War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

  'Liza, I'm asking you to stop,' said Prince Andrey, more meaningfully still.

  Pierre had been growing more and more agitated during this conversation, and now he got to his feet and walked over to the princess. Clearly the sight of her weeping was too much for him, and he was on the point of tears himself.

  'Please don't be so upset, Princess. I know how it seems to you . . . honestly, I've been through it myself . . . because . . . er, what I mean is . . . No, sorry, you don't want other people . . . Oh, please don't be so upset . . . I must go.'

  Prince Andrey caught him by the arm and stopped him.

  'No, wait, Pierre. The princess is very kind. She wouldn't want to deprive me of the pleasure of spending an evening with you.'

  'No, he's just thinking about himself,' the princess declared, with no attempt to check her bitter tears.

  'Liza,' said Prince Andrey sharply, raising his voice to a level that declared his patience to be at an end.

  All at once the princess's lovely little face changed its angry squirrel-like expression into a look of fear that made her seem both beautiful and sympathetic. She frowned and glared, directing her lovely eyes at her husband, but her face wore the timid, apologetic look of a dog wagging its drooping tail quickly but without much confidence.

  'Oh, good Lord!' murmured the princess, and with one hand holding her gown she walked over to her husband and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

  'Goodnight, Liza,' said Prince Andrey, getting up to kiss her hand, politely, as if she was a stranger to him.

  The two friends were silent. Neither wished to start a conversation. Pierre kept looking across at Prince Andrey; Prince Andrey rubbed his forehead with a small hand.

  'Let's go and have some supper,' he said with a sigh as he got to his feet and went over to the door.

  They went into the elegant, newly decorated and richly appointed dining-room. Everything from the dinner napkins to the silver, the china and the glass, bore the special stamp of newness that exists in the households of recently married couples. Half-way through supper Prince Andrey leant on one elbow, and with the air of a man who has something on his mind and has suddenly decided to talk about it he assumed an expression of nervous irritability the like of which Pierre had never seen in his friend before, and began to speak.

  'Never, never get married, my dear fellow, that's my advice to you. Don't get married, not until you can say you've done everything possible, and until you have stopped loving your chosen woman, until you can see her clearly - otherwise you will be making a cruel mistake that cannot be put right. Marry when you're old and good for nothing . . . Otherwise everything good and noble in you will be finished. It will all be frittered away over trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Don't look so surprised. If you're expecting some kind of future for yourself, you'll feel every step of the way that everything is closed to you, blocked off, except the drawing-room, where you'll operate on the same level as the court lackey and the fool. Oh, why bother?' He made a vigorous gesture with his arm.

  Pierre took off his spectacles, which transformed his face, making it look even more benevolent, and gazed in amazement at his friend.

  'My wife,' Prince Andrey went on, 'is a splendid woman. She is one of those rare women with whom you feel your honour is secure, but, my God!, what wouldn't I give now to be an unmarried man! You're the first and only person I have said this to, because I'm close to you.'

  As Prince Andrey said this he seemed less than ever like the earlier Bolkonsky who had sat sprawling in Anna Pavlovna's drawing-room screwing up his eyes and forcing French phrases through his teeth. Now every muscle in his thin face was quivering with nervous excitement; his eyes, in which all the fire of life had seemed to have gone out, now shone with a radiant, vivid gleam. Clearly, the more lifeless he might seem at ordinary times, the more energetic he became when he was roused.

  'You don't understand why I'm saying this,' he went on. 'Well, this is life itself. You talk about Bonaparte and his career,' he said, though Pierre had not spoken about Bonaparte; 'you talk about Bonaparte, but Bonaparte, when he was working his way step by step straight towards his goal, he was free, he had nothing but his goal to go for and he got there. But you tie yourself to a woman and you'll lose all your freedom, like a convict in fetters. And all the hope and strength there is in you just drags you down and tortures you with regret. Drawing-rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, vacuous nonsense - that's the vicious circle I'm stuck in. I'm off to the war, the greatest war there's ever been, and I know nothing, I'm useless. I'm a nice fellow and I have a sharp tongue,' he went on, 'and at Anna Pavlovna's people listen when I speak. And all these stupid people without whom my wife can't exist, all these women . . . If you only knew what these fine women are, or let's say women in general! My father's right. Selfish, vain, stupid, totally vacuous - that's what women are when they show themselves in their true colours. You see them out in society, you think there might be something there, but no, there's nothing, nothing. Don't get married, my dear fellow, just don't!'

