XVIII

In the drawing room the conversation was continuing.

“Ah, my dear,” said the countess, “in my life too not everything is roses. Do you think I cannot see that with the way we live, our fortune will not last long? And it’s all the club, and his generous nature. When we are in the country, what rest do we get there? Theatres, hunts and God knows what else. But there I am talking about myself! Now, how did you arrange everything? I am constantly amazed at you, Annette, at your age, the way you gallop off in a carriage on your own, to Moscow, to St. Petersburg, to all the ministers and all the important people, and you know how to deal with them all, I am amazed! Well, how did everything go? I don’t know how to do anything of that sort.”

“Ah my darling,” replied Princess Anna Mikhailovna. “God grant that you may never know how hard it is to be left a widow with no support and with a son whom you love to distraction. One can learn to do everything,” she continued with a certain pride. “My lawsuit taught me that. If I need to see one of these bigwigs, I write a note: ‘Princess so-and-so wishes to see so-and-so’, and I go myself in a cab, two or three times if necessary, even four, until I get what I want. I don’t give a jot what people think of me.”

“Well, how did you ask for Borenka?” asked the countess. “After all, your son is a Guards officer, but Nikolai is going as a cadet. I have no one to intercede for me. Whom did you petition?”

“Prince Vasily. He was very kind. Now he has agreed to everything, and informed His Majesty,” Princess Anna Mikhailovna said ecstatically, completely forgetting all the humiliation that she had gone through to achieve her goal.

“And has he grown old, Prince Vasily?” the countess asked. “I haven’t seen him since our dramatics at the Rumyantsevs’. I think he has forgotten all about me. He used to run around after me,” the countess recalled with a smile.

“He is the same as ever,” replied Anna Mikhailovna. “The prince is courteous, positively brimming over with compliments. His high position has not turned his head at all. ‘I regret that I can do so little for you, my dear princess,’ he said to me, ‘ask what you will.’ Yes, he is a splendid man and an excellent relative. But you know, Nathalie, how I love my son. I don’t know what I would not do for his happiness. And my circumstances are so bad,” Anna Mikhailovna continued sadly, lowering her voice, “so very bad that I am now in a quite appalling situation. My miserable lawsuit is consuming everything I have and never makes progress. Can you believe that I do not have, literally do not have, ten kopecks to spare, and I have no idea where to get the money for Boris’s uniform.” She took out a handkerchief and began to cry. “I need five hundred roubles, and I have one twenty-five-rouble note. I am in such a state. My only hope now is Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov. If he will not support his godchild – after all, he is Boris’s godfather – and provide him with something to live on, then all my efforts will have been wasted, I shall have no money to fit him out.”

The countess shed a few tears and pondered something without speaking.

“I often think, perhaps it is a sin,” said the princess, “but I often think: there is Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov living alone … it’s an immense fortune … and what is he living for? Life is a burden to him, and Borya is only about to start living.”

“He is bound to leave something to Boris,” said the countess.

“God knows. These rich men and grandees are such egotists. But nonetheless I shall go to him now, and take Boris, and tell him to his face what is the matter. Let people think what they will of me, I really do not care, when my son’s destiny depends on it.” The princess got to her feet. “It is now two o’clock. And you are dining at four. I shall have enough time to go there and back.” And with the bearing and manners of a practical St. Petersburg lady who knows how to make good use of her time, Anna Mikhailovna sent for her son and went out into the front hall with him.

“Goodbye, my darling,” she said to the countess, who saw her to the door. “Wish me success,” she added, whispering so that her son would not hear.

“You are going to Count Kirill Vladimirovich, ma chère,” the count said from the dining room as he emerged into the hallway. “If he is feeling better, invite Pierre to dine with us. He has been here before, he danced with the children. You absolutely must invite him. Well, we shall see how Taras excels himself today. They say Count Orlov never had such a dinner as we shall have today.”

