And showing how the police officer waved his arms about, he went off again into his rich bass laugh, his sides shaking with mirth, as people do laugh who always eat and, still more, drink well. “Then do, please, come to dinner with us,” he said.
Chapter 8
A SILENCE followed. The countess looked at her guest, smiling affably, but still not disguising the fact that she would not take it at all amiss now if the guest were to get up and go. The daughter was already fingering at the folds of her gown and looking interrogatively at her mother, when suddenly they heard in the next room several girls and boys running to the door, and the grating sound of a chair knocked over and a girl of thirteen ran in, hiding something in her short muslin petticoat, and stopped short in the middle of the room. She had evidently bounded so far by mistake, unable to stop in her flight. At the same instant there appeared in the doorway a student with a crimson band on his collar, a young officer in the Guards, a girl of fifteen, and a fat, rosy-cheeked boy in a child’s smock.
The prince jumped up, and swaying from side to side, held his arms out wide round the little girl.
“Ah, here she is!” he cried, laughing. “Our little darling on her fête day!”
“My dear, there is a time for everything,” said the countess, affecting severity. “You’re always spoiling her, Elie,” she added to her husband.
“Bonjour, ma chère, je vous félicite,” said the visitor. “Quelle délicieuse enfant!” she added, turning to her mother.
The dark-eyed little girl, plain, but full of life, with her wide mouth, her childish bare shoulders, which shrugged and panted in her bodice from her rapid motion, her black hair brushed back, her slender bare arms and little legs in lace-edged long drawers and open slippers, was at that charming stage when the girl is no longer a child, while the child is not yet a young girl. Wriggling away from her father, she ran up to her mother, and taking no notice whatever of her severe remarks, she hid her flushed face in her mother’s lace kerchief and broke into laughter. As she laughed she uttered some incoherent phrases about the doll, which was poking out from her petticoat.
“Do you see?…My doll…Mimi…you see…” And Natasha could say no more, it all seemed to her so funny. She sank on her mother’s lap, and went off into such a loud peal of laughter that every one, even the prim visitor, could not help laughing too.
“Come, run along, run along with your monstrosity!” said her mother, pushing her daughter off with a pretence of anger. “This is my younger girl,” she said to the visitor. Natasha, pulling her face away from her mother’s lace kerchief for a minute, peeped down at her through tears of laughter, and hid her face again.
The visitor, forced to admire this domestic scene, thought it suitable to take some part in it.
“Tell me, my dear,” she said, addressing Natasha, “how did you come by your Mimi? Your daughter, I suppose?”
Natasha did not like the tone of condescension to childish things with which the visitor had spoken to her. She made no answer, but stared solemnly at her.
Meanwhile all the younger generation, Boris, the officer, Anna Milhalovna’s son; Nikolay, the student, the count’s elder son; Sonya, the count’s niece; and little Petya, his younger son, had all placed themselves about the drawing-room, and were obviously trying to restrain within the bounds of decorum the excitement and mirth which was brimming over in their faces. Clearly in the back part of the house, from which they had dashed out so impetuously, the conversation had been more amusing than the small-talk in the drawing-room of the scandal of the town, the weather, and Countess Apraxin. Now and then they glanced at one another and could hardly suppress their laughter.
The two young men, the student and the officer, friends from childhood, were of the same age, and both good-looking, but not like each other. Boris was a tall, fair-haired lad with delicate, regular features, and a look of composure on his handsome face. Nikolay was a curly-headed youth, not tall, with an open expression. On his upper lip there were already signs of a black moustache coming, and his whole face expressed impulsiveness and enthusiasm. Nikolay flushed red as he came into the drawing-room. He was unmistakably trying to find something to say, and unable to find anything. Boris, on the contrary, was at home immediately and talked easily and playfully of the doll Mimi, saying that he had known her as a young girl before her nose was broken, and she had grown older during the five years he remembered her, and how her head was cracked right across the skull. As he said this he looked at Natasha. Natasha turned away from him, glanced at her younger brother, who, with a scowl on his face, was shaking with noiseless laughter, and unable to restrain herself, she skipped up and flew out of the room as quickly as her swift little legs could carry her. Boris did not laugh.
“You were meaning to go out, mamma, weren’t you? Do you want the carriage?” he said, addressing his mother with a smile.
