“Well, old boy, infantry or cavalry, you’ll make it anywhere; that I prophesy to you,” said Shinshin, patting him on the shoulder and lowering his feet from the ottoman.
Berg smiled joyfully. The count, and his guests after him, went to the drawing room.
It was that time before a formal dinner when the assembled guests refrain from beginning a long conversation, expecting to be called to the hors d’oeuvres, but at the same time consider it necessary to move about and not be silent, in order to show that they are not at all impatient to sit down at the table. The hosts keep glancing at the door and occasionally exchange glances with each other. The guests try to guess from these glances who or what they are still waiting for: an important belated relation or a dish that is not ready yet.
Pierre arrived just before dinner and sat awkwardly in the middle of the drawing room, in the first armchair he happened upon, getting in everyone’s way. The countess wanted to get him to talk, but he looked around naïvely through his spectacles, as if searching for someone, and gave monosyllabic answers to all the countess’s questions. He was an inconvenience and was the only one not to notice it. The majority of the guests, knowing his story with the bear, looked curiously at this big, fat, and placid man, wondering how such a clumsy and shy fellow could perform such a stunt with a policeman.
“Did you arrive recently?” the countess asked him.
“Oui, madame,” he replied, looking around.
“Have you seen my husband?”
“Non, madame.” He smiled quite inappropriately.
“It seems you were recently in Paris? I suppose it was very interesting.”
“Very interesting.”
The countess exchanged glances with Anna Mikhailovna. Anna Mikhailovna understood that she was being asked to take up this young man, and sitting beside him, she began speaking of his father; but, as with the countess, he gave her nothing but monosyllabic answers. The guests were all taken up with each other.
“Les Razoumovsky…Ça a été charmant…Vous êtes bien bonne…La comtesse Apraksine…”*111 was heard on all sides. The countess got up and went to the reception room.
“Marya Dmitrievna?” her voice was heard from there.
“Herself,” a rough female voice was heard in reply, after which Marya Dmitrievna came into the room.
All the girls and even the ladies, except for the oldest ones, rose. Marya Dmitrievna stood in the doorway and, from the height of her corpulent body, her fifty-year-old head with its gray curled hair held high, looked over the guests, and unhurriedly straightened the wide sleeves of her dress, as if pushing them up. Marya Dmitrievna always spoke in Russian.
“Congratulations to the dear name-day lady and her children,” she said in her loud, dense voice, which overwhelmed all other noises. “And you, you old sinner,” she turned to the count, who was kissing her hand, “I bet you’re bored in Moscow? No chasing about with dogs here? Nothing to be done, old boy, look how these birdies are growing up.” She pointed to the girls. “Like it or not, you’ll have to hunt for suitors.”
“Well, how’s my Cossack?” (Marya Dmitrievna called Natasha a Cossack), she said, caressing Natasha, who came up to kiss her hand fearlessly and merrily. “I know she’s a wicked girl, but I love her.”
She took from her enormous reticule a pair of pear-shaped ruby earrings and, having given them to the festively radiant and red-cheeked Natasha, turned away at once and addressed Pierre.
“E-eh! my gallant! come here to me!” she said in a falsely quiet and high voice. “Come here to me, my gallant…”
And she menacingly pushed her sleeves up still higher.
Pierre approached, gazing at her naïvely through his spectacles.
“Come on, come on, my gallant! I was the only one to tell your father the truth when chance smiled on him,33 and to you, too, God willing.”
She paused. Everyone fell silent, waiting for what would happen and feeling that this was only the preface.
“A fine one, to say the least! a fine lad!…His father’s lying on his deathbed, and he’s having fun, sitting a policeman on the back of a bear! Shame on you, old boy, shame on you! You’d do better to go to the war.”
She turned away and offered her arm to the count, who could barely keep from laughing.
“Well, so, I suppose it’s to table?” said Marya Dmitrievna.
The count went first with Marya Dmitrievna; then came the countess, led by a hussar colonel, a useful man, with whom Nikolai was to overtake his regiment, and Anna Mikhailovna with Shinshin. Berg offered his arm to Vera. The smiling Julie Karagin went to the table with Nikolai. After them came other couples, stretching the whole length of the room, and behind them all the children, tutors, and governesses came singly. Servants bustled about, chairs scraped, music began playing in the gallery, and the guests seated themselves. The sounds of the count’s household music were replaced by the sounds of knives and forks, the talk of the guests, the soft footsteps of the servants. At the head of the table on one end sat the countess. To her right Marya Dmitrievna, to her left Anna Mikhailovna and the other ladies. At the other end sat the count, to his left the hussar colonel, to his right Shinshin and the other male guests. One side of the long table was occupied by the older young people: Vera sat next to Berg, Pierre next to Boris; on the other side were the children, tutors, and governesses. From behind the crystal, the bottles, and the bowls of fruit, the count kept glancing at his wife and her tall cap with blue ribbons, and diligently poured wine for his neighbors, not forgetting himself. The countess, too, from behind the pineapples, never forgetting her duties as hostess, cast meaningful glances at her husband, the redness of whose face and bald head, it seemed to her, contrasted sharply with his gray hair. At the ladies’ end a steady chatter went on; at the men’s, louder and louder voices could be heard, especially that of the hussar colonel, who ate and drank so much, growing redder and redder, that the count now set him as an example to the other guests. Berg was saying to Vera, with a tender smile, that love was a heavenly, not an earthly, feeling. Boris was naming the guests at the table for his new friend Pierre, while exchanging glances with Natasha, who was sitting across from him. Pierre spoke little, looked at the new faces, and ate a lot. Starting with the two soups, of which he chose à la tortue,*112 and the savory pie, and right up to the hazel grouse, he did not skip a single dish or a single wine, which the butler mysteriously displayed for him behind his neighbor’s shoulder, the bottle wrapped in a napkin, murmuring: “dry Madeira,” or “Hungarian,” or “Rhine wine.” Of the four crystal glasses with the count’s monogram that stood before each place, he would hold out the first he happened upon and drank with enjoyment, glancing around at the guests with a more and more pleasant air. Natasha, who was sitting across from him, gazed at Boris as a thirteen-year-old girl gazes at a boy she has just kissed for the first time and is in love with. She occasionally turned this same gaze to Pierre, and, under the gaze of this funny, lively girl, he wanted to laugh himself, without knowing why.
Nikolai sat far away from Sonya, next to Julie Karagin, and again was saying something to her with an involuntary smile. Sonya smiled formally, but was clearly suffering from jealousy: she turned pale, then red, and tried as hard as she could to hear what Nikolai and Julie were saying to each other. The governess looked around anxiously, as if preparing to resist, if anyone took it into his head to offend the children. The German tutor tried to memorize all the kinds of dishes, desserts, and wines, in order to describe everything in detail in his letter to his family in Germany, and was quite offended that the butler with the napkin-wrapped bottle bypassed him. The German frowned, trying to show by his look that he did not even wish to have this wine, but was offended because no one wanted to understand that the wine was necessary for him, not in order to quench his thirst, nor out of greed, but out of a conscientious love of knowledge.