War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [204]
“What’s with you?” Rostov shouted, looking at him with rapturously spiteful eyes. “Don’t you hear: to the health of the sovereign emperor!” Pierre sighed, rose obediently, drank his glass, and, waiting for everyone to sit down, turned to Rostov with his kindly smile.
“And I just didn’t recognize you,” he said. But Rostov could not be bothered, he was shouting “Hurrah!”
“Why don’t you renew your acquaintance?” Dolokhov said to Rostov.
“He’s a fool, God help him,” said Rostov.
“We must cherish the husbands of pretty women,” said Denisov.
Pierre did not hear what they were saying, but he knew it was about him. He blushed and turned away.
“Well, now to the health of beautiful women,” said Dolokhov, and with a serious expression, but with a smile at the corners of his mouth, he turned to Pierre, glass in hand. “To the health of beautiful women, Petrusha, and of their lovers,” he said.
Pierre, his eyes lowered, drank from his glass without looking at Dolokhov or answering him. The servant who was handing out Kutuzov’s cantata laid a sheet before Pierre, as one of the more honored guests. Pierre was about to pick it up, but Dolokhov leaned across, snatched it from his hand, and began to read it. Pierre looked at Dolokhov, the pupils of his eyes sank: the something terrible and ugly that had sickened him during dinner rose up and took possession of him. He leaned his entire corpulent body across the table.
“Don’t you dare take it!” he cried.
Hearing this cry and seeing to whom it was addressed, Nesvitsky and Pierre’s neighbor on the right turned fearfully and hastily to Bezukhov.
“Enough, enough, what’s wrong?” frightened voices whispered. Dolokhov looked at Pierre with his light, merry, cruel eyes, and with the same smile, as if saying: “Ah, this is what I like.”
“I won’t give it to you,” he said distinctly.
Pale, his lip trembling, Pierre tore at the page.
“You…you…are a scoundrel!…I challenge you!” he said and, having moved his chair back, he got up from the table. The very second he did so and uttered those words, he felt that the question of his wife’s guilt, which had tormented him all that past day, was definitively and indubitably resolved in the affirmative. He hated her and was severed from her forever. In spite of Denisov’s pleas that Rostov not get involved in the affair, Rostov agreed to be Dolokhov’s second, and after dinner talked over the conditions of the duel with Nesvitsky, Bezukhov’s second. Pierre went home, and Rostov sat in the club with Dolokhov and Denisov till late in the evening, listening to the Gypsies and the singers.
“So, till tomorrow in Sokolniki,” said Dolokhov, taking leave of Rostov on the porch of the club.
“And you’re calm?” asked Rostov.
Dolokhov stopped.
“Look, I’ll reveal to you in two words the whole secret of a duel. If you’re going to a duel, and you write your will and tender letters to your parents, if you think you may be killed, you’re a fool and are certainly lost; you should go with the firm intention of killing him as quickly and certainly as possible; then everything’s in good order, as our bear hunter in Kostroma used to say. ‘How can you not be afraid of a bear?’ he’d say. ‘But once you see him, your fear goes away, except of letting him escape!’ Well, that’s how I am. À demain, mon cher.”*279
The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, Pierre and Nesvitsky arrived at the Sokolniki woods and found Dolokhov, Denisov, and Rostov already there. Pierre had the look of a man occupied with some considerations of no concern to the present affair. His pinched face was yellow. He obviously had not slept that night. He looked around absentmindedly and winced as if from the bright sun. Two considerations occupied him exclusively: the guilt of his wife, of which, after the sleepless night, not the least doubt remained; and the innocence of Dolokhov, who had no reason whatever to preserve the honor of a man who was a stranger to him. “Maybe I would have done the same thing in his place,” thought Pierre. “I even certainly would have done