War and Peace (179 page)

Rostov saw all this as clearly as though he had known her whole life. He felt that he was in the presence of a creature utterly different from
and better than all those he had met up to that moment, and, above all, far better than he was himself.

The conversation was of the simplest and most insignificant kind. They talked of the war, unconsciously, like every one else, exaggerating their sadness on that subject; they talked of their last meeting—and Nikolay then tried to turn the subject; they talked of the kind-hearted governor’s wife, of Nikolay’s relations, and of Princess Marya’s.

Princess Marya did not talk of her brother, but turned the conversation, as soon as her aunt mentioned Prince Andrey. It was evident that of the troubles of Russia she could speak artificially, but her brother was a subject too near her heart, and she neither would nor could speak lightly of him. Nikolay noticed this, as indeed with a keenness of observation not usual with him, he noticed every shade of Princess Marya’s character, and everything confirmed him in the conviction that she was an altogether rare and original being.

Nikolay, like Princess Marya, had blushed and been embarrassed, when he heard the princess spoken of, and even when he thought of her; but in her presence he felt perfectly at ease, and he said to her not at all what he had prepared beforehand to say to her, but what came into his mind at the moment, and always quite appropriately.

As visitors always do where there are children, Nikolay, in a momentary silence during his brief visit, had recourse to Prince Andrey’s little son, caressing him, and asking him if he would like to be an hussar. He took the little boy in his arms, began gaily whirling him round, and glanced at Princess Marya. With softened, happy, shy eyes, she was watching the child she loved in the arms of the man she loved. Nikolay caught that look too, and as though he divined its significance, flushed with delight, and fell to kissing the child with simple-hearted gaiety.

Princess Marya was not going into society at all on account of her mourning, and Nikolay did not think it the proper thing to call on them again. But the governor’s wife still persisted in her match-making, and repeating to Nikolay something flattering Princess Marya had said of him, and
vice versa
, kept urging that Rostov should declare himself to Princess Marya. With this object, she arranged that the young people should meet at the reverend father’s before Mass.

Though Rostov did tell the governor’s wife that he should make no sort of declaration to Princess Marya, he promised to be there.

Just as at Tilsit Rostov had not allowed himself to doubt whether what was accepted by every one as right were really right, so now after
a brief but sincere struggle between the effort to order his life in accordance with his own sense of right, and humble submission to circumstances, he chose the latter, and yielded himself to the power, which, he felt, was irresistibly carrying him away. He knew that to declare his feelings to Princess Marya after his promise to Sonya would be what he called base. And he knew that he would never do a base thing. But he knew too (it was not what he knew, but what he felt at the bottom of his heart), that in giving way now to the force of circumstances and of the people guiding him, he was not only doing nothing wrong, but was doing something very, very grave, something of more gravity than anything he had done in his life.

After seeing Princess Marya, though his manner of life remained externally the same, all his former pleasures lost their charm for him, and he often thought of her. But he never thought of her, as he had thought of all the young girls he had met in society, nor as he had long, and sometimes with enthusiasm, thought of Sonya. Like almost every honest-hearted young man, he had thought of every young girl as of a possible future wife, had adapted to them in his imagination all the pictures of domestic felicity: the white morning wrapper, the wife behind the samovar, the wife’s carriage, the little ones, mamma and papa, their attitude to one another, and so on, and so on. And these pictures of the future afforded him gratification. But when he thought of Princess Marya, to whom the match-makers were trying to betroth him, he could never form any picture of his future married life with her. Even if he tried to do so, it all seemed incoherent and false. And it only filled him with dread.

The terrible news of the battle of Borodino, of our losses in killed and wounded, and the even more terrible news of the loss of Moscow reached Voronezh in the middle of September. Princess Marya, learning of her brother’s wound only from the newspapers, and having no definite information about him, was preparing (so Nikolay heard, though he had not seen her) to set off to try and reach Prince Andrey.

