War and Peace
know that pair of women’s gloves?” (He referred to the Masonic
gloves given to a newly initiated Brother to present to the woman he
loved.) “I... but no, I will talk to you later on,” and with a
strange light in his eyes and restlessness in his movements, Prince
Andrew approached Natásha and sat down beside her. Pierre saw how
Prince Andrew asked her something and how she flushed as she replied.
But at that moment Berg came to Pierre and began insisting that he
should take part in an argument between the general and the colonel on
the affairs in Spain.
Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his face.
The party was very successful and quite like other parties he had
seen. Everything was similar: the ladies’ subtle talk, the cards, the
general raising his voice at the card table, and the samovar and the tea
cakes; only one thing was lacking that he had always seen at the evening
parties he wished to imitate. They had not yet had a loud conversation
among the men and a dispute about something important and clever. Now
the general had begun such a discussion and so Berg drew Pierre to it.
CHAPTER XXII
Next day, having been invited by the count, Prince Andrew dined with the
Rostóvs and spent the rest of the day there.
Everyone in the house realized for whose sake Prince Andrew came, and
without concealing it he tried to be with Natásha all day. Not only in
the soul of the frightened yet happy and enraptured Natásha, but in the
whole house, there was a feeling of awe at something important that was
bound to happen. The countess looked with sad and sternly serious eyes
at Prince Andrew when he talked to Natásha and timidly started some
artificial conversation about trifles as soon as he looked her way.
Sónya was afraid to leave Natásha and afraid of being in the way when
she was with them. Natásha grew pale, in a panic of expectation, when
she remained alone with him for a moment. Prince Andrew surprised her by
his timidity. She felt that he wanted to say something to her but could
not bring himself to do so.
In the evening, when Prince Andrew had left, the countess went up to
Natásha and whispered: “Well, what?”
“Mamma! For heaven’s sake don’t ask me anything now! One can’t
talk about that,” said Natásha.
But all the same that night Natásha, now agitated and now frightened,
lay a long time in her mother’s bed gazing straight before her. She
told her how he had complimented her, how he told her he was going
abroad, asked her where they were going to spend the summer, and then
how he had asked her about Borís.
“But such a... such a... never happened to me before!” she said.
“Only I feel afraid in his presence. I am always afraid when I’m
with him. What does that mean? Does it mean that it’s the real thing?
Yes? Mamma, are you asleep?”
“No, my love; I am frightened myself,” answered her mother. “Now
go!”
“All the same I shan’t sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mummy!
Mummy! such a thing never happened to me before,” she said, surprised
and alarmed at the feeling she was aware of in herself. “And could we
ever have thought!...”
It seemed to Natásha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrew
at Otrádnoe she had fallen in love with him. It was as if she feared
this strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very man she had
then chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and of finding
him, as it seemed, not indifferent to her.
“And it had to happen that he should come specially to Petersburg
while we are here. And it had to happen that we should meet at that
ball. It is fate. Clearly it is fate that everything led up to this!
Already then, directly I saw him I felt something peculiar.”
“What else did he say to you? What are those verses? Read them...”
said her mother, thoughtfully, referring to some verses Prince Andrew
had written in Natásha’s album.
“Mamma, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?”
“Don’t, Natásha! Pray to God. ‘Marriages are made in
heaven,’” said her mother.
“Darling Mummy, how I love you! How happy I am!” cried Natásha,
shedding tears of joy and excitement and embracing her mother.
At that very time Prince Andrew was sitting with Pierre and telling him
of his love for Natásha and his firm resolve to make her his wife.
That day Countess Hélène had a reception at her house. The French
ambassador was there, and a foreign prince of the blood who had of
late become a frequent visitor of hers, and many brilliant ladies and
gentlemen. Pierre, who had come downstairs, walked through the rooms and
struck everyone by his preoccupied, absent-minded, and morose air.
Since the ball he had felt the approach of a fit of nervous depression
and had made desperate efforts to combat it. Since the intimacy of
his wife with the royal prince, Pierre had unexpectedly been made a
gentleman of the bedchamber, and from that time he had begun to feel
oppressed and ashamed in court society, and dark thoughts of the vanity
of all things human came to him oftener than before. At the same time
the feeling he had noticed between his protégée Natásha and Prince
Andrew accentuated his gloom by the contrast between his own position
and his friend’s. He tried equally to avoid thinking about his wife,
and about Natásha and Prince Andrew; and again everything seemed to him
insignificant in comparison with eternity; again the question: for what?
presented itself; and he forced himself to work day and night at Masonic
labors, hoping to drive away the evil spirit that threatened him. Toward
midnight, after he had left the countess’ apartments, he was sitting
upstairs in a shabby dressing gown, copying out the original transaction
of the Scottish lodge of Freemasons at a table in his low room cloudy
with tobacco smoke, when someone came in. It was Prince Andrew.
“Ah, it’s you!” said Pierre with a preoccupied, dissatisfied air.
