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XVI

When Natasha came out of the drawing room and started running, she only got 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 already beginning to feel impatient and stamped her foot, preparing to burst into tears because he was not coming immediately. When she heard the young man’s footsteps, not quiet, but rapid and discreet, the thirteen-year-old girl quickly dashed in among the tubs of plants and hid.

“Boris Nikolaevich!” she said in a deep bass, trying to frighten him, and then immediately started laughing. Catching sight of her, Boris shook his head and smiled.

“Boris, come here please,” she said with a look of significant cunning. He went over to her, making his way between the tubs.

“Boris! Kiss Mimi,” she said, smiling mischievously and holding out her doll.

“Why shouldn’t I kiss her?” he said, moving closer and keeping his eyes on Natasha.

“No, say: ‘I don’t want to.’”

She moved away from him.

“Well, I can say I don’t want to as well, if you like. Where’s the fun in kissing a doll?”

“You don’t want to? Right, then come here,” she said and moved away deeper into the plants and threw the doll onto a tub of flowers. “Closer, closer!” she whispered. She caught hold of the officer by his cuffs and her blushing face was filled with fearful solemnity.

“But do you want to kiss me?” she whispered barely audibly, peering at him warily, smiling and almost crying in her excitement.

Boris blushed.

“You’re so funny!” he said, leaning down towards her and blushing even more, but not trying to do anything and biding his time. The faint hint of mockery was still playing on his lips, on the point of disappearing.

She suddenly jumped up onto a tub so that she was taller than him, put both arms round him so that her slim, bare hands bent around his neck and, flinging her hair back with a toss of her head, kissed him full on the lips.

“Ah, what have I done!” she cried, then slipped, laughing, between the tubs to the other side of the plants, and her frisky little footsteps squeaked rapidly in the direction of the nursery. Boris ran after and stopped her.

“Natasha,” he said, “can I tell you something really special?”

She nodded.

“I love you,” he said slowly. “You’re not a child. Natasha, do what I’m going to ask you.”

“What are you going to ask me?”

“Please, let’s not do what we just did for another four years.”

Natasha stopped and thought for a moment.

“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,” she said, counting on her slim little fingers. “All right! Is it settled, then?” And a serious smile of joy illuminated her vivacious though not beautiful face.

“Yes!” said Boris.

“For ever?” the girl said. “Until death itself?”

And, taking him by the arm, she calmly walked with him into the nursery. Boris’s handsome, refined face turned red and the expression of mockery disappeared entirely from his lips. He thrust out his chest and sighed in happiness and contentment. His eyes seemed to be gazing far into the future, four years ahead, to the happy year of 1809. The young people gathered once again in the nursery, where they loved to sit most of all.

“No, you shan’t leave!” shouted Nikolai, who did and said everything passionately and impetuously, grabbing Boris by the sleeve of his uniform jacket with one hand and pulling his arm away from his sister with the other. “You have to get married.”

“You have to! You have to!” both the girls cried.

“I’ll be the sexton, Nikolaenka,” shouted Petrushka. “Please, let me be the sexton: ‘Oh Lord have mercy!’”

Although it might seem incomprehensible how much fun young men and girls could find in the wedding of the doll and Boris, one look at the exultation and joy expressed on all their faces when the doll, adorned with Seville orange blossom and wearing a white dress, was set on its kidskin bottom on a little post and Boris, who was ready to agree to anything, was led up to her, and little Petrusha, having donned a skirt, pretended he was the sexton – one look at all this was enough to share in this joy, even without understanding it.

During the dressing of the bride, for decency’s sake Nikolai and Boris were banished from the room. Nikolai walked to and fro, sighing to himself and shrugging his shoulders.

NATASHA ROSTOV AND BORIS DRUBETSKOY Drawing by M.S. Bashilov, 1866

“What’s the matter?” asked Boris.

Nikolai glanced at his friend and gestured despairingly with his hand.

“Ah, you don’t know what just happened to me!” he said, clutching his head in his hands.

“What?” asked Boris, in a calm, humorous tone.

“Well, I’m going away, and she … No, I can’t say it!”

