War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER I

作者: Leo Tolstoy

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Author: Leo Tolstoy

PRINCE VASSILY used not to think over his plans. Still less did he think of

doing harm to others for the sake of his own interest. He was simply a man of

the world, who had been successful in the world, and had formed a habit of being

so. Various plans and calculations were continually forming in his mind, arising

from circumstances and the persons he met, but he never deliberately considered

them, though they constituted the whole interest of his life. Of such plans and

calculations he had not one or two, but dozens in train at once, some of them

only beginning to occur to him, others attaining their aim, others again coming

to nothing. He never said to himself, for instance: “That man is now in power, I

must secure his friendship and confidence, and through him obtain a grant from

the Single-Assistance Fund”; nor, “Now Pierre is a wealthy man, I must entice

him to marry my daughter and borrow the forty thousand I need.” But the man in

power met him, and at the instant his instinct told him that that man might be

of use, and Prince Vassily made friends with him, and at the first opportunity

by instinct, without previous consideration, flattered him, became intimate with

him, and told him of what he wanted.

Pierre was ready at hand in Moscow, and Prince Vassily secured an appointment

as gentleman of the bedchamber for him, a position at that time reckoned equal

in status to that of a councillor of state, and insisted on the young man's

travelling with him to Petersburg, and staying at his house. Without apparent

design, but yet with unhesitating conviction that it was the right thing, Prince

Vassily did everything to ensure Pierre's marrying his daughter. If Prince

Vassily had definitely reflected upon his plans beforehand, he could not have

been so natural in his behaviour and so straightforward and familiar in his

relations with every one, of higher and of lower rank than himself. Something

drew him infallibly towards men richer or more powerful than himself, and he was

endowed with a rare instinct for hitting on precisely the moment when he should

and could make use of such persons.

Pierre, on unexpectedly becoming rich and Count Bezuhov, after his lonely and

careless manner of life, felt so surrounded, so occupied, that he never

succeeded in being by himself except in his bed. He had to sign papers, to

present himself at legal institutions, of the significance of which he had no

definite idea, to make some inquiry of his chief steward, to visit his estate

near Moscow, and to receive a great number of persons, who previously had not

cared to be aware of his existence, but now would have been hurt and offended if

he had not chosen to see them. All these various people, business men,

relations, acquaintances, were all equally friendly and well disposed towards

the young heir. They were all obviously and unhesitatingly convinced of Pierre's

noble qualities. He was continually hearing phrases, such as, “With your

exceptionally kindly disposition”; or, “Considering your excellent heart”; or,

“You are so pure-minded yourself, count …” or, “If he were as clever as you,”

and so on, so that he was beginning genuinely to believe in his own exceptional

goodness and his own exceptional intelligence, the more so, as at the bottom of

his heart it had always seemed to him that he really was very good-natured and

very intelligent. Even people, who had before been spiteful and openly hostile

to him, became tender and affectionate. The hitherto ill-tempered, eldest

princess, with the long waist and the hair plastered down like a doll, had gone

into Pierre's room after the funeral. Dropping her eyes and repeatedly turning

crimson, she said that she very much regretted the misunderstanding that had

arisen between them, and that now she felt she had no right to ask him for

anything except permission, after the blow that had befallen her, to remain for

a few weeks longer in the house which she was so fond of, and in which she had

made such sacrifices. She could not control herself, and wept at these words.

Touched at seeing the statue-like princess so changed, Pierre took her by the

hand and begged her pardon, though he could not have said what for. From that

day the princess began knitting a striped scarf for Pierre, and was completely

changed towards him.

“Do this for my sake, my dear boy; she had to put up with a great deal from

the deceased, any way,” Prince Vassily said to him, giving him some deed to sign

for the princess's benefit. Prince Vassily reflected that this note of hand for

thirty thousand was a sop worth throwing to the poor princess, that it might not

occur to her to gossip about Prince Vassily's part in the action taken with the

inlaid portfolio. Pierre signed the note, and from that time the princess became

even more amiable. The younger sisters became as affectionate too, especially

the youngest one, the pretty one with the mole, who often disconcerted Pierre

with her smiles and her confusion at the sight of him.

