Читать книгу War and Peace: Original Version - Лев Толстой, Leo Tolstoy, Liev N. Tolstói - Страница 38

While at the Rostovs’ house they were dancing the sixth anglaise to weary musicians playing out of tune and the weary footmen and chefs were preparing supper, discussing among themselves how the masters were able to keep on eating – they had only just finished their tea and now it was supper time again – at this very hour, Count Bezukhov suffered his sixth stroke, and with the doctors declaring there was no hope of recovery, the sick man was given mute confession and communion, and preparations began to be made for extreme unction, filling the house with the bustle and anxious anticipation usual at such moments. Outside the house, beyond the gates, concealing themselves from the carriages that were arriving, a throng of undertakers waited in anticipation of a rich commission for the count’s funeral. The commander-in-chief of Moscow, who had repeatedly sent his adjutants to enquire after the count’s condition, came himself that evening to take his leave of one of the representatives of the age of Catherine the Great. The count was said to be seeking someone with his eyes, asking for them. A mounted servant was sent for both Pierre and Anna Mikhailovna.

The magnificent reception room was full. Everyone rose respectfully when the commander-in-chief, who had spent about half an hour alone with the sick man, emerged, barely responding to their bows and trying to walk as quickly as possible past the glances trained on him by the doctors, clergymen and relatives. Prince Vasily, grown thinner and paler over the last few days, walked beside him, and everyone watched the commander-in-chief shake his hand and repeat something quietly to him several times.

Having seen the commander-in-chief out, Prince Vasily sat down on his own on a chair in the hall and crossed one leg high over the other, leaning his elbow on his knee and covering his eyes with his hand. Everyone could see he was suffering and no one approached. After sitting in this way for some time he stood up and, walking with unusual haste, glancing around with eyes that seemed either angry or frightened, went down the long corridor to the rear of the house to see the eldest princess.

The people in the dimly lit room talked between themselves in a faltering whisper, falling silent and glancing round with eyes full of questioning anticipation at the door leading to the dying man’s chambers every time it gave out a faint creak as someone came out or went in.

“Man’s span,” said an old man, a clergyman, to a lady who had sat beside him and was listening to him naïvely. “Even as thy span is fixed, thou shalt not exceed it.”

“I wonder, isn’t it too late to administer extreme unction?” asked the woman, adding an ecclesiastical title, as if she had no opinion of her own on this account.

“It is a great mystery, madame,” replied the clergyman, running his hands over his bald patch, over which several strands of greying hair had been carefully combed.

“Who’s that? Was that the commander-in-chief himself?” someone asked at the other end of the room. “How young he looks …”

“And he’s over sixty! Did they say the count can’t recognise anyone? They wanted to administer extreme unction.”

“I knew of one man who had extreme unction seven times.”

The second princess simply came out of the sick man’s room with tearful eyes and sat beside Lorrain, the famous young French doctor, who was sitting in a graceful pose next to a portrait of Catherine the Great, leaning his elbows on the table.

“Excellent,” said the doctor, replying to a question about the weather today, “excellent weather, but then, my princess, Moscow is so like the countryside.”

“Yes indeed, is it not?” said the princess, sighing. “Well, can he have something to drink?”

Lorrain pondered the question.

“Has he taken his medicine?”

“Yes.”

The doctor glanced at his Bréquet watch.

“Take a glass of boiled water and add a pinch” (with his slim fingers he showed her what a pinch meant) “of cream of tartar.”

“It has nefer happent,” said a German doctor to an adjutant, “that anyvone has surfifed a third stroke.”

“And how full of life he was!” said the adjutant. “And who will all this wealth go to?” he added in a whisper.

“Takers will be found,” the German replied, smiling.

Everyone glanced round at the door again as it creaked and the second princess, who had prepared the drink indicated by Lorrain, carried it in to the sick man. The German doctor approached Lorrain.

“Can he hold on until tomorrow morning?” the German asked, speaking in badly pronounced French.

Lorrain, pursing his lips, wagged his finger severely in front of his nose in a gesture of denial.

“Tonight and no later,” he said quietly with a decorous smile of self-satisfaction at his own ability to understand and convey the patient’s condition clearly, and walked away.

Meanwhile Prince Vasily opened the door into the eldest princess’s room. The room was in semi-darkness, there were only two icon lamps burning in front of the icons and there was a pleasant smell of incense and flowers. The entire room was crammed with little chiffoniers, closets and tables. The white coverlets of a high feather bed could be seen behind a screen. A little dog began barking.

