He returned home with his horse in a lather, and told Lavrushka—he had kept on Denisov’s old valet—and the comrades who dropped in that evening, that he had applied for leave and was going home. It was strange and difficult for him to believe that he was going away without hearing from the staff whether he had been promoted to be a captain or had received the St. Anne for the last man?uvres (a matter of the greatest interest to him). It was strange to him to think of going away like this without having sold Count Goluhovsky his three roan horses, over which the Polish count was haggling with him. Rostov had taken a bet that he would get two thousand for them. It seemed inconceivable that without him the ball could take place which the hussars were to give in honour of their favourite Polish belle, Madame Pshazdetsky, to outdo the Uhlans, who had given a ball to their favourite belle, Madame Borzhozovsky. Yet he knew he must leave world, where all was well and all was clear, to go where all was nonsensical and complicated. A week later his leave came. His comrades—not only in the regiment, but throughout the whole brigade—gave Rostov a dinner that cost a subscription of fifteen roubles a head. Two bands of musicians played, two choruses sang; Rostov danced the trepak with Major Bazov; the drunken officers tossed him in the air, hugged him, dropped him; the soldiers of the third squadron tossed him once more and shouted hurrah! Then they put Rostov in a sledge and escorted him as far as the first posting-station on his way.
For the first half of the journey, from Krementchug to Kiev, all Rostov’s thoughts—as is apt to be the case with travellers—turned to what he had left behind—to his squadron. But after being jolted over the first half of the journey, he had begun to forget his three roans and his quartermaster, Dozhoyveyky, and was beginning to wonder uneasily what he should find on reaching Otradnoe. The nearer he got, the more intense, far more intense, were his thoughts of home (as though moral feeling were subject to the law of acceleration in inverse ratio with the square of the distance). At the station nearest to Otradnoe he gave the sledge-driver a tip of three roubles, and ran breathless up the steps of his home, like a boy.
After the excitement of the first meeting, and the strange feeling of disappointment after his expectations—the feeling that “it’s just the same; why was I in such a hurry?”—Nikolay began to settle down in his old world of home. His father and mother were just the same, only a little older. All that was new in them was a certain uneasiness and at times a difference of opinion, which he had never seen between them before, and soon learned to be due to the difficulties of their position.
Sonya was now nearly twenty. She would grow no prettier now; there was no promise in her of more to come; but what she had was enough. She was brimming over with love and happiness as soon as Nikolay came home, and this girl’s faithful, steadfast love for him gladdened his heart. Petya and Natasha surprised Nikolay more than all the rest. Petya was a big, handsome lad of thirteen, whose voice was already cracking; he was full of gaiety and clever pranks. Nikolay did not get over his wonder at Natasha for a long while, and laughed as he looked at her.
“You’re utterly different,” he told her.
“How? Uglier?”
“No, quite the contrary; but what dignity! A real princess!” he whispered to her.
“Yes, yes, yes,” cried Natasha gleefully.
Natasha told him all the story of Prince Andrey’s lovemaking, of his visit to Otradnoe, and showed him his last letter.
“Well, are you glad?” asked Natasha. “I’m so at peace and happy now.”
“Very glad,” answered Nikolay. “He’s a splendid fellow. Are you very much in love, then?”
“How shall I say?” answered Natasha. “I was in love with Boris, with our teacher, with Denisov; but this is utterly different. I feel calm, settled. I know there is no one better than he in the world, and so I am calm now and content. It’s utterly different from anything before…”
Nikolay expressed his dissatisfaction at the marriage being put off for a year. But Natasha fell on him with exasperation, proving to him that no other course was possible, that it would be a horrid thing to enter a family against the father’s will, and that she would not consent to it herself.
“You don’t understand at all, at all,” she kept saying.
Nikolay paused a moment, and then said he agreed with her.
Her brother often wondered as he looked at her. It seemed quite incredible that she was a girl in love and parted from her betrothed lover. She was even-tempered, serene, and quite as light-hearted as ever. This made Nikolay wonder, and look on the engagement to Bolkonsky rather sceptically. He could not believe that her fate was by now sealed, especially as he had never seen her with Prince Andrey. It still seemed to him that there was something not real in this proposed marriage.
“Why this delay? Why were they not formally betrothed?” he thought.
