War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [203]
IV
Pierre was sitting across from Dolokhov and Nikolai Rostov. He ate a lot and greedily, and drank a lot, as usual. But those who knew him intimately could see that some great change had taken place in him that day. He was silent all through dinner and, squinting and wincing, looked around him or, fixing his eyes with a completely absentminded air, rubbed the bridge of his nose with his finger. His face was dejected and gloomy. He seemed to see and hear nothing of what was going on around him and to be thinking of some one painful and unresolved thing.
This unresolved question that tormented him came from the hints of the young princess in Moscow at Dolokhov’s intimacy with his wife, and from an anonymous letter he had received that morning, which said, with the mean jocularity of all anonymous letters, that he saw poorly through his spectacles and that his wife’s liaison with Dolokhov was a secret to no one but him. Pierre decidedly did not believe either the princess’s hints or the letter, but it was scary for him now to look at Dolokhov, who was sitting in front of him. Each time his gaze chanced to meet Dolokhov’s handsome, insolent eyes, Pierre felt something terrible and ugly rise up in his soul, and he quickly turned away. Involuntarily recalling all his wife’s past and her relations with Dolokhov, Pierre saw clearly that what was said in the letter might be true, might at least seem true, if it had not concerned his wife. Pierre involuntarily recalled how Dolokhov, to whom everything had been restored after the campaign, had returned to Petersburg and come to see him. Using his relations of carousing friendship with Pierre, Dolokhov had come straight to his house, and Pierre had put him up and lent him money. Pierre recalled how Hélène, smiling, had expressed her displeasure at Dolokhov’s living in their house, and how Dolokhov had cynically praised his wife’s beauty to him, and how from then until they came to Moscow, he had not parted from them for a minute.
“Yes, he’s very handsome,” thought Pierre, “I know him. For him there would be a special charm in disgracing my name and laughing at me, precisely because I solicited for him, took him in, and helped him. I know, I understand what salt it would give his deceit in his own eyes, if it were true. Yes, if it were true; but I don’t believe it, I have no right to and cannot believe it.” He recalled the expression Dolokhov’s face assumed in moments when cruelty came over him, as when he tied the policeman to the bear and threw him into the water, or when he challenged a man to a duel for no reason, or killed a cabby’s horse with a pistol. That expression was often on Dolokhov’s face when he looked at him. “Yes, he’s a duellist,” thought Pierre, “to kill a man is nothing to him, he must think everybody’s afraid of him, it must make him feel good. He must think I’m also afraid of him. And, in fact, I am afraid of him,” thought Pierre, and again, at these thoughts, he felt something frightful and ugly rise up in his soul. Dolokhov, Denisov, and Rostov now sat facing Pierre and seemed very merry. Rostov talked merrily with his two friends, one of whom was a dashing hussar, the other a notorious duellist and scapegrace, and from time to time glanced mockingly at Pierre, who stood out at this dinner because of his concentrated, absentminded, massive figure. Rostov looked at Pierre unkindly, first, because in his hussar’s eyes Pierre was a rich civilian, the husband of a beauty, and generally an old woman; second, because Pierre, in his concentrated and absentminded mood, had not recognized Rostov and had not responded to his bow. When they drank to the sovereign’s health, Pierre, being deep in thought,