“Yes, go along and tell them to get it ready,” she said, smiling. Boris walked slowly to the door and went after Natasha. The stout boy ran wrathfully after them, as though resenting the interruption of his pursuits.
Chapter 9
OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE, not reckoning the countess’s elder daughter (who was four years older than her sister and behaved quite like a grown-up person) and the young lady visitor, there were left in the drawing-room Nikolay and Sonya, the niece. Sonya was a slender, miniature brunette, with soft eyes shaded by long lashes, thick black hair twisted in two coils round her head, and a skin of a somewhat sallow tint, particularly marked on her bare, thin, but shapely, muscular arms and neck. The smoothness of her movements, the softness and flexibility of her little limbs, and something of slyness and reserve in her manner, suggested a lovely half-grown kitten, which would one day be a charming cat. Apparently she thought it only proper to show an interest in the general conversation and to smile. But against her own will, her eyes turned under their thick, long lashes to her cousin, who was going away into the army, with such girlish, passionate adoration, that her smile could not for one moment impose upon any one, and it was clear that the kitten had only perched there to skip off more energetically than ever and to play with her cousin as soon as they could, like Boris and Natasha, get out of the drawing-room.
“Yes, ma chère,” said the old count, addressing the visitor and pointing to his Nikolay; “here his friend Boris has received his commission as an officer, and he’s so fond of him he doesn’t want to be left behind, and is giving up the university and his poor old father to go into the army, ma chère. And there was a place all ready for him in the archives department, and all. Isn’t that friendship now?” said the count interrogatively.
“But they do say that war has been declared, you know,” said the visitor.
“They’ve been saying so a long while,” said the count. “They’ll say so again and again, and so it will remain. There’s friendship for you, ma chère!” he repeated. “He’s going into the hussars.”
The visitor, not knowing what to say, shook her head.
“It’s not from friendship at all,” answered Nikolay, flushing hotly, and denying it as though it were some disgraceful imputation. “Not friendship at all, but simply I feel drawn to the military service.”
He looked round at his cousin and the young lady visitor; both looked at him with a smile of approval.
“Schubert’s dining with us to-night, the colonel of the Pavologradsky regiment of hussars. He has been here on leave, and is taking him with him. There’s no help for it,” said the count, shrugging his shoulder and speaking playfully of what evidently was a source of much distress to him.
“I’ve told you already, papa,” said his son, “that if you’re unwilling to let me go, I’ll stay. But I know I’m no good for anything except in the army. I’m not a diplomatist, or a government clerk. I’m not clever at disguising my feelings,” he said, glancing repeatedly with the coquetry of handsome youth at Sonya and the young lady.
The kitten, her eyes riveted on him, seemed on the point of breaking into frolic, and showing her cat-like nature.
“Well, well, it’s all-right!” said the old count; “he always gets so hot. Bonaparte’s turned all their heads; they’re all dreaming of how he rose from a lieutenant to be an emperor. Well, and so may it turn out again, please God,” he added, not noticing the visitor’s sarcastic smile.
While their elders began talking about Bonaparte, Julie, Madame Karagin’s daughter, turned to young Rostov.
“What a pity you weren’t at the Arharovs’ on Thursday. I was so dull without you,” she said, giving him a tender smile. The youth, highly flattered, moved with a coquettish smile nearer her, and entered into a conversation apart with the smiling Julie, entirely unaware that his unconscious smile had dealt a jealous stab to the heart of Sonya, who was flushing crimson and assuming a forced smile. In the middle of his talk with Julie he glanced round at her. Sonya gave him an intensely furious look, and, hardly able to restrain her tears, though there was still a constrained smile on her lips, she got up and went out of the room. All Nikolay’s animation was gone. He waited for the first break in the conversation, and, with a face of distress, walked out of the room to look for Sonya.
“How all the young things wear their hearts on their sleeves!” said Anna Mihalovna, pointing to Nikolay’s retreating figure. “Cousinage, dangereux voisinage,” she added.
“Yes,” said the countess, when the sunshine that had come into the drawing-room with the young people had vanished. She was, as it were, replying to a question which no one had put to her, but which was always in her thoughts: “What miseries, what anxieties one has gone through for the happiness one has in them now! And even now one feels really more dread than joy over them. One’s always in terror! At this age particularly when there are so many dangers both for girls and boys.”
