War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [410]
“If you’re asking me,” said Prince Andrei, without looking at his father (for the first time in his life he was censuring his father), “I didn’t want to say it, but if you’re asking me, I’ll tell you my frank opinion about it all. If there is any misunderstanding and discord between you and Masha, I can’t blame her for it—I know how she loves and respects you. If you’re asking me,” Prince Andrei went on, becoming irritated, because lately he was always ready to become irritated, “I can say one thing: if there are misunderstandings, the cause of them is a worthless woman, who should never have been my sister’s friend.”
At first the old man stared at his son with fixed eyes and an unnatural smile that revealed his newly missing tooth, which Prince Andrei could not get used to.
“What friend, my dear? Eh? So you had to say it! Eh?”
“Papa, I didn’t want to judge,” Prince Andrei said in a bilious and hard tone, “but you challenged me, and I’ve said and will always say that Princess Marya is not to blame, but the one to blame…the one to blame is this Frenchwoman…”
“Ah, judging!…judging!” the old man said in a low voice and, it seemed to Prince Andrei, with embarrassment, but then he suddenly jumped up and shouted: “Out, out! Don’t leave a trace behind!…”
Prince Andrei wanted to leave at once, but Princess Marya persuaded him to stay for one more day. That day Prince Andrei did not see his father, who did not come out and did not let anyone in except for Mlle Bourienne and Tikhon, and asked several times if his son was gone. The next day, before his departure, Prince Andrei went to his son’s rooms. The healthy boy, curly-headed like his mother, sat on his lap. Prince Andrei began telling him a fairy tale about Bluebeard, but did not finish and fell to thinking. He was not thinking about this pretty boy, his son, as he held him on his lap, but about himself. With horror he sought and did not find in himself either remorse for having irritated his father or regret at leaving him (having quarreled with him for the first time in his life). Worst of all for him was that he sought and did not find in himself the former tenderness for his son, which he had hoped to awaken in himself by caressing the boy and sitting him on his lap.
“Well, tell me, tell me,” said the boy. Prince Andrei did not answer him, took him off his knees, and left the room.
As soon as Prince Andrei abandoned his everyday occupations, and especially as soon as he entered the former conditions of life, in which he had lived when he was still happy, life’s anguish took hold of him with its former force, and he hastened to get away quickly from those memories and quickly find something to do.
“So, André, you’re definitely leaving?” his sister said to him.
“Thank God I can,” said Prince Andrei, “it’s too bad you can’t.”
“Why do you say that?” said Princess Marya. “Why do you say that now, when you’re going to this terrible war, and he’s so old! Mlle Bourienne said he asked about you…” As soon as she began to speak of it, her lips trembled and tears began to fall. Prince Andrei turned away from her and started pacing the room.
“Ah, my God! My God!” he said. “And to think of who—of what nonentities—can be the cause of people’s unhappiness!” he said with a malice that frightened Princess Marya.
She understood that, in referring to the people he called nonentities, he had in mind not only Mlle Bourienne, who had ruined her happiness, but also the man who had ruined his own.
“André, I ask you one thing, I beg you,” she said, touching his elbow and looking at him through the tears in her shining eyes. “I understand you” (Princess Marya lowered her eyes). “Don’t think that grief is caused by people. People are His instruments.” She looked slightly over Prince Andrei’s head with that confident, habitual look with which one looks at the place of a familiar portrait. “Grief is sent by Him, not by people. People are His instruments, they’re not to blame. If it seems to you that someone is to blame before you, forget