War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [212]
No laughter was heard in the big maids’ room. In the footmen’s quarters the men all sat silently, ready for something. The caretakers did not sleep and had splinters and candles burning. The old prince paced his study, stepping on his heels, and sent Tikhon to Marya Bogdanovna to ask what news.
“Just say the prince told me to ask what news. And come and tell me what she says.”
“Tell the prince that labor has begun,” said Marya Bogdanovna, glancing significantly at the messenger. Tikhon went and told him.
“Very well,” said the prince, closing the door behind him, and Tikhon did not hear the least sound from the study after that. A little later, Tikhon went into the study as if to tend to the candles. Seeing the prince lying on the sofa, Tikhon looked at him, at his upset face, shook his head, silently went over to him, kissed him on the shoulder, and went out without tending to the candles or saying why he had come. The mystery, the most solemn in the world, continued to be accomplished. Evening passed, night came. And the feeling of expectation and of the heart’s softness before the inconceivable did not diminish, but heightened. No one slept.
It was one of those March nights when it is as if winter wants to claim its own back and with desperate malice pours out its last snows and storms. The German doctor from Moscow was expected any moment, a carriage had been sent for him to the turning from the highway to the country road, and mounted men with lanterns went to lead him along the bumpy and muddy road.
Princess Marya had long ago abandoned her book: she was sitting silently, her luminous eyes fixed on her nanny’s wrinkled face, familiar to her in the smallest detail: on the lock of gray hair that strayed from under her kerchief, at the little pouch of skin that hung under her chin.
The nanny Savishna, holding her knitting, was telling in a low voice, herself not hearing or understanding the words, the story she had told a hundred times, about how the late princess had given birth to Princess Marya in Kishinev, with a Moldavian peasant woman instead of a midwife.
“With God’s mercy, there’s no need for any dokhturs,” she said. Suddenly a gust of wind blew open the poorly latched window (at the prince’s behest, with the coming of the larks, one frame of the double windows was removed in each room), sent the heavy silk curtain fluttering, blew in cold and snow, and put out the candle. Princess Marya shuddered; the nanny set her knitting down, went to the window, leaned out, and began snatching at the open window frame. Cold wind blew about the ends of her kerchief and her stray locks of gray hair.
“Princess, dearest, somebody’s driving down the avenue!” she said, holding the frame and not closing it. “With lanterns. Must be the dokhtur.”
“Ah, my God! Thank God!” said Princess Marya. “I must go and meet him; he doesn’t know Russian.”
Princess Marya threw on her shawl and ran to meet the arrivals. As she went down the hall, she saw through the window a carriage with lanterns standing by the porch. She went out to the stairs. A tallow candle stood on a baluster, melting in the wind. The servant Filipp, with an alarmed face and holding another candle, stood below on the first landing of the stairs. Still lower, around the turning of the stairs, footsteps in warm boots could be heard. And a voice that seemed familiar to Princess Marya was saying something.
“Thank God!” said the voice. “And father?”
“Gone to bed,” replied the voice of the butler Demyan, who was already downstairs.
Then the voice said something else, Demyan made some reply, and the footsteps in warm boots began to approach more quickly the invisible turning of the