War and Peace (107 page)

Natasha got up and curtseyed to the magnificent countess. Natasha was so delighted at the praise from this brilliant beauty that she blushed with pleasure.

“I quite want to become a Moscow resident myself,” said Ellen. “What a shame of you to bury such pearls in the country!”

Countess Bezuhov had some right to her reputation of being a fascinating woman. She could say what she did not think, especially what was flattering, with perfect simplicity and naturalness.

“No, dear count, you must let me help to entertain your daughters, though I’m not here now for very long, nor you either. But I’ll do my best to amuse them. I have heard a great deal about you in Petersburg, and wanted to know you,” she said to Natasha, with her unvarying beautiful smile. “I have heard of you, too, from my page, Drubetskoy—you have heard he is to be married—and from my husband’s friend, Bolkonsky, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky,” she said, with peculiar emphasis, by which she meant to signify that she knew in what relation he stood to Natasha. She asked that one of the young ladies might be allowed to sit
through the rest of the performance in her box that they might become better acquainted, and Natasha moved into it.

In the third act the scene was a palace in which a great many candles were burning, and pictures were hanging on the walls, representing knights with beards. In the middle stood a man and a woman, probably meant for a king and a queen. The king waved his right hand, and, obviously nervous, sang something very badly, and sat down on a crimson throne. The actress, who had been in white at first and then in blue, was now in nothing but a smock, and had let her hair down. She was standing near the throne, singing something very mournful, addressed to the queen. But the king waved his hand sternly, and from the sides there came in men and women with bare legs who began dancing all together. Then the violins played very shrilly and merrily: one of the actresses, with thick, bare legs and thin arms, leaving the rest, went to the side to set straight her bodice, then walked into the middle of the stage and began skipping into the air and kicking one leg very rapidly with the other. Every one in the stalls clapped their hands and roared “bravo!” Then one man stood alone at one corner of the stage. The cymbals and trumpets struck up more loudly in the orchestra, and this man began leaping very high in the air and rapidly waving his legs. (This was Duport, who earned sixty thousand a year by this accomplishment.) Every one in the boxes and in the stalls began clapping and shouting with all their might, and the man stood still and began smiling and bowing in all directions. Then other men and women with bare legs danced; then again the king shouted something to music, and they all began singing. But suddenly a storm came on, chromatic scales and chords with the diminishing sevenths could be heard in the orchestra, and they all ran off, dragging one of the performers again behind the scenes, and the curtain dropped. Again a fearful uproar of applause arose among the spectators, and all began screaming with rapturous faces:

“Duport! Duport! Duport!”

Natasha did not now feel this strange. She looked about her with pleasure, smiling joyfully.

“Isn’t Duport admirable?” said Ellen, turning to her.

“Oh yes,” answered Natasha.

In the entr’acte there was a current of chill air in Ellen’s box, the door was opened, and Anatole walked in, bending and trying not to brush against any one.

“Allow me to introduce my brother,” said Ellen, her eyes shifting uneasily from Natasha to Anatole. Natasha turned her pretty little head towards the handsome adjutant and smiled over her bare shoulder. Anatole, who was as handsome on a closer view as he was from a distance, sat down beside her, and said he had long wished to have this pleasure, ever since the Narishkins’ ball, at which he had had the pleasure he had not forgotten of seeing her. Kuragin was far more sensible and straightforward with women than he was in men’s society. He talked boldly and simply, and Natasha was strangely and agreeably impressed by finding nothing so formidable in this man, of whom such stories were told, but, on the contrary, seeing on his face the most innocent, merry, and simple-hearted smile.

Kuragin asked her what she thought of the performance, and told her that at the last performance Semyonovna had fallen down while she was acting.

