War and Peace (109 page)

“Natalie?” his voice whispered interrogatively, and her hands were squeezed till it hurt. “Natalie?”

“I don’t understand; I have nothing to say,” was the answer in her eyes.

Burning lips were pressed to her lips, and at the same instant she felt herself set free again, and caught the sound of Ellen’s steps and rustling gown in the room again. Natasha looked round towards Ellen; then, red and trembling, she glanced at him with alarmed inquiry, and moved towards the door.

“One word, just one word, for God’s sake,” Anatole was saying. She stopped. She so wanted him to say that word, that would have explained to her what had happened and to which she could have found an answer.

“Natalie, one word … one …” he kept repeating, plainly not knowing what to say, and he repeated it till Ellen reached them.

Ellen went back with Natasha to the drawing-room. The Rostovs went away without staying to supper.

When she got home, Natasha did not sleep all night. She was tortured by the insoluble question, Which did she love, Anatole or Prince Andrey? Prince Andrey, she did love—she remembered clearly how great her love was for him. But she loved Anatole too, of that there was no doubt. “Else could all that have happened?” she thought. “If after that I could answer with a smile to his smile at parting, if I could sink to that, it means that I fell in love with him from the first minute. So he must be kind, noble, and good, and I could not help loving him. What am I to do, if I love him and the other too?” she said to herself, and was unable to find an answer to those terrible questions.

The morning came with daily cares and bustle. Every one got up and began to move about and to talk; dressmakers came again; again Marya Dmitryevna went out and they were summoned to tea. Natasha kept uneasily looking round at every one with wide-open eyes, as though she wanted to intercept every glance turned upon her. She did her utmost to seem exactly as usual.

After luncheon—it was always her best time—Marya Dmitryevna seated herself in her own arm-chair and drew Natasha and the old count to her.

“Well, my friends, I have thought the whole matter over now, and I’ll tell you my advice,” she began. “Yesterday, as you know, I was at Prince Bolkonsky’s; well, I had a talk with him … He thought fit to scream at me. But there’s no screaming me down! I had it all out with him.”

“Well, but what does he mean?” asked the count.

“He’s crazy … he won’t hear of it, and there’s no more to be said. As it is we have given this poor girl worry enough,” said Marya Dmitryevna. “And my advice to you is, to make an end of it and go home to Otradnoe … and there to wait.”

“Oh no!” cried Natasha.

“Yes, to go home,” said Marya Dmitryevna, “and to wait there. If your betrothed comes here now, there’ll be no escaping a quarrel; but alone here he’ll have it all out with the old man, and then come on to you.”

Count Ilya Andreitch approved of this suggestion, and at once saw all the sound sense of it. If the old man were to come round, then it would be better to visit him at Moscow or Bleak Hills, later on; if not, then the wedding, against his will, could only take place at Otradnoe.

“And that’s perfectly true,” said he. “I regret indeed that I ever went to see him and took her too,” said the count.

“No, why regret it? Being here, you could do no less than show him respect. If he wouldn’t receive it, that’s his affair,” said Marya Dmitryevna, searching for something in her reticule. “And now the trousseau’s ready, what have you to wait for? What is not ready, I’ll send after you. Though I’m sorry to lose you, still the best thing is for you to go, and God be with you.” Finding what she was looking for in her reticule, she handed it to Natasha. It was a letter from Princess Marya. “She writes to you. How worried she is, poor thing! She is afraid you might think she does not like you.”

“Well, she doesn’t like me,” said Natasha.

“Nonsense, don’t say so,” cried Marya Dmitryevna.

“I won’t take any one’s word for that, I know she doesn’t like me,” said Natasha boldly as she took the letter, and there was a look of cold and angry resolution in her face, that made Marya Dmitryevna look at her more closely and frown.

“Don’t you answer me like that, my good girl,” she said. “If I say so, it’s the truth. Write an answer to her.”

Natasha made no reply, and went to her own room to read Princess Marya’s letter.

Princess Marya wrote that she was in despair at the misunderstanding that had arisen between them. Whatever her father’s feelings might be, wrote Princess Marya, she begged Natasha to believe that she could not fail to love her, as the girl chosen by her brother, for whose happiness she was ready to make any sacrifice.

