War and Peace
and go into bondage! I dare say! ‘I’ll give you grain, indeed!’ she
says,” voices in the crowd were heard saying.
With drooping head Princess Mary left the crowd and went back to the
house. Having repeated her order to Dron to have horses ready for her
departure next morning, she went to her room and remained alone with her
own thoughts.
CHAPTER XII
For a long time that night Princess Mary sat by the open window of her
room hearing the sound of the peasants’ voices that reached her from
the village, but it was not of them she was thinking. She felt that she
could not understand them however much she might think about them. She
thought only of one thing, her sorrow, which, after the break caused
by cares for the present, seemed already to belong to the past. Now she
could remember it and weep or pray.
After sunset the wind had dropped. The night was calm and fresh. Toward
midnight the voices began to subside, a cock crowed, the full moon began
to show from behind the lime trees, a fresh white dewy mist began to
rise, and stillness reigned over the village and the house.
Pictures of the near past—her father’s illness and last moments—rose
one after another to her memory. With mournful pleasure she now lingered
over these images, repelling with horror only the last one, the
picture of his death, which she felt she could not contemplate even in
imagination at this still and mystic hour of night. And these pictures
presented themselves to her so clearly and in such detail that they
seemed now present, now past, and now future.
She vividly recalled the moment when he had his first stroke and was
being dragged along by his armpits through the garden at Bald Hills,
muttering something with his helpless tongue, twitching his gray
eyebrows and looking uneasily and timidly at her.
“Even then he wanted to tell me what he told me the day he died,” she
thought. “He had always thought what he said then.” And she recalled in
all its detail the night at Bald Hills before he had the last stroke,
when with a foreboding of disaster she had remained at home against his
will. She had not slept and had stolen downstairs on tiptoe, and going
to the door of the conservatory where he slept that night had listened
at the door. In a suffering and weary voice he was saying something to
Tíkhon, speaking of the Crimea and its warm nights and of the Empress.
Evidently he had wanted to talk. “And why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t
he let me be there instead of Tíkhon?” Princess Mary had thought and
thought again now. “Now he will never tell anyone what he had in his
soul. Never will that moment return for him or for me when he might have
said all he longed to say, and not Tíkhon but I might have heard and
understood him. Why didn’t I enter the room?” she thought. “Perhaps he
would then have said to me what he said the day he died. While talking
to Tíkhon he asked about me twice. He wanted to see me, and I was
standing close by, outside the door. It was sad and painful for him
to talk to Tíkhon who did not understand him. I remember how he began
speaking to him about Lise as if she were alive—he had forgotten she
was dead—and Tíkhon reminded him that she was no more, and he shouted,
‘Fool!’ He was greatly depressed. From behind the door I heard how he
lay down on his bed groaning and loudly exclaimed, ‘My God!’ Why didn’t
I go in then? What could he have done to me? What could I have lost? And
perhaps he would then have been comforted and would have said that word
to me.” And Princess Mary uttered aloud the caressing word he had said
to her on the day of his death. “Dear-est!” she repeated, and began
sobbing, with tears that relieved her soul. She now saw his face before
her. And not the face she had known ever since she could remember and
had always seen at a distance, but the timid, feeble face she had seen
for the first time quite closely, with all its wrinkles and details,
when she stooped near to his mouth to catch what he said.
“Dear-est!” she repeated again.
“What was he thinking when he uttered that word? What is he thinking
now?” This question suddenly presented itself to her, and in answer she
saw him before her with the expression that was on his face as he lay
in his coffin with his chin bound up with a white handkerchief. And the
horror that had seized her when she touched him and convinced herself
that that was not he, but something mysterious and horrible, seized her
again. She tried to think of something else and to pray, but could do
neither. With wide-open eyes she gazed at the moonlight and the shadows,
expecting every moment to see his dead face, and she felt that the
silence brooding over the house and within it held her fast.
“Dunyásha,” she whispered. “Dunyásha!” she screamed wildly, and tearing
herself out of this silence she ran to the servants’ quarters to meet
her old nurse and the maidservants who came running toward her.
CHAPTER XIII
On the seventeenth of August Rostóv and Ilyín, accompanied by Lavrúshka
who had just returned from captivity and by an hussar orderly, left
their quarters at Yankóvo, ten miles from Boguchárovo, and went for a
ride—to try a new horse Ilyín had bought and to find out whether there
was any hay to be had in the villages.
For the last three days Boguchárovo had lain between the two hostile
armies, so that it was as easy for the Russian rearguard to get to it as
for the French vanguard; Rostóv, as a careful squadron commander, wished
to take such provisions as remained at Boguchárovo before the French
could get them.
Rostóv and Ilyín were in the merriest of moods. On the way to
Boguchárovo, a princely estate with a dwelling house and farm where
they hoped to find many domestic serfs and pretty girls, they questioned
Lavrúshka about Napoleon and laughed at his stories, and raced one
another to try Ilyín’s horse.
Rostóv had no idea that the village he was entering was the property of
that very Bolkónski who had been engaged to his sister.
Rostóv and Ilyín gave rein to their horses for a last race along the
incline before reaching Boguchárovo, and Rostóv, outstripping Ilyín, was
the first to gallop into the village street.
