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ON HIS RETURN to Moscow from the army, Nikolay Rostov was received by his
family as a hero, as the best of sons, their idolised Nikolenka; by his
relations, as a charming, agreeable, and polite young man; by his acquaintances
as a handsome lieutenant of hussars, a good dancer, and one of the best matches
in Moscow.
All Moscow was acquainted with the Rostovs; the old count had plenty of money
that year, because all his estates had been mortgaged, and so Nikolenka, who
kept his own racehorse, and wore the most fashionable riding-breeches of a
special cut, unlike any yet seen in Moscow, and the most fashionable boots, with
extremely pointed toes, and little silver spurs, was able to pass his time very
agreeably. After the first brief interval of adapting himself to the old
conditions of life, Rostov felt very happy at being home again. He felt that he
had grown up and become a man. His despair at failing in a Scripture
examination, his borrowing money from Gavrilo for his sledge-drivers, his stolen
kisses with Sonya—all that he looked back upon as childishness from which he was
now immeasurably remote. Now he was a lieutenant of hussars with a
silver-braided jacket, and a soldier's cross of St. George, he had a horse in
training for a race, and kept company with well-known racing men, elderly and
respected persons. He had struck up an acquaintance too, with a lady living in a
boulevard, whom he used to visit in the evening. He led the mazurka at the
Arharovs' balls, talked to Field-Marshal Kamensky about the war, and used
familiar forms of address to a colonel of forty, to whom he had been introduced
by Denisov.
His passion for the Tsar flagged a little in Moscow, as he did not see him,
and had no chance of seeing him all that time. But still he often used to talk
about the Emperor and his love for him, always with a suggestion in his tone
that he was not saying all that there was in his feeling for the Emperor,
something that every one could not understand; and with his whole heart he
shared the general feeling in Moscow of adoration for the Emperor Alexander
Pavlovitch, who was spoken of at that time in Moscow by the designation of the
“angel incarnate.”
During this brief stay in Moscow, before his return to the army, Rostov did
not come nearer to Sonya, but on the contrary drifted further away from her. She
was very pretty and charming, and it was obvious that she was passionately in
love with him. But he was at that stage of youth when there seems so much to do,
that one has not time to pay attention to love, and a young man dreads being
bound, and prizes his liberty, which he wants for so much else. When he thought
about Sonya during this stay at Moscow, he said to himself: “Ah! there are many,
many more like her to come, and there are many of them somewhere now, though I
don't know them yet. There's plenty of time before me to think about love when I
want to, but I have not the time now.” Moreover, it seemed to him that feminine
society was somewhat beneath his manly dignity. He went to balls, and into
ladies' society with an affection of doing so against his will. Races, the
English club, carousals with Denisov, and the nocturnal visits that followed—all
that was different, all that was the correct thing for a dashing young
hussar.
At the beginning of March the old count, Ilya Andreivitch Rostov, was very
busily engaged in arranging a dinner at the English Club, to be given in honour
of Prince Bagration.
The count, in his dressing-gown, was continually walking up and down in the
big hall, seeing the club manager, the celebrated Feoktista, and the head cook,
and giving them instructions relative to asparagus, fresh cucumbers,
strawberries, veal, and fish, for Prince Bagration's dinner. From the day of its
foundation, the count had been a member of the club, and was its steward. He had
been entrusted with the organisation of the banquet to Bagration by the club,
because it would have been hard to find any one so well able to organise a
banquet on a large and hospitable scale, and still more hard to find any one so
able and willing to advance his own money, if funds were needed, for the
organisation of the fête. The cook and the club manager listened to the count's
orders with good-humoured faces, because they knew that with no one better than
with him could one make a handsome profit out of a dinner costing several
thousands.
“Well, then, mind there are scallops, scallops in pie-crust, you know.”
“Cold entrées, I suppose—three? …” questioned the cook.
The count pondered.
“Couldn't do with less, three … mayonnaise, one,” he said, crooking
his finger.
“Then it's your excellency's order to take the big sturgeons?” asked the
manager.
