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PIERRE was conducted into the big, lighted-up dining-room. In a few minutes
he heard footsteps and the princess and Natasha came into the room. Natasha was
calm, though the stern, unsmiling expression had come back again now into her
face. Princess Marya, Natasha, and Pierre all equally experienced that feeling
of awkwardness which usually follows when a serious and deeply felt conversation
is over. To continue on the same subject is impossible; to speak of trivial
matters seems desecration, and to be silent is unpleasant, because one wants to
talk, and this silence seems a sort of affectation. In silence they came to the
table. The footmen drew back and pushed up the chairs. Pierre unfolded his cold
dinner napkin, and making up his mind to break the silence he glanced at Natasha
and at Princess Marya. Both had plainly reached the same decision at the same
moment; in the eyes of both there gleamed a satisfaction with life, and an
admission that there was gladness in it as well as sorrow.
“Do you drink vodka?” said Princess Marya, and those words at once dispelled
the shadows of the past.
“Tell us about yourself,” said Princess Marya; “such incredibly marvellous
stories are being told about you.”
“Yes,” answered Pierre, with the gentle smile of irony that had now become
habitual with him. “I myself am told of marvels that I never dreamed of. Marya
Abramovna invited me to come and see her and kept telling me what had happened
to me, or ought to have happened. Stepan Stepanovitch too instructed me how I
was to tell my story. Altogether I have noticed that to be an interesting person
is a very easy position (I am now an interesting person); people invite me and
then tell me all about it.”
Natasha smiled and was about to say something.
“We have been told that you lost two millions in Moscow. Is that true?”
“Oh, I am three times as rich,” said Pierre. In spite of the strain on his
fortune, of his wife's debts, and the necessity of rebuilding, Pierre still said
that he had become three times as rich.
“What I have undoubtedly gained,” he said, “is freedom …” he was beginning
seriously; but on second thoughts he did not continue, feeling that it was too
egoistic a subject.
“And you are building?”
“Yes, such are Savelitch's orders.”
“Tell me, you had not heard of the countess's death when you stayed in
Moscow?” said Princess Marya; and she flushed crimson at once, conscious that in
putting this question to him after his mention of “freedom,” she was ascribing a
significance to his words which was possibly not intended.
“No,” answered Pierre, obviously unconscious of any awkwardness in the
interpretation Princess Marya had put on his allusion to his freedom. “I heard
of it in Orel, and you cannot imagine how it affected me. We were not an
exemplary couple,” he said quickly, glancing at Natasha and detecting in her
face curiosity as to how he would speak of his wife. “But her death affected me
greatly. When two people quarrel, both are always in fault. And one becomes
terribly aware of one's shortcomings towards any one who is no more. And then
such a death … apart from friends and consolation. I felt very sorry for her,”
he concluded, and noticed with satisfaction a glad look of approval on Natasha's
face.
“And so you are once more an eligible parti,” said Princess
Marya.
Pierre flushed suddenly crimson; and for a long while he tried not to look at
Natasha. When he did venture to glance at her, her face was cold and severe,
even, he fancied, disdainful.
“But did you really see and talk to Napoleon, as we have been told?” said
Princess Marya.
Pierre laughed.
“Not once, never. Every one always imagines that to be a prisoner is
equivalent to being on a visit to Napoleon. I never saw, never even heard
anything about him. I was in much lower company.”
Supper was over, and Pierre, who had at first refused to talk about his
captivity, was gradually drawn into telling them about it.
“But it is true that you stayed behind to kill Napoleon?” Natasha asked him
with a slight smile. “I guessed that at the time when we met you by the Suharev
Tower: do you remember?”
Pierre owned that it was so; and from that question was led on by Princess
Marya's, and still more by Natasha's, questions to give a detailed account of
his adventures.
At first he told his story with that tone of gentle irony that he always had
now towards men and especially towards himself. But as he came to describe the
horrors and sufferings he had seen, he was drawn on unawares, and began to speak
with the suppressed emotion of a man living again in imagination through the
intense impressions of the past.
Princess Marya looked from Pierre to Natasha with a gentle smile. In all he
told them she saw only Pierre and his goodness. Natasha, her head supported in
her hand, and her face changing continually with the story, watched Pierre,
never taking her eyes off him, and was in imagination passing through all he
told her with him. Not only her eyes, but her exclamations and the brief
questions she put showed Pierre that she understood from his words just what he
was trying to convey by them. It was evident that she understood, not only what
he said, but also what he would have liked to say and could not express in
words. The episode of the child and of the woman in whose defence he was taken
prisoner, Pierre described in this way. “It was an awful scene, children
abandoned, some in the midst of the fire … Children were dragged out before my
eyes … and women, who had their things pulled off them, earrings torn off
…”
Pierre flushed and hesitated. “Then a patrol came up and all who were not
pillaging, all the men, that is, they took prisoner. And me with them.”
