War and Peace by graf Leo Tolstoy (latest ebook reader .TXT) 📕

to be my sister’s companion.”

The old man at first stared fixedly at his son, and an unnatural smile disclosed the fresh gap between his teeth to which Prince Andrew could not get accustomed.

“What companion, my dear boy? Eh? You’ve already been talking it over! Eh?”

“Father, I did not want to judge,” said Prince Andrew, in a hard and bitter tone, “but you challenged me, and I have said, and always shall say, that Mary is not to blame, but those to blame—the one to blame—is that Frenchwoman.”

“Ah, he has passed judgment... passed judgement!” said the old man in a low voice and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, with some embarrassment, but then he suddenly jumped up and cried: “Be off, be off! Let not a trace of you remain here!...”

Prince Andrew wished to leave at once, but Princess Mary persuaded him to stay another day. That day he did not see his father, who did not leave his room and admitted no one but Mademoiselle Bourienne and Tíkhon, but asked several times whether his son had gone. Next day, before leaving, Prince Andrew went to his son’s rooms. The boy, curly-headed like his mother and glowing with health, sat on his knee, and Prince Andrew began telling him the story of Bluebeard, but fell into a reverie without finishing the story. He thought not of this pretty child, his son whom he held on his knee, but of himself. He sought in himself either remorse for having angered his father or regret at leaving home for the first time in his life on bad terms with him, and was horrified to find neither. What meant still more to him was that he sought and did not find in himself the former tenderness for his son which he had hoped to reawaken by caressing the boy and taking him on his knee.

“Well, go on!” said his son.

Prince Andrew, without replying, put him down from his knee and went out of the room.

As soon as Prince Andrew had given up his daily occupations, and especially on returning to the old conditions of life amid which he had been happy, weariness of life overcame him with its former intensity, and he hastened to escape from these memories and to find some work as soon as possible.

“So you’ve decided to go, Andrew?” asked his sister.

“Thank God that I can,” replied Prince Andrew. “I am very sorry you can’t.”

“Why do you say that?” replied Princess Mary. “Why do you say that, when you are going to this terrible war, and he is so old? Mademoiselle Bourienne says he has been asking about you....”

As soon as she began to speak of that, her lips trembled and her tears began to fall. Prince Andrew turned away and began pacing the room.

“Ah, my God! my God! When one thinks who and what—what trash—can cause people misery!” he said with a malignity that alarmed Princess Mary.

She understood that when speaking of “trash” he referred not only to Mademoiselle Bourienne, the cause of her misery, but also to the man who had ruined his own happiness.

“Andrew! One thing I beg, I entreat of you!” she said, touching his elbow and looking at him with eyes that shone through her tears. “I understand you” (she looked down). “Don’t imagine that sorrow is the work of men. Men are His tools.” She looked a little above Prince Andrew’s head with the confident, accustomed look with which one looks at the place where a familiar portrait hangs. “Sorrow is sent by Him, not by men. Men are His instruments, they are not to blame. If you think someone has wronged you, forget it and forgive! We have no right to punish. And then you will know the happiness of forgiving.”

“If I were a woman I would do so, Mary. That is a woman’s virtue. But a man should not and cannot forgive and forget,” he replied, and though till that moment he had not been thinking of Kurágin, all his unexpended anger suddenly swelled up in his heart.

“If Mary is already persuading me to forgive, it means that I ought long ago to have punished him,” he thought. And giving her no further reply, he began thinking of the glad vindictive moment when he would meet Kurágin who he knew was now in the army.

Princess Mary begged him to stay one day more, saying that she knew how unhappy her father would be if Andrew left without being reconciled to him, but Prince Andrew replied that he would probably soon be back again from the army and would certainly write to his father, but that the longer he stayed now the more embittered their differences would become.

“Good-by, Andrew! Remember that misfortunes come from God, and men are never to blame,” were the last words he heard from his sister when he took leave of her.

“Then it must be so!” thought Prince Andrew as he drove out of the avenue from the house at Bald Hills. “She, poor innocent creature, is left to be victimized by an old man who has outlived his wits. The old man feels he is guilty, but cannot change himself. My boy is growing up and rejoices in life, in which like everybody else he will deceive or be deceived. And I am off to the army. Why? I myself don’t know. I want to meet that man whom I despise, so as to give him a chance to kill and laugh at me!”

These conditions of life had been the same before, but then they were all connected, while now they had all tumbled to pieces. Only senseless things, lacking coherence, presented themselves one after another to Prince Andrew’s mind.