War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [761]
After these words, an awkward silence ensued. Natasha was the first to speak, defending her husband and attacking her brother. Her defense was weak and awkward, but her purpose was achieved. The conversation picked up again, and no longer in that unpleasantly hostile tone in which Nikolai’s last words had been spoken.
When they all rose for supper, Nikolenka Bolkonsky went up to Pierre, pale, with shining, luminous eyes.
“Uncle Pierre…you…no…If papa were alive…He’d agree with you?” he asked.
Pierre suddenly realized what a special, independent, complex, and intense work of feeling and thought must have been going on in this boy while he was talking, and, recalling everything he had said, he was vexed that the boy had heard him. However, he had to give him an answer.
“I think so,” he said reluctantly and left the study.
The boy bowed his head, and here it was as if he noticed for the first time what he had done on the table. He blushed and went over to Nikolai.
“Uncle, forgive me, I didn’t mean to do it,” he said, pointing to the broken pens and sticks of wax.
Nikolai gave an angry start.
“All right, all right,” he said, throwing the pens and sticks of wax under the table. And, clearly having a hard time suppressing the wrath that had risen in him, he turned away.
“You shouldn’t have been here at all,” he said.
XV
Over supper the conversation was no longer about politics and societies but, on the contrary, started on what was most pleasant for Nikolai—memories of the year twelve—which Denisov evoked and in which Pierre was especially nice and amusing. And the family parted on the most friendly terms.
When Nikolai, having undressed in his study after supper and given instructions to the steward, who had long been waiting, went to the bedroom in his dressing gown, he found his wife still at the writing table: she was writing something.
“What are you writing, Marie?” asked Nikolai. Countess Marya blushed. She was afraid that her husband would not understand or approve of what she was writing.
She would have liked to hide what she had written from him, but at the same time she was glad that he had found her and that she could tell him.
“It’s my diary, Nicolas,” she said, handing him a blue notebook covered with her firm, large handwriting.
“Your diary?…” Nikolai said with a shade of mockery and took the notebook from her. It was written in French:
December 4. Today Andryusha [the elder son] woke up and did not want to get dressed, and Mlle Louise sent for me. He was capricious and headstrong. I tried to threaten him, but he became still more angry. Then I took it upon myself to let him be, and the nanny and I began getting the other children up, and I told him that I did not like him. He remained silent for a long time, as if he was surprised; then, in nothing but his nightshirt, he jumped up to me and burst into such sobs that it was long before I could calm him. It was clear that he suffered most of all from having upset me; then, in the evening, when I gave him his little ticket, he again wept pitifully as he kissed me. With him everything can be done by tenderness.
“What is a little ticket?” asked Nikolai.
“I’ve begun giving the older ones little reports in the evening on their behavior.”
Nikolai glanced into the luminous eyes that were looking at him and went on turning pages and reading. The diary contained everything from the children’s life that the mother found noteworthy, expressing the children’s character or inspiring general thoughts about methods of upbringing. These were for the most part the most insignificant trifles, but they did not seem so either to the mother or to the father as he now read this children’s diary for the first time.
For December 5 there was written:
Mitya was mischievous at the table. Papa ordered that he not be given dessert. He was not; but he looked at the others so pitifully and greedily