“But what is it?” Boris asked again. “Something with Sonya?”

“Yes. Do you know what?”

“What?”

“Agh, it’s incredible! What do you think? Do I have to tell my father after this?”

“But what?”

“You know, I don’t even know myself how it happened, I kissed Sonya today: I have acted vilely. But what am I to do? I am madly in love. But was it bad of me? I know it was bad … What do you say?”

Boris smiled.

“What are you saying? Did you really?” he asked in sly, mocking amazement. “Kissed her straight on the lips? When?”

“Why, just now. You wouldn’t have done that? Eh? You wouldn’t have. Have I acted badly?”

“Well, I don’t know. It all depends on what your intentions are.”

“Well! But of course. That’s right. I told her. As soon as they make me an officer, I shall marry her.”

“That’s amazing,” declared Boris. “How very decisive you are!”

Nikolai laughed, reassured.

“I’m amazed that you have never been in love and no one has ever fallen in love with you.”

“That’s my character,” said Boris, blushing.

“Oh, yes, you’re so very cunning! It’s true what Vera says,” Nikolai said and suddenly began tickling his friend.

“And you’re so very awful. It is true, what Vera says.” And Boris, who disliked being tickled, pushed his friend’s hands away. “You’re bound to do something extraordinary.”

Both of them, laughing, went back to the girls to conclude the rite of marriage.

XVII

The countess felt so tired after the visits that she gave orders not to receive anyone else, and the doorman was given strict instructions to invite everyone who might still arrive with congratulations to dine. Besides that, she wanted to have a confidential talk with her childhood friend Anna Mikhailovna, whom she had not seen properly since her arrival from St. Petersburg. Anna Mikhailovna, with her careworn and agreeable face, moved closer to the countess’s armchair.

“I shall be entirely candid with you,” said Anna Mikhailovna. “There are so few of us old friends left. That is why I value your friendship so.”

The princess looked at Vera and stopped. The countess squeezed her friend’s hand.

“Vera,” said the countess, addressing her elder, and obviously less loved daughter. “How can you be so completely tactless? Surely you can tell you are not needed here? Go to your sisters or …”

The beautiful Vera smiled, apparently not feeling in the least insulted, and went to her room. But as she passed by the nursery she noticed two couples in there, seated symmetrically at the two windows. Sonya was sitting close beside Nikolai, who, with his face flushed, was reading her the first poem that he had ever composed. Boris and Natasha were sitting by the other window without speaking. Boris was holding her hand and he let go of it when Vera appeared. Natasha picked up the little box of gloves standing beside her and began sorting through them. Vera smiled. Nikolai and Sonya looked at her, got up and left the room.

“Natasha,” said Vera to her younger sister, who was intently sorting through the scented gloves. “Why do Nikolai and Sonya run away from me? What secrets do they have?”

“Why, what business is it of yours, Vera?” Natasha asked protectively in her squeaky voice, continuing with her work. She was evidently feeling even more kind and affectionate towards everyone because of her own happiness.

“It’s very stupid of them,” said Vera in a tone that Natasha thought sounded offensive.

“Everyone has their own secrets. We don’t bother you and Berg,” she said, growing heated.

“How stupid! You’ll see, I’m going to tell mama how you carry on with Boris. It’s not right.”

“Natalya Ilinishna treats me perfectly well. I can’t complain,” he said sarcastically.

Natasha did not laugh and looked up at him.

“Don’t, Boris, you’re such a diplomat” (the word diplomat was very popular with the children, in the special meaning which they gave to this word), “it’s really boring,” she said. “Why is she pestering me?”

She turned to Vera.

“You’ll never understand,” she said, “because you’ve never loved anyone, you have no heart, you’re nothing but Madame de Genlis” (this nickname, which was regarded as very insulting, had been given to Vera by Nikolai) “and your greatest pleasure is to cause trouble for others. You can flirt with Berg as much as you like.”

She blurted this out hurriedly and flounced out of the nursery.

The beautiful Vera, who had such an irritating, disagreeable effect on everyone, smiled again with the same smile that meant nothing and, apparently unaffected by what had been said to her, went up to the mirror and adjusted her scarf and hair. As she gazed at her own beautiful face, she visibly turned colder and calmer than ever.