Once in talking to his mother about his sister, he found to his surprise, and partly to his satisfaction, that at the bottom of her heart his mother sometimes regarded the marriage as sceptically as he did.
“Here, you see, he writes,” she said, showing her son a letter from Prince Andrey with that latent feeling of grudge which mothers always have in regard to their daughter’s happiness in marriage, “he writes that he won’t be coming before December. What can it be that keeps him? Illness, no doubt! His health is very weak. Don’t tell Natasha. Don’t make a mistake, because she seems in good spirits; it’s the last she has of her girlhood, and I know how she is when she gets his letters. Still, God grant, all may be well yet,” she always concluded: “he’s a splendid fellow.”
Chapter 2
IN THE EARLY PART of his time at home Nikolay was serious and even dull. He was worried by the necessity of meddling in the stupid business matters which his mother had sent for him to look after. To be rid of this burden as soon as possible, on the third day after his return, he marched angrily off, making no reply to inquiries where he was going, with scowling brows entered Mitenka’s lodge, and demanded from him an account in full. What he meant by an account in full, Nikolay knew even less than the panic-stricken and bewildered Mitenka. The conversation and Mitenka’s accounts did not last long. The village elder, the deputy, and the village clerk, waiting in the entry of the lodge, heard with awe and delight at first the booming and snapping of the young count’s voice in a constantly ascending scale, then terrible words of abuse, flung one after another.
“Robber! Ungrateful brute!…I’ll thrash the dog!…not papa to deal with…plundering us…” and so on.
Then, with no less awe and delight, these persons saw the young count, with a red face and bloodshot eyes, dragging Mitenka out by the collar, kicking him with great dexterity at every appropriate moment between his words, and shouting:
“Away with you! Never let me set eyes on you, blackguard!”
Mitenka flew head first down six steps and ran to the shrubbery. This shrubbery was well known as a haven of refuge for delinquents at Otradnoe. Mitenka had, on coming home drunk from the town, himself hidden in the shrubbery, and many of the residents of Otradnoe had been indebted to the saving power of the shrubbery when anxious to conceal themselves from Mitenka.
Mitenka’s wife and sister-in-law, with frightened faces, peeped into the passage from the door of their room, where was a bright samovar boiling, and the bailiff’s high bedstead stood under a quilted patchwork coverlet.
The young count walked by, treading resolutely and breathing hard, taking no notice of them, and went into the house.
The countess heard at once through her maids of what had been happening in the lodge, and on one side was comforted by the reflection that now their position would be sure to improve, though on the other hand she was uneasy as to the effect of the scene on her son. She went several times on tiptoe to his door, and listened as he lighted one pipe after another.
The next day the old count drew his son on one side, and, with a timid smile, said to him, “But you know, my dear boy, you had no reason to be so angry. Mitenka has told me all about it.”
“I knew,” thought Nikolay, “that I should never make head or tail of anything in this crazy world.”
“You were angry at his not having put down these seven hundred and eight roubles. But you see they were carried forward by double entry, and you didn’t look at the next page.”
“Papa, he’s a blackguard and a thief, I am certain. And what I have done, I have done. But if you don’t wish it, I will say nothing to him.”
“No, my dear boy!” (The old count was confused. He was conscious that he had mismanaged his wife’s estate and had wronged his children, but he had no notion how to rectify the position.) “No, I beg you to go into things. I am old. I…”
“No, papa, forgive me if I have done what you dislike. I know less about it than you do.”
“Damn them all, these peasants, and money matters and double entries,” he thought. “I used once to understand scoring at cards, but bookkeeping by the double entry is quite beyond me,” he said to himself, and from that time he did not meddle further with the management of the family affairs. But one day the countess called her son into her room, told him that she had a promissory note from Anna Mihalovna for two thousand roubles, and asked Nikolay what he thought it best to do about it.
“Well,” answered Nikolay, “you say that it rests with me. I don’t like Anna Mihalovna, and I don’t like Boris, but they were our friends, and they were poor. So that’s what I would do!” and he tore up the note and by so doing made the countess sob with tears of joy. After this, young Rostov took no further part in business of any sort, but devoted himself with passionate interest to everything to do with the chase, which was kept up on a great scale on the old count’s estate.