To Pierre it seemed so natural that every one should be fond of him, it would

have seemed to him so unnatural if any one had not liked him, that he could not

help believing in the sincerity of the people surrounding him. Besides, he had

no time to doubt their sincerity or insincerity. He never had a moment of

leisure, and felt in a continual state of mild and agreeable intoxication. He

felt as though he were the centre of some important public function, felt that

something was continually being expected of him; that if he did this and that,

all would be well, and he did what was expected of him, but still that happy

result loomed in the future.

In these early days Prince Vassily, more than all the rest, took control of

Pierre's affairs, and of Pierre himself. On the death of Count Bezuhov he did

not let Pierre slip out of his hands. Prince Vassily had the air of a man

weighed down by affairs, weary, worried, but from sympathetic feeling, unable in

the last resort to abandon this helpless lad, the son, after all, of his friend,

and the heir to such an immense fortune, to leave him to his fate to become a

prey to plotting knaves. During the few days he had stayed on in Moscow after

Count Bezuhov's death, he had invited Pierre to him, or had himself gone to see

Pierre, and had dictated to him what he was to do in a tone of weariness and

certainty which seemed to be always saying: “You know that I am overwhelmed with

business and that it is out of pure charity that I concern myself with you, and

moreover you know very well that what I propose to you is the only feasible

thing.”

“Well, my dear boy, to-morrow we are off at last,” he said one day, closing

his eyes, drumming his fingers on his elbow, and speaking as though the matter

had long ago been settled between them, and could not be settled in any other

way.

“To-morrow we set off; I'll give you a place in my coach. I'm very glad. Here

all our important business is settled. And I ought to have been back long ago.

Here, I have received this from the chancellor. I petitioned him in your favour,

and you are put on the diplomatic corps, and created a gentleman of the

bedchamber. Now a diplomatic career lies open to you.”

Notwithstanding the effect produced on him by the tone of weariness and

certainty with which these words were uttered, Pierre, who had so long been

pondering over his future career, tried to protest. But Prince Vassily broke in

on his protest in droning, bass tones, that precluded all possibility of

interrupting the flow of his words; it was the resource he fell back upon when

extreme measures of persuasion were needed.

“But, my dear boy, I have done it for my own sake, for my conscience' sake,

and there is no need to thank me. No one has ever complained yet of being too

much loved; and then you are free, you can give it all up to-morrow. You'll see

for yourself in Petersburg. And it is high time you were getting away from these

terrible associations.” Prince Vassily sighed. “So that's all settled, my dear

fellow. And let my valet go in your coach. Ah, yes, I was almost forgetting,”

Prince Vassily added. “You know, my dear boy, I had a little account to settle

with your father, so as I have received something from the Ryazan estate, I'll

keep that; you don't want it. We'll go into accounts later.”

What Prince Vassily called “something from the Ryazan estate” was several

thousands of roubles paid in lieu of service by the peasants, and this sum he

kept for himself.

In Petersburg, Pierre was surrounded by the same atmosphere of affection and

tenderness as in Moscow. He could not decline the post, or rather the title (for

he did nothing) that Prince Vassily had obtained for him, and acquaintances,

invitations, and social duties were so numerous that Pierre was even more than

in Moscow conscious of the feeling of stupefaction, hurry and continued

expectation of some future good which was always coming and was never

realised.

Of his old circle of bachelor acquaintances there were not many left in

Petersburg. The Guards were on active service, Dolohov had been degraded to the

ranks; Anatole had gone into the army and was somewhere in the provinces; Prince

Andrey was abroad; and so Pierre had not the opportunity of spending his nights

in the way he had so loved spending them before, nor could he open his heart in

intimate talk with the friend who was older than himself and a man he respected.

All his time was spent at dinners and balls, or at Prince Vassily's in the

society of the fat princess, his wife, and the beauty, his daughter Ellen.

Like every one else, Anna Pavlovna Scherer showed Pierre the change that had

taken place in the attitude of society towards him.

In former days, Pierre had always felt in Anna Pavlovna's presence that what

he was saying was unsuitable, tactless, not the right thing; that the phrases,

which seemed to him clever as he formed them in his mind, became somehow stupid

as soon as he uttered them aloud, and that, on the contrary, Ippolit's most

pointless remarks had the effect of being clever and charming. Now everything he

said was always “delightful.” Even if Anna Pavlovna did not say so, he saw she

was longing to say so, and only refraining from doing so from regard for his

modesty.