  'It seems odd,' said Pierre, 'that you, you consider yourself a failure and your life ruined. You've got your whole life in front of you, everything. And you . . .'

  He did not say what about you, but his tone showed how much he admired his friend, and how much he was expecting from him in the future.

  'How can he talk like that?' Pierre thought. He regarded Prince Andrey as a model of all the virtues, because he combined in the highest degree all the qualities he himself lacked - they were best summed up in a single concept: will power. Pierre always admired Prince Andrey's ability to get on easily with all sorts of people, his remarkable memory, his wide reading (he had read everything, he knew everything and he could understand something about everything), and most of all his capacity for hard work and learning. If Pierre was sometimes struck by Andrey's inability to dream dreams and philosophize (activities that Pierre was particularly prone to) he saw this not as a defect but as a positive quality.

  Even in the very warmest, friendliest and simplest of relationships you need either flattery or praise in the way that you need grease to keep wheels turning.

  'I'm yesterday's man,' said Prince Andrey. 'There's no point in talking about me. Let's talk about you,' he said after a short pause, smiling at his own thoughts of consolation. His smile was instantly reflected on Pierre's face.

  'Why, what is there to say about me?' said Pierre, his mouth broadening in an easy-going, happy smile. 'What am I? I am a bastard.' And he suddenly blushed to the roots of his hair. Clearly, it cost him a great effort to say this. 'No name, no fortune . . . And really, when all's said and done . . .' But he didn't say really what. 'Anyway, I'm free for the time being and I'm doing all right. It's just that I've no idea what to get going on. I wanted to talk things over with you seriously.'

  Prince Andrey looked at him with kindly eyes. But as he looked, for all his friendliness and kindness he knew his own superiority.

  'I feel close to you because you're the only living person in our social group. You'll be all right. Choose anything; it won't make any difference. You'll always be all right, but there is one thing - stop knocking about with the Kuragins and leading their kind of life. It doesn't suit you, all that riotous living, debauchery and all that stuff . . .'

  'Can't be helped, old man,' said Pierre with a shrug. 'Women, my dear fellow, women.'

  'I can't see it,' answered Andrey. 'Decent women are all very well, but Kuragin's women, women and wine . . . No, I just can't see it!' Pierre was staying at Prince Vasily Kuragin's, and sharing in the dissipated lifestyle of his son Anatole, the young man whom they were proposing to marry off to Prince Andrey's sister - in order to reform him.

  'You know what?' said Pierre, as though a happy thought had suddenly struck him. 'Seriously, I've been thinking that for quite a while now. With this kind of life I can't make any decisions, or think anything through. I've got a permanent headache and no money in my pocket. He's invited me tonight, but I'm not g
oing.'

  'Promise me you won't go.'

  'I promise.'

  It was past one o'clock when Pierre left his friend. On one of those limpid 'white nights' typical of Petersburg in June17 Pierre got into a hired cab with every intention of going home. But the nearer he got, the more he realized it would be impossible to get to sleep on a night like this, when it was more like evening or morning. You could see right down the empty streets. On the way Pierre remembered that the old gambling school would be meeting at Anatole Kuragin's that night, and it would usually lead on to a drinking session followed by one of Pierre's favourite pastimes.

  'It would be nice to go to Kuragin's,' he thought, but then remembered he had promised Prince Andrey he wouldn't go there again.

  But, as so often happens with people who might be described as spineless, he felt such a strong urge for one more shot at the old debauchery that he decided to go. And it suddenly occurred to him that his promise wasn't valid anyway because he had already promised Prince Anatole that he would go before promising Andrey that he wouldn't. Then he began to think that all promises like that were relative, they had no definite meaning, especially if you imagined that tomorrow you might be dead or something so strange might happen that there would be no difference between honesty and dishonesty. Pierre was very prone to this kind of speculation which destroyed all his resolutions and intentions. He went to Kuragin's.

