War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [154]
“Don’t come in,” she said to the old count, who was following her, “later,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
The count put his ear to the keyhole and began to listen.
At first he heard the sounds of indifferent talk, then only the sound of Anna Mikhailovna’s voice making a long speech, then a cry, then silence, then both voices again, speaking together with joyful intonations, and then footsteps, and then Anna Mikhailovna opened the door to him. Anna Mikhailovna’s face bore the proud expression of a surgeon who has completed a difficult amputation and admits the public so that it can appreciate his art.
“C’est fait!”*259 she said to the count, pointing with a solemn gesture to the countess, who was holding the snuffbox with the portrait in one hand and the letter in the other, and pressing her lips first to the one, then to the other.
Seeing the count, she held her arms out to him, embraced his bald head, and again, over his bald head, looked at the letter and the portrait, and again pushed the bald head slightly away so as to press her lips to them. Vera, Natasha, Sonya, and Petya came into the room, and the reading began. In the letter Nikolushka gave a brief description of the march, the two battles in which he had taken part, and his promotion to officer, and said that he kissed the hands of maman and papa, asking their blessing, and kissed Vera, Natasha, and Petya. Besides that, he sent his greetings to M. Schelling, and Mme Schoss, and the nanny, and besides that he asked them to kiss his dear Sonya, whom he loved as ever and remembered as ever. Hearing that, Sonya blushed so much that tears came to her eyes. And, unable to bear the gazes turned to her, she rushed to the ballroom, made a run, twirled, and, her dress ballooning, all flushed and smiling, sat down on the floor. The countess was crying.
“What are you crying for, maman?” said Vera. “From all that he writes, you should rejoice and not cry.”
That was perfectly correct, but the count, and the countess, and Natasha—everyone looked at her with reproach. “Who does she take after?” thought the countess.
Nikolushka’s letter was read a hundred times, and those who were deemed worthy of listening to it had to come to the countess, who never let it out of her hands. Tutors, nannies, Mitenka, some acquaintances came, and the countess reread the letter each time with new delight and each time, through this letter, discovered new virtues in her Nikolushka. How strange, extraordinary, joyful it was that her son—that son who twenty years ago had moved his tiny limbs barely perceptibly inside her, that son over whom she had quarreled with the too-indulgent count, that son who had first learned to say “brush,” and then “mama,” that this son was now there, in a foreign land, in foreign surroundings, a manly warrior, alone, with no help or guidance, and doing there some manly business of his own. All the worldwide, age-old experience showing that children grow in an imperceptible way from the cradle to manhood, did not exist for the countess. Her son’s maturing had been at every point as extraordinary for her as if there had not been millions upon millions of men who had matured in just the same way. As it was hard to believe twenty years ago that the little being who lived somewhere under her heart would start crying, and suck her breast, and begin to talk, so now it was hard to believe that this same being could be the strong, brave man, an example to sons and people, that he was now, judging by this letter.
“What shtil, how nicely he describes things!” she said, reading the descriptive part of the letter. “And what soul! Nothing about himself…nothing! About some Denisov, but he himself is probably braver than all of them. He writes nothing about his sufferings. And what