And with brisk steps, as usual, he entered the drawing room, took everyone in with a quick glance, noticed the little princess’s change of dress, the ribbon on Bourienne, and Princess Marya’s ugly hairstyle, and the smiles of Bourienne and Anatole, and his daughter’s solitude amidst the general conversation. “Got herself up like a fool!” he thought, looking spitefully at his daughter. “No shame! And he doesn’t even want to know her!”
He went over to Prince Vassily.
“Well, greetings, greetings; glad to see you.”
“For a dear friend, no detour’s too long,” Prince Vassily began, as usual, quickly, self-confidently, and familiarly. “Here is my second one, I recommend him to your loving kindness.”
Prince Nikolai Andreevich looked Anatole over.
“A fine boy, a fine boy!” he said. “Well, come and kiss me.” And he offered him his cheek.
Anatole kissed the old man, then looked at him curiously and with perfect calm, expecting him to come out with something eccentric, as his father had promised.
Prince Nikolai Andreevich sat in his usual place at the end of the sofa, moved a chair for Prince Vassily towards him, pointed to it, and began asking questions about political matters and the latest news. He listened as if with attention to Prince Vassily’s account, but kept glancing at Princess Marya.
“So they’re already writing from Potsdam?” he repeated Prince Vassily’s last words, suddenly stood up, and went over to his daughter.
“So you’ve spruced yourself up like that for the guests, eh?” he said. “Fine, very fine. You do your hair up in some new way for the guests, but I say to you in front of the guests that in future you dare not change anything without my permission.”
“Mon père, it’s my fault,” the little princess intervened, blushing.
“That’s entirely as you will, ma’am,” said Prince Nikolai Andreevich, bowing and scraping before his daughter-in-law, “but she needn’t make herself ugly—she’s plain enough as it is.”
And he sat down in his place again, paying no further attention to the daughter he had driven to tears.
“On the contrary, this hairstyle is very becoming to the princess,” said Prince Vassily.
“Well, my good fellow, young prince what’s your name?” said Prince Nikolai Andreevich, turning to Anatole, “come here, let’s talk, let’s get acquainted.”
“Now the fun begins,” thought Anatole and, smiling, he took a seat nearer to the old prince.
“Well, now, they say, my dear, that you were educated abroad. Not like your father and me, who were taught to read by the beadle. Tell me, my dear, you’re now serving in the horse guards?” the old man asked, studying Anatole closely and intently.
“No, I’ve been transferred to the infantry,” replied Anatole, barely able to keep from laughing.
“Ah! a good thing. So, my dear, you want to serve your tsar and country? It’s wartime. Such a fine fellow must serve, must serve. So, off to the front?”
“No, Prince. Our regiment is already on the march. But I’m enlisted—what am I enlisted in, papa?” Anatole turned with a laugh to his father.
“Nice service, very nice. What am I enlisted in! Ha, ha, ha!” Prince Nikolai Andreevich laughed.
And Anatole laughed still louder. Suddenly Prince Nikolai Andreevich frowned.
“Well, go,” he said to Anatole.
Anatole, with a smile, went back to the ladies.
“So you did educate them abroad, Prince Vassily? Eh?” The old prince turned to Prince Vassily.
“I did what I could; and I’ll tell you, the education there is much better than ours.”
“Yes, everything’s different nowadays, everything’s the new way. A fine lad, though! A fine lad! Well, come with me.”
He took Prince Vassily under the arm and led him to his study.
Prince Vassily, finding himself alone with the prince, at once declared to him his wishes and hopes.
“And what do you think,” the old prince said gruffly, “that I’m holding on to her, that I can’t part with her? People imagine things!” he pronounced gruffly. “She can marry tomorrow! Only I’ll tell you, I’d like to know my son-in-law better. You know my rules: everything’s in the open! I’ll ask her tomorrow in your presence: if she wants, let him stay a while. Let him stay, and I’ll see.” The prince snorted. “Let her marry him, it’s all the same to me,” he shrieked in the same shrill voice in which he had shouted on taking leave of his son.
“I’ll tell you straight out,” said Prince Vassily, in the tone of a cunning man convinced that it is unnecessary to use cunning in view of his interlocutor’s perceptiveness. “You see through people. Anatole is no genius, but he’s an honest, good lad, an excellent son, and one of us.”
“Well, well, all right, we’ll see.”
As always happens with lonely women who have long lived without the society of men, on Anatole’s appearance all three women in Prince Nikolai Andreevich’s house felt equally that their life had not been life until that moment. The power of thought, feeling, observation instantly increased tenfold in them, as if their life, going on in darkness till then, was suddenly lit up by a new light filled with meaning.
Princess Marya did not think at all or even remember about her face and hairstyle. The handsome, open face of the man who would perhaps be her husband absorbed all her attention. To her he seemed kind, brave, resolute, manly, and magnanimous. She was convinced of it. Thousands of fancies of her future family life kept emerging in her imagination. She drove them away and tried to hide them.
“But am I not too cold with him?” thought Princess Marya. “I’m trying to restrain myself, because deep in my soul I feel myself already too close to him; but he doesn’t know all that I’m thinking about him and may imagine that I find him disagreeable.”
And Princess Marya tried and was unable to be cordial with the new guest.
“La pauvre fille! Elle est diablement laide,”*249 thought Anatole.
Mlle Bourienne, whom Anatole’s arrival had also brought to a high level of excitement, was thinking along different lines. Of course, the beautiful young woman, with no definite position in the world, with no family or friends or even country, did not intend to devote her life to serving Prince Nikolai Andreevich, reading books to him, or being friends with Princess Marya. Mlle Bourienne had long been waiting for a Russian prince who would at once be able to appreciate her superiority over the plain, badly dressed, awkward Russian princesses, would fall in love with her and carry her off; and this Russian prince had finally come. Mlle Bourienne had a story, heard from her aunt, completed by herself, which she liked to tell over in her imagination. It was a story about a seduced girl, whose poor mother, sa pauvre mère, appeared to her in a vision and reproached her for giving herself to a man outside wedlock. Mlle Bourienne often brought herself to tears, telling him, the seducer, this story in her imagination. Now he, this real Russian prince, had come. He will carry her off, then ma pauvre mère will appear, and he will marry her. Thus the whole future story of Mlle Bourienne had taken shape in her head while she was talking with him about Paris. Mlle Bourienne was not guided by calculation (she did not spend a moment thinking of what she was to do), but it had all been long prepared in her and now merely arranged itself around the visiting Anatole, whom she wished and strove to please as much as she could.
The little princess, like an old warhorse hearing the sound of trumpets, was preparing herself, unconsciously and forgetting her condition, for her habitual coquettish gallop, without any second thoughts or struggles, but with naïve, light-minded merriment.
Although Anatole, in women’s company, usually placed himself in the position of a man who is sick of having women running after him, he took a vain pleasure in seeing his effect on these three women. Besides, he was beginning to experience for the pretty and provocative Bourienne that passionate, animal feeling which came over him with extraordinary quickness and urged him towards the most coarse and bold actions.