“Everything depends on bringing up,” said the visitor.
“Yes, you are right,” the countess went on. “So far I have been, thank God, my children’s friend and have enjoyed their full confidence,” said the countess, repeating the error of so many parents, who imagine their children have no secrets from them. “I know I shall always be first in my children’s confidence, and that Nikolay, if, with his impulsive character, he does get into mischief (boys will be boys) it won’t be like these Petersburg young gentlemen.”
“Yes, they’re capital children, capital children,” assented the count, who always solved all perplexing questions by deciding that everything was capital. “Fancy now, his taking it into his head to be an hussar! But what can one expect, ma chère?”
“What a sweet little thing your younger girl is!” said the visitor. “Full of fun and mischief!”
“Yes, that she is,” said the count. “She takes after me! And such a voice; though she’s my daughter, it’s the truth I’m telling you, she’ll be a singer, another Salomini. We’ve engaged an Italian to give her lessons.”
“Isn’t it too early? They say it injures the voice to train it at that age.”
“Oh, no! Too early!” said the count. “Why, our mothers used to be married at twelve and thirteen.”
“Well, she’s in love with Boris already! What do you say to that?” said the countess, smiling softly and looking at Boris’s mother. And apparently in reply to the question that was always in her mind, she went on: “Why, you know, if I were strict with her, if I were to forbid her…God knows what they might not be doing in secret” (the countess meant that they might kiss each other), “but as it is I know every word she utters. She’ll come to me this evening and tell me everything of herself. I spoil her, perhaps, but I really believe it’s the best way. I brought my elder girl up more strictly.”
“Yes, I was brought up quite differently,” said the elder girl, the handsome young Countess Vera; and she smiled. But the smile did not improve Vera’s face; on the contrary her face looked unnatural, and therefore unpleasing. Vera was good-looking; she was not stupid, was clever at her lessons, and well educated; she had a pleasant voice, and what she said was true and appropriate. But, strange to say, every one—both the visitor and the countess—looked at her, as though wondering why she had said it, and conscious of a certain awkwardness.
“People are always too clever with their elder children; they try to do something exceptional with them,” said the visitor.
“We won’t conceal our errors, ma chère! My dear countess was too clever with Vera,” said the count. “But what of it? she has turned out capitally all the same,” he added, with a wink of approval to Vera.
The guests got up and went away, promising to come to dinner.
“What manners! Staying on and on!” said the countess, when she had seen her guests out.
Chapter 10
WHEN NATASHA ran out of the drawing-room she only ran as far as the conservatory. There she stopped listening to the talk in the drawing-room, and waiting for Boris to come out. She was beginning to get impatient, and stamping her foot was almost ready to cry at his not coming at once, when she heard the young man’s footsteps coming out discreetly, not too slowly nor too quickly. Natasha darted swiftly away and hid among the tubs of shrubs.
Boris stood still in the middle of the room, looked round him, brushed a speck of dirt off the sleeve of his uniform, and going up to the looking-glass examined his handsome face. Natasha, keeping quiet, peeped out of her hiding-place, waiting to see what he would do. He stood a little while before the glass, smiled at his reflection, and walked towards the other door. Natasha was on the point of calling to him, but she changed her mind. “Let him look for me,” she said to herself. Boris had only just gone out, when at the other door Sonya came in, flushed and muttering something angrily through her tears. Natasha checked her first impulse to run out to her, and remained in her hiding-place, as it were under the invisible cap, looking on at what was going on in the world. She began to feel a peculiar novel sort of enjoyment in it. Sonya was murmuring something as she looked towards the drawing-room door. The door opened and Nikolay came in.
“Sonya! what is the matter? how can you?” said Nikolay, running up to her.
“Nothing, nothing, leave me alone!” Sonya was sobbing.
“No, I know what it is.”
“Very well, you do, so much the better then, and you can go back to her.”
“So-o-onya! one word! How can you torture me and yourself for a mere fancy?” said Nikolay, taking her hand. Sonya did not pull her hand away, and left off crying.
Natasha, not stirring and hardly breathing, looked with shining eyes from her hiding-place. “What’s coming now?” she thought.
“Sonya! I care for nothing in the whole world! You’re everything to me,” said Nikolay. “I’ll prove it to you.”
