Читать книгу War and Peace: Original Version - Лев Толстой, Leo Tolstoy, Liev N. Tolstói - Страница 20

A woman’s dress rustled in the next room. As if he had just woken up, Prince Andrei shook himself and his face assumed the expression it had worn in Anna Pavlovna’s drawing room. Pierre lowered his feet from the divan. The princess came in. She was wearing a different dress, more homely but just as elegant and fresh. Prince Andrei stood up and courteously moved up an armchair for her by the fireplace, but there was such intense boredom on his face as he did so, the princess would surely have taken offence, had she been able to see it.

“Why, I often wonder,” she began, as always in French, as she hastily seated herself in the armchair, “why did Annette never marry? How foolish you all are, gentlemen, for not marrying her. Forgive my saying so, but you understand nothing at all about women.”

Pierre and Prince Andrei involuntarily exchanged glances and said nothing. But neither their glance nor their silence embarrassed the princess in the least. She carried on prattling in the same way as before.

“What a wrangler you are, Monsieur Pierre,” she said to the young man. “What a wrangler you are, Monsieur Pierre,” she repeated, fussily settling herself into the large armchair.

Folding her little hands over the mound of her waist, she stopped talking, evidently intent on listening. Her face assumed that distinctive, serious expression in which the eyes seem to be gazing inwards – an expression that only pregnant women have.

“I keep arguing with your husband as well; I cannot understand why he wants to go to war,” said Pierre, addressing the princess without a trace of the inhibition so usual in relations between a young man and a young woman.

The princess started. Apparently Pierre’s words had touched a sore spot.

“Ah, that is just what I say!” she said with her society smile. “I do not understand, I absolutely do not understand, why men cannot live without war. Why is it that we women do not want anything, do not need anything? Why you, you can be the judge. I keep telling him: here he is my uncle’s adjutant, a most brilliant position. Everybody knows him so well and appreciates him so. The other day at the Apraksins’ I heard one lady ask: ‘Is that the famous Prince Andrei?’ On my word of honour.”

She laughed.

“He is asked everywhere. He could quite easily be an aide-de-camp … Do you know that only two days ago His Majesty spoke to him most graciously? Annette and I were saying how very easy it would be to arrange. What do you think?”

Pierre looked at Prince Andrei and, noticing that his friend did not like this conversation, made no reply.

“When are you leaving?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t talk of our leaving, don’t even mention it! I don’t wish to hear of it,” said the princess in the same skittish, capricious manner in which she had spoken with Hippolyte in the drawing room, and which was so obviously unsuited to a family circle of which Pierre was ostensibly a member.

“Today, when I thought about having to break off all these dear, precious connections … And then, you know, Andrei.”

She blinked significantly at her husband.

“I’m afraid, I’m so afraid!” she whispered, quivering all the way down her back.

Her husband looked at her as though he were surprised to have noticed that there was someone else apart from Pierre and himself in the room; however, he enquired of the princess with cold civility:

“What are you afraid of, Lise? I can’t understand it,” he said.

“See what egoists all men are! All, all of them egoists! Out of nothing but his own whimsy, God only knows why, he is abandoning me, shutting me away alone in the country.”

“With my father and sister, do not forget,” Prince Andrei said quietly.

“All the same alone, without my friends … And he does not want me to be afraid.” Her tone was peevish now, her short little lip was raised, lending her face an expression that was not joyful, but feral, squirrel-like. She stopped speaking, as if she found it improper to talk of her future delivery in front of Pierre, while this was in fact the very essence of the matter.

“Even so, I do not understand what you are afraid of,” Prince Andrei enunciated slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on his wife.

The princess blushed and fluttered her hands in despair.

“No, Andrei, it’s just as I said: you have changed so much, so very much.”

“Your doctor says you should go to bed earlier,” said Prince Andrei. “You ought to go to bed.”

The princess said nothing, and suddenly her short lip with the faint moustache began trembling. Prince Andrei stood up and, with a shrug of his shoulders, began pacing around the room.

Pierre gazed through his spectacles in naïve surprise, first at one, then at the other and began fidgeting on the spot, as if he kept wanting to get up and then changing his mind.

“What does it matter to me that Monsieur Pierre is here,” the little princess said suddenly, and her pretty face suddenly dissolved into a tearful, unlovely grimace. “I have wanted to ask you for a long time, Andrei: What has made you change so much towards me. What have I done to you? You are going to the army, you have no pity for me. Why?”

“Lise!” was all that Prince Andrei said, but the word expressed both supplication and threat and also, above all, the assurance that she would regret what she had said; but she continued hastily:

“You treat me like a sick woman or a child. I see everything. You were not like this six months ago, were you?”

“Lise, will you please stop this,” said Prince Andrei even more emphatically.

Pierre, who had become more and more agitated in the course of this conversation, stood up and walked across to the princess. He seemed unable to bear the sight of her tears and was ready to start crying himself.

“Calm down, princess. It only seems like that to you, because, I assure you, I myself have experienced … the reason … because … No, I beg your pardon, this is no place for an outsider … Please, calm down … Goodbye … Please excuse me …”

He bowed, preparing to leave. Prince Andrei took his arm and stopped him.

“No, wait, Pierre. The princess is so kind, she would not wish to deprive me of the pleasure of spending the evening with you.”

“Yes, he thinks only of himself,” said the princess, making no effort to restrain her angry tears.

“Lise,” Prince Andrei said coldly, raising his tone of voice to a level that indicated his patience had been exhausted.

Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression on the princess’s beautiful little face was replaced by an expression of fearful appeal that aroused compassion; she cast her husband a sullen glance out of her lovely eyes, and her face assumed the timid expression of a dog rapidly but feebly wagging its lowered tail in a confession of guilt.

“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” said the princess and, gathering up the folds of her dress in one hand, she went up to her husband and kissed him on his brown forehead.

“Bon soir, Lise,” said Prince Andrei, rising and kissing her hand courteously, as though it were a stranger’s.