Читать книгу War and Peace: Original Version - Лев Толстой, Leo Tolstoy, Liev N. Tolstói - Страница 33

It was that moment before a formal dinner when the guests, all assembled in their finery and anticipating the summons to the hors d’oeuvres, refrain from starting long conversations yet feel they ought to keep moving about and not remain silent, lest they show impatience to take their seats at the table. The hosts keep glancing at the door and occasionally exchange glances with each other. The guests try to guess from these glances for whom or for what they are still waiting: an important relative who is late or the food which, according to the information from the kitchen, is not yet ready. In the servants’ room the servants have not yet been able to start discussing the ladies and gentlemen, because they keep having to get up for new arrivals.

In the kitchen meanwhile the cooks are growing fierce and ill-tempered, moving in their white hats and aprons between the stove, the spit and the oven and shouting at the kitchen boys, who at such moments become especially timid. The coachmen at the entrance draw up in lines and, having settled down comfortably on their coachboxes, chat among themselves or drop into the coachmen’s room to smoke a pipe.

Pierre arrived and sat awkwardly in the middle of the drawing room, on the first armchair he came across, blocking everybody’s way. The countess tried to induce him to speak, but he gazed naïvely around through his spectacles, as though searching for someone, replying in monosyllables to all the countess’s questions. He was in people’s way, and he was the only one who was unaware of it. A large number of the guests, knowing about the incident with the bear, looked at this big, fat, meek man with curiosity, wondering how such an unassuming duffer could possibly have played such a trick on a policeman.

“Did you arrive recently?” the countess asked him.

“Oui, madame,” he replied, looking around the room.

“Have you not seen my husband?”

“Non, madame,” he said, smiling quite inappropriately.

“I believe you were in Paris recently? How very interesting.”

“It was very interesting,” he replied, debating with himself where that Boris, to whom he had taken such a liking, could have got to.

The countess exchanged glances with Princess Anna Mikhailovna. Anna Mikhailovna realised that she was being asked to entertain this young man and, seating herself beside him, began to talk about his father, but he answered her as he had the countess, in words of a single syllable. The guests were all occupied with each other. The sound of dresses rustling could be heard on every side. “The Razumovskys … It was quite exquisite … You are most kind … Countess Apraksina … Apraksina …”

The countess rose and went out to the entrance hall.

“Marya Dmitrievna?” her voice said in the hall.

“The very same,” replied a gruff woman’s voice, and then into the room came Marya Dmitrievna, who had arrived with her daughter.

All the young and even the older ladies, apart from the most elderly, stood up. Marya Dmitrievna halted in the doorway, and from the height of her corpulent frame, holding high her beautiful fifty-year-old head with its grey ringlets, she ran her eye over the guests. Marya Dmitrievna always spoke in Russian.

“Dear name-day girl and children,” she said in her loud, rich voice that subdued all other sounds. “I would have paid you a visit this morning, but I don’t like roaming about in the mornings. I suppose, you old sinner,” she said to the count, who was kissing her hand, “you are probably bored in Moscow? Nowhere to run the dogs? But what’s to be done, old man, when these little chicks grow up …” She indicated her daughter, who was quite unlike her mother, a rather attractive young lady who appeared as tender and sweet as her mother appeared coarse. “Like it or not, you have to look for suitors for them. There are yours, now, and all of them of age.” She pointed to Natasha and Sonya, who had come into the drawing room.

When Marya Dmitrievna arrived, everyone had gathered in the drawing room, anticipating the exodus to the dinner table. Boris came in as well, and Pierre immediately attached himself to him.

“Well now, my Cossack.” (Marya Dmitrievna always called Natasha a Cossack.) “What a winner this girl’s become!” she said, stroking Natasha, who had approached her hand fearlessly and happily. “I know she’s a little scallywag, and she ought to be whipped, but I adore her.”

From out of her vast reticule (Marya Dmitrievna’s reticule was known to everyone for the abundance and variety of its contents) she extracted a pair of sapphire drop earrings and, after handing them to the glowing, ruddy-cheeked name-day girl, instantly turned away from her and, catching sight of Pierre, said to him:

“Hey, hey, my dear fellow! Here, come over here.” She spoke with a deliberately quiet, modulated voice, the way people speak to a dog that they want to scold. “Here, my dear fellow …”

Pierre, somewhat alarmed, went over, gazing at her through his spectacles naïvely and merrily, like a schoolboy, as though he fully intended to enjoy the forthcoming amusement as much as everyone else.

“Come here, come here, dear fellow! I was the only one to tell your father the truth when he got into a predicament and it’s God’s own will that I should tell you too.”

She paused. Nobody said a word, waiting for what would happen next and sensing this was only the preamble.

