War and Peace
Natásha betook herself to the ballroom, picked up her guitar, sat down
in a dark corner behind a bookcase, and began to run her fingers over
the strings in the bass, picking out a passage she recalled from an
opera she had heard in Petersburg with Prince Andrew. What she drew from
the guitar would have had no meaning for other listeners, but in her
imagination a whole series of reminiscences arose from those sounds.
She sat behind the bookcase with her eyes fixed on a streak of light
escaping from the pantry door and listened to herself and pondered. She
was in a mood for brooding on the past.
Sónya passed to the pantry with a glass in her hand. Natásha glanced
at her and at the crack in the pantry door, and it seemed to her that
she remembered the light falling through that crack once before and
Sónya passing with a glass in her hand. “Yes it was exactly the
same,” thought Natásha.
“Sónya, what is this?” she cried, twanging a thick string.
“Oh, you are there!” said Sónya with a start, and came near and
listened. “I don’t know. A storm?” she ventured timidly, afraid of
being wrong.
“There! That’s just how she started and just how she came up smiling
timidly when all this happened before,” thought Natásha, “and in
just the same way I thought there was something lacking in her.”
“No, it’s the chorus from The Water-Carrier, listen!” and Natásha
sang the air of the chorus so that Sónya should catch it. “Where were
you going?” she asked.
“To change the water in this glass. I am just finishing the design.”
“You always find something to do, but I can’t,” said Natásha.
“And where’s Nicholas?”
“Asleep, I think.”
“Sónya, go and wake him,” said Natásha. “Tell him I want him to
come and sing.”
She sat awhile, wondering what the meaning of it all having happened
before could be, and without solving this problem, or at all regretting
not having done so, she again passed in fancy to the time when she was
with him and he was looking at her with a lover’s eyes.
“Oh, if only he would come quicker! I am so afraid it will never be!
And, worst of all, I am growing old—that’s the thing! There won’t
then be in me what there is now. But perhaps he’ll come today, will
come immediately. Perhaps he has come and is sitting in the drawing
room. Perhaps he came yesterday and I have forgotten it.” She rose,
put down the guitar, and went to the drawing room.
All the domestic circle, tutors, governesses, and guests, were already
at the tea table. The servants stood round the table—but Prince Andrew
was not there and life was going on as before.
“Ah, here she is!” said the old count, when he saw Natásha enter.
“Well, sit down by me.” But Natásha stayed by her mother and
glanced round as if looking for something.
“Mamma!” she muttered, “give him to me, give him, Mamma, quickly,
quickly!” and she again had difficulty in repressing her sobs.
She sat down at the table and listened to the conversation between the
elders and Nicholas, who had also come to the table. “My God, my God!
The same faces, the same talk, Papa holding his cup and blowing in the
same way!” thought Natásha, feeling with horror a sense of repulsion
rising up in her for the whole household, because they were always the
same.
After tea, Nicholas, Sónya, and Natásha went to the sitting room, to
their favorite corner where their most intimate talks always began.
CHAPTER X
“Does it ever happen to you,” said Natásha to her brother, when
they settled down in the sitting room, “does it ever happen to you to
feel as if there were nothing more to come—nothing; that everything
good is past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?”
“I should think so!” he replied. “I have felt like that when
everything was all right and everyone was cheerful. The thought has come
into my mind that I was already tired of it all, and that we must all
die. Once in the regiment I had not gone to some merrymaking where there
was music... and suddenly I felt so depressed...”
“Oh yes, I know, I know, I know!” Natásha interrupted him. “When
I was quite little that used to be so with me. Do you remember when
I was punished once about some plums? You were all dancing, and I sat
sobbing in the schoolroom? I shall never forget it: I felt sad and sorry
for everyone, for myself, and for everyone. And I was innocent—that
was the chief thing,” said Natásha. “Do you remember?”
“I remember,” answered Nicholas. “I remember that I came to you
afterwards and wanted to comfort you, but do you know, I felt ashamed
to. We were terribly absurd. I had a funny doll then and wanted to give
it to you. Do you remember?”
“And do you remember,” Natásha asked with a pensive smile, “how
once, long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us into
the study—that was in the old house—and it was dark—we went in and
suddenly there stood...”
“A Negro,” chimed in Nicholas with a smile of delight. “Of course
I remember. Even now I don’t know whether there really was a Negro, or
if we only dreamed it or were told about him.”
“He was gray, you remember, and had white teeth, and stood and looked
at us....”
“Sónya, do you remember?” asked Nicholas.
“Yes, yes, I do remember something too,” Sónya answered timidly.
“You know I have asked Papa and Mamma about that Negro,” said
Natásha, “and they say there was no Negro at all. But you see, you
remember!”
“Of course I do, I remember his teeth as if I had just seen them.”
“How strange it is! It’s as if it were a dream! I like that.”
“And do you remember how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom,
and suddenly two old women began spinning round on the carpet? Was that
real or not? Do you remember what fun it was?”
“Yes, and you remember how Papa in his blue overcoat fired a gun in
the porch?”
