فصل 22

22

NEXT day, having been invited by the count, Prince Andrei dined with the Rostovs and spent the rest of the day there.

Everyone in the house realized for whose sake Prince Andrei came, and without concealing it he tried to be with Natasha all day. Not only in the soul of the frightened yet happy and enraptured Natasha, 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 Andrei when he talked to Natasha, and timidly started some artificial conversation about trifles as soon as he looked her way. Sonya was afraid to leave Natasha and afraid of being in the way when she was with them. Natasha grew pale, in a panic of expectation, when she remained alone with him for a moment. Prince Andrei 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 Andrei had left, the countess went up to Natasha and whispered:

‘Well, what?’

‘Mama! For heaven’s sake don’t ask me anything now! One can’t talk about that,’ said Natasha.

But all the same that night Natasha, 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 Boris.

‘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? Mamasha, are you asleep?’ ‘No, my love; I am frightened myself,’ answered her mother. ‘Now go!’

‘All the same I won’t sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mamasha! Mamasha! 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 Natasha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrei at Otradnoe, 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 Andrei had written in Natasha’s album.

‘Mama, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?’

‘Don’t, Natasha! Pray to God. “Marriages are made in heaven”,’ said her mother.

‘My darling Mamasha, how I love you, how good this is!’ shouted Natasha, crying tears of happiness and embracing her mother.

At that very time Prince Andrei was sitting with Pierre and telling him of his love for Natasha and his firm resolve to make her his wife.

That day Countess Elena Vasilievna 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 Natasha and Prince Andrei 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 Natasha and Prince Andrei; 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 labours, hoping to drive away the evil spirit that threatened him. Towards midnight, after he had left the countess’s apartments, he was sitting upstairs in a shabby dressing-gown, copying out the original transactions of the Scottish Lodge of Freemasons, at a table in his low room cloudy with tobacco smoke, when someone came in. It was Prince Andrei.

‘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 Andrei, 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’ve 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 Andrei. ‘With Natasha Rostova, 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 Andrei, smiling and looking into Pierre’s eyes.

‘She does, I know,’ Pierre cried fiercely.

‘But do listen,’ returned Prince Andrei, 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 Andrei. Prince Andrei 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 marvelled 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 Andrei. ‘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 all is 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 Andrei’s lot appeared to him, the gloomier seemed his own.