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PIERRE was sitting opposite Dolohov and Nikolay Rostov. He ate greedily and
drank heavily, as he always did. But those who knew him slightly could see that
some great change was taking place in him that day. He was silent all through
dinner, and blinking and screwing up his eyes, looked about him, or letting his
eyes rest on something with an air of complete absent-mindedness, rubbed the
bridge of his nose with his finger. His face was depressed and gloomy. He seemed
not to be seeing or hearing what was passing about him and to be thinking of
some one thing, something painful and unsettled.
This unsettled question that worried him was due to the hints dropped by the
princess, his cousin, at Moscow in regard to Dolohov's close intimacy with his
wife, and to an anonymous letter he had received that morning, which, with the
vile jocoseness peculiar to all anonymous letters, had said that he didn't seem
to see clearly through his spectacles, and that his wife's connection with
Dolohov was a secret from no one but himself. Pierre did not absolutely believe
either the princess's hints, or the anonymous letter, but he was afraid now to
look at Dolohov, who sat opposite him. Every time his glance casually met
Dolohov's handsome, insolent eyes, Pierre felt as though something awful,
hideous was rising up in his soul, and he made haste to turn away. Involuntarily
recalling all his wife's past and her attitude to Dolohov, Pierre saw clearly
that what was said in the letter might well be true, might at least appear to be
the truth, if only it had not related to his wife. Pierre could not help
recalling how Dolohov, who had been completely reinstated, had returned to
Petersburg and come to see him. Dolohov had taken advantage of his friendly
relations with Pierre in their old rowdy days, had come straight to his house,
and Pierre had established him in it and lent him money. Pierre recalled how
Ellen, smiling, had expressed her dissatisfaction at Dolohov's staying in their
house, and how cynically Dolohov had praised his wife's beauty to him, and how
he had never since left them up to the time of their coming to Moscow.
“Yes, he is very handsome,” thought Pierre, “and I know him. There would be a
particular charm for him in disgracing my name and turning me into ridicule,
just because I have exerted myself in his behalf, have befriended him and helped
him. I know, I understand what zest that would be sure to give to his betrayal
of me, if it were true. Yes, if it were true, but I don't believe it. I have no
right to and I can't believe it.” He recalled the expression on Dolohov's face
in his moments of cruelty, such as when he was tying the police officer on to
the bear and dropping him into the water, or when he had utterly without
provocation challenged a man to a duel or killed a sledge-driver's horse with a
shot from his pistol. That expression often came into Dolohov's face when he was
looking at him. “Yes, he's a duelling bully,” thought Pierre; “to him it means
nothing to kill a man, it must seem to him that every one's afraid of him. He
must like it. He must think I am afraid of him. And, in fact, I really am afraid
of him,” Pierre mused; and again at these thoughts he felt as though something
terrible and hideous were rising up in his soul. Dolohov, Denisov, and Rostov
were sitting facing Pierre and seemed to be greatly enjoying themselves. Rostov
talked away merrily to his two friends, of whom one was a dashing hussar, the
other a notorious duellist and scapegrace, and now and then cast ironical
glances at Pierre, whose appearance at the dinner was a striking one, with his
preoccupied, absent-minded, massive figure. Rostov looked with disfavour upon
Pierre. In the first place, because Pierre, in the eyes of the smart hussar, was
a rich civilian, and husband of a beauty, was altogether, in fact, an old woman.
And secondly, because Pierre in his preoccupation and absent-mindedness had not
recognised Rostov and had failed to respond to his bow. When they got up to
drink the health of the Tsar, Pierre, plunged in thought, did not rise nor take
up his glass.
“What are you about?” Rostov shouted to him, looking at him with enthusiastic
and exasperated eyes. “Don't you hear: the health of our sovereign the
Emperor!”
Pierre with a sigh obeyed, got up, emptied his glass, and waiting till all
were seated again, he turned with his kindly smile to Rostov. “Why, I didn't
recognise you,” he said. But Rostov had no thoughts for him, he was shouting
“Hurrah!”
“Why don't you renew the acquaintance?” said Dolohov to Rostov.
“Oh, bother him, he's a fool,” said Rostov.
“One has to be sweet to the husbands of pretty women,” said Denisov. Pierre
did not hear what they were saying, but he knew they were talking of him. He
flushed and turned away. “Well, now to the health of pretty women,” said
Dolohov, and with a serious expression, though a smile lurked in the corners of
his mouth, he turned to Pierre.
“To the health of pretty women, Petrusha, and their lovers too,” he
said.
Pierre, with downcast eyes, sipped his glass, without looking at Dolohov or
answering him. The footman, distributing copies of Kutuzov's cantata, laid a
copy by Pierre, as one of the more honoured guests. He would have taken it, but
Dolohov bent forward, snatched the paper out of his hands and began reading it.
Pierre glanced at Dolohov, and his eyes dropped; something terrible and hideous,
that had been torturing him all through the dinner, rose up and took possession
of him. He bent the whole of his ungainly person across the table. “Don't you
dare to take it!” he shouted.