“And do you know, countess,” said he, suddenly addressing her as though she were an old friend, “we are getting up a costume ball; you ought to take part in it; it will be great fun. They are all assembling at the Karagins’. Please, do come, really now, eh?” he said. As he said this he never took his smiling eyes off the face, the neck, the bare arms of Natasha. Natasha knew beyond all doubt that he was fascinated by her. That pleased her, yet she felt for some reason constrained and oppressed in his presence. When she was not looking at him she felt that he was looking at her shoulders, and she could not help trying to catch his eyes that he might rather look in her face. But as she looked into his eyes she felt with horror that, between him and her, there was not that barrier of modest reserve she had always been conscious of between herself and other men. In five minutes she felt—she did not know how—that she had come fearfully close to this man. When she turned away, she felt afraid he might take her from behind by her bare arm and kiss her on the neck. They talked of the simplest things, and she felt that they were close as she had never been with any man. Natasha looked round at Ellen and at her father, as though to ask them what was the meaning of it. But Ellen was absorbed in talking to a general
and did not respond to her glance, and her father’s eyes said nothing to her but what they always said: “Enjoying yourself? Well, I’m glad then.”

In one of the moments of awkward silence, during which Anatole gazed calmly and persistently at her, Natasha, to break the silence, asked him how he liked Moscow. Natasha asked this question and blushed as she did so; she was feeling all the while that there she was doing something improper in talking to him. Anatole smiled as though to encourage her.

“At first I didn’t like it much, for what is it makes one like a town? It’s the pretty women, isn’t it? Well, but now I like it awfully,” he said, with a meaning look at her. “You’ll come to the fancy dress ball, countess? Do come,” he said, and putting his hand out to her bouquet he said, dropping his voice, “You will be the prettiest. Come, dear countess, and as a pledge give me this flower.”

Natasha did not understand what he was saying, nor did he himself; but she felt that in his uncomprehended words there was some improper intention. She did not know what to say, and turned away as though she had not heard what he said. But as soon as she turned away she felt that he was here behind her, so close to her.

“What is he feeling now? Is he confused? Is he angry? Must I set it right?” she wondered. She could not refrain from looking round. She glanced straight into his eyes, and his nearness and confidence, and the simple-hearted warmth of his smile vanquished her. She smiled exactly as he did, looking straight into his eyes. And again, she felt with horror that no barrier lay between him and her.

The curtain rose again. Anatole walked out of the box, serene and good-humoured. Natasha went back to her father’s box, completely under the spell of the world in which she found herself. All that passed before her eyes now seemed to her perfectly natural. But on the other hand all previous thoughts of her betrothed, of Princess Marya, of her life in the country, did not once recur to her mind, as though all that belonged to the remote past.

In the fourth act there was some sort of devil who sang, waving his arms till the boards were moved away under him and he sank into the opening. That was all Natasha saw of the fourth act; she felt harassed and excited; and the cause of that excitement was Kuragin, whom she could not help watching. As they came out of the theatre Anatole came up to them, called their carriage and helped them into it. As he assisted
Natasha he pressed her arm above the elbow. Natasha, flushed and excited, looked round at him. He gazed at her with flashing eyes and a tender smile.

It was only on getting home that Natasha could form any clear idea of what had happened. All at once, remembering Prince Andrey, she was horrified, and at tea, to which they all sat down after the theatre, she groaned aloud, and flushing crimson ran out of the room. “My God! I am ruined!” she said to herself. “How could I sink to such a depth?” she thought. For a long while she sat, with her flushed face hidden in her hands, trying to get a clear idea of what had happened and unable to grasp either what had happened or what she was feeling. Everything seemed to her dark, obscure, and dreadful. In that immense, lighted hall, where Duport had jumped about to music with his bare legs on the damp boards in his short jacket with tinsel, and young girls and old men, and that Ellen, proudly and serenely smiling in her nakedness, had enthusiastically roared “bravo”; there, in the wake of that Ellen, all had been clear and simple. But now, alone by herself, it was past comprehending. “What does it mean? What is that terror I felt with him? What is the meaning of those gnawings of conscience I am feeling now?” she thought.

To no one but to her mother at night in bed Natasha could have talked of what she was feeling. Sonya she knew, with her strict and single-minded view of things, would either have failed to understand at all, or would have been horrified at the avowal. Natasha all by herself had to try and solve the riddle that tormented her.

