Then the little princess went in. The playing stopped half-way through. He heard an exclamation followed by the heavy footsteps of Princess Marya and kissing noises. When Prince Andrey came in the two princesses, who had met only once before, briefly, at the wedding, were hugging each other and kissing hard wherever they happened to touch. Mademoiselle Bourienne was standing near them, hand on heart, smiling blissfully and not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. Prince Andrey shrugged and scowled like a music-lover frowning at a false note. The two ladies let go, then immediately seized each other’s hands as if every second counted, kissed them, tore them away, smothered each other’s faces with more kisses and then amazed Prince Andrey by bursting into floods of tears, both of them, before carrying on with yet more kissing. Mademoiselle Bourienne cried too. Prince Andrey was clearly embarrassed, but to the two women crying seemed the most natural thing in the world; it would never have occurred to them that this meeting could have taken place without it.
‘Oh, my dear! . . . My dear Marie! . . .’ both ladies blurted out together, and then laughed. ‘I had a dream last night . . . You really didn’t expect us? . . . Oh, Marie, you’ve lost weight.’ ‘And you’ve put some on . . .’
‘I recognized the princess straightaway,’ put in Mademoiselle Bourienne.
‘No, I had no idea! . . .’ cried Princess Marya. ‘Oh, Andrey, I didn’t see you there.’
Prince Andrey and his sister kissed each other’s hands, and he told her she was just the same crybaby she always had been. Princess Marya turned to her brother, and through all the tears her wide and radiant eyes, shining for an instant with a rare beauty, lingered with gentle, loving tenderness on Prince Andrey’s face. The little princess chattered away. Her short, downy upper lip would flick down momentarily to meet the rosy, lower lip at just the right point, only to flit away in a smile, teeth gleaming and eyes sparkling. She was describing something that had happened to them on Spassky Hill that could have been serious for someone in her condition, and went on to say that she had left all her dresses behind in Petersburg and God knows what she would walk about in here, that Andrey had completely changed, that Kitty Odyntsov had married an old man, and that someone ‘quite serious’ had turned up as a suitor for Princess Marya, but that was something they could talk about later. Princess Marya was still gazing in silence at her brother, her lovely eyes filled with affection and sadness. She was clearly thinking thoughts of her own, miles away from the young bride’s chatter. In the middle of her sister-in-law’s description of the last holiday celebration in Petersburg she spoke to her brother.
‘So, it’s settled, then. You are going to the war, Andrey?’ she asked with a sigh. Liza sighed with her.
‘Yes, I’m going tomorrow,’ answered her brother.
‘He’s deserting me. God knows why, when he could have been promoted . . .’
Princess Marya stopped listening, followed her own train of thought and then turned to Liza, directing sympathetic eyes to her figure.
‘It’s true, then?’ she asked.
Liza’s face changed, and she gave a sigh.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ she said. ‘Oh! I’m so scared . . .’
Liza’s lip drooped. She brought her face close to her sister-in-law’s, and yet again she burst into tears.
‘She needs to rest,’ said Prince Andrey with a frown. ‘Don’t you, Liza? Take her to your room, while I go and see Father. How is he – same as always?’
‘Yes, just the same. I don’t know what you’ll make of him,’ Princess Marya answered with some delight.
‘The same old timetable, walks in the avenues, that lathe?’ asked Prince Andrey with a barely noticeable smile which showed that he loved and respected his father but knew about his eccentricities.
‘The same timetable, the same lathe, still mathematics – and my geometry lessons,’ Princess Marya answered cheerfully, as though geometry lessons were one of the most delightful prospects in her life.
When the old prince’s twenty minutes for getting up had come and gone, Tikhon arrived to summon the young man to his father. The old man allowed one infringement of his normal routine in honour of his son’s arrival, arranging for him to be admitted to his rooms while he was dressing for dinner. The old prince dressed in the old style – all kaftan and powder. And when Prince Andrey walked into his father’s room, not with the moody face and attitude that he assumed for entering fashionable drawing-rooms, but with the eager look he had shown when talking to Pierre, the old man was sitting in a big leather armchair with his head abandoned to the ministrations of Tikhon.
‘Aha! The warrior comes! So you want to fight Bonaparte?’ said the old man, shaking his powdered head and pigtail as best he could, with Tikhon still working on it. ‘And you get after him as soon as you like, or he’ll have us down as his subjects sooner than you think. Hello, my boy!’
And he offered a cheek.
