‘I have received a letter from my brother, who announces his coming to Bleak Hills with his wife. It will be a pleasure of brief duration, since he is leaving us to take part in this unhappy war into which we have been drawn, God knows how and why. It is not only with you, in the centre of business and society, that people talk of nothing except war, for here also, amid those rustic labours and that calm of nature, which townspeople generally imagine in the country, rumours of war are heard and are felt painfully. My father talks of nothing but marches and counter-marches, things of which I understand nothing; and the day before yesterday, taking my usual walk in the village street, I witnessed a heartrending scene. ... It was a convoy of recruits that had been enrolled in our district, and were being sent away to the army. You should have seen the state of the mothers, wives and children of the men who were going, and have heard the sobs on both sides. It seems as though humanity had forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached love and the forgiveness of offences, and were making the greatest merit to consist in the art of killing one another.
‘Adieu, dear and good friend: may our divine Saviour and His most Holy Mother keep you in their holy and powerful care. Marie.’
‘Ah, you are sending off your letters, princess. I have already finished mine. I have written to my poor mother,’ said Mademoiselle Bourienne quickly in her agreeable, juicy voice, with a roll of the r’s. She came in, all smiles, bringing into the intense, melancholy, gloomy atmosphere of the Princess Marya an alien world of gay frivolity and self-satisfaction. ‘Princess, I must warn you,’ she added, dropping her voice, ‘the prince has had an altercation,’ she said, with a peculiar roll of the r, seeming to listen to herself with pleasure. ‘An altercation with Mihail Ivanov. He is in a very ill humour, very morose. Be prepared, you know.’
‘Ah, chere amie,’ answered Princess Marya, ‘I have begged you never to tell me beforehand in what humour I shall find my father. I do not permit myself to judge him and I would not have others do so.’
The princess glanced at her watch, and seeing that it was already five minutes later than the hour fixed for her practice on the clavichord, she went with a face of alarm into the divan-room. In accordance with the rules by which the day was mapped out, the prince rested from twelve to two, while the young princess practised on the clavichord.
XXIII
The grey-haired valet was sitting in the waiting-room dozing and listening to the prince’s snoring in his immense study. From a far-off part of the house there came through closed doors the sound of difficult passages of a sonata of Dusseck’s repeated twenty times over.
At that moment a carriage and a little cart drove up to the steps, and Prince Andrey got out of the carriage, helped his little wife out and let her pass into the house before him. Grey Tihon in his wig, popping out at the door of the waiting-room, informed him in a whisper that the prince was taking a nap and made haste to close the door. Tihon knew that no extraordinary event, not even the arrival of his son, would be permitted to break through the routine of the day. Prince Andrey was apparently as well aware of the fact as Tihon. He looked at his watch as though to ascertain whether his father’s habits had changed during the time he had not seen him, and satisfying himself that they were unchanged, he turned to his wife.
‘He will get up in twenty minutes. Let’s go to Marie,’ he said.
The little princess had grown stouter during this time, but her short upper lip, with a smile and the faint moustache on it, rose as gaily and charmingly as ever when she spoke.
‘Why, it is a palace,’ she said to her husband, looking round her with exactly the expression with which people pay compliments to the host at a ball. ‘Come, quick, quick!’ As she looked about her, she smiled at Tihon and at her husband, and at the footman who was showing them in.
‘It is Marie practising? Let us go quietly, we must surprise her.’ Prince Andrey followed her with a courteous and depressed expression.
■You’re looking older, Tihon,’ he said as he passed to the old man, who was kissing his hand.
Before they had reached the room, from which the sounds of the clavichord were coming, the pretty, fair-haired Frenchwoman emerged from a side-door. Mademoiselle Bourienne seemed overwhelmed with delight.
‘Ah, what a pleasure for the princess!’ she exclaimed. ‘At last! I must tell her.’
‘No, no, please not’ . . . said the little princess, kissing her. ‘You are Mademoiselle Bourienne; I know you already through my sister-in- law’s friendship for you. She does not expect us!’
"They went up to the door of the divan-room, from which came the sound of the same passage repeated over and over again. Prince Andrey stood still frowning as though in expectation of something unpleasant.
