War and Peace (210 page)

“Yes, yes,…” said Pierre, bending forward over Princess Marya, and eagerly drinking in her words. “Yes, yes. So he found peace? He was softened? He was always striving with his whole soul for one thing only: to be entirely good, so that he could not dread death. The defects that were in him—if he had any—did not come from himself. So he was softened?” he said.

“What a happy thing that he saw you again,” he said to Natasha, turning suddenly to her, and looking at her with eyes full of tears.

Natasha’s face quivered. She frowned, and for an instant dropped her eyes. For a moment she hesitated whether to speak or not to speak.

“Yes, it was a great happiness,” she said in a low, deep voice; “for me it was certainly a great happiness.” She paused. “And he … he … he told me he was longing for it the very moment I went in to him …” Natasha’s voice broke. She flushed, squeezed her hands against her knees and suddenly, with an evident effort to control herself, she lifted her head and began speaking rapidly:

“We knew nothing about it when we were leaving Moscow. I did not dare ask about him. And all at once Sonya told me he was with us. I could think of nothing, I had no conception in what state he was; all I wanted was to see him—to be with him,” she said, trembling and breathless. And not letting them interrupt her, she told all that she had never spoken of to any one before; all she had gone through in those three weeks of their journey and their stay in Yaroslavl.

Pierre heard her with parted lips and eyes full of tears fastened upon her. As he listened to her, he was not thinking of Prince Andrey, nor of death, nor of what she was saying. He heard her voice and only pitied her for the anguish she was feeling now in telling him.

The princess, frowning in the effort to restrain her tears, sat by Natasha’s side and heard for the first time the story of those last days of her brother’s and Natasha’s love.

To speak of that agonising and joyous time was evidently necessary to Natasha.

She talked on, mingling up the most insignificant details with the most secret feelings of her heart, and it seemed as though she could never finish. Several times she said the same thing twice.

Dessalle’s voice was heard at the door asking whether Nikolushka might come in to say good-night. “And that is all, all …” said Natasha.
She got up quickly at the moment Nikolushka was coming in, and almost running to the door, knocked her head against it as it was hidden by the portière, and with a moan, half of pain, half of sorrow, she rushed out of the room.

Pierre gazed at the door by which she had gone out, and wondered why he felt suddenly alone in the wide world.

Princess Marya roused him from his abstraction, calling his attention to her nephew who had just come into the room.

The face of Nikolushka, so like his father, had such an effect on Pierre at this moment of emotional tension, that, after kissing the child, he got up himself, and taking out his handkerchief, walked away to the window. He would have taken leave, but Princess Marya would not let him go.

“No, Natasha and I often do not go to bed till past two, please stay a little longer. We will have supper. Go downstairs, we will come in a moment.”

Before Pierre went down, the princess said to him: “It is the first time she has talked of him like this.”

Pierre was conducted into the big, lighted-up dining-room. In a few minutes he heard footsteps and the princess and Natasha came into the room. Natasha was calm, though the stern, unsmiling expression had come back again now into her face. Princess Marya, Natasha, and Pierre all equally experienced that feeling of awkwardness which usually follows when a serious and deeply felt conversation is over. To continue on the same subject is impossible; to speak of trivial matters seems desecration, and to be silent is unpleasant, because one wants to talk, and this silence seems a sort of affectation. In silence they came to the table. The footmen drew back and pushed up the chairs. Pierre unfolded his cold dinner napkin, and making up his mind to break the silence he glanced at Natasha and at Princess Marya. Both had plainly reached the same decision at the same moment; in the eyes of both there gleamed a satisfaction with life, and an admission that there was gladness in it as well as sorrow.

“Do you drink vodka?” said Princess Marya, and those words at once dispelled the shadows of the past.

“Tell us about yourself,” said Princess Marya; “such incredibly marvellous stories are being told about you.”