“You’re first!” cried Ilyín, flushed.
“Yes, always first both on the grassland and here,” answered Rostóv,
stroking his heated Donéts horse.
“And I’d have won on my Frenchy, your excellency,” said Lavrúshka
from behind, alluding to his shabby cart horse, “only I didn’t wish to
mortify you.”
They rode at a footpace to the barn, where a large crowd of peasants was
standing.
Some of the men bared their heads, others stared at the new arrivals
without doffing their caps. Two tall old peasants with wrinkled faces
and scanty beards emerged from the tavern, smiling, staggering, and
singing some incoherent song, and approached the officers.
“Fine fellows!” said Rostóv laughing. “Is there any hay here?”
“And how like one another,” said Ilyín.
“A mo-o-st me-r-r-y co-o-m-pa...!” sang one of the peasants with a
blissful smile.
One of the men came out of the crowd and went up to Rostóv.
“Who do you belong to?” he asked.
“The French,” replied Ilyín jestingly, “and here is Napoleon
himself”—and he pointed to Lavrúshka.
“Then you are Russians?” the peasant asked again.
“And is there a large force of you here?” said another, a short man,
coming up.
“Very large,” answered Rostóv. “But why have you collected here?” he
added. “Is it a holiday?”
“The old men have met to talk over the business of the commune,” replied
the peasant, moving away.
At that moment, on the road leading from the big house, two women and a
man in a white hat were seen coming toward the officers.
“The one in pink is mine, so keep off!” said Ilyín on seeing Dunyásha
running resolutely toward him.
“She’ll be ours!” said Lavrúshka to Ilyín, winking.
“What do you want, my pretty?” said Ilyín with a smile.
“The princess ordered me to ask your regiment and your name.”
“This is Count Rostóv, squadron commander, and I am your humble
servant.”
“Co-o-om-pa-ny!” roared the tipsy peasant with a beatific smile as
he looked at Ilyín talking to the girl. Following Dunyásha, Alpátych
advanced to Rostóv, having bared his head while still at a distance.
“May I make bold to trouble your honor?” said he respectfully, but with
a shade of contempt for the youthfulness of this officer and with a hand
thrust into his bosom. “My mistress, daughter of General in Chief Prince
Nicholas Bolkónski who died on the fifteenth of this month, finding
herself in difficulties owing to the boorishness of these people”—he
pointed to the peasants—“asks you to come up to the house.... Won’t
you, please, ride on a little farther,” said Alpátych with a melancholy
smile, “as it is not convenient in the presence of...?” He pointed to
the two peasants who kept as close to him as horseflies to a horse.
“Ah!... Alpátych... Ah, Yákov Alpátych... Grand! Forgive us for Christ’s
sake, eh?” said the peasants, smiling joyfully at him.
Rostóv looked at the tipsy peasants and smiled.
“Or perhaps they amuse your honor?” remarked Alpátych with a staid air,
as he pointed at the old men with his free hand.
“No, there’s not much to be amused at here,” said Rostóv, and rode on a
little way. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I make bold to inform your honor that the rude peasants here don’t
wish to let the mistress leave the estate, and threaten to unharness her
horses, so that though everything has been packed up since morning, her
excellency cannot get away.”
“Impossible!” exclaimed Rostóv.
“I have the honor to report to you the actual truth,” said Alpátych.
Rostóv dismounted, gave his horse to the orderly, and followed Alpátych
to the house, questioning him as to the state of affairs. It appeared
that the princess’ offer of corn to the peasants the previous day, and
her talk with Dron and at the meeting, had actually had so bad an effect
that Dron had finally given up the keys and joined the peasants and had
not appeared when Alpátych sent for him; and that in the morning when
the princess gave orders to harness for her journey, the peasants had
come in a large crowd to the barn and sent word that they would not let
her leave the village: that there was an order not to move, and that
they would unharness the horses. Alpátych had gone out to admonish them,
but was told (it was chiefly Karp who did the talking, Dron not showing
himself in the crowd) that they could not let the princess go, that
there was an order to the contrary, but that if she stayed they would
serve her as before and obey her in everything.
At the moment when Rostóv and Ilyín were galloping along the road,
Princess Mary, despite the dissuasions of Alpátych, her nurse, and the
maids, had given orders to harness and intended to start, but when the
cavalrymen were espied they were taken for Frenchmen, the coachman ran
away, and the women in the house began to wail.
“Father! Benefactor! God has sent you!” exclaimed deeply moved voices as
Rostóv passed through the anteroom.
Princess Mary was sitting helpless and bewildered in the large sitting
room, when Rostóv was shown in. She could not grasp who he was and why
he had come, or what was happening to her. When she saw his Russian
face, and by his walk and the first words he uttered recognized him as a
man of her own class, she glanced at him with her deep radiant look and
began speaking in a voice that faltered and trembled with emotion. This
meeting immediately struck Rostóv as a romantic event. “A helpless girl
overwhelmed with grief, left to the mercy of coarse, rioting peasants!
And what a strange fate sent me here! What gentleness and nobility there
are in her features and expression!” thought he as he looked at her and