War and Peace
love such as filled her heart. While she sat in the carriage beside her
father, pensively watching the lights of the street lamps flickering on
the frozen window, she felt still sadder and more in love, and forgot
where she was going and with whom. Having fallen into the line of
carriages, the Rostóvs’ carriage drove up to the theater, its wheels
squeaking over the snow. Natásha and Sónya, holding up their dresses,
jumped out quickly. The count got out helped by the footmen, and,
passing among men and women who were entering and the program sellers,
they all three went along the corridor to the first row of boxes.
Through the closed doors the music was already audible.
“Natásha, your hair!...” whispered Sónya.
An attendant deferentially and quickly slipped before the ladies and
opened the door of their box. The music sounded louder and through the
door rows of brightly lit boxes in which ladies sat with bare arms and
shoulders, and noisy stalls brilliant with uniforms, glittered before
their eyes. A lady entering the next box shot a glance of feminine envy
at Natásha. The curtain had not yet risen and the overture was being
played. Natásha, smoothing her gown, went in with Sónya and sat down,
scanning the brilliant tiers of boxes opposite. A sensation she had not
experienced for a long time—that of hundreds of eyes looking at
her bare arms and neck—suddenly affected her both agreeably and
disagreeably and called up a whole crowd of memories, desires and
emotions associated with that feeling.
The two remarkably pretty girls, Natásha and Sónya, with Count Rostóv
who had not been seen in Moscow for a long time, attracted general
attention. Moreover, everybody knew vaguely of Natásha’s engagement
to Prince Andrew, and knew that the Rostóvs had lived in the country
ever since, and all looked with curiosity at a fiancée who was making
one of the best matches in Russia.
Natásha’s looks, as everyone told her, had improved in the country,
and that evening thanks to her agitation she was particularly pretty.
She struck those who saw her by her fullness of life and beauty,
combined with her indifference to everything about her. Her black eyes
looked at the crowd without seeking anyone, and her delicate arm, bare
to above the elbow, lay on the velvet edge of the box, while, evidently
unconsciously, she opened and closed her hand in time to the music,
crumpling her program. “Look, there’s Alénina,” said Sónya,
“with her mother, isn’t it?”
“Dear me, Michael Kirílovich has grown still stouter!” remarked the
count.
“Look at our Anna Mikháylovna—what a headdress she has on!”
“The Karágins, Julie—and Borís with them. One can see at once that
they’re engaged....”
“Drubetskóy has proposed?”
“Oh yes, I heard it today,” said Shinshín, coming into the
Rostóvs’ box.
Natásha looked in the direction in which her father’s eyes were
turned and saw Julie sitting beside her mother with a happy look on her
face and a string of pearls round her thick red neck—which Natásha
knew was covered with powder. Behind them, wearing a smile and leaning
over with an ear to Julie’s mouth, was Borís’ handsome smoothly
brushed head. He looked at the Rostóvs from under his brows and said
something, smiling, to his betrothed.
“They are talking about us, about me and him!” thought Natásha.
“And he no doubt is calming her jealousy of me. They needn’t trouble
themselves! If only they knew how little I am concerned about any of
them.”
Behind them sat Anna Mikháylovna wearing a green headdress and with a
happy look of resignation to the will of God on her face. Their box was
pervaded by that atmosphere of an affianced couple which Natásha knew
so well and liked so much. She turned away and suddenly remembered all
that had been so humiliating in her morning’s visit.
“What right has he not to wish to receive me into his family? Oh,
better not think of it—not till he comes back!” she told herself,
and began looking at the faces, some strange and some familiar, in
the stalls. In the front, in the very center, leaning back against
the orchestra rail, stood Dólokhov in a Persian dress, his curly hair
brushed up into a huge shock. He stood in full view of the audience,
well aware that he was attracting everyone’s attention, yet as much at
ease as though he were in his own room. Around him thronged Moscow’s
most brilliant young men, whom he evidently dominated.
The count, laughing, nudged the blushing Sónya and pointed to her
former adorer.
“Do you recognize him?” said he. “And where has he sprung from?”
he asked, turning to Shinshín. “Didn’t he vanish somewhere?”
“He did,” replied Shinshín. “He was in the Caucasus and ran
away from there. They say he has been acting as minister to some ruling
prince in Persia, where he killed the Shah’s brother. Now all the
Moscow ladies are mad about him! It’s ‘Dólokhov the Persian’ that
does it! We never hear a word but Dólokhov is mentioned. They swear
by him, they offer him to you as they would a dish of choice sterlet.
Dólokhov and Anatole Kurágin have turned all our ladies’ heads.”
A tall, beautiful woman with a mass of plaited hair and much exposed
plump white shoulders and neck, round which she wore a double string of
large pearls, entered the adjoining box rustling her heavy silk dress
and took a long time settling into her place.
Natásha involuntarily gazed at that neck, those shoulders, and pearls
and coiffure, and admired the beauty of the shoulders and the pearls.
While Natásha was fixing her gaze on her for the second time the lady
looked round and, meeting the count’s eyes, nodded to him and smiled.