So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not the sad
memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones—those impressions of
one’s most distant past in which dreams and realities blend—and they
laughed with quiet enjoyment.
Sónya, as always, did not quite keep pace with them, though they shared
the same reminiscences.
Much that they remembered had slipped from her mind, and what she
recalled did not arouse the same poetic feeling as they experienced. She
simply enjoyed their pleasure and tried to fit in with it.
She only really took part when they recalled Sónya’s first arrival.
She told them how afraid she had been of Nicholas because he had on a
corded jacket and her nurse had told her that she, too, would be sewn up
with cords.
“And I remember their telling me that you had been born under a
cabbage,” said Natásha, “and I remember that I dared not disbelieve
it then, but knew that it was not true, and I felt so uncomfortable.”
While they were talking a maid thrust her head in at the other door of
the sitting room.
“They have brought the cock, Miss,” she said in a whisper.
“It isn’t wanted, Pólya. Tell them to take it away,” replied
Natásha.
In the middle of their talk in the sitting room, Dimmler came in and
went up to the harp that stood there in a corner. He took off its cloth
covering, and the harp gave out a jarring sound.
“Mr. Dimmler, please play my favorite nocturne by Field,” came the
old countess’ voice from the drawing room.
Dimmler struck a chord and, turning to Natásha, Nicholas, and Sónya,
remarked: “How quiet you young people are!”
“Yes, we’re philosophizing,” said Natásha, glancing round for a
moment and then continuing the conversation. They were now discussing
dreams.
Dimmler began to play; Natásha went on tiptoe noiselessly to the table,
took up a candle, carried it out, and returned, seating herself quietly
in her former place. It was dark in the room especially where they were
sitting on the sofa, but through the big windows the silvery light of
the full moon fell on the floor. Dimmler had finished the piece but
still sat softly running his fingers over the strings, evidently
uncertain whether to stop or to play something else.
“Do you know,” said Natásha in a whisper, moving closer to Nicholas
and Sónya, “that when one goes on and on recalling memories, one at
last begins to remember what happened before one was in the world....”
“That is metempsychosis,” said Sónya, who had always learned well,
and remembered everything. “The Egyptians believed that our souls have
lived in animals, and will go back into animals again.”
“No, I don’t believe we ever were in animals,” said Natásha,
still in a whisper though the music had ceased. “But I am certain that
we were angels somewhere there, and have been here, and that is why we
remember....”
“May I join you?” said Dimmler who had come up quietly, and he sat
down by them.
“If we have been angels, why have we fallen lower?” said Nicholas.
“No, that can’t be!”
“Not lower, who said we were lower?... How do I know what I
was before?” Natásha rejoined with conviction. “The soul is
immortal—well then, if I shall always live I must have lived before,
lived for a whole eternity.”
“Yes, but it is hard for us to imagine eternity,” remarked Dimmler,
who had joined the young folk with a mildly condescending smile but now
spoke as quietly and seriously as they.
“Why is it hard to imagine eternity?” said Natásha. “It is now
today, and it will be tomorrow, and always; and there was yesterday, and
the day before....”
“Natásha! Now it’s your turn. Sing me something,” they heard the
countess say. “Why are you sitting there like conspirators?”
“Mamma, I don’t at all want to,” replied Natásha, but all the
same she rose.
None of them, not even the middle-aged Dimmler, wanted to break off
their conversation and quit that corner in the sitting room, but
Natásha got up and Nicholas sat down at the clavichord. Standing
as usual in the middle of the hall and choosing the place where the
resonance was best, Natásha began to sing her mother’s favorite song.
She had said she did not want to sing, but it was long since she had
sung, and long before she again sang, as she did that evening. The
count, from his study where he was talking to Mítenka, heard her and,
like a schoolboy in a hurry to run out to play, blundered in his talk
while giving orders to the steward, and at last stopped, while Mítenka
stood in front of him also listening and smiling. Nicholas did not take
his eyes off his sister and drew breath in time with her. Sónya, as she
listened, thought of the immense difference there was between herself
and her friend, and how impossible it was for her to be anything like as
bewitching as her cousin. The old countess sat with a blissful yet sad
smile and with tears in her eyes, occasionally shaking her head. She
thought of Natásha and of her own youth, and of how there was something
unnatural and dreadful in this impending marriage of Natásha and Prince
Andrew.
Dimmler, who had seated himself beside the countess, listened with
closed eyes.
“Ah, Countess,” he said at last, “that’s a European talent, she
has nothing to learn—what softness, tenderness, and strength....”
“Ah, how afraid I am for her, how afraid I am!” said the countess,
not realizing to whom she was speaking. Her maternal instinct told her
that Natásha had too much of something, and that because of this
she would not be happy. Before Natásha had finished singing,
fourteen-year-old Pétya rushed in delightedly, to say that some mummers
had arrived.
Natásha stopped abruptly.
“Idiot!” she screamed at her brother and, running to a chair, threw
herself on it, sobbing so violently that she could not stop for a long
time.
“It’s nothing, Mamma, really it’s nothing; only Pétya startled
me,” she said, trying to smile, but her tears still flowed and sobs
still choked her.