“Yes,” answered Pierre, with the gentle smile of irony that had now become habitual with him. “I myself am told of marvels that I never dreamed of. Marya Abramovna invited me to come and see her and kept telling me what had happened to me, or ought to have happened. Stepan Stepanovitch too instructed me how I was to tell my story. Altogether I have noticed that to be an interesting person is a very easy position (I am now an interesting person); people invite me and then tell me all about it.”

Natasha smiled and was about to say something.

“We have been told that you lost two millions in Moscow. Is that true?”

“Oh, I am three times as rich,” said Pierre. In spite of the strain on his fortune, of his wife’s debts, and the necessity of rebuilding, Pierre still said that he had become three times as rich.

“What I have undoubtedly gained,” he said, “is freedom …” he was beginning seriously; but on second thoughts he did not continue, feeling that it was too egoistic a subject.

“And you are building?”

“Yes, such are Savelitch’s orders.”

“Tell me, you had not heard of the countess’s death when you stayed in Moscow?” said Princess Marya; and she flushed crimson at once, conscious that in putting this question to him after his mention of “freedom,” she was ascribing a significance to his words which was possibly not intended.

“No,” answered Pierre, obviously unconscious of any awkwardness in the interpretation Princess Marya had put on his allusion to his freedom. “I heard of it in Orel, and you cannot imagine how it affected me. We were not an exemplary couple,” he said quickly, glancing at Natasha and detecting in her face curiosity as to how he would speak of his wife. “But her death affected me greatly. When two people quarrel, both are always in fault. And one becomes terribly aware of one’s shortcomings towards any one who is no more. And then such a death … apart from friends and consolation. I felt very sorry for her,” he concluded, and noticed with satisfaction a glad look of approval on Natasha’s face.

“And so you are once more an eligible
parti
,” said Princess Marya.

Pierre flushed suddenly crimson; and for a long while he tried not to look at Natasha. When he did venture to glance at her, her face was cold and severe, even, he fancied, disdainful.

“But did you really see and talk to Napoleon, as we have been told?” said Princess Marya.

Pierre laughed.

“Not once, never. Every one always imagines that to be a prisoner is equivalent to being on a visit to Napoleon. I never saw, never even heard anything about him. I was in much lower company.”

Supper was over, and Pierre, who had at first refused to talk about his captivity, was gradually drawn into telling them about it.

“But it is true that you stayed behind to kill Napoleon?” Natasha asked him with a slight smile. “I guessed that at the time when we met you by the Suharev Tower: do you remember?”

Pierre owned that it was so; and from that question was led on by Princess Marya’s, and still more by Natasha’s, questions to give a detailed account of his adventures.

At first he told his story with that tone of gentle irony that he always had now towards men and especially towards himself. But as he came to describe the horrors and sufferings he had seen, he was drawn on unawares, and began to speak with the suppressed emotion of a man living again in imagination through the intense impressions of the past.

Princess Marya looked from Pierre to Natasha with a gentle smile. In all he told them she saw only Pierre and his goodness. Natasha, her head supported in her hand, and her face changing continually with the story, watched Pierre, never taking her eyes off him, and was in imagination passing through all he told her with him. Not only her eyes, but her exclamations and the brief questions she put showed Pierre that she understood from his words just what he was trying to convey by them. It was evident that she understood, not only what he said, but also what he would have liked to say and could not express in words. The episode of the child and of the woman in whose defence he was taken prisoner, Pierre described in this way. “It was an awful scene, children abandoned, some in the midst of the fire … Children were dragged out before my eyes … and women, who had their things pulled off them, earrings torn off …”

Pierre flushed and hesitated. “Then a patrol came up and all who were not pillaging, all the men, that is, they took prisoner. And me with them.”

“I am sure you are not telling us all; I am sure you did something,” said Natasha, and after a moment’s pause, “something good.”

Pierre went on with his story. When he came to the execution, he would have passed over the horrible details of it, but Natasha insisted on his leaving nothing out.

