War and Peace (106 page)

“Natasha, your hair …” whispered Sonya. The box-opener deferentially and hurriedly slipped before the ladies and opened the door of the box. The music became more distinctly audible at the door, and they saw the brightly lighted rows of boxes, with the bare arms and shoulders of the ladies, and the stalls below, noisy, and gay with uniforms. A lady entering the next box looked round at Natasha with an envious, feminine glance. The curtain had not yet risen and they were playing the overture. Natasha smoothing down her skirt went in with Sonya and sat down looking round at the brightly lighted tiers of boxes facing them. The sensation she had not experienced for a long while—that hundreds of eyes were looking at her bare arms and neck—suddenly came upon her both pleasantly and unpleasantly, calling up a whole swarm of memories, desires, and emotions connected with that sensation.

The two strikingly pretty girls, Natasha and Sonya, with Count Ilya Andreitch, who had not been seen for a long while in Moscow, attracted general attention. Moreover, every one had heard vaguely of Natasha’s engagement to Prince Andrey, knew that the Rostovs had been living in the country ever since, and looked with curiosity at the girl who was to make one of the best matches in Russia.

Natasha had, so every one told her, grown prettier in the country; and that evening, owing to her excited condition, she was particularly pretty. She made a striking impression of fulness of life and beauty, together with indifference to everything around her. Her black eyes gazed at the crowd, seeking out no one, while her slender arm, bare to above the elbow, leaned on the velvet edge of the box, and her hand, holding the programme, clasped and unclasped in time to the music with obvious unconsciousness.

“Look, there’s Alenina,” said Sonya, “with her mother, isn’t it?”

“Heavens, Mihail Kirillitch is really stouter than ever,” said the old count.

“Look! our Anna Mihalovna in such a cap!”

“The Karagins, Julie, and Boris with them. One can see at once they are engaged.”

“Drubetskoy has made his offer! To be sure, I heard so to-day,” said Shinshin, coming into the Rostovs’ box.

Natasha looked in the direction her father was looking in and saw Julie with diamonds on her thick, red neck (Natasha knew it was powdered), sitting with a blissful face beside her mother.

Behind them could be seen the handsome, well-brushed head of Boris, with a smile inclining his ear towards Julie’s mouth. He looked from under his brows at the Rostovs, and said something, smiling, to his betrothed.

“They are talking about us, about me and himself!” thought Natasha. “And he is, most likely, soothing his fiancée’s jealousy of me; they needn’t worry themselves! If only they knew how little they matter to me, any one of them.”

Behind the engaged couple sat Anna Mihalovna in a green cap, with a face happy, in honour of the festive occasion, and devoutly resigned to the will of God. Their box was full of that atmosphere of an engaged couple—which Natasha knew so well and liked so much. She turned away; and suddenly all that had been humiliating in her morning visit came back to her mind.

“What right has he not to want to receive me into his family? Ah, better not think about it, not think till he comes back!” she said to herself, and began to look about at the faces, known and unknown, in the stalls.

In the front of the stalls, in the very centre, leaning back against the rail stood Dolohov, in a Persian dress, with his huge shock of curly hair combed upwards. He stood in the most conspicuous place in the theatre, well aware that he was attracting the attention of the whole audience, and as much at his ease as though he had been alone in his room. The most brilliant young men in Moscow were all thronging about him, and he was obviously the leading figure among them.

Count Ilya Andreitch, laughing, nudged the blushing Sonya, pointing out her former admirer.

“Did you recognise him?” he asked. “And where has he dropped from?” said he, turning to Shinshin. “I thought he had disappeared somewhere?”

“He did disappear,” answered Shinshin. “He was in the Caucasus, and he ran away from there, and they say he has been acting as minister to some reigning prince in Persia, and there killed the Shah’s brother. Well, all the Moscow ladies are wild about him! ‘Dolohov the Persian,’ that’s what does it! Nowadays there’s nothing can be done without Dolohov; they do homage to him, invite you to meet him, as if he were a sturgeon,” said Shinshin. “Dolohov and Anatole Kuragin have taken all the ladies’ hearts by storm.”