XIX

“My dear Boris,” Princess Anna Mikhailovna said to her son as Countess Rostova’s carriage, in which they were sitting, drove along the straw-covered street and into the wide, sand-strewn courtyard of the unfamiliar colonnaded house belonging to Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov. “My dear Boris,” said his mother, freeing her hand from under her old coat and laying it on her son’s arm in a gesture of timid affection, “please, set aside your pride. Count Kirill Vladimirovich is after all your godfather, and your future fate depends on him. Remember that, be nice, as you know how to be.”

“If only I knew that anything would come of it, apart from humiliation,” her son replied coldly. “But I promised and I am doing it for you. Only this is the last time, mama. Remember that.”

Even though the carriage was standing at the entrance, the doorman scrutinised the mother and son who, without giving their names, had walked straight up between the two rows of niched statues and into the glazed vestibule, and he asked, casting a significant glance at the countess’s shabby coat, whom they wished to see, the princesses or the count, and, on learning that it was the count, he informed them that his excellency was feeling worse today and his excellency was not receiving anyone.

“We can leave,” the son said in French, evidently delighted at this news.

“My friend!” the mother said in an imploring tone of voice, touching her son’s arm again, as though this touch could calm or excite him.

Boris, fearful of creating a scene in front of the doorman, said nothing, with the expression of a man who has decided to drain his bitter cup to the last drop. Without unbuttoning his greatcoat, he looked enquiringly at his mother.

“My dear fellow,” said Anna Mikhailovna in a soft voice, addressing the doorman, “I know that Count Kirill Vladimirovich is very ill … that is why I have come … I am a relative … I will not disturb him, my dear fellow … And I would only need to see Prince Vasily Sergeevich, he is staying here, after all. Announce us, please.”

The doorman tugged morosely on a cord leading upstairs and turned away.

“Princess Drubetskaya to see Prince Vasily Sergeevich,” he called to the footman in knee-breeches, shoes and tails, who had come running down and was peering out from under the overhang of the stairs.

The mother straightened the folds of her dyed silk dress and, with a glance at herself in the tall Venetian pier glass set into the wall, strode briskly up the stair-carpet in her down-at-heel shoes. “My dear, you promised me,” she said again to her son, trying to rouse him with the touch of her hand. Lowering his eyes, the son walked on gloomily.

They entered a hall from which one of the doors led into the chambers allotted to Prince Vasily.

As the mother and son, walking out into the centre of the room, were contemplating asking the way from an old footman who had jumped to his feet at their arrival, the bronze handle of one of the doors turned and Prince Vasily emerged, dressed simply in a velvet smoking jacket with only a single star, accompanied by a handsome, dark-haired man. This man was the famous St. Petersburg physician Lorrain.

“So it is definite,” the prince was saying.

“Prince, errare est humanum, but …” the doctor replied, burring his r’s and pronouncing the Latin words with a French accent.

“Very well, very well …”

Noticing Anna Mikhailovna and her son, Prince Vasily dismissed the doctor with a bow and approached them without speaking, but with an interrogatory air. The son was astonished to see the profound grief that was suddenly expressed in Princess Anna Mikhailovna’s eyes.

“Indeed, what distressing circumstances we are obliged to meet in, prince … Well, how is our dear invalid?” she said, disregarding the cold, insulting gaze directed at her and addressing the prince as her best friend, with whom she could share her woe. Prince Vasily looked in baffled enquiry, first at her, then at Boris. Boris bowed politely. Prince Vasily, making no response to the bow, turned back to Anna Mikhailovna and answered her question with a movement of the head and lips which signified the very worst prospect for the invalid.

“Surely not!” exclaimed Anna Mikhailovna. “Oh, that is terrible! The very idea is appalling … This is my son,” she added, indicating Boris. “He wished to thank you himself.”

Boris bowed politely once again.

“Believe me, prince, a mother’s heart will never forget what you have done for us.”

“I am glad to have been able to do something to please you, my dear Anna Mikhailovna,” said Prince Vasily, adjusting his jabot, expressing far greater self-importance with his gesture and tone of voice to his satisfied suppliant here in Moscow than he had managed in St. Petersburg, at Anna Scherer’s soirée.