Pierre was beginning to tell them about Karataev; he had risen from the table and was walking up and down, Natasha following him with her eyes.

“No,” he said, stopping short in his story, “you cannot understand what I learned from that illiterate man—that simple creature.”

“No, no, tell us,” said Natasha. “Where is he now?”

“He was killed almost before my eyes.”

And Pierre began to describe the latter part of their retreat, Karataev’s illness (his voice shook continually) and then his death.

Pierre told the tale of his adventures as he had never thought of them before. He saw now as it were a new significance in all he had been through. He experienced now in telling it all to Natasha that rare happiness given to men by women when they listen to them—not by clever women, who, as they listen, are either trying to remember what they are told to enrich their intellect and on occasion to repeat it, or to adapt what is told them to their own ideas and to bring out in haste the clever comments elaborated in their little mental factory. This rare happiness is given only by those real women, gifted with a faculty for picking out and assimilating all that is best in what a man shows them. Natasha, though herself unconscious of it, was all rapt attention; she did not lose one word, one quaver of the voice, one glance, one twitching in the facial muscles, one gesture of Pierre’s. She caught the word before it was uttered and bore it straight to her open heart, divining the secret import of all Pierre’s spiritual travail.

Princess Marya understood his story and sympathised with him, but she was seeing now something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre. And this idea, which struck her now for the first time, filled her heart with gladness.

It was three o’clock in the night. The footmen, with melancholy and severe faces, came in with fresh candles, but no one noticed them.

Pierre finished his story. With shining, eager eyes Natasha still gazed intently and persistently at him, as though she longed to understand something more, that perhaps he had left unsaid. In shamefaced and happy confusion, Pierre glanced at her now and then, and was thinking
what to say now to change the subject. Princess Marya was mute. It did not strike any of them that it was three o’clock in the night, and time to be in bed.

“They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. “But if at once, this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God’s sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us. That I say to you,” he said, turning to Natasha.

“Yes, yes,” she said, answering something altogether different, “and I too would ask for nothing better than to go through it all again.”

Pierre looked intently at her.

“Yes, and nothing more,” Natasha declared.

“Not true, not true,” cried Pierre. “I am not to blame for being alive and wanting to live; and you the same.”

All at once Natasha let her head drop into her hands, and burst into tears.

“What is it, Natasha?” said Princess Marya.

“Nothing, nothing.” She smiled through her tears to Pierre. “Goodnight, it’s bedtime.”

Pierre got up, and took leave.

Natasha, as she always did, went with Princess Marya into her bedroom. They talked of what Pierre had told them. Princess Marya did not give her opinion of Pierre. Natasha, too, did not talk of him.

“Well, good-night, Marie,” said Natasha. “Do you know I am often afraid that we don’t talk of him” (she meant Prince Andrey), “as though we were afraid of desecrating our feelings, and so we forget him.”

Princess Marya sighed heavily, and by this sigh acknowledged the justice of Natasha’s words; but she did not in words agree with her.

“Is it possible to forget?” she said.

“I was so glad to tell all about it to-day; it was hard and painful, and yet I was glad to … very glad,” said Natasha; “I am sure that he really loved him. That was why I told him … it didn’t matter my telling him?” she asked suddenly, blushing.

“Pierre? Oh, no! How good he is,” said Princess Marya.

“Do you know, Marie,” said Natasha, suddenly, with a mischievous
smile, such as Princess Marya had not seen for a long while on her face. “He has become so clean and smooth and fresh; as though he had just come out of a bath; do you understand? Out of a moral bath. Isn’t it so?”

“Yes,” said Princess Marya. “He has gained a great deal.”

“And his short jacket, and his cropped hair; exactly as though he had just come out of a bath … papa used sometimes …”

“I can understand how
he
” (Prince Andrey) “cared for no one else as he did for him,” said Princess Marya.