A tall, handsome woman with a mass of hair and very naked, plump, white arms and shoulders, and a double row of big pearls round her throat, walked into the next box, and was a long while settling into her place and rustling her thick silk gown.

Natasha unconsciously examined that neck and the shoulders, the pearls, the coiffure of this lady, and admired the beauty of the shoulders and the pearls. While Natasha was scrutinising her a second time, the lady looked round, and meeting the eyes of Count Ilya Andreitch, she nodded and smiled to him. It was the Countess Bezuhov, Pierre’s wife. The count, who knew every one in society, bent over and entered into conversation with her.

“Have you been here long?” he began. “I’m coming; I’m coming to kiss your hand. I have come to town on business and brought my girls with me. They say Semyonovna’s acting is superb,” the count went on. “Count Pyotr Kirillovitch never forgot us. Is he here?”

“Yes, he meant to come,” said Ellen, looking intently at Natasha.

Count Ilya Andreitch sat down again in his place.

“Handsome, isn’t she?” he whispered to Natasha.

“Exquisite!” said Natasha. “One might well fall in love with her!”

At that moment they heard the last chords of the overture, and the tapping of the conductor’s stick. Late comers hurried to their seats in the stalls, and the curtain rose.

As soon as the curtain rose, a hush fell on the boxes and stalls, and all the men, old and young, in their frock coats or uniforms, all the women with precious stones on their bare flesh concentrated all their attention with eager curiosity on the stage. Natasha too began to look at it.

The stage consisted of a boarded floor in the middle, with painted cardboard representing trees at the sides, and linen stretched over the boards at the back. In the middle of the stage there were sitting maidens in red bodices and white skirts. An excessively stout woman in a white silk dress was sitting apart on a low bench with green cardboard fixed on the back of it. They were all singing something. When they had finished their song, the woman in white moved towards the prompter’s box, and a man, with his stout legs encased in silk tights, with a plume and a dagger, went up to her and began singing and waving his arms.

The man in the tights sang alone, then she sang alone. Then both paused, while the music played, and the man fumbled with the hand of the woman in white, obviously waiting for the bar at which he was to begin singing with her. They sang a duet, and every one in the theatre began clapping and shouting, while the man and woman on the stage, supposed to represent lovers, began bowing with smiles and gesticulations.

After the country, and in her serious mood, Natasha felt it all grotesque and extraordinary. She could not follow the opera; she could not even listen to the music: she saw nothing but painted cardboard and strangely dressed-up men and women, talking, singing, and moving strangely about in the bright light. She knew what it all was meant to represent; but it was all so grotesquely false and unnatural that she felt alternately ashamed and amused at the actors. She looked about her at the faces of the spectators, seeking in them signs of the same irony and bewilderment that she was feeling herself. But all the faces were watching
what was passing on the stage, and expressed nothing but an affected—so Natasha thought—rapture. “I suppose it is meant to be like this!” thought Natasha. She looked alternately at the rows of pomaded masculine heads in the stalls, and at the naked women in the boxes, especially at her next neighbour Ellen, who, quite undressed, sat gazing intently, with a quiet and serene smile, at the stage, and basking in the bright light that flooded the theatre, and the warm air, heated by the crowd. Natasha began gradually to pass into a state of intoxication she had not experienced for a long while. She lost all sense of what she was and where she was and what was going on before her eyes. She gazed and dreamed, and the strangest ideas flashed unexpectedly and disconnectedly into her mind. At one moment the idea occurred to her to leap over the footlights and sing that air the actress was singing; then she felt inclined to hook her fan into an old gentleman sitting near her, or to bend over to Ellen and tickle her.