At the beginning of the winter, in the year 1805, Pierre received one of Anna

Pavlovna's customary pink notes of invitation, in which the words occurred: “You

will find the fair Hélène at my house, whom one never gets tired of

seeing.”

On reading that passage, Pierre felt for the first time that there was being

formed between himself and Ellen some sort of tie, recognised by other people,

and this idea at once alarmed him, as though an obligation were being laid upon

him which he could not fulfil, and pleased him as an amusing supposition.

Anna Pavlovna's evening party was like her first one, only the novel

attraction which she had provided for her guests was not on this occasion

Mortemart, but a diplomat, who had just arrived from Berlin, bringing the latest

details of the Emperor Alexander's stay at Potsdam, and of the inviolable

alliance the two exalted friends had sworn together, to maintain the true cause

against the enemy of the human race. Pierre was welcomed by Anna Pavlovna with a

shade of melancholy, bearing unmistakable reference to the recent loss sustained

by the young man in the death of Count Bezuhov (every one felt bound to be

continually assuring Pierre that he was greatly afflicted at the death of his

father, whom he had hardly known). Her melancholy was of precisely the same kind

as that more exalted melancholy she always displayed at any allusion to Her Most

August Majesty the Empress Marya Fyodorovna. Pierre felt flattered by it. Anna

Pavlovna had arranged the groups in her drawing-room with her usual skill. The

larger group, in which were Prince Vassily and some generals, had the benefit of

the diplomat. Another group gathered about the tea-table. Pierre would have

liked to join the first group, but Anna Pavlovna, who was in the nervous

excitement of a general on the battlefield, that mental condition in which

numbers of brilliant new ideas occur to one that one has hardly time to put into

execution—Anna Pavlovna, on seeing Pierre, detained him with a finger on his

coat sleeve: “Wait, I have designs on you for this evening.”

She looked round at Ellen and smiled at her.

“My dear Hélène, you must show charity to my poor aunt, who has an adoration

for you. Go and keep her company for ten minutes. And that you may not find it

too tiresome, here's our dear count, who certainly won't refuse to follow

you.”

The beauty moved away towards the old aunt; but Anna Pavlovna still detained

Pierre at her side, with the air of having still some last and essential

arrangement to make with him.

“She is exquisite, isn't she?” she said to Pierre, indicating the majestic

beauty swimming away from them. “And how she carries herself! For such a young

girl, what tact, what a finished perfection of manner. It comes from the heart.

Happy will be the man who wins her. The most unworldly of men would take a

brilliant place in society as her husband. That's true, isn't it? I only wanted

to know your opinion,” and Anna Pavlovna let Pierre go.

Pierre was perfectly sincere in giving an affirmative answer to her question

about Ellen's perfection of manner. If ever he thought of Ellen, it was either

of her beauty that he thought, or of her extraordinary capacity for serene,

dignified silence in society.

The old aunt received the two young people in her corner, but appeared

anxious to conceal her adoration of Ellen, and rather to show her fear of Anna

Pavlovna. She glanced at her niece, as though to inquire what she was to do with

them. Anna Pavlovna again laid a finger on Pierre's sleeve and said: “I hope you

will never say in future that people are bored at my house,” and glanced at

Ellen. Ellen smiled with an air, which seemed to say that she did not admit the

possibility of any one's seeing her without being enchanted. The old aunt

coughed, swallowed the phlegm, and said in French that she was very glad to see

Ellen; then she addressed Pierre with the same greeting and the same grimace. In

the middle of a halting and tedious conversation, Ellen looked round at Pierre

and smiled at him with the bright, beautiful smile with which she smiled at

every one. Pierre was so used to this smile, it meant so little to him, that he

did not even notice it. The aunt was speaking at that moment of a collection of

snuff-boxes belonging to Pierre's father, Count Bezuhov, and she showed them her

snuff-box. Princess Ellen asked to look at the portrait of the aunt's husband,

which was on the snuff-box.