“Do not believe, though,” she wrote, “that my father is ill-disposed to you. He is an old man and an invalid, for whom one must make excuses. But he is good-hearted and generous, and will come to love the woman who makes his son happy.” Princess Marya begged Natasha, too, to fix a time when she might see her again.

After reading the letter, Natasha sat down to the writing-table to answer it. “Dear princess,” she began, writing rapidly and mechanically in French, and there she stopped. What more could she write after what had happened the day before? “Yes, yes, all that had happened, and now
everything was different,” she thought, sitting before the letter she had begun. “Must I refuse him? Must I really? That’s awful!…” And to avoid these horrible thoughts, she went in to Sonya, and began looking through embroidery designs with her.

After dinner Natasha went to her own room and took up Princess Marya’s letter again. “Can everything be over?” she thought. “Can all this have happened so quickly and have destroyed all that went before?” She recalled in all its past strength her love for Prince Andrey, and at the same time she felt that she loved Kuragin. She vividly pictured herself the wife of Prince Andrey, of her happiness with him, called up the picture she had so often dwelt on in her imagination, and at the same time, all aglow with emotion, she recalled every detail of her interview the previous evening with Anatole.

“Why could not that be as well?” she wondered sometimes in complete bewilderment. “It’s only so that I could be perfectly happy: as it is, I have to choose, and without either of them I can’t be happy. There’s one thing,” she thought, “to tell Prince Andrey what has happened; to hide it from him—are equally impossible. But with
him
nothing is spoilt. But can I part for ever from the happiness of Prince Andrey’s love, which I have been living on for so long?”

“Madame,” whispered a maid, coming into the room with a mysterious air, “a man told me to give you this.” The girl gave her a letter. “Only for Christ’s sake …” said the girl, as Natasha, without thinking, mechanically broke the seal and began reading a love-letter from Anatole, of which she did not understand a word, but understood only that it was a letter from him, from the man whom she loved. “Yes, she loved him; otherwise, how could what had happened have happened? How could a love-letter from him be in her hand?”

With trembling hands Natasha held that passionate love-letter, composed for Anatole by Dolohov, and as she read it, she found in it echoes of all that it seemed to her she was feeling herself.

“Since yesterday evening my fate is sealed: to be loved by you or to die. There is nothing else left for me,” the letter began. Then he wrote that he knew her relations would never give her to him, to Anatole; that there were secret reasons for that which he could only reveal to her alone; but that if she loved him, she had but to utter the word
Yes
, and no human force could hinder their happiness. Love would conquer all. He could capture her and bear her away to the ends of the earth.

“Yes, yes, I love him!” thought Natasha, reading the letter over for
the twentieth time, and finding some special deep meaning in every word.

That evening Marya Dmitryevna was going to the Arharovs’, and proposed taking the young ladies with her. Natasha pleaded a headache and stayed at home.

On returning late in the evening, Sonya went into Natasha’s room, and to her surprise found her not undressed asleep on the sofa. On the table near her Anatole’s letter lay open. Sonya picked up the letter and began to read it.

She read it, and looked at Natasha asleep, seeking in her face some explanation of what she had read and not finding it. Her face was quiet, gentle, and happy. Clutching at her own chest to keep herself from choking, Sonya, pale and shaking with horror and emotion, sat down in a low chair and burst into tears.

“How was it I saw nothing? How can it have gone so far? Can she have ceased loving Prince Andrey? And how could she have let this Kuragin go as far as this? He’s a deceiver and a villain, that’s clear. What will Nikolenka—dear, noble Nikolenka—do when he hears of it? So that was the meaning of her excited, determined, unnatural face the day before yesterday, and yesterday and to-day,” thought Sonya. “But it’s impossible that she can care for him! Most likely she opened the letter not knowing from whom it was. Most likely she feels insulted by it. She’s not capable of doing such a thing!”

Sonya dried her tears and went up to Natasha, carefully scrutinising her face again.

“Natasha!” she said, hardly audibly.

Natasha waked up and saw Sonya.

“Ah, you have come back?”

And with the decision and tenderness common at the moment of awakening she embraced her friend. But noticing embarrassment in Sonya’s face, her face too expressed embarrassment and suspicion.