On hearing the news of the battle of Borodino and of the abandonment of Moscow, Rostov felt, not despair, rage, revenge, nor any such feeling, but a sudden weariness and vexation with everything at Voronezh, and a
sense of awkwardness and uneasy conscience. All the conversations he listened to seemed to him insincere; he did not know what to think of it all, and felt that only in the regiment would all become clear to him again. He made haste to conclude the purchase of horses, and was often without good cause ill-tempered with his servant and quartermaster.

Several days before Rostov’s departure there was a thanksgiving service in the cathedral for the victory gained by the Russian troops, and Nikolay went to the service. He was a little behind the governor, and was standing through the service meditating with befitting sedateness on the most various subjects. When the service was concluding, the governor’s wife beckoned him to her.

“Did you see the princess?” she said, with a motion of her hand towards a lady in black standing behind the choir.

Nikolay recognised Princess Marya at once, not so much from the profile he saw under her hat as from the feeling of watchful solicitude, awe, and pity which came over him at once. Princess Marya, obviously buried in her own thoughts, was making the last signs of the cross before leaving the church.

Nikolay gazed in wonder at her face. It was the same face he had seen before; there was the same general look of refined, inner, spiritual travail; but now there was an utterly different light in it. There was a touching expression of sadness, of prayer and of hope in it. With the same absence of hesitation as he had felt before in her presence, without waiting for the governor’s wife to urge him, without asking himself whether it were right, whether it were proper for him to address her here in church, Nikolay went up to her, and said he had heard of her trouble and grieved with his whole heart to hear of it. As soon as she heard his voice, a vivid colour glowed in her face, lighting up at once her joy and her sorrow.

“One thing I wanted to tell you, princess,” said Rostov, “that is, that if Prince Andrey Nikolaevitch were not living, since he is a colonel, it would be announced immediately in the gazettes.”

The princess looked at him, not comprehending his words, but comforted by the expression of sympathetic suffering in his face.

“And I know from so many instances that a wound from a splinter” (the papers said it was from a grenade) “is either immediately fatal or else very slight,” Nikolay went on. “We must hope for the best, and I am certain …”

Princess Marya interrupted him.

“Oh, it would be so aw …” she began, and her emotion choking her utterance, she bent her head with a graceful gesture, like everything she did in his presence, and glancing gratefully at him followed her aunt.

That evening Nikolay did not go out anywhere, but stayed at home to finish some accounts with the horse-vendors. By the time he had finished his work it was rather late to go out anywhere, but still early to go to bed, and Nikolay spent a long while walking up and down the room, thinking over his life, a thing that he rarely did.

Princess Marya had made an agreeable impression on him at Bogutcharovo. The fact of his meeting her then in such striking circumstances, and of his mother having at one time pitched precisely on her as the wealthy heiress suitable for him, had led him to look at her with special attention. During his stay at Voronezh, that impression had become, not merely a pleasing, but a very strong one. Nikolay was impressed by the peculiar, moral beauty which he discerned in her at this time. He had, however, been preparing to go away, and it had not entered his head to regret that in leaving Voronezh he was losing all chance of seeing her. But his meeting with Princess Marya that morning in church had, Nikolay felt, gone more deeply to his heart than he had anticipated and more deeply than he desired for his peace of mind. That pale, delicate, melancholy face, those luminous eyes, those soft, gracious gestures, and, above all, the deep and tender melancholy expressed in all her features, agitated him and drew his sympathy. In men Rostov could not bear an appearance of higher, spiritual life (it was why he did not like Prince Andrey), he spoke of it contemptuously as philosophy, idealism; but in Princess Marya it was just in that melancholy, showing all the depth of a spiritual world, strange and remote to Nikolay, that he found an irresistible attraction.

