《War And Peace》 Book1 CHAPTER VI
by Leo Tolstoy
THERE was the rustle of a woman's dress in the next room. Prince Andrey started up,
as it were pulling himself together, and his face assumed the expression it had worn in
Anna Pavlovna's drawing-room. Pierre dropped his legs down off the sofa. The princess
came in. She had changed her gown, and was wearing a house dress as fresh and elegant as
the other had been. Prince Andrey got up and courteously set a chair for her.
“Why is it, I often wonder,” she began in French as always, while she hurriedly and
fussily settled herself in the low chair, “why is it Annette never married? How stupid
you gentlemen all are not to have married her. You must excuse me, but you really have no
sense about women. What an argumentative person you are, Monsieur Pierre!”
“I'm still arguing with your husband; I can't make out why he wants to go to the
war,” said Pierre, addressing the princess without any of the affectation so common in
the attitude of a young man to a young woman.
The princess shivered. Clearly Pierre's words touched a tender spot.
“Ah, that's what I say,” she said. “I can't understand, I simply can't
understand why men can't get on without war. Why is it we women want nothing of the
sort? We don't care for it. Come, you shall be the judge. I keep saying to him: here he
is uncle's adjutant, a most brilliant position. He's so well known, so appreciated by
every one. The other day at the Apraxins' I heard a lady ask: ‘So that is the famous
Prince André? Upon my word!' ” She laughed. “He's asked everywhere. He
could very easily be a flügel-adjutant. You know the Emperor has spoken very
graciously to him. Annette and I were saying it would be quite easy to arrange it. What do
you think?”
Pierre looked at Prince Andrey, and, noticing that his friend did not like this
subject, made no reply.
“When are you starting?” he asked.
“Ah, don't talk to me about that going away; don't talk about it. I won't even
hear it spoken of,” said the princess in just the capriciously playful tone in which she
had talked to Ippolit at the soirée, a tone utterly incongruous in her own
home circle, where Pierre was like one of the family. “This evening when I thought all
these relations so precious to me must be broken off.…And then, you know, André?”
She looked significantly at her husband. “I'm afraid! I'm afraid!” she whispered,
twitching her shoulder. Her husband looked at her as though he were surprised to observe
that there was some one in the room beside himself and Pierre, and with frigid courtesy he
addressed an inquiry to his wife.
“What are you afraid of, Liza? I don't understand,” he said.
“See what egoists all men are; they are all, all egoists! Of his own accord, for his
own whim, for no reason whatever, he is deserting me, shutting me up alone in the country.”
“With my father and sister, remember,” said Prince Andrey quietly.
“It's just the same as alone, without my friends.…And he doesn't expect me to
be afraid.” Her tone was querulous now, her upper lip was lifted, giving her face not a
joyous expression, but a wild-animal look, like a squirrel. She paused as though feeling
it indecorous to speak of her condition before Pierre, though the whole gist of the matter
lay in that.
“I still don't understand what you are afraid of,” Prince Andrey said
deliberately, not taking his eyes off his wife. The princess flushed red, and waved her
hands despairingly.
“No, André, I say you are so changed, so changed…”
“Your doctor's orders were that you were to go to bed earlier,” said Prince
Andrey. “It's time you were asleep.”
The princess said nothing, and suddenly her short, downy lip began to quiver; Prince
Andrey got up and walked about the room, shrugging his shoulders.
Pierre looked over his spectacles in naïve wonder from him to the princess, and
stirred uneasily as though he too meant to get up, but had changed his mind.
“What do I care if Monsieur Pierre is here,” the little princess said suddenly, her
pretty face contorted into a tearful grimace; “I have long wanted to say to you, Andrey,
why are you so changed to me? What have I done? You go away to the war, you don't feel
for me. Why is it?”
“Liza!” was all Prince Andrey said, but in that one word there was entreaty and
menace, and, most of all, conviction that she would herself reGREt her words; but she went
on hurriedly.
“You treat me as though I were ill, or a child. I see it all. You weren't like this
six months ago.”
“Liza, I beg you to be silent,” said Prince Andrey, still more expressively.
Pierre, who had been growing more and more agitated during this conversation, got up
and went to the princess. He seemed unable to endure the sight of her tears, and was ready
to weep himself.
“Please don't distress yourself, princess. You only fancy that because …I assure
you, I've felt so myself…because…through…oh, excuse me, an outsider has no
business…Oh, don't distress yourself…goodbye.”