“Sonya, you have read the letter?” she said.

“Yes,” said Sonya softly.

Natasha smiled ecstatically.

“No, Sonya, I can’t help it!” she said. “I can’t keep it secret from you
any longer. You know we love each other!… Sonya, darling, he writes … Sonya …”

Sonya gazed with wide-open eyes at Natasha, as though unable to believe her ears.

“But Bolkonsky?” she said.

“O Sonya, oh, if you could only know how happy I am!” said Natasha. “You don’t know what love …”

“But, Natasha, you can’t mean that all
that
is over?”

Natasha looked with her big, wide eyes at Sonya as though not understanding her question.

“Are you breaking it off with Prince Andrey then?” said Sonya.

“Oh, you don’t understand; don’t talk nonsense; listen,” said Natasha, with momentary annoyance.

“No, I can’t believe it,” repeated Sonya. “I don’t understand it. What, for a whole year you have been loving one man, and all at once … Why, you have only seen him three times. Natasha, I can’t believe you, you’re joking. In three days to forget everything, and like this …”

“Three days,” said Natasha. “It seems to me as though I had loved him for a hundred years. It seems to me that I have never loved any one before him. You can’t understand that. Sonya, stay, sit here.” Natasha hugged and kissed her. “I have been told of its happening, and no doubt you have heard of it too, but it’s only now that I have felt such love. It’s not what I have felt before. As soon as I saw him, I felt that he was my sovereign and I was his slave, and that I could not help loving him. Yes, his slave! Whatever he bids me, I shall do. You don’t understand that. What am I to do? What am I to do, Sonya?” said Natasha, with a blissful and frightened face.

“But only think what you are doing,” said Sonya. “I can’t leave it like this. These secret letters … How could you let him go so far as that?” she said, with a horror and aversion she could with difficulty conceal.

“I have told you,” answered Natasha, “that I have no will. How is it you don’t understand that? I love him!”

“Then I can’t let it go on like this. I shall tell about it,” cried Sonya with a burst of tears.

“What … for God’s sake … If you tell, you are my enemy,” said Natasha. “You want to make me miserable, and you want us to be separated …”

On seeing Natasha’s alarm, Sonya wept tears of shame and pity for her friend.

“But what has passed between you?” she asked. “What has he said to you? Why doesn’t he come to the house?”

Natasha made no answer to her question.

“For God’s sake, Sonya, don’t tell any one; don’t torture me,” Natasha implored her. “Remember that it doesn’t do to meddle in such matters. I have told you …”

“But why this secrecy? Why doesn’t he come to the house?” Sonya persisted. “Why doesn’t he ask for your hand straight out? Prince Andrey, you know, gave you complete liberty, if it really is so; but I can’t believe in it. Natasha, have you thought what the
secret reasons
can be?”

Natasha looked with wondering eyes at Sonya. Evidently it was the first time that question had presented itself to her, and she did not know how to answer it.

“What the reasons are, I don’t know. But there must be reasons!”

Sonya sighed and shook her head distrustfully.

“If there were reasons …” she was beginning. But Natasha, divining her doubts, interrupted her in dismay.

“Sonya, you mustn’t doubt of him; you mustn’t, you mustn’t! Do you understand?” she cried.

“Does he love you?”

“Does he love me?” repeated Natasha, with a smile of compassion for her friend’s dullness of comprehension. “Why, you have read his letter, haven’t you? You’ve seen him.”

“But if he is a dishonourable man?”

“
He
!… a dishonourable man? If only you knew!” said Natasha.

“If he is an honourable man, he ought either to explain his intentions, or to give up seeing you; and if you won’t do that, I will do it. I’ll write to him. I’ll tell papa,” said Sonya resolutely.

“But I can’t live without him!” cried Natasha.

“Natasha, I don’t understand you. And what are you saying? Think of your father, of Nikolenka.”

“I don’t care for any one, I don’t love any one but him. How dare you say he’s dishonourable! Don’t you know that I love him?” cried Natasha. “Sonya, go away; I don’t want to quarrel with you; go away, for God’s sake, go away; you see how wretched I am,” cried Natasha angrily, in a voice of repressed irritation and despair. Sonya burst into sobs and ran out of the room.