“Try to serve well and be worthy,” he added, addressing Boris with severity. “I am so glad … Are you here on leave?” he enunciated in his impassive tone of voice.

“I am awaiting orders, your excellency, to take up my new posting,” Boris replied, betraying neither annoyance at the prince’s sharp tone nor a desire to engage in conversation, but speaking so calmly and coldly that the prince regarded him more closely.

“Do you live with your mother?”

“I live in the house of Countess Rostova,” said Boris and added, again coldly, “your excellency.”

He evidently said “your excellency” not so much in order to flatter the other man as to restrain him from familiarity.

“That is the Ilya Rostov who married Natalya Z.,” put in Anna Mikhailovna.

“I know, I know,” said Prince Vasily in his monotonous voice, with a typical Petersburgian’s contempt for everything Muscovite.

“I never could understand how Natalya could bring herself to marry that ill-bred bear of a man. A perfectly stupid and ridiculous individual. And a gambler into the bargain, so they say,” he said, thereby demonstrating that for all his contempt for Count Rostov and his like, and for all his important affairs of state, he was not above listening to the rumours of the town.

“But a very kind man, prince,” Anna Mikhailovna remarked, smiling with feeling, as though she were also aware that Count Rostov deserved such a low opinion, but was asking the prince to pity the poor old man.

“What do the doctors say?” the princess asked after a brief pause, once again with an expression of great sadness on her tearful face.

“There is not much hope,” said the prince.

“And I so much wanted to thank my uncle once more for all his kindnesses to me and Borya. He is his godson,” she added in a tone which suggested that this news ought to delight the prince highly.

Prince Vasily began thinking and frowned. Anna Mikhailovna realised that he was afraid of discovering in her a rival for Count Bezukhov’s inheritance. She hastened to reassure him.

“If it were not for my genuine love and devotion to my uncle,” she said, pronouncing the word with an especially casual confidence, “I know his character, noble and straightforward, but he has only the princesses here … They are still young.” She inclined her head and added in a whisper: “Has he fulfilled his final duty, prince? How precious those final minutes are! After all, things cannot get any worse, he must be made ready, if he is in such a bad way. We women, prince,” she said, smiling sweetly, “always know how to say these things. I must see him, no matter how painful it is for me, I am already accustomed to suffering.”

The prince had evidently understood what she was saying, and he had also understood, as he had at Anna Scherer’s soirée, that Anna Mikhailovna was not easily to be put off. “I fear that meeting might be too hard on him, dear Anna Mikhailovna,” he said. “Let us wait until the evening, the doctors have predicted a crisis.”

“But one must not wait, prince, at moments like this. Think, it concerns the salvation of his soul. Aah! The duty of a Christian is a terrible thing.” A door from the inner rooms opened and one of the princesses, the count’s nieces, emerged, with a beautiful, but cheerless, cold face and a long waist quite astonishingly out of proportion with her legs.

Prince Vasily turned to her.

“How is he?”

“Still the same. But now there’s all this noise,” said the princess, examining Anna Mikhailovna like a stranger.

“Ah, my dear, I did not recognise you,” Anna Mihailovna said with a glad smile, springing nimbly across to the count’s niece. “I have come to help you care for your uncle. I can well imagine how much you have suffered,” she added sympathetically, rolling her eyes upwards.

The princess did not even smile, but excused herself and went away. Anna Mikhailovna took off her gloves and, consolidating the gains she had made, settled down in an armchair, inviting Prince Vasily to sit beside her.

“Boris,” she said to her son with a smile. “I am going in to see the count … my uncle, and meanwhile you, my friend, go to see Pierre, and don’t forget to pass on the invitation from the Rostovs. They want him to come for dinner. He should not go though, I think,” she said, turning to the count.

“On the contrary,” said the prince, suddenly quite clearly out of sorts. “I should be glad if you would relieve me of that young fellow. He simply hangs about here. The count has not asked for him once.”

He shrugged. A footman led the young man down one staircase and up another to Pyotr Vladimirovich’s rooms.

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