw that there were tears in her eyes and her mouth was quivering, on the point of breaking into sobs.

“Come, dear princess,” said Mademoiselle Bourienne, “one more little effort.”

The little princess, taking the dress from the hands of the maid, went up to Princess Marya.

“Now, we’ll try something simple and charming,” she said. Her voice and Mademoiselle Bourienne’s and the giggle of Katya blended into a sort of gay babble like the twitter of birds.

“No, leave me alone,” said the princess; and there was such seriousness and such suffering in her voice that the twitter of the birds ceased at once. They looked at the great, beautiful eyes, full of tears and of
thought, looking at them imploringly, and they saw that to insist was useless and even cruel.

“At least alter your hair,” said the little princess. “I told you,” she said reproachfully to Mademoiselle Bourienne, “there were faces which that way of doing the hair does not suit a bit. Not a bit, not a bit, please alter it.”

“Leave me alone, leave me alone, all that is nothing to me,” answered a voice scarcely able to struggle with tears.

Mademoiselle Bourienne and the little princess could not but admit to themselves that Princess Marya was very plain in this guise, far worse than usual, but it was too late. She looked at them with an expression they knew well, an expression of deep thought and sadness. That expression did not inspire fear. (That was a feeling she could never have inspired in any one.) But they knew that when that expression came into her face, she was mute and inflexible in her resolutions.

“You will alter it, won’t you?” said Liza, and when Princess Marya made no reply, Liza went out of the room.

Princess Marya was left alone. She did not act upon Liza’s wishes, she did not re-arrange her hair, she did not even glance into the looking-glass. Letting her eyes and her hands drop helplessly, she sat mentally dreaming. She pictured her husband, a man, a strong, masterful, and inconceivably attractive creature, who would bear her away all at once into an utterly different, happy world of his own. A child, her own, like the baby she had seen at her old nurse’s daughter’s, she fancied at her own breast. The husband standing, gazing tenderly at her and the child. “But no, it can never be, I am too ugly,” she thought.

“Kindly come to tea. The prince will be going in immediately,” said the maid’s voice at the door. She started and was horrified at what she had been thinking. And before going downstairs she went into the oratory, and fixing her eyes on the black outline of the great image of the Saviour, she stood for several minutes before it with clasped hands. Princess Marya’s soul was full of an agonising doubt. Could the joy of love, of earthly love for a man, be for her? In her reveries of marriage, Princess Marya dreamed of happiness in a home and children of her own, but her chief, her strongest and most secret dream was of earthly love. The feeling became the stronger the more she tried to conceal it from others, and even from herself. “My God,” she said, “how am I to subdue in my heart these temptings of the devil? How am I to renounce for ever all evil thoughts, so as in peace to fulfil Thy will?” And scarcely
had she put this question than God’s answer came to her in her own heart. “Desire nothing for thyself, be not covetous, anxious, envious. The future of men and thy destiny too must be unknown for thee; but live that thou mayest be ready for all. If it shall be God’s will to prove thee in the duties of marriage, be ready to obey His will.” With this soothing thought (though still she hoped for the fulfilment of that forbidden earthly dream) Princess Marya crossed herself, sighing, and went downstairs, without thinking of her dress nor how her hair was done; of how she would go in nor what she would say. What could all that signify beside the guidance of Him, without Whose will not one hair falls from the head of man?

When Princess Marya went into the room, Prince Vassily and his son were already in the drawing-room, talking to the little princess and Mademoiselle Bourienne. When she walked in with her heavy step, treading on her heels, the gentlemen and Mademoiselle Bourienne rose, and the little princess, with a gesture indicating her to the gentlemen, said: “Here is Marie!” Princess Marya saw them all and saw them in detail. She saw the face of Prince Vassily, growing serious for an instant at the sight of her, and then hastily smiling, and the face of the little princess, scanning the faces of the guests with curiosity to detect the impression Marie was making on them. She saw Mademoiselle Bourienne, too, with her ribbon and her pretty face, turned towards
him
with a look of more eagerness than she had ever seen on it. But
him
she could not see, she could only see something large, bright-coloured, and handsome moving towards her, as she entered the room. Prince Vassily approached her first; and she kissed his bald head, as he bent over to kiss her hand, and in reply to his words said, that on the contrary, she remembered him very well. Then Anatole went up to her. She still could not see him. She only felt a soft hand taking her hand firmly, and she touched with her lips a white forehead, over which there was beautiful fair hair, smelling of pomade. When she glanced at him, she was impressed by his beauty. Anatole was standing with the thumb of his right hand at a button of his uniform, his chest squared and his spine arched; swinging one foot, with his head a little on one side, he was gazing in silence with a beaming face on the princess, obviously not thinking of her at all. Anatole
was not quick-witted, he was not ready, not eloquent in conversation, but he had that faculty, so invaluable for social purposes, of composure and imperturbable assurance. If a man of no self-confidence is dumb at first making acquaintance, and betrays a consciousness of the impropriety of this dumbness and an anxiety to find something to say, the effect will be bad. But Anatole was dumb and swung his leg, as he watched the princess’s hair with a radiant face. It was clear that he could be silent with the same serenity for a very long while. “If anybody feels silence awkward, let him talk, but I don’t care about it,” his demeanour seemed to say. Moreover, in his manner to women, Anatole had that air, which does more than anything else to excite curiosity, awe, and even love in women, the air of supercilious consciousness of his own superiority. His manner seemed to say to them: “I know you, I know, but why trouble my head about you? You’d be pleased enough, of course!” Possibly he did not think this on meeting women (it is probable, indeed, that he did not, for he thought very little at any time), but that was the effect of his air and his manner. Princess Marya felt it, and as though to show him she did not even venture to think of inviting his attention, she turned to his father. The conversation was general and animated, thanks to the voice and the little downy lip, that flew up and down over the white teeth of the little princess. She met Prince Vassily in that playful tone so often adopted by chatty and lively persons, the point of which consists in the assumption that there exists a sort of long-established series of jokes and amusing, partly private, humorous reminiscences between the persons so addressed and oneself, even when no such reminiscences are really shared, as indeed was the case with Prince Vassily and the little princess. Prince Vassily readily fell in with this tone, the little princess embellished their supposed common reminiscences with all sorts of droll incidents that had never occurred, and drew Anatole too into them, though she had scarcely known him. Mademoiselle Bourienne too succeeded in taking a part in them, and even Princess Marya felt with pleasure that she was being made to share in their gaiety.