At a moment when there was a lull on the stage before the beginning of a song, the door opening to the stalls creaked on the side nearest the Rostovs’ box, and there was the sound of a man’s footsteps. “Here he is, Kuragin!” whispered Shinshin. Countess Bezuhov turned smiling to the new-comer. Natasha looked in the direction of the Countess Bezuhov’s eyes, and saw an exceedingly handsome adjutant coming towards their box with a confident, but yet courteous, bearing. It was Anatole Kuragin, whom she had seen long before, and noticed at the Petersburg ball. He was now wearing an adjutant’s uniform, with one epaulette and a shoulder knot. He walked with a jaunty strut, which would have been ridiculous if he had not been so handsome, and if his good-looking face had not expressed such simple-hearted satisfaction and good spirits. Although the performance was going on he walked lightly, without haste, along the carpeted corridor, holding his scented, handsome head high, and accompanied by a slight clank of spurs and sword. Glancing at Natasha, he went up to his sister, laid his hand in a close-fitting glove on the edge of her box, nodded his head at her, and, bending down, asked her a question, with a motion towards Natasha.

“Very, very charming!” he said, obviously speaking of Natasha. She did not exactly hear the words, but divined them from the movement of his lips. Then he went on to the front row and sat down beside Dolohov, giving a friendly and careless nudge with his elbow to the man whom other people treated with such punctilio. With a merry wink, he smiled at him, and leaned with his foot against the footlights.

“How like the brother is to his sister!” said the count. “And how handsome they both are!”

Shinshin began telling the count in an undertone some story of an intrigue of Kuragin’s in Moscow, to which Natasha listened, simply because he had said of her “very charming.”

The first act was over; every one stood up in the stalls, changed places, and began going out and coming in.

Boris came to the Rostovs’ box, received their congratulations very simply, and lifting his eyebrows with an absent-minded smile, gave Natasha and Sonya his fiancée’s message, begging them to come to her wedding, and went away. Natasha, with a gay and coquettish smile, talked to him and congratulated him on his approaching marriage—the very Boris she had once been in love with. In the condition of emotional intoxication in which she found herself everything seemed simple and natural.

Ellen sat in her nakedness close by her, and smiled on all alike, and just such a smile Natasha bestowed on Boris.

Ellen’s box was filled and surrounded on the side of the stalls by the most distinguished and intellectual men, who seemed vying with one another in their desire to show every one that they knew her.

All throughout that entr’acte Kuragin stood with Dolohov in front of the footlights staring at the Rostovs’ box. Natasha knew he was talking about her, and that afforded her satisfaction. She even turned so that he could see her profile from what she believed to be the most becoming angle. Before the beginning of the second act she observed in the stalls the figure of Pierre, whom the Rostovs had not seen since their arrival. His face looked sad, and he had grown stouter since Natasha had seen him last. He walked up to the front rows, not noticing any one. Anatole went up to him, and began saying something to him, with a look and a gesture towards the Rostovs’ box. Pierre looked pleased at seeing Natasha, and walked hurriedly along the rows of stalls towards their box. Leaning on his elbow, he talked smiling to Natasha for a long while. While she was talking to Pierre, Natasha heard a man’s voice speaking in Countess Bezuhov’s box, and something told her it was Kuragin. She looked round and met his eyes. He looked her straight in the eyes, almost smiling, with a look of such warmth and admiration that it seemed strange to be so near him, to look at him like that, to be so certain that he admired her, and not to be acquainted with him.

In the second act there was scenery representing monuments, and a
hole in the drop at the back that represented the moon, and shades were put over the footlights, and trumpets and bassoons began playing, and a number of people came in on the right and on the left wearing black cloaks. These people began waving their arms, and in their hands they had something of the nature of a dagger. Then some more people ran in and began dragging away the woman who had been in white but who was now in a blue dress. They did not drag her away at once; they spent a long while singing with her; but finally they did drag her away, and behind the scenes they struck something metallic three times, and then all knelt down and began singing a prayer. All these performances were interrupted several times by the enthusiastic shouts of the spectators.

During that act, every time Natasha glanced towards the stalls, she saw Anatole Kuragin, with one arm flung across the back of his chair, staring at her. It pleased her to see that he was so captivated by her, and it never entered her head that there could be anything amiss in it.

When the second act was over, Countess Bezuhov got up, turned towards the Rostovs’ box (the whole of her bosom was completely exposed), with her gloved little finger beckoned the old count to her, and taking no notice of the men who were thronging about her box, began with an amiable smile talking to him.

“Oh, do make me acquainted with your charming daughters,” she said. “All the town is singing their praises, and I don’t know them.”