‘Be a man, my friend. I shall be looking after your interests,’ she said in response to his glance and quickened her pace down the corridor.
Pierre still couldn’t understand what was going on, and he had even less idea of what was meant by ‘looking after his interests’, but he did gather one thing – everything was as it should be. The corridor brought them into the half-lit hall just off the count’s reception-room. This was one of the cold, magnificently furnished rooms that Pierre normally entered from the main staircase. But even here there was an empty bath in the middle of the room, and water had been splashed on the carpet. Tiptoeing in their direction came a servant and a deacon with a censer, who ignored them. They went on into the reception-room, which Pierre knew well, with its two Italian windows and a door into the winter garden, its large bust and full-length portrait of Catherine. The same people were still sitting there in almost in the same positions, whispering. Everyone paused and looked round at Anna Mikhaylovna as she came in with her pale, tear-stained face, and at the large, stout figure of Pierre, who trailed along meekly in her wake, hanging his head.
Anna Mikhaylovna’s face betrayed her awareness that the moment of crisis had arrived. With her Petersburg businesswoman’s air she strode into the room even more assertively than in the morning, keeping Pierre close by her. Since she was bringing the person the dying man wanted to see, she felt sure of a warm welcome for herself. With a rapid glance she took in the whole room, and particularly the presence of the count’s spiritual adviser. Without actually bowing, she seemed somehow to shrink into herself before gliding slowly over to the priest and reverently offering herself for a blessing to the two ecclesiastics one after the other.
‘Thank God we are in time,’ she said to the priest. ‘We are family, and we have been terribly worried. This young man is the count’s son,’ she added more softly. ‘This is a dreadful time.’
This said, she went over to the doctor.
‘Dear doctor,’ she said to him, ‘this young man is the count’s son . . . Is there any hope at all?’
Without speaking the doctor gave a quick shrug and rolled his eyes upwards. With precisely the same gesture Anna Mikhaylovna shrugged and looked upwards, almost closing her eyes, then with a sigh she walked away from the doctor and went back to Pierre. She addressed him with particular respect and sad solemnity.
‘Have faith in his mercy,’ she said to him, and indicating a small sofa for him to sit on and wait, she went soundlessly over to the door that all the eyes were on. It opened almost inaudibly, and she slid through as it closed behind her.
Pierre, having decided to obey his guide in everything, went over towards the sofa she had pointed to. The moment Anna Mikhaylovna disappeared he noticed the eyes of everyone in the room turning towards him with something more than curiosity and sympathy. He noticed they were all talking in whispers, looking across at him with something like a mixture of awe and sycophancy. They showed him the kind of respect he had never seen before. A lady quite unknown to him stopped talking to the priest, got to her feet and offered him a seat; an adjutant picked up a glove that Pierre had dropped and handed it back to him; the doctors fell into a polite silence when he passed by and stood aside for him. Pierre’s first desire was to sit somewhere else so as not to disturb the lady, to pick up the glove himself and to go round the doctors, who weren’t in his way at all, but suddenly he realized that to do so would be improper. He realized that tonight he had become a special person, obliged to endure some ghastly ceremony because it was expected of him, and this meant he was bound to accept favours from everyone. He took the glove from the adjutant in silence, sat down in the lady’s place, spreading out his big hands symmetrically on his knees and posing innocently like some Egyptian statue, and then made up his mind that all was as it should be, and that to avoid losing his head and doing stupid things tonight he must not act on his own initiative but bend wholly to the will of those who were guiding him.
In a couple of minutes Prince Vasily marched into the room, majestic in his coat with the three stars on it, and carrying his head high. He seemed to have grown thinner since the morning. His eyes seemed wider than usual as he glanced round the room and picked out Pierre. He came across and took his hand (something he had never done before), pressing it downwards, as if he wanted to test the strength of its grip.
‘Do take courage, my friend. He has asked to see you. That’s a good thing . . .’
He made as if to leave, but Pierre felt a need to ask something. ‘How is, er . . .’ He hesitated, undecided whether it was proper for him to call the dying man ‘the count’, but embarrassed to call him ‘father’.