“She must be a marvellous girl! An angel, really!” he said to himself. “Why am I not free? Why was I in such a hurry with Sonya?” And involuntarily he compared the two: the poverty of the one and the wealth of the other in those spiritual gifts, which Nikolay was himself without and therefore prized so highly. He tried to picture what would have happened if he had been free, and in what way he would have made her an offer and she would have become his wife. No, he could not imagine that. A feeling of dread came over him and that picture would take no definite shape. With Sonya he had long ago made his picture of the future, and it was all so simple and clear, just because it was all made up
and he knew all there was in Sonya. But with Princess Marya he could not picture his future life, because he did not understand her—he simply loved her.

There was something light-hearted, something of child’s play in his dreams of Sonya. But to dream of Princess Marya was difficult and a little terrible.

“How she was praying!” he thought. “One could see that her whole soul was in her prayer. Yes, it was that prayer that moves mountains, and I am convinced that her prayer will be answered. Why don’t I pray for what I want?” he bethought himself. “What do I want? Freedom, release from Sonya. She was right,” he thought of what the governor’s wife had said, “nothing but misery can come of my marrying her. Muddle, mamma’s grief … our position … a muddle, a fearful muddle! Besides, I don’t even love her. No, I don’t love her in the right way. My God! take me out of this awful, hopeless position!” he began praying all at once. “Yes, prayer will move mountains, but one must believe, and not pray, as Natasha and I prayed as children for the snow to turn into sugar, and then ran out into the yard to try whether it had become sugar. No; but I am not praying for trifles now,” he said, putting his pipe down in the corner and standing with clasped hands before the holy picture. And softened by the thought of Princess Marya, he began to pray as he had not prayed for a long while. He had tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat when Lavrushka came in at the door with papers.

“Blockhead! bursting in when you’re not wanted!” said Nikolay, quickly changing his attitude.

“A courier has come,” said Lavrushka in a sleepy voice, “from the governor, a letter for you.”

“Oh, very well, thanks, you can go!”

Nikolay took the two letters. One was from his mother, the other from Sonya. He knew them from the handwriting, and broke open Sonya’s letter first. He had hardly read a few lines when his face turned white and his eyes opened wide in dismay and joy. “No, it’s not possible!” he said aloud. Unable to sit still, he began walking to and fro in the room, holding the letter in both hands as he read it. He skimmed through the letter, then read it through once and again, and shrugging his shoulders and flinging up his hands, he stood still in the middle of the room with wide-open mouth and staring eyes. What he had just been praying for with the assurance that God would answer his prayer had come to pass; but Nikolay was astounded at it as though it were
something extraordinary, and as though he had not expected it, and as though the very fact of its coming to pass so quickly proved that it had not come from God, to whom he had been praying, but was some ordinary coincidence.

The knot fastening his freedom, that had seemed so impossible to disentangle, had been undone by this unexpected and, as it seemed to Nikolay, uncalled-for letter from Sonya. She wrote that their late misfortunes, the loss of almost the whole of the Rostovs’ property in Moscow, and the countess’s frequently expressed desire that Nikolay should marry Princess Bolkonsky, and his silence and coldness of late, all taken together led her to decide to set him free from his promise, and to give him back complete liberty.

“It would be too painful to me to think that I could be a cause of sorrow and discord in the family which has overwhelmed me with benefits,” she wrote; “and the one aim of my love is the happiness of those I love, and therefore I beseech you, Nicolas, to consider yourself free, and to know that in spite of everything, no one can love you more truly than your—S
ONYA
.”

Both letters were from Troitsa. The other letter was from the countess. It described the last days in Moscow, the departure, the fire and the loss of the whole of their property. The countess wrote too that Prince Andrey had been among the train of wounded soldiers who had travelled with them. He was still in a very critical condition, but that the doctor said now that there was more hope. Sonya and Natasha were nursing him.

With this letter Nikolay went next day to call on Princess Marya. Neither Nikolay nor Princess Marya said a word as to all that was implied by the words: “Natasha is nursing him”; but thanks to this letter, Nikolay was brought suddenly into intimate relations, almost those of a kinsman, with the princess.

Next day Rostov escorted Princess Marya as far as Yaroslavl, and a few days later he set off himself to join his regiment.