Prince Andrey held his hand and stopped him.
“No, stay a little, Pierre. The princess is so good, she would not wish to deprive me
of the pleasure of spending an evening with you.”
“No, he thinks of nothing but himself,” the princess declared, not attempting to
check her tears of anger.
“Liza,” said Prince Andrey drily, raising his voice to a pitch that showed his
patience was exhausted.
All at once the angry squirrel expression of the princess's lovely little face
changed to an attractive look of terror that awakened sympathy. She glanced from under her
brows with lovely eyes at her husband, and her face wore the timorous, deprecating look of
a dog when it faintly but rapidly wags its tail in penitence.
“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!” murmured the princess, and holding her gown with one
hand, she went to her husband and kissed him on the forehead.
“Good-night, Liza,” said Prince Andrey, getting up and kissing her hand
courteously, as though she were a stranger.
The friends were silent. Neither of them began to talk. Pierre looked at Prince Andrey;
Prince Andrey rubbed his forehead with his small hand.
“Let us go and have supper,” he said with a sigh, getting up and going to the door.
They went into the elegantly, newly and richly furnished dining-room. Everything from
the dinner-napkins to the silver, the china and the glass, wore that peculiar stamp of
newness that is seen in the household belongings of newly married couples. In the middle
of supper Prince Andrey leaned on his elbow, and like a man who has long had something on
his mind, and suddenly resolves on giving it utterance, he began to speak with an
expression of nervous irritation which Pierre had never seen in his friend before.
“Never, never marry, my dear fellow; that's my advice to you; don't marry till
you have faced the fact that you have done all you're capable of doing, and till you
cease to love the woman you have chosen, till you see her plainly, or else you will make a
cruel mistake that can never be set right. Marry when you're old and good for nothing…Or
else everything good and lofty in you will be done for. It will all be frittered away over
trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Don't look at me with such surprise. If you expect anything of
yourself in the future you will feel at every step that for you all is over, all is closed
up except the drawing-room, where you will stand on the same level with the court lackey
and the idiot…And why!”…He made a vigorous gesture.
Pierre took off his spectacles, which transformed his face, making it look even more
good-natured, and looked wonderingly at his friend.
“My wife,” pursued Prince Andrey, “is an excellent woman. She is one of those
rare women with whom one can feel quite secure of one's honour; but, my God! what wouldn't
I give now not to be married! You are the first and the only person I say this to, because
I like you.”
As Prince Andrey said this he was less than ever like the Bolkonsky who had sat lolling
in Anna Pavlovna's drawing-room with half-closed eyelids, filtering French phrases
through his teeth. His dry face was quivering with nervous excitement in every muscle; his
eyes, which had seemed lustreless and lifeless, now gleamed with a full, vivid light. It
seemed that the more lifeless he was at ordinary times, the more energetic he became at
such moments of morbid irritability.
“You can't understand why I say this,” he went on. “Why, the whole story of
life lies in it. You talk of Bonaparte and his career,” he said, though Pierre had not
talked of Bonaparte; “you talk of Bonaparte, but Bonaparte when he was working his way
up, going step by step straight to his aim, he was free; he had nothing except his aim and
he attained it. But tie yourself up with a woman, and, like a chained convict, you lose
all freedom. And all the hope and strength there is in you is only a drag on you,
torturing you with reGREt. Drawing-rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, frivolity—that's the
enchanted circle I can't get out of. I am setting off now to the war, the greatest war
there has ever been, and I know nothing, and am good for nothing. I am very agreeable and
sarcastic,” pursued Prince Andrey, “and at Anna Pavlovna's every one listens to me.
And this imbecile society without which my wife can't exist, and these women…If you
only knew what these society women are, and, indeed, women generally! My father's right.
Egoism, vanity, silliness, triviality in everything—that's what women are when they
show themselves as they really are. Looking at them in society, one fancies there's
something in them, but there's nothing, nothing, nothing. No, don't marry, my dear
fellow, don't marry!” Prince Andrey concluded.
“It seems absurd to me,” said Pierre, “that you, you consider yourself
a failure, your life wrecked. You have everything, everything before you. And you…”
He did not say why you, but his tone showed how highly he thought of his friend,
and how much he expected of him in the future.
“How can he say that?” Pierre thought.