“And I, you see, am hard at it.” He pointed to his manuscript book
with that air of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy
people look at their work.
Prince Andrew, with a beaming, ecstatic expression of renewed life on
his face, paused in front of Pierre and, not noticing his sad look,
smiled at him with the egotism of joy.
“Well, dear heart,” said he, “I wanted to tell you about it
yesterday and I have come to do so today. I never experienced anything
like it before. I am in love, my friend!”
Suddenly Pierre heaved a deep sigh and dumped his heavy person down on
the sofa beside Prince Andrew.
“With Natásha Rostóva, yes?” said he.
“Yes, yes! Who else should it be? I should never have believed it,
but the feeling is stronger than I. Yesterday I tormented myself and
suffered, but I would not exchange even that torment for anything in
the world, I have not lived till now. At last I live, but I can’t
live without her! But can she love me?... I am too old for her.... Why
don’t you speak?”
“I? I? What did I tell you?” said Pierre suddenly, rising and
beginning to pace up and down the room. “I always thought it.... That
girl is such a treasure... she is a rare girl.... My dear friend,
I entreat you, don’t philosophize, don’t doubt, marry, marry,
marry.... And I am sure there will not be a happier man than you.”
“But what of her?”
“She loves you.”
“Don’t talk rubbish...” said Prince Andrew, smiling and looking
into Pierre’s eyes.
“She does, I know,” Pierre cried fiercely.
“But do listen,” returned Prince Andrew, holding him by the
arm. “Do you know the condition I am in? I must talk about it to
someone.”
“Well, go on, go on. I am very glad,” said Pierre, and his face
really changed, his brow became smooth, and he listened gladly to Prince
Andrew. Prince Andrew seemed, and really was, quite a different, quite
a new man. Where was his spleen, his contempt for life, his
disillusionment? Pierre was the only person to whom he made up his mind
to speak openly; and to him he told all that was in his soul. Now he
boldly and lightly made plans for an extended future, said he could not
sacrifice his own happiness to his father’s caprice, and spoke of how
he would either make his father consent to this marriage and love her,
or would do without his consent; then he marveled at the feeling that
had mastered him as at something strange, apart from and independent of
himself.
“I should not have believed anyone who told me that I was capable of
such love,” said Prince Andrew. “It is not at all the same feeling
that I knew in the past. The whole world is now for me divided into two
halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the
other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and
darkness....”
“Darkness and gloom,” reiterated Pierre: “yes, yes, I understand
that.”
“I cannot help loving the light, it is not my fault. And I am very
happy! You understand me? I know you are glad for my sake.”
“Yes, yes,” Pierre assented, looking at his friend with a touched
and sad expression in his eyes. The brighter Prince Andrew’s lot
appeared to him, the gloomier seemed his own.
CHAPTER XXIII
Prince Andrew needed his father’s consent to his marriage, and to
obtain this he started for the country next day.
His father received his son’s communication with external composure,
but inward wrath. He could not comprehend how anyone could wish to
alter his life or introduce anything new into it, when his own life
was already ending. “If only they would let me end my days as I want
to,” thought the old man, “then they might do as they please.”
With his son, however, he employed the diplomacy he reserved for
important occasions and, adopting a quiet tone, discussed the whole
matter.
In the first place the marriage was not a brilliant one as regards
birth, wealth, or rank. Secondly, Prince Andrew was no longer as young
as he had been and his health was poor (the old man laid special stress
on this), while she was very young. Thirdly, he had a son whom it would
be a pity to entrust to a chit of a girl. “Fourthly and finally,”
the father said, looking ironically at his son, “I beg you to put it
off for a year: go abroad, take a cure, look out as you wanted to for
a German tutor for Prince Nicholas. Then if your love or passion or
obstinacy—as you please—is still as great, marry! And that’s my
last word on it. Mind, the last...” concluded the prince, in a tone
which showed that nothing would make him alter his decision.
Prince Andrew saw clearly that the old man hoped that his feelings, or
his fiancée’s, would not stand a year’s test, or that he (the old
prince himself) would die before then, and he decided to conform to his
father’s wish—to propose, and postpone the wedding for a year.
Three weeks after the last evening he had spent with the Rostóvs,
Prince Andrew returned to Petersburg.
Next day after her talk with her mother Natásha expected Bolkónski all
day, but he did not come. On the second and third day it was the same.
Pierre did not come either and Natásha, not knowing that Prince Andrew
had gone to see his father, could not explain his absence to herself.
Three weeks passed in this way. Natásha had no desire to go out
anywhere and wandered from room to room like a shadow, idle and
listless; she wept secretly at night and did not go to her mother in the
evenings. She blushed continually and was irritable. It seemed to her
that everybody knew about her disappointment and was laughing at her and
pitying her. Strong as was her inward grief, this wound to her vanity
intensified her misery.
Once she came to her mother, tried to say something, and suddenly began
to cry. Her tears were those of an offended child who does not know why
it is being punished.
The countess began to soothe Natásha, who after first listening to her