“Ah, it is you, cousin.”

She stood up and arranged her hair, which was always, even now, so uncommonly smooth that it seemed to have been made in a single piece with her head and covered with lacquer.

“What is it, has something happened?” she asked. “I am so frightened already.”

“Nothing, everything is still the same, I only came to finish talking business with you, Katish,” said the prince, seating himself wearily in the armchair from which she had just risen. “My, how you have warmed it,” he said, “come, sit here, let us talk.”

“I thought something might have happened,” said the princess, and with her unvarying calm, strict, stony decorum she sat facing the prince, preparing to listen.

“Well then, my dear?” said Prince Vasily, taking the princess’s hand and by force of habit pulling it downwards.

It was obvious that this “well then” concerned many things that they both understood without naming them.

The princess, with her stiff, straight waist that was absurdly long for her legs, looked directly and fearlessly at the prince with her prominent grey eyes.

She shook her head and looked at an icon with a sigh. Her gesture could have been taken either as an expression of grief-stricken devotion or an expression of weariness and hope to rest soon. Prince Vasily took the gesture as an expression of weariness.

“Do you think,” he said, “it is any easier for me? I am as exhausted as a post horse, but even so I have to talk to you, Katish, and very seriously too.”

Prince Vasily stopped speaking and his cheeks began twitching nervously, first on one side, then on the other, lending his face an unpleasant expression such as never appeared on Prince Vasily’s face when he was in society drawing rooms. His eyes were also not the same as usual: they either glared with facetious insolence or gazed around in fright.

The princess, holding the little dog on her knees with her dry, thin hands, looked attentively into Prince Vasily’s eyes, but it was clear that she would not break the silence with a question, even if she had to remain silent until morning. The princess had one of those faces on which the expression remains the same, regardless of how the expression changes on another person’s face.

“Well, you see, my dear princess and cousin, Ekaterina Semyonovna,” Prince Vasily continued, evidently resuming what he had been saying with a certain inward struggle, “at moments such as this, one has to think of everything. We have to think about the future, about you … I love all of you like my own children, you know that.”

The princess gazed at him as drearily and rigidly as ever.

“Finally, I have to think about my family too,” Prince Vasily continued, angrily pushing the little table away from him and not looking at her, “you know, Katish, that you three Mamontov sisters, together with my wife, we are the count’s only direct heirs. I know how painful it is for you to talk and think of such things. And it is no easier for me, my friend, I am over fifty and I have to be prepared for anything. Do you know that I have sent for Pierre and that the count pointed directly at his portrait and demanded that he be brought to him?”

Prince Vasily looked enquiringly at the princess, but could not tell whether she understood what he had just said or was simply looking at him.

“I never cease praying to God for one thing,” she replied, “that He will have mercy on him and allow his noble soul to depart in peace from …”

“Yes, yes, quite so,” Prince Vasily interrupted impatiently, wiping his bald patch and angrily moving back towards himself the little table that he had pushed away, “but ultimately … ultimately the point is, you know yourself that last winter the count wrote a will in which he left the entire estate, bypassing the direct heirs and us, to Pierre.”

“It doesn’t matter how many wills he wrote!” the princess said calmly. “He could not leave anything to Pierre. Pierre is illegitimate.”

“My dear,” Prince Vasily said abruptly, hugging the little table close to him, becoming more animated and starting to speak more rapidly, “but what if a letter was written to His Majesty and the count had asked to adopt Pierre? You realise that in reward for the count’s services his request would be granted …”

The princess smiled as people smile when they think they know some matter better than those with whom they are speaking.

“I shall tell you more,” Prince Vasily continued, seizing hold of her hand, “the letter was written, although not sent, and His Majesty knew of it. It is only a question of whether it has been destroyed or not. If not, then as soon as it is all over” – Prince Vasily sighed, in this way making it clear what he meant by “all over” – “and they open the count’s documents, the will and the letter will be sent to His Majesty and his request will probably be granted. Pierre, as the legitimate son, will receive everything.”

“And our part?” the princess asked, smiling ironically, as though anything at all but that could happen.

“But, my dear Katish, it is as clear as day. He is then the sole legitimate heir to everything, and you will not receive even that much. You must know, my dear, whether the will and the letter were written and whether they have been destroyed. And if for some reason they have been forgotten, then you must know where they are, and find them, because …”

“This is just too much!” the princess interrupted him, smiling sardonically without changing the expression of her eyes. “I am a woman, you think that we are all stupid, but I know this much, that an illegitimate son cannot inherit … Un bâtard,” she added, hoping that this translation would finally demonstrate to the prince that his argument was groundless.