Pierre regarded Prince Andrey as a model of all perfection, because Prince Andrey
possessed in the highest deGREe just that combination of qualities in which Pierre was
deficient, and which might be most nearly expressed by the idea of strength of will.
Pierre always marvelled at Prince Andrey's faculty for dealing with people of every sort
with perfect composure, his exceptional memory, his wide knowledge (he had read
everything, knew everything, had some notion of everything), and most of all at his
capacity for working and learning. If Pierre were frequently struck in Andrey by his lack
of capacity for dreaming and philosophising (to which Pierre was himself greatly given),
he did not regard this as a defect but as a strong point. Even in the very warmest,
friendliest, and simplest relations, flattery or praise is needed just as grease is needed
to keep wheels going round.
“I am a man whose day is done,” said Prince Andrey. “Why talk of me? let's talk
about you,” he said after a brief pause, smiling at his own reassuring thoughts. The
smile was instantly reflected on Pierre's face.
“Why, what is there to say about me?” said Pierre, letting his face relax into an
easy-going, happy smile. “What am I? I am a bastard.” And he suddenly flushed crimson.
Apparently it was a GREat effort to him to say this. “With no name, no fortune.…And
after all, really…” He did not finish. “Meanwhile I am free though and I'm
content. I don't know in the least what to set about doing. I meant to ask your advice
in earnest.”
Prince Andrey looked at him with kindly eyes. But in his eyes, friendly and kind as
they were, there was yet a consciousness of his own superiority.
“You are dear to me just because you are the one live person in all our society. You're
lucky. Choose what you will, that's all the same. You'll always be all right, but
there's one thing: give up going about with the Kuragins and leading this sort of life.
It's not the right thing for you at all; all this riotous living and dissipation and all…”
“What would you have, my dear fellow?” said Pierre, shrugging his shoulders; “women,
my dear fellow, women.”
“I can't understand it,” answered Andrey. “Ladies, that's another matter, but
Kuragin's women, women and wine, I can't understand!”
Pierre was living at Prince Vassily Kuragin's, and sharing in the dissipated mode of
life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were proposing to marry to Prince Andrey's
sister to reform him.
“Do you know what,” said Pierre, as though a happy thought had suddenly occurred to
him; “seriously, I have been thinking so for a long while. Leading this sort of life I
can't decide on anything, or consider anything properly. My head aches and my money's
all gone. He invited me to-night, but I won't go.”
“Give me your word of honour that you will give up going.”
“On my honour!”
It was past one o'clock when Pierre left his friend's house. It was a cloudless
night, a typical Petersburg summer night. Pierre got into a hired coach, intending to
drive home. But the nearer he got, the more he felt it impossible to go to bed on such a
night, more like evening or morning. It was light enough to see a long way in the empty
streets. On the way Pierre remembered that all the usual gambling set were to meet at
Anatole Kuragin's that evening, after which there usually followed a drinking-bout,
winding up with one of Pierre's favorite entertainments.
“It would be jolly to go to Kuragin's,” he thought. But he immediately recalled
his promise to Prince Andrey not to go there again.
But, as so often happens with people of weak character, as it is called, he was at once
overcome with such a passionate desire to enjoy once more this sort of dissipation which
had become so familiar to him, that he determined to go. And the idea at once occurred to
him that his promise was of no consequence, since he had already promised Prince Anatole
to go before making the promise to Andrey. Finally he reflected that all such promises
were merely relative matters, having no sort of precise significance, especially if one
considered that to-morrow one might be dead or something so extraordinary might happen
that the distinction between honourable and dishonourable would have ceased to exist. Such
reflections often occurred to Pierre, completely nullifying all his resolutions and
intentions. He went to Kuragin's.
Driving up to the steps of a big house in the Horse Guards' barracks, where Anatole
lived, he ran up the lighted steps and the staircase and went in at an open door. There
was no one in the ante-room; empty bottles, cloaks, and over-shoes were lying about in
disorder: there was a strong smell of spirits; in the distance he heard talking and
shouting.
The card-playing and the supper were over, but the party had not broken up. Pierre
flung off his cloak, and went into the first room, where there were the remnants of
supper, and a footman who, thinking himself unobserved, was emptying the half-full glasses
on the sly. In the third room there was a GREat uproar of laughter, familiar voices
shouting, and a bear growling. Eight young men were crowding eagerly about the open
window. Three others were busy with a young bear, one of them dragging at its chain and
frightening the others with it.
