“But anything suits you, my charmer!” she declared. The smile of pleasure never left Natasha’s face. She felt happy, and as it were blossoming out under the praises of this charming Countess Bezuhov, who had seemed to her before a lady so unapproachable and dignified, and was now being so king to her. Natasha’s spirits rose, and she felt almost in love with this handsome and good-natured woman. Ellen, for her part, was genuine in her admiration of Natasha, and in her desire to make her enjoy herself. Anatole had begged her to throw him with Natasha, and it was with that object she had come to the Rostovs’. The idea of throwing her brother and Natasha together amused her.
Although Ellen had once owed Natasha a grudge for carrying off Boris from her in Petersburg, she thought no more of that now, and with all her heart wished Natasha nothing but good. As she was leaving the Rostovs’, she drew her protégée aside.
“My brother was dining with me yesterday—we half died with laughing at him—he won’t eat, and does nothing but sigh for you, my charmer! He is madly, madly in love with you, my dear.”
Natasha flushed crimson on hearing those words.
“How she blushes, how she blushes, my pretty!” Ellen went on. “You must be sure to come. If you do love some one, it is not a reason to cloister yourself. Even if you are betrothed, I am sure your betrothed would have preferred you to go into society rather than to languish in ennui.”
“So then she knows I am engaged. So then they with her husband, with Pierre, with that good Pierre, talked and laughed about it. So that it means nothing.”
And again under Ellen’s influence what had struck her before as terrible seemed to her simple and natural. “And she, such a grande dame, is so kind, and obviously she likes me with all her heart,” thought Natasha. “And why not enjoy myself,” thought Natasha, gazing at Ellen with wide-open, wondering eyes.
Marya Dmitryevna came back to dinner silent and serious, having evidently been defeated by the old prince. She was too much agitated by the conflict she had been through to be able to describe the interview. To the count’s inquiries, she replied that everything had been all right and she would tell him about it next day. On hearing of the visit of Countess Bezuhov and the invitation for the evening, Marya Dmitryevna said:
“I don’t care to associate with Countess Bezuhov and I don’t advise you to, but still, since you have promised, better go. It will divert your mind,” she added, addressing Natasha.
Chapter 13
COUNT ILYA ANDREITCH took his two girls to the Countess Bezuhov’s. There were a good many people assembled there. But Natasha hardly knew any of the persons present. Count Ilya Andreitch observed with dissatisfaction that almost all the company consisted of men or of ladies notorious for the freedom of their behaviour. Mademoiselle George was standing in one corner of the room, surrounded by young men. There were several Frenchmen present, and among them Metivier, who had been a constant visitor at Countess Bezuhov’s ever since her arrival in Moscow. Count Ilya Andreitch made up his mind not to take a hand at cards, not to leave his daughter’s side, and to get away as soon as Mademoiselle George’s performance was over.
Anatole was at the door, unmistakably on the look-out for the Rostovs. At once greeting the count, he went up to Natasha and followed her in. As soon as Natasha saw him, the same feeling came upon her as at the theatre—the feeling of gratified vanity at his admiration of her, and terror at the absence of any moral barrier between them.
Ellen gave Natasha a delighted welcome, and was loud in her admiration of her loveliness and her dress. Soon after their arrival, Mademoiselle George went out of the room to change her dress. In the drawing-room chairs were being set in rows and people began to sit down. Anatole moved a chair for Natasha, and would have sat down by her, but the count, who was keeping his eye on Natasha, took the seat beside her. Anatole sat down behind.
Mademoiselle George, with bare, fat, dimpled arms, and a red scarf flung over one shoulder, came into the empty space left for her between the chairs and threw herself into an unnatural pose. An enthusiastic whisper was audible.
Mademoiselle George scanned her audience with stern and gloomy eyes, and began reciting French verses, describing her guilty love for her son. In places she raised her voice, in places she dropped to a whisper solemnly lifting her head; in places she broke off and hissed with rolling eyes.
“Exquisite, divine, marvellous!” was heard on all sides. Natasha gazed at the fat actress; but she heard nothing, saw nothing and understood nothing of what was passing before her. She felt nothing, but that she was borne away again irrevocably into that strange and senseless world so remote from her old world, a world in which there was no knowing what was good and what was bad, what was sensible and what was senseless. Behind her was sitting Anatole; and conscious of his nearness, she was in frightened expectation of something.
After the first monologue all the company rose and surrounded Mademoiselle George, expressing their admiration.
“How handsome she is!” said Natasha to her father, as he got up with the rest and moved through the crowd to the actress.
“I don’t think so, looking at you,” said Anatole, following Natasha. He said this at a moment when no one but she could hear him. “You are charming…from the moment I first saw you, I have not ceased…”
“Come along, come along, Natasha!” said the count, turning back for his daughter. “How pretty she is!”
Natasha saying nothing went up to her father, and gazed at him with eyes of inquiring wonder.
After several recitations in different styles, Mademoiselle George went away, and Countess Bezuhov invited all the company to the great hall.
The count would have taken leave, but Ellen besought him not to spoil her improvised ball. The Rostovs stayed on. Anatole asked Natasha for a waltz, and during the waltz, squeezing her waist and her hand, he told her she was bewitching and that he loved her. During the écossaise, which she danced again with Kuragin, when they were left alone Anatole said nothing to her, he simply looked at her. Natasha was in doubt whether she had not dreamed what he said to her during the waltz. At the end of the first figure he pressed her hand again. Natasha lifted her frightened eyes to his face, but there was an expression of such assurance and warmth in his fond look and smile that she could not as she looked at him say what she had to say to him. She dropped her eyes.
“Don’t say such things to me. I am betrothed, and I love another man …” she articulated rapidly. She glanced at him. Anatole was neither disconcerted nor mortified at what she had said.
“Don’t talk to me of that. What is that to me,” he said; “I tell you I am mad, mad with love of you. Is it my fault that you are fascinating?…It’s for us to begin.”
Natasha, eager and agitated, looked about her with wide-open, frightened eyes, and seemed to be enjoying herself more than usual. She scarcely grasped anything that happened that evening. They danced the écossaise and “Grandfather.” Her father suggested their going, and she begged to stay longer. Wherever she was, and with whomsoever she was speaking, she felt his eyes upon her. Then she remembered that she had asked her father’s permission to go into a dressing-room to rearrange her dress, that Ellen had followed her, had talked to her, laughing, of her brother’s passion, and that in the little divan-room she had been met again by Anatole; that Ellen had somehow vanished, they were left alone, and Anatole taking her by the hand, had said in a tender voice:
“I can’t come to see you, but is it possible that I shall never see you? I love you madly. Can I never …?” and barring her way he brought his face close to hers.
His large, shining, masculine eyes were so close to her eyes, that she could see nothing but those eyes.
“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.
Chapter 14
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?”
