‘Ah! the warrior! So you want to fight Bonaparte?’ said the old
‘Mind you look sharp after him, at any rate, or he’ll soon be putting us on the list of his subjects. How are you?’
And he held out his cheek to him.
The old gentleman was in excellent humour after his nap before dinner. (He used to say that sleep after dinner was silver, but before dinner it was golden.) He took delighted, sidelong glances at his son from under his thick, overhanging brows. Prince Andrey went up and kissed his father on the spot indicated for him. He made no reply on his father’s favourite topic—jesting banter at the military men of the period, and particularly at Bonaparte.
‘Yes, I have come to you, father, bringing a wife with child,’ said Prince Andrey, with eager and reverential eyes watching every movement of his father’s face. ‘How is your health?’
‘None but fools, my lad, and profligates are unwell, and you know me; busy from morning till night and temperate, so of course I’m well.’
‘Thank God,’ said his son, smiling.
‘God’s not much to do with the matter. Come, tell me/ the old man went on, going back to his favourite hobby, ‘how have the Germans trained you to fight with Bonaparte on their new scientific method- strategy as they call it?’
Prince Andrey smiled.
‘Give me time to recover myself, father/ he said, with a smile that showed that his father’s failings did not prevent his respecting and loving him. ‘Why, I have only just got here.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ cried the old man, shaking his tail to try whether it were tightly plaited, and taking his son by the hand. ‘The house is ready for your wife. Marie will look after her and show her everything, and talk nineteen to the dozen with her too. That’s their feminine way. I’m glad to have her. Sit down, talk to me. Mihelson’s army, I understand, Tolstoy’s too ... a simultaneous expedition . . . but what’s the army of the South going to do? Prussia, her neutrality . . . I know all that. What of Austria?’ he said, getting up from his chair and walking about the room, with Tihon running after him, giving him various articles of his apparel. ‘What about Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?’
Prince Andrey, seeing the urgency of his father’s questions, began explaining the plan of operations of the proposed campaign, speaking at first reluctantly, but becoming more interested as he went on, and unconsciously from habit passing from Russian into French. He told him how an army of ninety thousand troops was to threaten Prussia so as to drive her out of her neutrality and draw her into the war, how part of these troops were to join the Swedish troops at Strahlsund, how two hundred and twenty thousand Austrians were to combine with a hundred thousand Russians in Italy and on the Rhine, and how fifty thousand Russians and fifty thousand English troops were to meet at
This meant that Tihon had not given him the waistcoat he wanted. Another time, he stood still, asked: ‘And will she be confined soon?’ and shook his head reproachfully: ‘That’s bad! Go on, go on.’
The third time was when Prince Andrey was just finishing his description. The old man hummed in French, in his falsetto old voice: ‘Malbrook goes off to battle, God knows when he’ll come back.’
His son only smiled.
‘I don’t say that this is a plan I approve of,’ he said; ‘I’m only telling you what it is. Napoleon has made a plan by now as good as this one.’
‘Well, you have told me nothing new.’ And thoughtfully the old man repeated, speaking quickly to himself: ‘God knows when he’ll come •back. Go into the dining-room.’
XXIV
At the exact hour, the prince, powdered and shaven, walked into the dining-room, where there were waiting for him his daughter-in-law, Princess Marya, Mademoiselle Bourienne, and the prince’s architect, who, by a strange whim of the old gentleman’s, dined at his table, though being an insignificant person of no social standing, he would not naturally have expected to be treated with such honour. The prince, who was in practice a firm stickler for distinctions of rank, and rarely admitted to his table even important provincial functionaries, had suddenly pitched on the architect Mihail Ivanovitch, blowing his nose in a check pocket-handkerchief in the corner, to illustrate the theory that all men are equal, and had more than once impressed upon his daughter that Mihail Ivanovitch was every whit as good as himself and her. At table the prince addressed his conversation to the taciturn architect more often than to any one.
