War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [273]
“Spring, and love, and happiness!” the oak seemed to say. “And how is it you’re not bored with the same stupid, senseless deception! Always the same, and always a deception! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness. Look, there sit those smothered, dead fir trees, always the same; look at me spreading my broken, flayed fingers wherever they grow—from my back, from my sides. As they’ve grown, so I stand, and I don’t believe in your hopes and deceptions.”
Prince Andrei turned several times to look at this oak as he drove through the woods, as if he expected something from it. There were flowers and grass beneath the oak as well, but it stood among them in the same way, scowling, motionless, ugly, and stubborn.
“Yes, it’s right, a thousand times right, this oak,” thought Prince Andrei. “Let others, the young ones, succumb afresh to this deception, but we know life—our life is over!” A whole new series of thoughts in connection with the oak, hopeless but sadly pleasant, emerged in Prince Andrei’s soul. During this journey it was as if he again thought over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion, that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything.
II
On business to do with the trusteeship of the Ryazan estates, Prince Andrei had to see the provincial marshal of nobility. The marshal was Count Ilya Andreevich Rostov, and in the middle of May Prince Andrei went to see him.
It was now the hot period of spring. The woods were now fully clothed, it was dusty and so hot that, passing by water, one wanted to go for a swim.
Prince Andrei, cheerless and preoccupied by considerations of one thing and another that he had to ask the marshal to do with business, was driving up the garden avenue to the Rostovs’ house in Otradnoe. From behind the trees on the right, he heard merry feminine cries and saw a crowd of girls running across the path of his carriage. Ahead of the others, closer, a dark-haired girl came running towards the carriage, very slender, strangely slender, dark-eyed, in a yellow cotton dress, her head tied with a white kerchief, from under which strands of loose hair escaped. The girl was shouting something, but, seeing the stranger, ran back laughing without looking at him.
For some reason, Prince Andrei suddenly felt pained. The day was so beautiful, the sun was so bright, everything around was so cheerful; and this slender and pretty girl did not know and did not want to know of his existence and was content and happy with some separate—probably stupid—but cheerful and happy life of her own. “What is she so glad of? What is she thinking about? Not about military regulations, not about setting up quitrenters in Ryazan. What is she thinking about? And what makes her happy?” Prince Andrei asked himself with involuntary curiosity.
In 1809 Count Ilya Andreich was living in Otradnoe in the same way as before, that is, receiving almost the entire province, with hunts, theatricals, dinners, and musicians. He was glad to see Prince Andrei, as he was to see any new guest, and almost forced him to spend the night.
In the course of a boring day, during which Prince Andrei was entertained by the older hosts and the most respected guests, who filled the old count’s house on the occasion of an approaching name-day party, Bolkonsky glanced several times at Natasha, who was laughing at something and having fun among the other, young half of the company, still asking himself: “What is she thinking about? What is she so glad of?”
In the evening, left alone in a new place, he could not fall asleep for a long time. He read, then put out the candle, but lit it again. The room, with the shutters closed from inside, was hot. He was vexed with this stupid old man (as he called Rostov), who had