“I am sure you are not telling us all; I am sure you did something,” said
Natasha, and after a moment's pause, “something good.”
Pierre went on with his story. When he came to the execution, he would have
passed over the horrible details of it, but Natasha insisted on his leaving
nothing out.
Pierre was beginning to tell them about Karataev; he had risen from the table
and was walking up and down, Natasha following him with her eyes.
“No,” he said, stopping short in his story, “you cannot understand what I
learned from that illiterate man—that simple creature.”
“No, no, tell us,” said Natasha. “Where is he now?”
“He was killed almost before my eyes.”
And Pierre began to describe the latter part of their retreat, Karataev's
illness (his voice shook continually) and then his death.
Pierre told the tale of his adventures as he had never thought of them
before. He saw now as it were a new significance in all he had been through. He
experienced now in telling it all to Natasha that rare happiness given to men by
women when they listen to them—not by clever women, who, as they listen, are
either trying to remember what they are told to enrich their intellect and on
occasion to repeat it, or to adapt what is told them to their own ideas and to
bring out in haste the clever comments elaborated in their little mental
factory. This rare happiness is given only by those real women, gifted with a
faculty for picking out and assimilating all that is best in what a man shows
them. Natasha, though herself unconscious of it, was all rapt attention; she did
not lost one word, one quaver of the voice, one glance, one twitching in the
facial muscles, one gesture of Pierre's. She caught the word before it was
uttered and bore it straight to her open heart, divining the secret import of
all Pierre's spiritual travail.
Princess Marya understood his story and sympathised with him, but she was
seeing now something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the
possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre. And this idea,
which struck her now for the first time, filled her heart with gladness.
It was three o'clock in the night. The footmen, with melancholy and severe
faces, came in with fresh candles, but no one noticed them.
Pierre finished his story. With shining, eager eyes Natasha still gazed
intently and persistently at him, as though she longed to understand something
more, that perhaps he had left unsaid. In shamefaced and happy confusion, Pierre
glanced at her now and then, and was thinking what to say now to change the
subject. Princess Marya was mute. It did not strike any of them that it was
three o'clock in the night, and time to be in bed.
“They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. “But if at once, this
minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or
go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a
prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of
our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and
good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a
great deal before us. That I say to you,” he said, turning to Natasha.
“Yes, yes,” she said, answering something altogether different, “and I too
would ask for nothing better than to go through it all again.”
Pierre looked intently at her.
“Yes, and nothing more,” Natasha declared.
“Not true, not true,” cried Pierre. “I am not to blame for being alive and
wanting to live; and you the same.”
All at once Natasha let her head drop into her hands, and burst into
tears.
“What is it, Natasha?” said Princess Marya.
“Nothing, nothing.” She smiled through her tears to Pierre. “Good-night, it's
bedtime.”
Pierre got up, and took leave.
Natasha, as she always did, went with Princess Marya into her bedroom. They
talked of what Pierre had told them. Princess Marya did not give her opinion of
Pierre. Natasha, too, did not talk of him.
“Well, good-night, Marie,” said Natasha. “Do you know I am often afraid that
we don't talk of him” (she meant Prince Andrey), “as though we were afraid of
desecrating our feelings, and so we forget him.”
Princess Marya sighed heavily, and by this sigh acknowledged the justice of
Natasha's words; but she did not in words agree with her.
“Is it possible to forget?” she said.
“I was so glad to tell all about it to-day; it was hard and painful, and yet
I was glad to … very glad,” said Natasha; “I am sure that he really loved him.
That was why I told him … it didn't matter my telling him?” she asked suddenly,
blushing.
“Pierre? Oh, no! How good he is,” said Princess Marya.
“Do you know, Marie,” said Natasha, suddenly, with a mischievous smile, such
as Princess Marya had not seen for a long while on her face. “He has become so
clean and smooth and fresh; as though he had just come out of a bath; do you
understand? Out of a moral bath. Isn't it so?”
“Yes,” said Princess Marya. “He has gained a great deal.”
“And his short jacket, and his cropped hair; exactly as though he had just
come out of a bath … papa used sometimes …”
“I can understand how he” (Prince Andrey) “cared for no one else as he
did for him,” said Princess Marya.
“Yes, and he is so different from him. They say men are better friends when
they are utterly different. That must be true; he is not a bit like him in
anything, is he?”
“Yes, and he is such a splendid fellow.”
“Well, good-night,” answered Natasha. And the same mischievous smile lingered
a long while as though forgotten on her face.
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