  He drove up to the front of a mansion near the horse guards' barracks where Anatole lived, went up the well-lit steps and the staircase, and walked in through an open door. There was no one in the vestibule; empty bottles, cloaks and overshoes were scattered about everywhere. The place reeked of drink, and in the distance he could hear people talking and shouting.

  They had finished playing cards and supper was over, but the party had not broken up. Pierre threw off his cloak, and went into the first room, where there were some leftovers from supper, and a servant, thinking that no one could see him, was downing half-empty glasses on the side. From the third room came great roars of laughter, the sound of familiar voices shouting, and a bear growling. Eight or nine young men were jostling each other by an open window. Three others were playing with a bear-cub, one of them yanking at its chain and scaring the others with it.

  'A hundred on Stevens!' cried one.

  'No holding on to the window!' shouted another.

  'My money's on Dolokhov!' shouted a third. 'You're my witness, Kuragin.'

  'Forget that bear. There's a bet on here.'

  'Down in one, or you've lost!' cried a fourth.

  'Yakov. Bring us a bottle, Yakov!' shouted Anatole himself, a tall, handsome man, standing in his shirtsleeves in the middle of the group, his fine shirt-front unbuttoned down to mid-chest. 'Hang on, gentlemen. Look who's come - it's old Pierre! Good man!' He had turned towards Pierre.

  From the window a blue-eyed man of average height, conspicuously sober amidst the drunken uproar, called out clearly, 'Come on over here. Sort out your bets!' This was Dolokhov, an officer in the Semyonov regiment, a notorious gambler and swaggering madcap, at present living with Anatole. Pierre beamed at the company.

  'I don't get it. What's happening?'

  'Hang on, he's not drunk. Get him a bottle!' said Anatole. He took a glass from the table and walked over to Pierre.

  'First things first. Have a good drink.'

  Pierre proceeded to down glass after glass, looking doubtfully at the drunken revellers, who were crowding round the window again, and listening to what they were saying. Anatole kept his glass topped up and told him that Dolokhov had made a bet with an English sailor by the name of Stevens, who was passing through, that he, Dolokhov, could drink a bottle of rum sitting on the third-floor window-sill with his legs dangling outside.

  'Come on, finish that bottle,' said Anatole, giving Pierre the last glass, 'or I'm not letting you go!'

  'No, I don't want it,' said Pierre, shoving Anatole away, and he went over to the window.

  Dolokhov had a grip on the Englishman's arm and he was meticulously explaining the terms of the bet, looking mainly at Anatole and Pierre.

  Dolokhov was a man of average height in his mid-twenties, with curly hair and bright blue eyes. Like all infantry officers he wore no moustache, so that his mouth, the most striking thing about him, was fully revealed. The lines of that mouth were very finely curved. The upper lip closed sharply down in the middle wedge-like over the firm lower one, and at the two corners the mouth always worked itself into something like a double smile. All of this, together with the decisive, brazen, shrewd look in his eyes, was so impressive that no one could fail to notice this face. Dolokhov was a man of few resources and no contacts. And yet somehow, despite the fact that Anatole doled out his money in tens of thousands, Dolokhov lived with him and managed to present himself in such a way that Anatole himself and everybody who knew them admired Dolokhov more than Anatole. Dolokhov gambled on everything, and usually won. However much he drank, he always kept a clear head. Both of them, Kuragin and Dolokhov, were currently infamous figures among the fast-and-loose young men of Petersburg.

  The bottle of rum was brought. Two servants, clearly flustered and intimidated by shouts and directions issuing from gentlemen on all sides, were in the process of removing the section of the window-frame that prevented anyone sitting on the outer sill. Anatole swaggered across to the window, eager to smash something. He shoved the servants out of the way and pulled at the frame, but it wouldn't give. He broke one of the panes.

  'Come on, Hercules, you have a go,' he said, turning to Pierre. Pierre grabbed hold of the cross-piece and heaved, broke the oak frame with a crash and wrenched it out.

  'Get the lot out, or they'll think I'm holding on,' said Dolokhov.