“But after all, why can you not understand, Katish! You are so intelligent: why can you not understand that if the count has written His Majesty a letter in which he requests him to declare his son legitimate, in that case Pierre will no longer be Pierre, but Count Bezukhov, and then under the will he will receive everything? And if the will and the letter have not been destroyed then, apart from the consolation of having been virtuous and everything that follows from that, you will be left with nothing. That is certain.”

“I know that the will was written, but I also know that it is invalid, and you seem to take me for a complete fool,” the princess said with the expression that women assume when they believe that they have said something witty and insulting.

“My dear princess, Ekaterina Semyonovna,” Prince Vasily began impatiently, “I did not come here in order to swap insults with you, but in order to speak with a dear, good, kind, truly dear friend about your own interests. I tell you for the tenth time that if the letter to the sovereign and the will in favour of Pierre are among the count’s papers, then you, my dearest, and your sisters too, are not the heirs. If you do not believe me, then believe people who know these things: I have just been speaking with Dmitri Onufrievich,” (he was the family lawyer), “and he said the same.”

Something clearly suddenly changed in the princess’s thoughts: her thin lips turned pale (her eyes remained the same) and as she began to speak her voice burst out in loud tones that she herself had evidently not expected.

“That would be good,” she said. “I never wanted and I do not want a thing.” She threw her little dog off her knees and adjusted the pleats of her dress. “That is his gratitude, that is his thanks to the people who have sacrificed everything for him,” she said. “Excellent! Very good! I do not want a thing, prince.”

“Yes, but you are not alone, you have sisters,” Prince Vasily replied. But the princess would not listen to him.

“Yes, I had known this for a long time, but I had forgotten that apart from meanness, deceit and intrigues, apart from ingratitude, the blackest ingratitude, I could expect nothing in this house …”

“Do you or do you not know where this will is?” asked Prince Vasily, his cheeks twitching even more violently than before.

“Yes, I was stupid, I still believed in people, and loved them, and sacrificed myself. But the only ones who prosper are those who are base and vile. I know who is behind these intrigues.”

The princess was about to stand, but the prince held her back by the arm. The princess had the air of someone suddenly disillusioned with the whole of humankind: she glared angrily at the prince.

“There is still time, my friend. Remember, Katish, that this was all done suddenly, in a moment of anger and sickness, and then forgotten. It is our duty, my dear, to correct his mistake, to make his final minutes easier and not allow him to commit this injustice, not allow him to die with the thought that he has rendered miserable those people …”

“Those people who have sacrificed everything for him,” the princess interjected, attempting to stand once again, but the prince prevented her, “which he has never appreciated, No, cousin,” she added with a sigh, “I shall remember that in this world one must not expect any reward, that in this world there is neither honour nor justice. In this world one must be cunning and wicked.”

“Now, listen, calm yourself; I know your noble heart.”

“No, my heart is wicked.”

“I know your heart,” the prince repeated, “I value your friendship, and I should wish you to hold the same opinion of me. Calm yourself and let us talk plainly while there is still time – perhaps a day, perhaps an hour: tell me everything that you know about the will, most importantly of all, where it is, you must know. We will take it now and show it to the count. He must have forgotten about it and will wish to destroy it. You understand that my only wish is to carry out his wishes religiously; that is the only reason why I came here. I am only here in order to help him and you.”

“I understand everything now. I know who is behind these intrigues. I know,” said the princess.

“That is not the point, my dearest.”

“It is your protégée, your dear Princess Drubetskaya, Anna Mikhailovna, whom I would not wish to have as a maidservant, that loathsome, repulsive woman.”

“Let us not waste time.”

“Oh, do not speak to me! Last winter she wormed her way in here and said such vile things, such abominable things about all of us, especially about Sophia, I cannot even repeat them – that the count became ill and would not see us for two weeks. That was the time, I know, when he wrote that repulsive, loathsome document, but I thought that the paper meant nothing.”

“That is the whole point – why did you not say anything to me earlier?”

“In the mosaic document case that he keeps under his pillow! Now I know,” the princess said, not answering him. “Yes, if I have a sin to answer for, it is my hate for that horrible woman,” the princess almost shouted, completely changed now. “And why does she come worming her way in here? But I shall speak my mind to her, I shall. The time will come.”

“For God’s sake, in your righteous wrath do not forget,” said Prince Vasily, smiling faintly, “that thousand-eyed envy is following our every move. We must act, but …”