War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [388]
Anatole walked behind him with his usual swaggering stride. But uneasiness could be noticed on his face.
Having gone into his study, Pierre closed the door and addressed Anatole without looking at him.
“So you promised Countess Rostov to marry her? You were going to elope with her?”
“My dear,” Anatole answered in French (as the whole conversation went on), “I don’t consider myself obliged to answer questions put in such a tone.”
Pierre’s face, pale before then, became distorted with rage. He seized Anatole by the collar of his uniform with his big hand and began shaking him from side to side, until Anatole’s face acquired a sufficiently frightened expression.
“When I say I must talk with you…” Pierre repeated.
“Well, that’s stupid. Eh?” said Anatole, feeling a button of his collar, which had been ripped out with a bit of cloth.
“You’re a scoundrel and a villain, and I don’t know what restrains me from the pleasure of smashing your head with this,” said Pierre, expressing himself so artificially because he was speaking in French. He picked up a heavy paperweight and raised it threateningly, but at once hastened to set it down again.
“Did you promise to marry her?”
“I…I…I didn’t think; anyhow, I never promised, because…”
Pierre interrupted him.
“Do you have letters from her? Do you?” Pierre repeated, stepping towards Anatole.
Anatole looked at him and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, at once took out his wallet.
Pierre took the letter he handed him and, pushing aside the table that stood in his way, dropped onto the sofa.
“Je ne serai pas violent, ne craignez rien,”*387 said Pierre, responding to Anatole’s gesture of fear. “Letters—one,” said Pierre, as if repeating a lesson to himself. “Second,” he went on after a moment’s silence, getting up again and beginning to pace the room, “tomorrow you are to leave Moscow.”
“But how can I…”
“Third,” Pierre went on, not listening to him, “you are never to say a word about what happened between you and the countess. I know I can’t forbid you that, but if there’s a spark of conscience in you…” Pierre silently paced the room several times. Anatole sat by the table, frowning and biting his lips.
“Can’t you understand finally that, besides your own pleasure, there is the happiness, the peace of other people, that you are ruining a whole life just because you want to have fun? Amuse yourself with women like my spouse—with them you’re within your rights, they know what you want from them. They’re armed against you with the same experience of depravity. But to promise a girl you’ll marry her…to deceive her, make off…How can you not understand that it’s as mean as to beat an old man or a child!…”
Pierre paused and looked at Anatole now not with a wrathful, but with a questioning gaze.
“That I don’t know. Eh?” said Anatole, taking heart as Pierre overcame his wrath. “That I don’t know and don’t want to know,” he said, not looking at Pierre and with a slight trembling of his lower jaw, “but you have spoken to me in such words—‘mean’ and the like—as I, comme un homme d’honneur,†388 will not allow to anyone.”
Pierre looked at him in surprise, unable to grasp what he wanted.
“Though it was just between us,” Anatole went on, “I cannot…”
“What, do you want satisfaction?” Pierre said mockingly.
“You might at least take your words back. Eh? If you want me to fulfill your wishes. Eh?”
“I take them back, I take them back,” said Pierre, “and I beg you to forgive me.” Pierre glanced involuntarily at the torn-off button. “And money, if you need it for the road.”
Anatole smiled.
The expression of that timorous and mean smile, known to him from his wife, made Pierre explode.
“Oh, mean, heartless breed!” he said, and walked out of the room.
The next day Anatole left for Petersburg.
XXI
Pierre went to Marya Dmitrievna’s to inform her of the fulfillment of her wish, of the banishment of Kuragin from Moscow. The whole house was in fear and agitation. Natasha was very ill and, as Marya