War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [135]
She turned, looked straight at him with her shining dark eyes, and smiled.
“So you never noticed before how beautiful I am?” Hélène seemed to say. “You never noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman who could belong to anyone, even you,” said her gaze. And at that moment Pierre felt that Hélène not only could, but must be his wife, that it could not be otherwise.
He knew it at that moment as certainly as he would have known it standing at the altar with her. How it would be and when, he did not know; he did not even know whether it would be good (he even felt that it was not good for some reason), but he knew that it would be.
Pierre lowered his eyes, raised them again, and wanted to see her once more as a distant, alien beauty, the way he had seen her every day before then; but he could no longer do that. Could not, just as a man who once looked at a stalk of tall grass in the mist and saw it as a tree, can look at the stalk of grass itself and once more see it as a tree. She was terribly close to him. She already had power over him. And there were no longer any obstructions between them, except for the obstruction of his own will.
“Bon, je vous laisse dans votre petit coin. Je vois que vous y êtes très bien,”*230 said the voice of Anna Pavlovna.
And Pierre, trying fearfully to recall whether he had done anything reprehensible, blushed and looked around him. It seemed to him that everyone knew what had happened to him as well as he did.
A short time later, when he went up to the large circle, Anna Pavlovna said to him:
“On dit que vous embellisez votre maison de Pétersbourg.”*231
(That was true: the architect had said it was needed, and Pierre, not knowing why himself, was redecorating his enormous house in Petersburg.)
“C’est bien, mais ne déménagez pas de chez le prince Basile. Il est bon d’avoir un ami comme le prince,” she said, smiling at Prince Vassily. “J’en sais quelque chose. N’est-ce pas?†232 And you’re still so young. You need advice. You’re not angry with me for exercising an old woman’s rights?” She paused, as women always pause and wait for something after referring to their age. “If you get married, that’s another matter.” And she united them in a single glance. Pierre did not look at Hélène, nor she at him. But she was still just as terribly close to him. He mumbled something and blushed.
On returning home, Pierre could not fall asleep for a long time, thinking about what had happened to him. And what had happened to him? Nothing. He had simply realized that a woman he had known as a child, of whom he used to say distractedly, “Yes, good-looking,” when told that Hélène was a beauty—he had realized that this woman could belong to him.
“But she’s stupid, I’ve said myself that she’s stupid,” he thought. “This isn’t love. On the contrary, there’s something vile in the feeling she aroused in me, something forbidden. I’ve been told that her brother Anatole was in love with her and she with him, and there was a whole story, and that’s why Anatole was sent away. Ippolit is her brother. Prince Vassily is her father. It’s not good,” he thought; but while he was arguing like that (these arguments were left unfinished), he caught himself smiling and was aware that a whole series of arguments had floated up from behind the others, that he was at the same time thinking about her worthlessness and dreaming of how she would be his wife, how she might come to love him, how she might be quite different, and how everything he had thought and heard about her might be untrue. And again he saw her not as some daughter of Prince Vassily, but saw her whole body, merely covered by a gray dress.