“I bet a hundred on Stevens!” cried one.
“Mind there's no holding him up!” shouted another.
“I'm for Dolohov!” shouted a third. “Hold the stakes, Kuragin.”
“I say, let Mishka be, we're betting.”
“All at a go or the wager's lost!” cried a fourth.
“Yakov, give us a bottle, Yakov!” shouted Anatole himself, a tall, handsome fellow,
standing in the middle of the room, in nothing but a thin shirt, open over his chest. “Stop,
gentlemen. Here he is, here's Petrusha, the dear fellow.” He turned to Pierre.
A man of medium height with bright blue eyes, especially remarkable from looking sober
in the midst of the drunken uproar, shouted from the window: “Come here. I'll explain
the bets!” This was Dolohov, an officer of the Semenov regiment, a notorious gambler and
duellist, who was living with Anatole. Pierre smiled, looking good-humouredly about him.
“I don't understand. What's the point?”
“Wait a minute, he's not drunk. A bottle here,” said Anatole; and taking a glass
from the table he went up to Pierre.
“First of all, you must drink.”
Pierre began drinking off glass after glass, looking from under his brows at the
drunken group, who had crowded about the window again, and listening to their talk.
Anatole kept his glass filled and told him that Dolohov had made a bet with an Englishman,
Stevens, a sailor who was staying here, that he, Dolohov, would drink a bottle of rum
sitting in the third story window with his legs hanging down outside.
“Come, empty the bottle,” said Anatole, giving Pierre the last glass, “or I won't
let you go!”
“No, I don't want to,” said Pierre, shoving Anatole away; and he went up to the
window.
Dolohov was holding the Englishman's hand and explaining distinctly the terms of the
bet, addressing himself principally to Anatole and Pierre.
Dolohov was a man of medium height, with curly hair and clear blue eyes. He was
five-and-twenty. Like all infantry officers he wore no moustache, so that his mouth, the
most striking feature in his face, was not concealed. The lines of that mouth were
extremely delicately chiselled. The upper lip closed vigorously in a sharp wedge-shape on
the firm lower one, and at the corners the mouth always formed something like two smiles,
one at each side, and altogether, especially in conjunction with the resolute, insolent,
shrewd look of his eyes, made such an impression that it was impossible to overlook his
face. Dolohov was a man of small means and no connections. And yet though Anatole was
spending ten thousand a year, Dolohov lived with him and succeeded in so regulating the
position that Anatole and all who knew them respected Dolohov more than Anatole. Dolohov
played at every sort of game, and almost always won. However much he drank, his brain
never lost its clearness. Both Kuragin and Dolohov were at that time notorious figures in
the fast and dissipated world in Petersburg.
The bottle of rum was brought: the window-frame, which hindered any one sitting on the
outside sill of the window, was being broken out by two footmen, obviously flurried and
intimidated by the shouts and directions given by the gentlemen around them.
Anatole with his swaggering air came up to the window. He was longing to break
something. He shoved the footmen aside and pulled at the frame, but the frame did not
give. He smashed a pane.
“Now then, you're the strong man,” he turned to Pierre. Pierre took hold of the
cross beam, tugged, and with a crash wrenched the oak frame out.
“All out, or they'll think I'm holding on,” said Dolohov.
“The Englishman's bragging…it's a fine feat…eh?” said Anatole.
“Fine,” said Pierre, looking at Dolohov, who with the bottle in his hand had gone
up to the window, from which the light of the sky could be seen and the glow of morning
and of evening melting into it. Dolohov jumped up on to the window, holding the bottle of
rum in his hand. “Listen!” he shouted, standing on the sill and facing the room. Every
one was silent.
“I take a bet” (he spoke in French that the Englishman might hear him, and spoke it
none too well)…“I take a bet for fifty imperials—like to make it a hundred?” he
added, turning to the Englishman.
“Nó, fifty,” said the Englishman.
“Good, for fifty imperials, that I'll drink off a whole bottle of rum without
taking it from my lips. I'll drink it sitting outside the window, here on this place”
(he bent down and pointed to the sloping projection of the wall outside the window)… “and
without holding on to anything.…That right?”
“All right,” said the Englishman.
Anatole turned to the Englishman and taking him by the button of his coat, and looking
down at him (the Englishman was a short man), he began repeating the terms of the wager in
English.