“Yes; it can't be helped, we must take them, if they won't knock the price
down. Ah, mercy on us, I was forgetting. Of course we must have another
entrée on the table. Ah, good heavens!” he clutched at his head. “And
who's going to get me the flowers? Mitenka! Hey, Mitenka! You gallop, Mitenka,”
he said to the steward who came in at his call, “you gallop off to the
Podmoskovny estate” (the count's property in the environs of Moscow), “and tell
Maksimka the gardener to set the serfs to work to get decorations from the
greenhouses. Tell him everything from his conservatories is to be brought here,
and is to be packed in felt. And that I'm to have two hundred pots here by
Friday.”
After giving further and yet further directions of all sorts, he was just
going off to the countess to rest from his labours, but he recollected something
else, turned back himself, brought the cook and manager back, and began giving
orders again. They heard in the doorway a light, manly tread and a jingling of
spurs, and the young count came in, handsome and rosy, with his darkening
moustache, visibly sleeker and in better trim for his easy life in Moscow.
“Ah, my boy! my head's in a whirl,” said the old gentleman, with a somewhat
shamefaced smile at his son. “You might come to my aid! We have still the
singers to get, you see. The music is all settled, but shouldn't we order some
gypsy singers? You military gentlemen are fond of that sort of thing.”
“Upon my word, papa, I do believe that Prince Bagration made less fuss over
getting ready for the battle of Schöngraben than you are making now,” said his
son, smiling.
The old count pretended to be angry.
“Well, you talk, you try!” And the count turned to the cook, who with a
shrewd and respectful face looked observantly and sympathetically from father to
son.
“What are the young people coming to, eh, Feoktista?” said he; “they laugh at
us old fellows!”
“To be sure, your excellency, all they have to do is to eat a good dinner,
but to arrange it all and serve it up, that's no affair of theirs!”
“True, true!” cried the count; and gaily seizing his son by both hands, he
cried: “Do you know now I've got hold of you! Take a sledge and pair this minute
and drive off to Bezuhov, and say that Count Ilya Andreivitch has sent, say, to
ask him for strawberries and fresh pineapples. There's no getting them from any
one else. If he's not at home himself, you go in and give the message to the
princesses; and, I say, from there you drive off to the Gaiety—Ipatka the
coachman knows the place—and look up Ilyushka there, the gypsy who danced at
Count Orlov's, do you remember, in a white Cossack dress, and bring him here to
me.”
“And bring his gypsy girls here with him?” asked Nikolay, laughing.
“Come, come! …”
At this moment Anna Mihalovna stepped noiselessly into the room with that air
of Christian meekness, mingled with practical and anxious preoccupation, that
never left her face. Although Anna Mihalovna came upon the count in his
dressing-gown every day, he was invariably disconcerted at her doing so, and
apologised for his costume.
“Don't mention it, my dear count,” she said, closing her eyes meekly. “I am
just going to see Bezuhov,” she said. “Young Bezuhov has arrived, and now we
shall get all we want, count, from his greenhouses. I was wanting to see him on
my own account, too. He has forwarded me a letter from Boris. Thank God, Boris
is now on the staff.”
The count was overjoyed at Anna Mihalovna's undertaking one part of his
commissions, and gave orders for the carriage to be brought round for her.
“Tell Bezuhov to come. I'll put his name down. Brought his wife with him?” he
asked.
Anna Mihalovna turned up her eyes, and an expression of profound sadness came
into her face.
“Ah, my dear, he's very unhappy,” she said. “If it's true what we have been
hearing, it's awful. How little did we think of this when we were rejoicing in
happiness! and such a lofty, angelic nature, that young Bezuhov! Yes, I pity him
from my soul, and will do my utmost to give him any consolation in my
power.”
“Why, what is the matter?” inquired both the Rostovs, young and old
together.
Anna Mihalovna heaved a deep sigh.
“Dolohov, Marya Ivanovna's son,” she said in a mysterious whisper, “has, they
say, utterly compromised her. He brought him forward, invited him to his house
in Petersburg, and now this! … She has come here, and that scapegrace has come
after her,” said Anna Mihalovna. She wished to express nothing but sympathy with
Pierre, but in her involuntary intonations and half smile, she betrayed her
sympathy with the scapegrace, as she called Dolohov. “Pierre himself, they say,
is utterly crushed by his trouble.”