Chapter 3
WINTRY WEATHER was already setting in, the morning frosts hardened the earth drenched by the autumn rains. Already the grass was full of tufts, and stood out bright green against the patches of brown winter cornland trodden by the cattle, and the pale yellow stubble of the summer cornfields, and the reddish strips of buckwheat. The uplands and copses, which at the end of August had still been green islands among the black fields ploughed ready for winter corn, and the stubble had become golden and lurid red islands in a sea of bright green autumn crops. The grey hare had already half-changed its coat, the foxes’ cubs were beginning to leave their parents, and the young wolves were bigger than dogs. It was the best time of the year for the chase. The dogs of an ardent young sportsman like Rostov were only just coming into fit state for hunting, so that at a common council of the huntsmen it was decided to give the dogs three days’ rest, and on the 16th of September to go off on a hunting expedition, beginning with Dubravy, where there was a litter of wolves that had never been hunted.
Such was the position of affairs on the 14th of September.
All that day the dogs were kept at home. It was keen and frosty weather, but towards evening the sky clouded over and it began to thaw. On the morning of the 15th of September when young Rostov in his dressing-gown looked out of window he saw a morning which was all the heart could desire for hunting. It looked as though the sky were melting, and without the slightest wind, sinking down upon the earth. The only movement in the air was the soft downward motion of microscopic drops of moisture or mist. The bare twigs in the garden were hung with transparent drops which dripped on to the freshly fallen leaves. The earth in the kitchen-garden had a gleaming, wet, black look like the centre of a poppy, and at a short distance away it melted off into the damp, dim veil of fog.
Nikolay went out on to the wet and muddy steps. There was a smell of decaying leaves and dogs. The broad-backed, black and tan bitch Milka, with her big, prominent, black eyes, caught sight of her master, got up, stretched out her hindlegs, lay down like a hare, then suddenly jumped up and licked him right on his nose and moustache. Another harrier, catching sight of his master from the bright coloured path, arched its back, darted headlong to the steps, and, lifting its tail, rubbed itself against Nikolay’s legs.
“O, hoy!” He heard at that moment the inimitable hunting halloo which unites the deepest bass and the shrillest tenor notes. And round the corner came the huntsman and whipper-in, Danilo, a grey, wrinkled man, with his hair cropped round in the Ukrainian fashion. He held a bent whip in his hand, and his face had that expression of independence and scorn for everything in the world, which is only to be seen in huntsmen. He took off his Circassian cap to his master and looked scornfully at him. That scorn was not offensive to his master. Nikolay knew that this Danilo, disdainful of all, and superior to everything, was still his man and his huntsman.
“Danilo,” said Nikolay, at the sight of this hunting weather, those dogs, and the huntsman, feeling shyly that he was being carried away by that irresistible sporting passion in which a man forgets all his previous intentions, like a man in love at the sight of his mistress.
“What is your bidding, your excellency?” asked a bass voice, fit for a head deacon, and hoarse from hallooing, and a pair of flashing black eyes glanced up from under their brows at the silent young master. “Surely you can’t resist it?” those two eyes seemed to be asking.
“It’s a good day, eh? Just right for riding and hunting, eh?” said Nikolay, scratching Milka behind the ears.
Danilo winked and made no reply.
“I sent Uvarka out to listen at daybreak,” his bass boomed out after a moment’s silence. “He brought word she’s moved into the Otradnoe enclosure; there was howling there.” (“She’s moved” meant that the mother wolf, of whom both knew, had moved with her cubs into the Otradnoe copse, which was a small hunting preserve about two versts away.)
“Shouldn’t we go, eh?” said Nikolay. “Come to me with Uvarka.”
“As you desire.”
“Then put off feeding them.”
“Yes, sir!”
Five minutes later Danilo and Uvarka were standing in Nikolay’s big study. Although Danilo was not tall, to see him in a room gave one an impression such as one has on seeing a horse or bear standing on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human life. Danilo felt this himself, and as usual he kept close to the door and tried to speak more softly, and not to move for fear of causing some breakage in the master’s apartments. He did his utmost to get everything said quickly so as to get as soon as might be out into the open again, from under a ceiling out under the sky.
After making inquiries and extracting from Danilo an admission that the dogs were fit (Danilo himself was longing to go), Nikolay told them to have the horses saddled. But just as Danilo was about to go, Natasha, wrapped in a big shawl of her old nurse’s, ran into the room, not yet dressed, and her hair in disorder. Petya ran in with her.