She was the Countess Bezúkhova, Pierre’s wife, and the count, who
knew everyone in society, leaned over and spoke to her.
“Have you been here long, Countess?” he inquired. “I’ll call,
I’ll call to kiss your hand. I’m here on business and have brought
my girls with me. They say Semënova acts marvelously. Count Pierre
never used to forget us. Is he here?”
“Yes, he meant to look in,” answered Hélène, and glanced
attentively at Natásha.
Count Rostóv resumed his seat.
“Handsome, isn’t she?” he whispered to Natásha.
“Wonderful!” answered Natásha. “She’s a woman one could easily
fall in love with.”
Just then the last chords of the overture were heard and the conductor
tapped with his stick. Some latecomers took their seats in the stalls,
and the curtain rose.
As soon as it rose everyone in the boxes and stalls became silent, and
all the men, old and young, in uniform and evening dress, and all the
women with gems on their bare flesh, turned their whole attention with
eager curiosity to the stage. Natásha too began to look at it.
CHAPTER IX
The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides was
some painted cardboard representing trees, and at the back was a cloth
stretched over boards. In the center of the stage sat some girls in red
bodices and white skirts. One very fat girl in a white silk dress sat
apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard
was glued. They all sang something. When they had finished their song
the girl in white went up to the prompter’s box and a man with tight
silk trousers over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger,
went up to her and began singing, waving his arms about.
First the man in the tight trousers sang alone, then she sang, then they
both paused while the orchestra played and the man fingered the hand
of the girl in white, obviously awaiting the beat to start singing with
her. They sang together and everyone in the theater began clapping
and shouting, while the man and woman on the stage—who represented
lovers—began smiling, spreading out their arms, and bowing.
After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, all this
seemed grotesque and amazing to Natásha. She could not follow the opera
nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted cardboard and the
queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in
that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but
it was so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt ashamed
for the actors and then amused at them. She looked at the faces of the
audience, seeking in them the same sense of ridicule and perplexity she
herself experienced, but they all seemed attentive to what was happening
on the stage, and expressed delight which to Natásha seemed feigned.
“I suppose it has to be like this!” she thought. She kept looking
round in turn at the rows of pomaded heads in the stalls and then at
the seminude women in the boxes, especially at Hélène in the next box,
who—apparently quite unclothed—sat with a quiet tranquil smile, not
taking her eyes off the stage. And feeling the bright light that flooded
the whole place and the warm air heated by the crowd, Natásha little
by little began to pass into a state of intoxication she had not
experienced for a long while. She did not realize who and where she
was, nor what was going on before her. As she looked and thought, the
strangest fancies unexpectedly and disconnectedly passed through her
mind: the idea occurred to her of jumping onto the edge of the box and
singing the aria the actress was singing, then she wished to touch with
her fan an old gentleman sitting not far from her, then to lean over to
Hélène and tickle her.
At a moment when all was quiet before the commencement of a song, a door
leading to the stalls on the side nearest the Rostóvs’ box creaked,
and the steps of a belated arrival were heard. “There’s Kurágin!”
whispered Shinshín. Countess Bezúkhova turned smiling to the newcomer,
and Natásha, following the direction of that look, saw an exceptionally
handsome adjutant approaching their box with a self-assured yet
courteous bearing. This was Anatole Kurágin whom she had seen
and noticed long ago at the ball in Petersburg. He was now in an
adjutant’s uniform with one epaulet and a shoulder knot. He moved with
a restrained swagger which would have been ridiculous had he not been
so good-looking and had his handsome face not worn such an expression
of good-humored complacency and gaiety. Though the performance was
proceeding, he walked deliberately down the carpeted gangway, his sword
and spurs slightly jingling and his handsome perfumed head held high.
Having looked at Natásha he approached his sister, laid his well gloved
hand on the edge of her box, nodded to her, and leaning forward asked a
question, with a motion toward Natásha.
“Mais charmante!” said he, evidently referring to Natásha, who did
not exactly hear his words but understood them from the movement of his
lips. Then he took his place in the first row of the stalls and sat down
beside Dólokhov, nudging with his elbow in a friendly and offhand way
that Dólokhov whom others treated so fawningly. He winked at him gaily,
smiled, and rested his foot against the orchestra screen.
“How like the brother is to the sister,” remarked the count. “And
how handsome they both are!”
Shinshín, lowering his voice, began to tell the count of some intrigue
of Kurágin’s in Moscow, and Natásha tried to overhear it just
because he had said she was “charmante.”
The first act was over. In the stalls everyone began moving about, going
out and coming in.
Borís came to the Rostóvs’ box, received their congratulations very
simply, and raising his eyebrows with an absent-minded smile conveyed to
Natásha and Sónya his fiancée’s invitation to her wedding, and
went away. Natásha with a gay, coquettish smile talked to him, and
congratulated on his approaching wedding that same Borís with whom
she had formerly been in love. In the state of intoxication she was in,
everything seemed simple and natural.