  'The Englishman's bragging, isn't he? . . . Is everything all right?' said Anatole.

  'Yes,' said Pierre, watching Dolokhov go over to the window, bottle in hand. The light of the sky shone in with the merging of dusk and dawn. Dolokhov jumped up on to the window-sill, still holding his bottle. 'Listen!' he shouted, standing there and facing back into the room. Silence fell.

  'I bet you,' (he spoke in French so the Englishman could understand what he was saying, and his French wasn't too good) 'I bet you fifty imperials . . . make it a hundred?' he added, turning to the Englishman.

  'No, fifty,' said the Englishman.

  'All right, fifty it is - that I can drink a whole bottle of rum without taking it away from my lips. I'll drink it sitting outside the window, there,' (he bent down and pointed to the downward-sloping ledge on the outside) 'without holding on to anything . . . Is that it?'

  'Yes,' said the Englishman.

  Anatole turned to the sailor, took hold of a button on his coat and looked down at him (he was quite short), and went through the terms of the bet once again in English.

  'Hang on a minute!' shouted Dolokhov, calling for attention by banging the bottle on the window-sill. 'Hang on, Kuragin. Listen: if anybody else can do it I'll pay him a hundred imperials. All right?' The sailor nodded with no indication of whether he accepted this new bet or not. Anatole hung on to him, and although the sailor nodded to say he fully understood, Anatole kept on translating Dolokhov's words into English. A skinny young life guardsman, who had lost a lot that evening, climbed up on to the window-sill, stuck his head out and looked down.

  'Ugh!' he said, staring down at the pavement.

  'Atten-shun!' cried Dolokhov, yanking him back in, so that he tripped over his spurs and came tumbling down awkwardly into the room.

  Standing the bottle on the sill to keep it within easy reach, Dolokhov climbed slowly and deliberately out through the window and let his legs dangle down outside. Bracing himself with both hands against the sides of the frame, he settled himself, sat down, let go with his hands, shuffled slightly to the right, then to the left, and reached for the bottle. Anatole brought two candles, and put them on the window-ledge, even though it was quite light. Dolokhov's back with his white shirt
and his curly head were lit up from both sides. Everybody swarmed round the window, the English sailor at the front. Pierre smiled, and said nothing. One of the party, a bit older than the rest, suddenly pushed his way through with a scared and angry face, and tried to grab at Dolokhov's shirt.

  'Gentlemen, this is crazy. He'll get killed,' said this more sensible man.

  Anatole stopped him.

  'Don't touch him. You'll put him off, and then he will get killed. Eh? What about that?'

  Dolokhov looked round, shifting his position, still supporting himself with both hands.

  'If anybody tries to get hold of me again,' he said, forcing out his words one by one through tight thin lips, 'I'll chuck him down there . . . Right then!'

  Whereupon he turned round again to face the outside, took his hands away, picked up the bottle and put it to his mouth, bent his head back and held his free hand up in the air to balance himself. One of the servants, who had begun clearing up the broken glass, stood transfixed in a stooping posture, his eyes glued on the window and Dolokhov's back. Anatole stood erect, staring. The Englishman winced as he watched from one side. The man who had tried to stop it all had rushed across into a corner and now lay on the sofa facing the wall. Pierre covered his eyes, a feeble, forgotten smile lingered on his lips, and his face was now full of fear and horror. Nobody spoke. Pierre took his hands away from his eyes; there was Dolokhov still sitting in the same position, only his head was bent so far back that the curls on his neck touched his shirt collar, and the hand with the bottle rose higher and higher, trembling with the effort. The bottle was draining nicely, and went higher as it did so, bending the head further back. 'Why is it taking so long?' thought Pierre. More than half an hour seemed to have passed. Suddenly Dolokhov's spine jerked back, and his arm trembled nervously, enough to shift his whole body as he sat on the sloping ledge. He slipped, and his arm and head shook even more violently as he struggled. One hand rose to clutch at the window-sill, but fell back again. Pierre shut his eyes again, and swore he would never open them. Then suddenly he was aware of things beginning to move round about him. He glanced up. There was Dolokhov standing on the window-ledge, his pale face full of delight.