‘Hm! hm! huh! huh!’ growled the prince, sitting down to the table. He thought he’d been given a dirty plate, so he pointed to a stain and flung it away. Tikhon caught it and handed it on to a footman. The little princess was not unwell, but she was so abjectly terrified of the prince that when she heard he was in a bad temper she decided not to come down.
‘I’m afraid for my baby,’ she told Mademoiselle Bourienne. ‘You never know what a scare might do.’
And indeed the little princess’s life at Bald Hills was lived in a state of continual dread of the old prince, and a thorough dislike of him, which she wasn’t aware of because the overriding terror obscured any other feeling. The prince had the same thorough dislike of her, but on his side it was blotted out by contempt. As the days went by at Bald Hills the little princess made a close friend of Mademoiselle Bourienne. She would spend whole days with her, and sometimes invited her to sleep in her room, and she often talked about her father-in-law, and spoke badly of him.
‘We’re to have company then, Prince,’ said Mademoiselle Bourienne, unfolding her white napkin with pink fingers. ‘His Excellency Prince Kuragin and his son, I believe,’ she said in a tone of inquiry.
‘Hm! . . .
‘Oh no, father.’
Unabashed by her failed attempt at conversation, Mademoiselle Bourienne carried on chattering away about the conservatories and a beautiful flower that had just opened. By the end of the soup course the prince had subsided.
After dinner he went to see his daughter-in-law. The little princess was sitting at a small table chatting with her maid, Masha. She turned pale at the sight of her father-in-law.
The little princess had changed a great deal and now looked more ugly than pretty. Her cheeks were sunken, her lip was drawn up and there were bags under her eyes. ‘Yes, I feel a bit weighed down,’ she said in answer to the prince’s inquiry after her health.
‘Do you need anything?’
‘No thank you, Father.’
‘Good. Very well then.’
He went out and walked to the servants’ room. There stood Alpatych with downcast head.
‘Have you put that snow back?’
‘Yes, sir, we have. God forgive me, sir, it was a silly mistake.’
The prince cut him short with his weird laugh.
‘Oh, very well, then, very well.’ He held out a hand for Alpatych to kiss, and then went off to his study.
That evening Prince Vasily arrived. He was met on what the staff called ‘the avenoo’ by the Bolkonsky coachmen and servants, who with much shouting struggled with the carriages and sledge over a road deliberately re-covered with snow and brought them through to one wing of the house.
Prince Vasily and Anatole were conducted to their separate rooms.
Taking off his coat, Anatole sat beside a table, hands on hips, his beautiful big eyes staring at one corner, with a distracted smile on his face. He looked on life as one long party that someone was bound to arrange for him. It was in that spirit that he now viewed his visit to the irritable old country-gentleman and his rich, ugly heiress of a daughter. As he saw it, he might be in for a very jolly and amusing time. ‘Well, why not get married, if she’s got all that money? Never comes amiss, does it?’ thought Anatole.
He shaved and perfumed himself with the scrupulous elegance that was now second nature to him, and with his natural look of disarming good humour he strolled into his father’s room, with his head held high. Two valets were busy dressing Prince Vasily. He glanced around eagerly, and when his son came in nodded cheerfully, as if to say, ‘Yes, that’s just what I wanted you to look like.’
‘Come on, Father, joking apart, is she really as ugly as all that?’ Anatole asked in French, as though half-way through a subject much discussed on the way there.
‘Don’t be silly! The great thing is for you to try and be nice and polite to the old prince.’
‘If he gets nasty, I’m off,’ said Anatole. ‘I can’t stand old men like him. Can you?’
‘Don’t forget, as far as you’re concerned everything depends on this.’
Meanwhile, in the maids’ room not only the arrival of the minister and his son, but their physical appearance was known and described in detail. Princess Marya was sitting alone in her room struggling to control her emotions.
‘Why did they write? Why did Lise tell me about it? It’s quite impossible!’ she thought, glancing at the mirror. ‘How am I to go into the drawing-room? Even if I like him, I could never be my normal self with him now.’ The very thought of her father’s look reduced her to terror.
