War and Peace (89 page)

Prince Andrey scowled, and was mute.

“But, of course, you are a friend of Boris’s?” Vera said to him.

“Yes, I know him.…”

“He has probably told you of his childish love for Natasha?”

“Oh, was there a childish love between them?” asked Prince Andrey with a sudden, unexpected flush on his face.

“Yes. You know between cousins the close intimacy often leads to love. Cousinhood is a dangerous neighbourhood. Isn’t it?”

“Oh, not a doubt of it,” said Prince Andrey, and with sudden and unnatural liveliness, he began joking with Pierre about the necessity of his being careful with his cousins at Moscow, ladies of fifty, and in the middle of these jesting remarks he got up, and taking Pierre’s arm, drew him aside.

“Well, what is it?” said Pierre, who had been watching in wonder his friend’s excitement, and noticed the glance he turned upon Natasha as he got up.

“I must, I must talk to you,” said Prince Andrey. “You know that pair of women’s gloves” (he referred to the masonic gloves given to a newly initiated brother to be entrusted to the woman he loved). “I … but no, I will talk to you later on.…” And with a strange light in his eyes and a restlessness in his movements, Prince Andrey approached Natasha and sat down beside her. Pierre saw that Prince Andrey asked her some question, and she answered him, flushing hotly.

But at that moment Berg approached Pierre, and insisted upon his taking part in an argument between the general and the colonel on affairs in Spain.

Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of glee never left his face. The
soirée
was a great success, and exactly like other
soirées
he had seen. Everything was precisely similar: the ladies’ refined conversation, and the cards, and after the cards the general raising his voice and the samovar and the tea cakes; but one thing was still lacking, which he had always seen at
soirées
, and wished to imitate. There was still wanting the usual loud conversation between the gentlemen and discussion about some serious intellectual question. The general had started that conversation, and Berg drew Pierre into it.

Next day Prince Andrey went to dine at the Rostovs’, as Count Ilya Andreitch had invited him, and spent the whole day with them.

Every one in the house perceived on whose account Prince Andrey came, and he openly tried to be all day long with Natasha.

Not only in the soul of Natasha—scared, but happy and enthusiastic—in the whole household, too, there was a feeling of awe, of something of great gravity being bound to happen. With sorrowful and sternly serious eyes the countess looked at Prince Andrey as he talked to Natasha, and shyly and self-consciously tried to begin some insignificant talk with him as soon as he looked round at her. Sonya was afraid to leave Natasha, and afraid of being in their way if she stayed with them. Natasha turned pale in a panic of expectation every time she was left for a moment alone with him. Prince Andrey’s timidity impressed
her. She felt that he wanted to tell her something, but could not bring himself up to the point.

When Prince Andrey had gone away in the evening, the countess went up to Natasha and whispered:

“Well?”

“Mamma, for God’s sake, don’t ask me anything just now. This one can’t talk of,” said Natasha.

But in spite of this answer, Natasha lay a long while in her mother’s bed that night, her eyes fixed before her, excited and scared by turns. She told her how he had praised her, how he had said he was going abroad, how he had asked where they were going to spend the summer, and how he had asked her about Boris.

“But anything like this, like this … I have never felt before!” she said. “Only I’m afraid with him, I’m always afraid with him. What does that mean? Does it mean that it’s the real thing? Mamma, are you asleep?”

“No, my darling. I’m afraid of him myself,” answered her mother. “Go to bed.”

“Anyhow, I shouldn’t go to sleep. How stupid sleep is! Mamma, mamma, nothing like this have I ever felt before,” she said, with wonder and terror at the feeling she recognised in herself. “And could we ever have dreamed!…”

It seemed to Natasha that she had fallen in love with Prince Andrey the first time she saw him at Otradnoe. She was as it were terrified at this strange, unexpected happiness that the man she had chosen even then (she was firmly convinced that she had done so)—that very man should meet them again now and be apparently not indifferent to her.

“And it seems as though it all happened on purpose—his coming to Petersburg just while we are here. And our meeting at that ball. It was all fate. It’s clear that it is fate, that it has all led up to this. Even then, as soon as I saw him, I felt something quite different.”

