From that day forward, he saw Valcrya more and more often, testing her as much as himself. Marriage was such an important matter, he thought, that you mustn't commit yourself until you were sure, and had added up the good and bad points of your chosen one. Two columns: debit, credit. Under the suitor's probing eye, the total changed after every encounter. A detail of dress or hair style was enough to bring the whole project to a halt. If she talked clothes to him, he fretted: "She is frivolous! In her it would appear to be a lasting passion, rather than a passing fancy."38 If she wore a white gown, he went soft all over, as though her dress were a promise of angelic innocence: "Valerya had on a white dress. Very nice. Spent one of the most pleasant day's in my whole life. Do I love her seriously? Can she be steadfast in love?"80 If she used a bad word, his esteem turned to resentment: "Valerya is impossibly uncducatcd, ignorant, not to say stupid. The verb 'to prostitute,' which she used, pained me, God knows why, and coming on top of my toothache, plunged me into gloom."37 If she chanccd to appear bare-armed, he left off criticizing her soul and turned to her body: "She was wearing a white sleeveless dress: her arms are not pretty. This upset mc. I began to tease her so bitterly that she had to smile, but her tears showed through. ... I felt fine, but she was miserable. I am conscious of that."3* If, the following day, she received him in a dressing gown, sitting at her writing desk wearing a languid expression, it was worse stilclass="underline" "Valerya, decked out in that revolting, supposedly alluring peignoir again, was writing in an unlighted room."39 If she described the dresses she was going to wear in August for the coronation festivities, to which her family had been invited, he suspected her, oddly enough, of lacking a maternal instinct: "She is all frivolity about everything serious, and terrifyingly light-headed. I am afraid she is one of those people who do not even love children."40 If she paid less attention to her dress and drew her hair back to let her cars show, he warmed up again: "For the first time, I found her without 'her gowns,' as Sergey says. She is ten times better like that, and above all, more natural. She has put her hair behind her ears, now that she sees I like it that way. . . . Spent a positively blissful evening."41 Three days later his beatitude turned to acute physical excitement. After beating his brains out to convince himself that Valerya was nice, he began to find her attractive instead: "Odd that Valerya should be beginning to appeal to me as a woman, whereas before it was just as a woman that she repelled mc. Well, not always. It depended on my mood. Yesterday I noticed her arms for the first time, which used to disgust me." Perhaps, it was simply the fact that she was about to leave for Moscow that made her desirable. She was looking forward so intensely to those coronation festivities, the suppers, receptions, balls and fireworks, that he was jealous a priori of every man who would come near her! Around him, the two families were conspiring to force the hook down his throat, with Vergani, the tireless companion, leading the pack; she had sworn to marry off the poor creature before the end of the year, as she had just done for Olga.t She invented a thousand opportunities for the young people to meet, whispered advice into the girl's ear, chose her gowns, urged her on or held her back according to the mood of the man she was supposed to ensnare. Sometimes it was Tolstoy who went to Sudakovo, and sometimes Valerya, chaperoned by the Frenchwoman, who camc on some pretext or other to Yasnava Polyana. There were walks in the forest, impromptu picnics at the haying camp, reveries, tЈte-a-tetes on a moonlit balcony and four-handed sessions at the piano, while the older generation gathered around the samovar and laid plans for the future. When he was alone with Aunt Toinette, Tolstoy had to submit to her remonstrances. She could not understand why he was still waiting to become engaged. In her opinion Valerya was perfect in every respect. If he waited, he might lose her. Hadn't he had enough of living like a wild animal? Ah! God had given her a heavy cross to bear with her nephews: Dmitry had died in the arms of a prostitute, and the three others stubbornly refused to marry! . . . Aunt Pelagya Yushkov, who was visiting Yasnaya Polyana just then, shared Aunt Toinette's pro-marriage attitude. Sergey, on the other hand—the eternal skeptic—warned his brother against the folly he was about to commit. "Conversation about Valerya," Leo Tolstoy wrote. "Sergey's words were like a cold shower."42 lie was increasingly intimidated by the idea of marriage, but he did not have the courage to break off. She was to leave for Moscow on August 12. On the tenth he ran over to Sudakovo in an extremely positive frame of mind: "Talked marriage with Valerya. She is intelligent and exceptionally svvcct-tcmpcrcd." On the eleventh, "A storm prevented mc from going over to the Arsenyevs,
t Olga Arsenyev had just announced her engagement in Moscow.
although I badly wanted to go." On the twelfth he hastened along the sodden paths toward the girl he was already thinking of as his fiancee. What a lot of luggage! Trunks full of dresses and hats. The young lady was almost pretty in her traveling suit. Touching farewells, promise of a speedy return, admonitions on either side. That evening, in his bedroom, Tolstoy wrote, "She was more simple and sweeter than ever. I wish I knew whether or not I am in love with her."
When she was present, Valerya got on his nerves; absent, she seemed incplaccable. Even the "pretty peasant girls" he met in the forest, over whom he occasionally "lost his self-control," as he put it, could not take his mind off her. "These past day's I have been thinking more and more of my little Valerya," he wrote 011 August 16. And the following day, flaunting propriety, lie turned out a half-tender, half-teasing letter: "To my great surprise, I am bored without you! ... I console myself in your absence with the thought that you will come back a little older, for being youthful to the point of childishness is a fault, albeit charming. . . . Was Mortier* pleased with you? I can see your mournful smile, I can hear you say, 'lie cannot live without moralizing.' How can I help it? I have got into a bad habit, that of teaching others what I don't know myself."
He hoped for a quick reply, but Valerya would not give him that satisfaction and, on Mile. Vergani's advice, fired off a letter to Aunt Toinette that was brilliantly calculated to make him jealous. It contained an enthusiastic account of the coronation entertainment, her success with His Majesty's aides-de-camp, a military procession during which her dress had almost been torn in the crush. After reading this bulletin of Valerya's social success, Tolstoy gave free rein to his wrath:
"I try to restrain the mild hatred your note to my aunt has aroused in me," he wrote her. "Not even mild hatred, but rather sorrow and disappointment, for 'Drive nature out the window and it comes in at the door . . .' I low cruel. Why did you write that? Don't you know how it exasperates me?" He went on to say that she must be "ghastly" in her ceremonial gown, that the "current" pattern she spoke of sounded calculated to make her look ugly, that most of the aides-decamp sniffing about her skirts were "cads or imbeciles." He concluded with these vengeful words, "I shall not come to Moscow, although I should like to, if only to lose my temper at the sight of you. Wishing you every sort of vanity-flattering joy, accompanied by its usual
0 Louis-Henri-Stanislas Mortier de Fontaine (1816-1883), French pianist and composcr, who was living in Moscow at the time and with whom Valerya studied music.
bitter ending, I remain your most humble, but also most difficult, servant."