XVIII

In the drawing room the conversation was continuing.

“Ah, my dear,” said the countess, “in my life too not everything is roses. Do you think I cannot see that with the way we live, our fortune will not last long? And it’s all the club, and his generous nature. When we are in the country, what rest do we get there? Theatres, hunts and God knows what else. But there I am talking about myself! Now, how did you arrange everything? I am constantly amazed at you, Annette, at your age, the way you gallop off in a carriage on your own, to Moscow, to St. Petersburg, to all the ministers and all the important people, and you know how to deal with them all, I am amazed! Well, how did everything go? I don’t know how to do anything of that sort.”

“Ah my darling,” replied Princess Anna Mikhailovna. “God grant that you may never know how hard it is to be left a widow with no support and with a son whom you love to distraction. One can learn to do everything,” she continued with a certain pride. “My lawsuit taught me that. If I need to see one of these bigwigs, I write a note: ‘Princess so-and-so wishes to see so-and-so’, and I go myself in a cab, two or three times if necessary, even four, until I get what I want. I don’t give a jot what people think of me.”

“Well, how did you ask for Borenka?” asked the countess. “After all, your son is a Guards officer, but Nikolai is going as a cadet. I have no one to intercede for me. Whom did you petition?”

“Prince Vasily. He was very kind. Now he has agreed to everything, and informed His Majesty,” Princess Anna Mikhailovna said ecstatically, completely forgetting all the humiliation that she had gone through to achieve her goal.

“And has he grown old, Prince Vasily?” the countess asked. “I haven’t seen him since our dramatics at the Rumyantsevs’. I think he has forgotten all about me. He used to run around after me,” the countess recalled with a smile.

“He is the same as ever,” replied Anna Mikhailovna. “The prince is courteous, positively brimming over with compliments. His high position has not turned his head at all. ‘I regret that I can do so little for you, my dear princess,’ he said to me, ‘ask what you will.’ Yes, he is a splendid man and an excellent relative. But you know, Nathalie, how I love my son. I don’t know what I would not do for his happiness. And my circumstances are so bad,” Anna Mikhailovna continued sadly, lowering her voice, “so very bad that I am now in a quite appalling situation. My miserable lawsuit is consuming everything I have and never makes progress. Can you believe that I do not have, literally do not have, ten kopecks to spare, and I have no idea where to get the money for Boris’s uniform.” She took out a handkerchief and began to cry. “I need five hundred roubles, and I have one twenty-five-rouble note. I am in such a state. My only hope now is Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov. If he will not support his godchild – after all, he is Boris’s godfather – and provide him with something to live on, then all my efforts will have been wasted, I shall have no money to fit him out.”

The countess shed a few tears and pondered something without speaking.

“I often think, perhaps it is a sin,” said the princess, “but I often think: there is Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov living alone … it’s an immense fortune … and what is he living for? Life is a burden to him, and Borya is only about to start living.”

“He is bound to leave something to Boris,” said the countess.

“God knows. These rich men and grandees are such egotists. But nonetheless I shall go to him now, and take Boris, and tell him to his face what is the matter. Let people think what they will of me, I really do not care, when my son’s destiny depends on it.” The princess got to her feet. “It is now two o’clock. And you are dining at four. I shall have enough time to go there and back.” And with the bearing and manners of a practical St. Petersburg lady who knows how to make good use of her time, Anna Mikhailovna sent for her son and went out into the front hall with him.

“Goodbye, my darling,” she said to the countess, who saw her to the door. “Wish me success,” she added, whispering so that her son would not hear.

“You are going to Count Kirill Vladimirovich, ma chère,” the count said from the dining room as he emerged into the hallway. “If he is feeling better, invite Pierre to dine with us. He has been here before, he danced with the children. You absolutely must invite him. Well, we shall see how Taras excels himself today. They say Count Orlov never had such a dinner as we shall have today.”