“Well, any way, tell him to come to the club—it will divert his mind. It will
be a banquet on a grand scale.”
On the next day, the 3rd of March, at about two in the afternoon, the two
hundred and fifty members of the English Club and fifty of their guests were
awaiting the arrival of their honoured guest, the hero of the Austrian campaign,
Prince Bagration.
On receiving the news of the defeat of Austerlitz, all Moscow had at first
been thrown into bewilderment. At that period the Russians were so used to
victories, that on receiving news of a defeat, some people were simply
incredulous, while others sought an explanation of so strange an event in
exceptional circumstances of some kind. At the English Club, where every one of
note, every one who had authentic information and weight gathered together,
during December, when the news began to arrive, not a word was said about the
war and about the last defeat; it was as though all were in a conspiracy of
silence. The men who took the lead in conversation at the club, such as Count
Rostoptchin, Prince Yury Vladimirovitch Dolgoruky, Valuev, Count Markov, and
Prince Vyazemsky, did not put in an appearance at the club, but met together in
their intimate circles at each other's houses.
That section of Moscow society which took its opinions from others (to which,
indeed, Count Ilya Andreivitch Rostov belonged) remained for a short time
without leaders and without definite views upon the progress of the war. People
felt in Moscow that something was wrong, and that it was difficult to know what
to think of the bad news, and so better to be silent. But a little later, like
jurymen coming out of their consultation room, the leaders reappeared to give
their opinion in the club, and a clear and definite formula was found. Causes
had been discovered to account for the fact—so incredible, unheard-of, and
impossible—that the Russians had been beaten, and all became clear, and the same
version was repeated from one end of Moscow to the other. These causes were: the
treachery of the Austrians; the defective commissariat; the treachery of the
Pole Przhebyshevsky and the Frenchman Langeron; the incapacity of Kutuzov; and
(this was murmured in subdued tones) the youth and inexperience of the Emperor,
who had put faith in men of no character and ability. But the army, the Russian
army, said every one, had been extraordinary, and had performed miracles of
valour. The soldiers, the officers, the generals—all were heroes. But the hero
among heroes was Prince Bagration, who had distinguished himself in his
Schöngraben engagement and in the retreat from Austerlitz, where he alone had
withdrawn his column in good order, and had succeeded in repelling during the
whole day an enemy twice as numerous. What contributed to Bagration's being
chosen for the popular hero at Moscow was the fact that he was an outsider, that
he had no connections in Moscow. In his person they could do honour to the
simple fighting Russian soldier, unsupported by connections and intrigues, and
still associated by memories of the Italian campaign with the name of Suvorov.
And besides, bestowing upon him such honours was the best possible way of
showing their dislike and disapproval of Kutuzov.
“If there had been no Bagration, somebody would have to invent him,” said the
wit, Shinshin, parodying the words of Voltaire.
Of Kutuzov people did not speak at all, or whispered abuse of him, calling
him the court weathercock and the old satyr.
All Moscow was repeating the words of Prince Dolgorukov: “Chop down trees
enough and you're bound to cut your finger,” which in our defeat suggested a
consolatory reminder of former victories, and the saying of Rostoptchin, that
French soldiers have to be excited to battle by high-sounding phrases; that
Germans must have it logically proved to them that it is more dangerous to run
away than to go forward; but that all Russian soldiers need is to be held back
and urged not to be too reckless! New anecdotes were continually to be heard on
every side of individual feats of gallantry performed by our officers and men at
Austerlitz. Here a man had saved a flag, another had killed five Frenchmen,
another had kept five cannons loaded single-handed. The story was told of Berg,
by those who did not know him, that wounded in his right hand, he had taken his
sword in his left and charged on the enemy. Nothing was said about Bolkonsky,
and only those who had known him intimately regretted that he had died so young,
leaving a wife with child, and his queer old father.
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