“What has he said to you? What are those verses? Read them …” said the mother thoughtfully, referring to the verses Prince Andrey had written in Natasha’s album.

“Mamma, does it matter his being a widower?”

“Hush, Natasha. Pray to God. Marriages are made in heaven,” she said, quoting the French proverb.

“Mamma, darling, how I love you! how happy I am!” cried Natasha, shedding tears of excitement and happiness and hugging her mother.

At that very time Prince Andrey was telling Pierre of his love for Natasha and of his fixed determination to marry her.

That evening the Countess Elena Vassilyevna gave a reception; the French ambassador was there, and a royal prince who had become a very frequent visitor at the countess’s of late and many brilliant ladies and gentlemen. Pierre came down to it, wandered through the rooms and impressed all the guests by his look of concentrated preoccupation and gloom.

Pierre had been feeling one of his attacks of nervous depression coming upon him ever since the day of the ball and had been making desperate efforts to struggle against it. Since his wife’s intrigue with the royal prince, Pierre had been to his surprise appointed a kammerherr, and ever since he had felt a sense of weariness and shame in court society, and his old ideas of the vanity of all things human began to come back oftener and oftener. The feeling he had lately noticed between his protégée Natasha and Prince Andrey had aggravated his gloom by the contrast between his own position and his friend’s. He tried equally to avoid thinking of his wife and also of Natasha and Prince Andrey. Again everything seemed to him insignificant in comparison with eternity; again the question rose before him: “What for?” And for days and nights together he forced himself to work at masonic labours, hoping to keep off the evil spirit. Pierre had come out of the countess’s apartments at midnight, and was sitting in a shabby dressing-gown at the table in his own low-pitched, smoke-blackened room upstairs, copying out long transactions of the Scottish freemasons, when some one came into his room. It was Prince Andrey.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Pierre, with a preoccupied and dissatisfied air. “I’m at work, you see,” he added, pointing to the manuscript book with that look of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy people look at their work.

Prince Andrey stood before Pierre with a radiant, ecstatic face, full of new life, and with the egoism of happiness smiled at him without noticing his gloomy face.

“Well, my dear boy,” he said, “I wanted to tell you yesterday, and I have come to do so to-day. I have never felt anything like it. I am in love.”

Pierre suddenly heaved a heavy sigh, and dumped down his heavy person on the sofa beside Prince Andrey.

“With Natasha Rostov, yes?” he said.

“Yes, yes, who else could it be? I would never have believed it, but the feeling is too strong for me. Yesterday I was in torment, in agony, but I would not exchange that agony even for anything in the world. I have never lived till now, but I cannot live without her. But can she love me?… I’m too old for her.… Why don’t you speak?…”

“I? I? What did I tell you?” said Pierre, suddenly getting up and walking about the room. “I always thought so.… That girl is a treasure.… She’s a very rare sort of girl.… My dear fellow, don’t, I entreat you, be too wise, don’t doubt, marry, marry, marry!… And I am sure no man was ever happier than you will be.”

“But she?”

“She loves you.”

“Don’t talk nonsense …” said Prince Andrey, smiling and looking into Pierre’s face.

“She loves you, I know it,” Pierre cried angrily.

“No; do listen,” said Prince Andrey, taking hold of him by the arm and stopping him. “Do you know the state I am in? I must talk about it to some one.”

“Well, well, talk away, I’m very glad,” said Pierre, and his face did really change, the line of care in his brow was smoothed away, and he listened gladly to Prince Andrey. His friend seemed, and was indeed, an utterly different, new man. What had become of his ennui, his contempt of life, his disillusionment? Pierre was the only person to whom he could have brought himself to speak quite openly; but to him he did reveal all that was in his heart. Readily and boldly he made plans reaching far into the future; said he could not sacrifice his own happiness to the caprices of his father; declared that he would force his father to agree to the marriage and like her, or dispense with his consent altogether; then he marvelled at the feeling which had taken possession of him, as something strange, and apart, independent of himself.