XIX

“My dear Boris,” Princess Anna Mikhailovna said to her son as Countess Rostova’s carriage, in which they were sitting, drove along the straw-covered street and into the wide, sand-strewn courtyard of the unfamiliar colonnaded house belonging to Count Kirill Vladimirovich Bezukhov. “My dear Boris,” said his mother, freeing her hand from under her old coat and laying it on her son’s arm in a gesture of timid affection, “please, set aside your pride. Count Kirill Vladimirovich is after all your godfather, and your future fate depends on him. Remember that, be nice, as you know how to be.”

“If only I knew that anything would come of it, apart from humiliation,” her son replied coldly. “But I promised and I am doing it for you. Only this is the last time, mama. Remember that.”

Even though the carriage was standing at the entrance, the doorman scrutinised the mother and son who, without giving their names, had walked straight up between the two rows of niched statues and into the glazed vestibule, and he asked, casting a significant glance at the countess’s shabby coat, whom they wished to see, the princesses or the count, and, on learning that it was the count, he informed them that his excellency was feeling worse today and his excellency was not receiving anyone.

“We can leave,” the son said in French, evidently delighted at this news.

“My friend!” the mother said in an imploring tone of voice, touching her son’s arm again, as though this touch could calm or excite him.

Boris, fearful of creating a scene in front of the doorman, said nothing, with the expression of a man who has decided to drain his bitter cup to the last drop. Without unbuttoning his greatcoat, he looked enquiringly at his mother.

“My dear fellow,” said Anna Mikhailovna in a soft voice, addressing the doorman, “I know that Count Kirill Vladimirovich is very ill … that is why I have come … I am a relative … I will not disturb him, my dear fellow … And I would only need to see Prince Vasily Sergeevich, he is staying here, after all. Announce us, please.”

The doorman tugged morosely on a cord leading upstairs and turned away.

“Princess Drubetskaya to see Prince Vasily Sergeevich,” he called to the footman in knee-breeches, shoes and tails, who had come running down and was peering out from under the overhang of the stairs.

The mother straightened the folds of her dyed silk dress and, with a glance at herself in the tall Venetian pier glass set into the wall, strode briskly up the stair-carpet in her down-at-heel shoes. “My dear, you promised me,” she said again to her son, trying to rouse him with the touch of her hand. Lowering his eyes, the son walked on gloomily.

PRINCESS ANNA MIKHAILOVNA DRUBETSKAYA AND HER SON BORIS Drawing by M.S. Bashilov, 1866

They entered a hall from which one of the doors led into the chambers allotted to Prince Vasily.

As the mother and son, walking out into the centre of the room, were contemplating asking the way from an old footman who had jumped to his feet at their arrival, the bronze handle of one of the doors turned and Prince Vasily emerged, dressed simply in a velvet smoking jacket with only a single star, accompanied by a handsome, dark-haired man. This man was the famous St. Petersburg physician Lorrain.

“So it is definite,” the prince was saying.

“Prince, errare est humanum, but …” the doctor replied, burring his r’s and pronouncing the Latin words with a French accent.

“Very well, very well …”

Noticing Anna Mikhailovna and her son, Prince Vasily dismissed the doctor with a bow and approached them without speaking, but with an interrogatory air. The son was astonished to see the profound grief that was suddenly expressed in Princess Anna Mikhailovna’s eyes.

“Indeed, what distressing circumstances we are obliged to meet in, prince … Well, how is our dear invalid?” she said, disregarding the cold, insulting gaze directed at her and addressing the prince as her best friend, with whom she could share her woe. Prince Vasily looked in baffled enquiry, first at her, then at Boris. Boris bowed politely. Prince Vasily, making no response to the bow, turned back to Anna Mikhailovna and answered her question with a movement of the head and lips which signified the very worst prospect for the invalid.

“Surely not!” exclaimed Anna Mikhailovna. “Oh, that is terrible! The very idea is appalling … This is my son,” she added, indicating Boris. “He wished to thank you himself.”

Boris bowed politely once again.

“Believe me, prince, a mother’s heart will never forget what you have done for us.”

“I am glad to have been able to do something to please you, my dear Anna Mikhailovna,” said Prince Vasily, adjusting his jabot, expressing far greater self-importance with his gesture and tone of voice to his satisfied suppliant here in Moscow than he had managed in St. Petersburg, at Anna Scherer’s soirée.