“Am I spoilt for Prince Andrey’s love or not?” she asked herself, and with reassuring mockery she answered herself: “What a fool I am to ask such a thing! What has happened to me? Nothing. I have done nothing; I did nothing to lead him on. No one will ever know, and I shall never see him again,” she told herself. “So it’s plain that nothing has happened, that there’s nothing to regret, that Prince Andrey can love me
still
. But why
still
? O my God, my God, why isn’t he here!” Natasha felt comforted for a moment, but again some instinct told her that though that was all true, and though nothing had happened, yet some instinct told her that all the old purity of her love for Prince Andrey was lost. And again, in her imagination, she went over all her conversation with Kuragin, and saw again the face, the gestures, and the tender smile of that handsome, daring man at the moment when he had pressed her arm.

Anatole Kuragin was staying in Moscow because his father had sent him away from Petersburg, where he had been spending twenty thousand a year in hard cash and running up bills for as much more, and his creditors had been dunning his father. The father informed his son that for the last time he would pay half his debts; but only on condition that he would go away to Moscow, where his father had, by much exertion, secured a post for him as adjutant to the commander-in-chief, and would try finally to make a good match there. He suggested to him either Princess Marya or Julie Karagin.

Anatole consented, and went away to Moscow, where he stayed with Pierre. Pierre at first was by no means pleased to receive Anatole, but after a while he got used to his presence; sometimes accompanied him on his carousals, and by way of loans gave him money.

As Shinshin had with truth said of him, Anatole had won the hearts of all the Moscow ladies, especially by the nonchalance with which he treated them and the preference he openly showed for gypsy girls and actresses, with the most prominent of whom, Mademoiselle George, he was said to have an intrigue. He never missed a single drinking party at Danilov’s, or any other Moscow festivity, spent whole nights drinking, outdoing all the rest, and was at every
soirée
and ball in the best society. There were rumours of several intrigues of his with Moscow ladies, and at balls he flirted with a few of them. But he fought shy of unmarried ladies, especially the wealthy heiresses, who were most of them plain. He had a good reason for this, of which no one knew but his most intimate friends: he had been for the last two years married. Two years previously, while his regiment had been stationed in Poland, a Polish landowner, by no means well-to-do, had forced Anatole to marry his daughter.

Anatole had very shortly afterwards abandoned his wife, and in consideration of a sum of money, which he agreed to send his father-in-law, he was allowed by the latter to pass as a bachelor unmolested.

Anatole was very well satisfied with his position, with himself, and with other people. He was instinctively and thoroughly convinced that he could not possibly live except just in the way he did live, and that he had never in his life done anything base. He was incapable of considering either how his actions might be judged by others, or what might be the result of this or that action on his part. He was convinced that just
as the duck is created so that it must always live in the water, so he was created by God such that he must spend thirty thousand a year, and always take a good position in society. He had such perfect faith in this that, looking at him, others too were persuaded of it, and refused him neither the exalted position in society nor the money, which he borrowed right and left, obviously with no notion of repaying it.

He was not a gambler, at least he never greatly cared about winning money at cards. He was not vain. He did not care a straw what people thought of him. Still less could he have been reproached with ambition. Several times he had, to his father’s irritation, spoiled his best chances of a career, and he laughed at distinctions of all kinds. He was not stingy, and never refused any one who asked him for anything. What he loved was dissipation and women; and as, according to his ideas, there was nothing dishonourable in these tastes, and as he was incapable of considering the effect on others of the gratification of his tastes, he believed himself in his heart to be an irreproachable man, felt a genuine contempt for scoundrels and mean persons, and with an untroubled conscience held his head high. Rakes, those masculine Magdalens, have a secret feeling of their own guiltlessness, just as have women Magdalens, founded on the same hope of forgiveness. “All will be forgiven her, because she loved much; and all will be forgiven him, because he has enjoyed himself much.”