‘My mother. My mother. She’s an angel, an angel, and I adore her, my mother.’ Dolokhov squeezed Rostov’s hand and burst into tears. He took a few moments to compose himself and then explained to Rostov that he lived with his mother, and if she suddenly saw him half-dead she would never get over the shock. He begged Rostov to go on ahead and prepare her.
Rostov went on ahead to do as he was bidden. To his utter astonishment he found out that the rough, tough Dolokhov, Dolokhov the swaggering bully, lived in Moscow with his old mother and a hunch-back sister. He was a loving son and brother.
CHAPTER 6
In recent days Pierre had rarely been alone with his wife. In Petersburg and in Moscow the house had been constantly full of guests. The night after the duel he avoided the bedroom, as he often did, and spent the night in his vast study, formerly his father’s room, the room in which old Count Bezukhov had died. The night before had been sleepless, an agony of inner turmoil; this one would be even more agonizing.
He lay down on the sofa and tried to go to sleep in an effort to forget everything that had happened, but he couldn’t manage it. His mind was clouded with such a storm of ideas, emotions and memories that sleep was out of the question. Unable to remain in one place, he was forced to jump to his feet and stride boldly up and down the room. First he conjured up a vision of his wife as she had been in the first days of their marriage, with those naked shoulders and those eyes, languid pools of passion, then suddenly at her side was a handsome, insolent, hard and jeering face – Dolokhov at the banquet – and then a different Dolokhov, pale and trembling, in terrible pain, the man who had spun around and slumped down on to the snow.
‘What have I done?’ he asked himself. ‘I have killed
‘It’s not my fault, is it?’ he asked himself.
All too vividly he recalled the moment after supper at Prince Vasily’s when he had found the words ‘I love you’ so difficult to say. ‘That’s when it all started. I knew it even then,’ he thought. ‘Even then I knew it was wrong and I had no right to do it. And that’s how it’s turned out.’ He recalled the honeymoon and blushed at the memory of it. One particularly vivid, humiliating and embarrassing memory haunted him: one morning, not long after the wedding, he had emerged from his bedroom into the study at nearly mid-day still in his silk dressing-gown, and there was his head steward bowing and scraping and looking at Pierre’s face and then at his dressing-gown, smiling a little as if to communicate respectful acknowledgement of his master’s happiness.
‘And I used to be so proud of her, with that majestic beauty and that poise,’ he thought, ‘so proud of my house when she was entertaining all Petersburg, proud of her aloofness and her beauty. So much for pride! I used to think then that I didn’t understand her. Time after time I’ve thought about her personality and told myself it was my fault for not understanding her, not understanding that perpetual composure and complacency, the lack of any yearning or desire, and it all comes down to one dreadful word – immorality; she’s a dissolute woman. Say the word and it all becomes clear.
‘Anatole used to come borrowing money from her, and he used to kiss her on her bare shoulders. She didn’t give him any money, but she didn’t mind being kissed. Her father used to tease her, trying to make her jealous; she would just smile serenely and say she wasn’t fool enough to be jealous. Let him do what he wants, she used to say about me. I asked her once if she had noticed any signs of pregnancy. She laughed contemptuously and said she wasn’t stupid enough to want children, and she would
Then he thought of the sheer coarseness of her thinking and her vulgar way of speaking, even though she had been brought up in the highest aristocratic circles. She would say things like, ‘I ain’t nobody’s fool . . . just you try it . . . get away with you . . .’ Often, observing the impact she made on young and old, men and women, Pierre was at a loss to understand why he couldn’t love her. ‘No, I never loved her,’ Pierre told himself. ‘I knew she was a dissolute woman,’ he repeated to himself, ‘but I didn’t dare admit it.
‘And now Dolokhov sits there in the snow and forces himself to smile and dies with some clever quip on his lips – and that’s how he treats my remorse.’
Pierre was one of those characters who seem on the outside to be weak but who do not share their troubles with other people. He worked through his troubles on his own.