“Wait a minute!” shouted Dolohov, striking the bottle on the window to call
attention. “Wait a minute, Kuragin; listen: if any one does the same thing, I'll pay
him a hundred imperials. Do you understand?”
The Englishman nodded without making it plain whether be intended to take this new bet
or not.
Anatole persisted in keeping hold of the Englishman, and although the latter, nodding,
gave him to understand that he comprehended fully, Anatole translated Dolohov's words
into English. A thin, youthful hussar, who had been losing at cards that evening, slipped
up to the window, poked his head out and looked down.
“Oo!…oo!…oo!” he said looking out of the window at the pavement below.
“Shut up!” cried Dolohov, and he pushed the officer away, so that, tripping over
his spurs, he went skipping awkwardly into the room.
Setting the bottle on the window-sill, so as to have it within reach, Dolohov climbed
slowly and carefully into the window. Lowering his legs over, with both hands spread open
on the window-ledge, he tried the position, seated himself, let his hands go, moved a
little to the right, and then to the left, and took the bottle. Anatole brought two
candles, and set them on the window-ledge, so that it was quite light. Dolohov's back in
his white shirt and his curly head were lighted up on both sides. All crowded round the
window. The Englishman stood in front. Pierre smiled, and said nothing. One of the party,
rather older than the rest, suddenly came forward with a scared and angry face, and tried
to clutch Dolohov by his shirt.
“Gentlemen, this is idiocy; he'll be killed,” said this more sensible man.
Anatole stopped him.
“Don't touch him; you'll startle him and he'll be killed. Eh?…What then, eh?”
Dolohov turned, balancing himself, and again spreading his hands out.
“If any one takes hold of me again,” he said, letting his words drop one by one
through his thin, tightly compressed lips, “I'll throw him down from here. Now…”
Saying “now,” he turned again, let his hands drop, took the bottle and put it to
his lips, bent his head back and held his disengaged hand upwards to keep his balance. One
of the footmen who had begun clearing away the broken glass, stopped still in a stooping
posture, his eyes fixed on the window and Dolohov's back. Anatole stood upright, with
wide-open eyes. The Englishman stared from one side, pursing up his lips. The man who had
tried to stop it, had retreated to the corner of the room, and lay on the sofa with his
face to the wall. Pierre hid his face, and a smile strayed forgotten upon it, though it
was full of terror and fear. All were silent. Pierre took his hands from his eyes; Dolohov
was still sitting in the same position, only his head was so far bent back that his curls
touched his shirt collar, and the hand with the bottle rose higher and higher, trembling
with evident effort. Evidently the bottle was nearly empty, and so was tipped higher,
throwing the head back. “Why is it so long?” thought Pierre. It seemed to him that
more than half an hour had passed. Suddenly Dolohov made a backward movement of the spine,
and his arm trembled nervously; this was enough to displace his whole body as he sat on
the sloping projection. He moved all over, and his arm and head trembled still more
violently with the strain. One hand rose to clutch at the window-ledge, but it dropped
again. Pierre shut his eyes once more, and said to himself that he would never open them
again. Suddenly he was aware of a general stir about him. He glanced up, Dolohov was
standing on the window-ledge, his face was pale and full of merriment.
“Empty!”
He tossed the bottle to the Englishman, who caught it neatly. Dolohov jumped down from
the window. He smelt very strongly of rum.
“Capital! Bravo! That's something like a bet. You're a devil of a fellow!” came
shouts from all sides.
The Englishman took out his purse and counted out the money. Dolohov frowned and did
not speak. Pierre dashed up to the window.
“Gentlemen. Who'll take a bet with me? I'll do the same!” he shouted suddenly.
“I don't care about betting; see here, tell them to give me a bottle. I'll do it.…Tell
them to give it here.”
“Let him, let him!” said Dolohov, smiling.
“What, are you mad? No one would let you. Why, you turn giddy going downstairs,”
various persons protested.
“I'll drink it; give me the bottle of rum,” roared Pierre, striking the table
with a resolute, drunken gesture, and he climbed into the window. They clutched at his
arms; but he was so strong that he shoved every one far away who came near him.
“No, there's no managing him like that,” said Anatole. “Wait a bit, I'll get
round him.…Listen, I'll take your bet, but for to-morrow, for we're all going on now
to…”
“Yes, come along,” shouted Pierre, “come along.…And take Mishka with us.”…And
he caught hold of the bear, and embracing it and lifting it up, began waltzing round the
room with it.