“I should never have believed it, if any one had told me I could love like this,” said Prince Andrey. “It is utterly different from the feeling I once had. The whole world is split into two halves for me: one—she, and there all is happiness, hope, and light; the other half—all where she is not, there all is dejection and darkness.…”

“Darkness and gloom,” repeated Pierre; “yes, yes, I understand that.”

“I can’t help loving the light; that’s not my fault; and I am very happy. Do you understand me? I know you are glad for me.”

“Yes, yes,” Pierre assented, looking at his friend with eyes full of tenderness
and sadness. The brighter the picture of Prince Andrey’s fate before his mind, the darker seemed his own.

To get married his father’s consent was wanted, and to obtain this Prince Andrey set off to see his father.

The father received his son’s communication with external composure but with inward wrath. He could not comprehend how any one could want to alter his life, to introduce any new element into it, when life was for him so near its end. “If they would only let me live my life out as I want to, and then do as they like!” the old man said to himself. With his son, however, he made use of that diplomacy to which he always had resort in case of gravity. Assuming a calm tone, he went into the whole question judicially.

In the first place, the marriage was not a brilliant one from the point of view of birth, fortune, or distinction. Secondly, Prince Andrey was not in his first youth, and was delicate in health (the old man laid special stress on this), and the girl was very young. Thirdly, there was his son, whom it would be a pity to entrust to a mere girl. “Fourthly, and finally,” said the father, looking ironically at his son, “I beg you to defer the matter for a year; go abroad, and get well; find a German, as you want to do so, for Prince Nikolay, and then, if your love, your passion, your obstinacy—what you choose—are so great, then get married. And that’s my last word on the subject; you know, the last …” the old prince concluded, in a tone that showed that nothing would compel him to alter his decision.

Prince Andrey saw clearly that the old man hoped that either his feeling or that of his betrothed would not stand the test of a year or that he, the old prince, would die himself in the course of it, and he decided to act in accordance with his father’s wish; to make an offer and to defer the marriage for a year.

Three weeks after his last visit to the Rostovs, Prince Andrey returned to Petersburg.

The day after her conversation with her mother, Natasha spent the whole day expecting Bolkonsky but he did not come. The next day, and
the third, it was just the same. Pierre too stayed away, and Natasha, not knowing Prince Andrey had gone away to see his father, did not know how to interpret his absence.

So passed the three weeks. Natasha would not go out anywhere, and wandered like a shadow about the house, idle and listless, wept at night in secret, and did not go in to her mother in the evenings. She was continually flushing and very irritable. It seemed to her that every one knew of her disappointment, was laughing at her, and pitying her. In spite of all the intensity of her inward grief, the wound to her vanity aggravated her misery.

She came in to the countess one day, tried to say something, and all at once burst into tears. Her tears were the tears of an offended child, who does not know why it is being punished. The countess tried to comfort Natasha. At first she listened to her mother’s words, but suddenly she interrupted her:

“Stop, mamma, I don’t think of him or want to think of him! Why, he kept coming, and he has left off, and he has left off …” Her voice quivered, she almost began to cry, but recovered herself, and went on calmly:

“And I don’t want to be married at all. And I’m afraid of him; I have quite, quite got over it now …”

The day after this conversation, Natasha put on the old dress she specially associated with the fun she had often had when wearing it in the mornings, and began from early morning to take up her old manner of life, which she had given up ever since the ball. After morning tea, she went into the big hall, which she particularly liked on account of the loud resonance in it, and began singing her sol-fa exercises. When she had finished the first exercise she stood still in the middle of the room and repeated a single musical phrase which particularly pleased her. She listened with delight, as though it were new to her, to the charm of these notes ringing out, filling the empty space of the great room and dying slowly away, and she felt all at once cheerful. “Why think so much about it; things are nice even as it is,” she said to herself; and she began walking up and down the room, not putting her feet simply down on the resounding parquet, but at each step bending her foot from the heel to the toe (she had on some new shoes she particularly liked), and listening to the regular tap of the heel and creak of the toe with the same pleasure with which she had listened to the sound of her own voice. Passing by the looking-glass, she glanced into it. “Yes, that’s me!” the expression of her
face seemed to say at the sight of herself. “Well, and very nice too. And I need nobody.”