“It's probably the work of Vines,” said Pierre, mentioning a celebrated

miniature painter. He bent over the table to take the snuff-box, listening all

the while to the conversation going on in the larger group. He got up to move

towards it, but the aunt handed him the snuff-box, passing it across Ellen,

behind her back. Ellen bent forward to make room, and looked round smiling. She

was, as always in the evening, wearing a dress cut in the fashion of the day,

very low in the neck both in front and behind. Her bust, which had always to

Pierre looked like marble, was so close to his short-sighted eyes that he could

discern all the living charm of her neck and shoulders, and so near his lips

that he need scarcely have stooped to kiss it. He felt the warmth of her body,

the fragrance of scent, and heard the creaking of her corset as she moved. He

saw not her marble beauty making up one whole with her gown; he saw and felt all

the charm of her body, which was only veiled by her clothes. And having once

seen this, he could not see it otherwise, just as we cannot return to an

illusion that has been explained.

“So you have never noticed till now that I am lovely?” Ellen seemed to be

saying. “You haven't noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman, who might

belong to any one—to you, too,” her eyes said. And at that moment Pierre felt

that Ellen not only could, but would become his wife, that it must be so.

He knew it at that moment as surely as he would have known it, standing under

the wedding crown beside her. How would it be? and when? He knew not, knew not

even if it would be a good thing (he had a feeling, indeed, that for some reason

it would not), but he knew it would be so.

Pierre dropped his eyes, raised them again, and tried once more to see her as

a distant beauty, far removed from him, as he had seen her every day before. But

he could not do this. He could not, just as a man who has been staring in a fog

at a blade of tall steppe grass and taking it for a tree cannot see a tree in it

again, after he has once recognised it as a blade of grass. She was terribly

close to him. Already she had power over him. And between him and her there

existed no barriers of any kind, but the barrier of his own will.

“Very good, I will leave you in your little corner. I see you are very

comfortable there,” said Anna Pavlovna's voice. And Pierre, trying

panic-stricken to think whether he had done anything reprehensible, looked about

him, crimsoning. It seemed to him as though every one knew, as well as he did,

what was passing in him. A little later, when he went up to the bigger group,

Anna Pavlovna said to him:

“I am told you are making improvements in your Petersburg house.” (This was

the fact: the architect had told him it was necessary, and Pierre, without

knowing with what object, was having his immense house in Petersburg

redecorated.) “That is all very well, but do not move from Prince Vassily's. It

is a good thing to have such a friend as the prince,” she said, smiling to

Prince Vassily. “I know something about that. Don't I? And you are so young. You

need advice. You mustn't be angry with me for making use of an old woman's

privileges.” She paused, as women always do pause, in anticipation of something,

after speaking of their age. “If you marry, it's a different matter.” And she

united them in one glance. Pierre did not look at Ellen, nor she at him. But she

was still as terribly close to him.

He muttered something and blushed.

After Pierre had gone home, it was a long while before he could get to sleep;

he kept pondering on what was happening to him. What was happening? Nothing.

Simply he had grasped the fact that a woman, whom he had known as a child, of

whom he had said, without giving her a thought, “Yes, she's nice-looking,” when

he had been told she was a beauty, he had grasped the fact that that woman might

belong to him. “But she's stupid, I used to say myself that she was stupid,” he

thought. “There is something nasty in the feeling she excites in me, something

not legitimate. I have been told that her brother, Anatole, was in love with

her, and she in love with him, that there was a regular scandal, and that's why

Anatole was sent away. Her brother is Ippolit.…Her father is Prince

Vassily.…That's bad,” he mused; and at the very moment that he was reflecting

thus (the reflections were not followed out to the end) he caught himself

smiling, and became conscious that another series of reflections had risen to

the surface across the first, that he was at the same time meditating on her

worthlessness, and dreaming of how she would be his wife, how she might love

him, how she might become quite different, and how all he had thought and heard

about her might be untrue. And again he saw her, not as the daughter of Prince

Vassily, but saw her whole body, only veiled by her grey gown. “But, no, why

didn't that idea ever occur to me before?” And again he told himself that it was

impossible, that there would be something nasty, unnatural, as it seemed to him,

and dishonourable in this marriage. He recalled her past words and looks, and

the words and looks of people, who had seen them together. He remembered the

words and looks of Anna Pavlovna, when she had spoken about his house, he

recollected thousands of such hints from Prince Vassily and other people, and he

was overwhelmed with terror that he might have bound himself in some way to do a

thing obviously wrong, and not what he ought to do. But at the very time that he

was expressing this to himself, in another part of his mind her image floated to

the surface in all its womanly beauty.