“A fine boy, what can I say! What a fine boy! His father’s on his deathbed, but he’s having fun, mounting a policeman on a bear. For shame, my good fellow, for shame! You’d do better to go off to the war.”

She turned away and proffered her hand to the count, who could barely restrain his laughter. Pierre simply winked at Boris.

“Well then, to table, I think it’s probably time,” said Marya Dmitrievna. The count and Marya Dmitrievna went in first, followed by the countess, who was escorted by the colonel of the hussars, an important man, for he would be taking Nikolai to his regiment; then came Anna Mikhailovna and Shinshin. Berg lent his arm to Vera. Marya Dmitrievna’s daughter Julie, who constantly smiled and rolled her eyes and had not let Nikolai get away from her side since the moment she had arrived, went to the table with him. They were followed by other couples, extending right across the hall, and behind all of them the single figures of children, tutors and governesses. Footmen began bustling about, chairs clattered, music struck up in the gallery and the guests took their places. The sounds of the house musicians gave way to the sounds of knives and forks, the voices of the guests, the quiet footsteps of the venerable, grey-haired footmen. The countess sat at the head of one end of the table with the ladies, Marya Dmitrievna on her right, and Anna Mikhailovna on her left. At the other end sat the count with the gentlemen, the colonel of hussars on his left and Shinshin on his right. Along one side of the long table sat the more senior young: Vera beside Berg, Pierre beside Boris; and along the other side sat the children with their tutors and governesses. The count peered past the crystal, the bottles and bowls of fruit at his wife, although in fact all he could see was her tall cap with its light-blue ribbons, while he assiduously poured wine for his neighbours, without forgetting himself. The countess also, while not forgetting the obligations of a hostess, cast meaningful glances past the pineapples at her husband, the redness of whose bald head and face contrasted, it seemed to her, more sharply than usual with his grey hair. At the ladies’ end there was a continuous, even babbling; at the male end the voices sounded louder and louder, especially that of the colonel of hussars, who ate and drank so much, growing redder and redder as he went, that the count kept holding him up as an example to the other guests. Berg was quietly telling the disagreeably smiling Vera about the advantages of wartime from the financial point of view; Boris was naming the guests at the table for his new friend Pierre and exchanging glances with Natasha, who was sitting facing him. Pierre, who had involuntarily absorbed the contempt of St. Petersburg for Muscovites, confirmed with his own observations all that he had heard about the manners of Moscow society. It was all true: the prim conventionality (dishes were served to guests according to rank and age), the narrowness of interests (no one was concerned with politics) and the warm hospitality, to which he nonetheless did full justice. Of the two soups, he chose the turtle to start with, then ate the pie, then the woodcock sauté that the count had liked so much; he did not miss a single dish, or a single wine, which the butler thrust out mysteriously from behind his neighbour’s shoulder in a napkin-swathed bottle, intoning quietly: “Dry Madeira, Hungarian, Rheinwein” and so on. He held up whichever crystal wineglass with the count’s monogram first came to hand from the set of four that stood before every place-setting and he drank with pleasure, looking at the guests with an expression that grew increasingly agreeable. Natasha, sitting opposite him, looked at Boris the way thirteen-year-old girls look at a boy whom they have kissed for the first time that morning and with whom they are in love, smiling now and again. Pierre continually glanced at her and was met by the gaze and the smile intended for Boris.

“Strange,” he whispered to Boris, “she is not good-looking, the younger Rostov girl, this little black-haired one here, but what a lovely face! Don’t you think so?”

“The elder girl is better-looking,” replied Boris, smiling almost imperceptibly.

“No, but just fancy that! All the features are irregular, but how wonderfully lovely she is.”

And Pierre kept looking at her. Boris expressed surprise at Pierre’s having such strange taste. Nikolai was sitting far away from Sonya beside Julie Akhrosimova, replying to her affectionate and ecstatic utterances, while constantly glancing at his cousin to reassure her and make her feel that wherever he might be, at the other end of the table or the other end of the world, his thoughts would always belong to her alone. Sonya smiled ostentatiously, but she was clearly already tormented by jealousy, turning pale and red by turns and straining with all her might to hear what Nikolai and Julie were saying to each other. Natasha, to her chagrin, was sitting with the children, between her little brother and a fat governess. The governess looked around uneasily, constantly whispering something to her charge and immediately glancing at the guests in anticipation of approval. The German tutor was trying to remember all the various kinds of dishes, desserts and wines in order to describe it all in detail in a letter to his family at home in Germany, and was highly offended that the butler with the bottle wrapped in a napkin carried it past without serving him. The German frowned and tried to pretend that he had not wished to be given this wine, but he was offended, because no one would understand that he wanted the wine not to quench his thirst, not out of greed, but out of genuine intellectual curiosity …