Hearing that shout and seeing to whom it was addressed, Nesvitsky and his
neighbour on the right side turned in haste and alarm to Bezuhov.
“Hush, hush, what are you about?” whispered panic-stricken voices. Dolohov
looked at Pierre with his clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, still with the same
smile, as though he were saying: “Come now, this is what I like.”
“I won't give it up,” he said distinctly.
Pale and with quivering lips, Pierre snatched the copy.
“You…you…blackguard!…I challenge you,” he said, and moving back his chair, he
got up from the table. At the second Pierre did this and uttered these words he
felt that the question of his wife's guilt, that had been torturing him for the
last four and twenty hours, was finally and incontestably answered in the
affirmative. He hated her and was severed from her for ever. In spite of
Denisov's entreaties that Rostov would have nothing to do with the affair,
Rostov agreed to be Dolohov's second, and after dinner he discussed with
Nesvitsky, Bezuhov's second, the arrangements for the duel. Pierre had gone
home, but Rostov with Dolohov and Denisov stayed on at the club listening to the
gypsies and the singers till late in the evening.
“So good-bye till to-morrow, at Sokolniky,” said Dolohov, as he parted from
Rostov at the club steps.
“And do you feel quite calm?” asked Rostov.
Dolohov stopped.
“Well, do you see, in a couple of words I'll let you into the whole secret of
duelling. If, when you go to a duel, you make your will and write long letters
to your parents, if you think that you may be killed, you're a fool and certain
to be done for. But go with the firm intention of killing your man, as quickly
and as surely as may be, then everything will be all right. As our bear-killer
from Kostroma used to say to me: ‘A bear,' he'd say, ‘why, who's not afraid of
one? but come to see one and your fear's all gone, all you hope is he won't get
away!' Well, that's just how I feel. A demain, mon cher.”
Next day at eight o'clock in the morning, Pierre and Nesvitsky reached the
Sokolniky copse, and found Dolohov, Denisov, and Rostov already there. Pierre
had the air of a man absorbed in reflections in no way connected with the matter
in hand. His face looked hollow and yellow. He had not slept all night. He
looked about him absent-mindedly, and screwed up his eyes, as though in glaring
sunshine. He was exclusively absorbed by two considerations: the guilt of his
wife, of which after a sleepless night he had not a vestige of doubt, and the
guiltlessness of Dolohov, who was in no way bound to guard the honour of a man,
who was nothing to him. “Maybe I should have done the same in his place,”
thought Pierre. “For certain, indeed, I should have done the same; then why this
duel, this murder? Either I shall kill him, or he will shoot me in the head, in
the elbow, or the knee. To get away from here, to run, to bury myself
somewhere,” was the longing that came into his mind. But precisely at the
moments when such ideas were in his mind, he would turn with a peculiarly calm
and unconcerned face, which inspired respect in the seconds looking at him, and
ask: “Will it be soon?” or “Aren't we ready?”
When everything was ready, the swords stuck in the snow to mark the barrier,
and the pistols loaded, Nesvitsky went up to Pierre.
“I should not be doing my duty, count,” he said in a timid voice, “nor
justifying the confidence and the honour you have done me in choosing me for
your second, if at this grave moment, this very grave moment, I did not speak
the whole truth to you. I consider that the quarrel has not sufficient grounds
and is not worth shedding blood over.… You were not right, not quite in the
right; you lost your temper.…”
“Oh, yes, it was awfully stupid,” said Pierre.
“Then allow me to express your regret, and I am convinced that our opponents
will agree to accept your apology,” said Nesvitsky (who, like the others
assisting in the affair, and every one at such affairs, was unable to believe
that the quarrel would come to an actual duel). “You know, count, it is far
nobler to acknowledge one's mistake than to push things to the irrevocable.
There was no great offence on either side. Permit me to convey…”
“No, what are you talking about?” said Pierre; “it doesn't matter.… Ready
then?” he added. “Only tell me how and where I am to go, and what to shoot at?”
he said with a smile unnaturally gentle. He took up a pistol, and began
inquiring how to let it off, as he had never had a pistol in his hand before, a
fact he did not care to confess. “Oh, yes, of course, I know, I had only
forgotten,” he said.
“No apologies, absolutely nothing,” Dolohov was saying to Denisov, who for
his part was also making an attempt at reconciliation, and he too went up to the
appointed spot.
The place chosen for the duel was some eighty paces from the road, on which
their sledges had been left, in a small clearing in the pine wood, covered with
snow that had thawed in the warmer weather of the last few days. The antagonists
stood forty paces from each other at the further edge of the clearing. The
seconds, in measuring the paces, left tracks in the deep, wet snow from the spot
where they had been standing to the swords of Nesvitsky and Denisov, which had
been thrust in the ground ten paces from one another to mark the barrier. The
thaw and mist persisted; forty paces away nothing could be seen. In three
minutes everything was ready, but still they delayed beginning. Every one was
silent.
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