War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [439]
Pierre decided to himself that he would not visit the Rostovs anymore.
XXI
After the resolute refusal he had received, Petya went to his room and, locking himself in, wept bitterly. Everyone pretended to notice nothing when he came to tea, silent and gloomy, with tearful eyes.
The next day the sovereign arrived. Several of the Rostovs’ domestics asked permission to go and look at the tsar. That morning, Petya spent a long time getting dressed, combing his hair, and arranging his collar the way grown-ups do. He frowned into the mirror, gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders, and finally, without telling anyone, put on his peaked cap and left the house by the back door, trying not to be noticed. Petya had decided to go directly to the place where the sovereign was and explain directly to some gentleman-in-waiting (Petya thought that a sovereign was always surrounded by gentlemen-in-waiting) that he, Count Rostov, despite his youth, wished to serve the fatherland, that youth could be no hindrance to devotion, and that he was prepared…While getting ready to go, Petya had prepared many fine words which he would say to the gentleman-in-waiting.
Petya was counting on the success of his undertaking precisely because he was a child (Petya even thought how everyone would be astonished at his youth), and yet in the arrangement of his collar, in his hairstyle, and in his slow, sedate walk, he wanted to make himself look like an old man. But the further he went, the more distracted he was by the ever-increasing numbers of people near the Kremlin, the more he forgot to maintain the slowness and sedateness proper to grown-up people. As he approached the Kremlin, he already began to worry about being jostled, and with a menacing look he resolutely stuck out his elbows. But at the Trinity Gate, in spite of all his resoluteness, people who probably did not know with what a patriotic purpose he was going to the Kremlin so pressed him to the wall that he had to submit and stop, while carriages passed under the archway with a hollow rumble. Next to Petya stood a peasant woman, a footman, two merchants, and a retired soldier. After standing for a while in the gateway, Petya, unwilling to wait until all the carriages went by, wanted to start moving ahead before the others and resolutely began to work with his elbows; but the peasant woman standing in his way, to whom he first applied his elbows, angrily shouted at him:
“What are you shoving for, little master, see, everybody’s standing. What’s all this pushing for?”
“Anybody can push in that case,” said the footman, and, also beginning to work with his elbows, he squeezed Petya into the stinking corner of the gateway.
Petya wiped his sweat-covered face with his hands and straightened the sweat-soaked collar he had arranged so well, like a grown-up’s, at home.
Petya felt that he looked unpresentable and was afraid that, if he appeared before the gentlemen-in-waiting like that, he would not be admitted to the sovereign. But, owing to the crowd, it was quite impossible to set himself right and move to another place. One of the generals driving by was an acquaintance of the Rostovs’. Petya wanted to ask for his help, but considered that it would be unmanly. When all the carriages had gone past, the crowd poured through and brought Petya out on the square, which was all filled with people. Not only on the square, but on the glacis, on the roofs, everywhere there were people. As soon as Petya found himself on the square, he clearly heard the sounds of the bells and the joyful talk of people that filled the whole Kremlin.
For a time the square was less crowded, but suddenly all heads were uncovered, everyone rushed forward somewhere. Petya was pressed so hard that he could not breathe, and everyone shouted: “Hurrah! Hur-r-rah! Hurrah!” Petya stood on tiptoe, shoved, pinched, but could see nothing except the people around him.
On all faces there was the same general expression of tenderness and rapture. A merchant woman standing beside Petya sobbed,