“Try to serve well and be worthy,” he added, addressing Boris with severity. “I am so glad … Are you here on leave?” he enunciated in his impassive tone of voice.

“I am awaiting orders, your excellency, to take up my new posting,” Boris replied, betraying neither annoyance at the prince’s sharp tone nor a desire to engage in conversation, but speaking so calmly and coldly that the prince regarded him more closely.

“Do you live with your mother?”

“I live in the house of Countess Rostova,” said Boris and added, again coldly, “your excellency.”

He evidently said “your excellency” not so much in order to flatter the other man as to restrain him from familiarity.

“That is the Ilya Rostov who married Natalya Z.,” put in Anna Mikhailovna.

“I know, I know,” said Prince Vasily in his monotonous voice, with a typical Petersburgian’s contempt for everything Muscovite.

“I never could understand how Natalya could bring herself to marry that ill-bred bear of a man. A perfectly stupid and ridiculous individual. And a gambler into the bargain, so they say,” he said, thereby demonstrating that for all his contempt for Count Rostov and his like, and for all his important affairs of state, he was not above listening to the rumours of the town.

“But a very kind man, prince,” Anna Mikhailovna remarked, smiling with feeling, as though she were also aware that Count Rostov deserved such a low opinion, but was asking the prince to pity the poor old man.

“What do the doctors say?” the princess asked after a brief pause, once again with an expression of great sadness on her tearful face.

“There is not much hope,” said the prince.

“And I so much wanted to thank my uncle once more for all his kindnesses to me and Borya. He is his godson,” she added in a tone which suggested that this news ought to delight the prince highly.

Prince Vasily began thinking and frowned. Anna Mikhailovna realised that he was afraid of discovering in her a rival for Count Bezukhov’s inheritance. She hastened to reassure him.

“If it were not for my genuine love and devotion to my uncle,” she said, pronouncing the word with an especially casual confidence, “I know his character, noble and straightforward, but he has only the princesses here … They are still young.” She inclined her head and added in a whisper: “Has he fulfilled his final duty, prince? How precious those final minutes are! After all, things cannot get any worse, he must be made ready, if he is in such a bad way. We women, prince,” she said, smiling sweetly, “always know how to say these things. I must see him, no matter how painful it is for me, I am already accustomed to suffering.”

The prince had evidently understood what she was saying, and he had also understood, as he had at Anna Scherer’s soirée, that Anna Mikhailovna was not easily to be put off. “I fear that meeting might be too hard on him, dear Anna Mikhailovna,” he said. “Let us wait until the evening, the doctors have predicted a crisis.”

“But one must not wait, prince, at moments like this. Think, it concerns the salvation of his soul. Aah! The duty of a Christian is a terrible thing.” A door from the inner rooms opened and one of the princesses, the count’s nieces, emerged, with a beautiful, but cheerless, cold face and a long waist quite astonishingly out of proportion with her legs.

Prince Vasily turned to her.

“How is he?”

“Still the same. But now there’s all this noise,” said the princess, examining Anna Mikhailovna like a stranger.

“Ah, my dear, I did not recognise you,” Anna Mihailovna said with a glad smile, springing nimbly across to the count’s niece. “I have come to help you care for your uncle. I can well imagine how much you have suffered,” she added sympathetically, rolling her eyes upwards.

The princess did not even smile, but excused herself and went away. Anna Mikhailovna took off her gloves and, consolidating the gains she had made, settled down in an armchair, inviting Prince Vasily to sit beside her.

“Boris,” she said to her son with a smile. “I am going in to see the count … my uncle, and meanwhile you, my friend, go to see Pierre, and don’t forget to pass on the invitation from the Rostovs. They want him to come for dinner. He should not go though, I think,” she said, turning to the count.

“On the contrary,” said the prince, suddenly quite clearly out of sorts. “I should be glad if you would relieve me of that young fellow. He simply hangs about here. The count has not asked for him once.”

He shrugged. A footman led the young man down one staircase and up another to Pyotr Vladimirovich’s rooms.