War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [215]
“No, I understand very well,” replied Rostov, who was under the influence of his new friend.
In the fall the Rostov family returned to Moscow. At the beginning of winter, Denisov also returned and stayed with the Rostovs. This early wintertime of 1806 that Nikolai Rostov spent in Moscow was one of the happiest and merriest for him and his whole family. Nikolai attracted many young men to his parents’ house. Vera was a beautiful twenty-year-old girl; Sonya a sixteen-year-old, with all the loveliness of a just-opened flower; Natasha, half young lady, half child, now childishly funny, now girlishly bewitching.
At that time there was a special atmosphere of amorousness in the Rostovs’ house, as happens in a house where there are very nice and very young girls. Every young man who came to the Rostovs’ house, looking at these young, susceptible girlish faces, always smiling at something (probably their own happiness), at this lively rushing about, listening to this young female babble, incoherent, but affectionate towards everyone, ready for anything, filled with hope, listening to these incoherent noises, now of singing, now of music, experienced the same feeling of readiness for love and expectation of happiness that these young people of the Rostovs’ house themselves experienced.
Among the young men introduced by Rostov, one of the first was Dolokhov, whom everyone in the house liked with the exception of Natasha. She almost quarreled with her brother over Dolokhov. She insisted that he was a wicked man, that, in his duel with Bezukhov, Pierre had been right and Dolokhov wrong, that he was unpleasant and unnatural.
“There’s nothing for me to understand!” Natasha cried with stubborn willfulness. “He’s wicked and unfeeling. I do like your Denisov, and he’s a carouser and all that, but even so I like him, which means I understand. I don’t know how to tell you; he has it all calculated, and I don’t like that. But Denisov…”
“Well, Denisov’s something else,” replied Nikolai, making it clear that, compared with Dolokhov, even Denisov was nothing, “you should understand what a soul Dolokhov has, you should see him with his mother, he has such a heart!”
“Well, that I don’t know, but I feel awkward with him. And do you know that he’s in love with Sonya?”
“What silliness…”
“I’m certain, you’ll see.”
Natasha’s prediction was proving true. Dolokhov, who did not like the society of women, began to frequent their house, and the question of whom he was doing it for was soon resolved (though no one spoke of it), in the sense that he was doing it for Sonya. And Sonya knew it, though she would never have dared to say it, and she flushed crimson every time Dolokhov appeared.
Dolokhov dined frequently with the Rostovs, never missed a play when they went, and attended the balls for adolescentes*286 at Iogel’s, where the Rostovs always went. He paid most attention to Sonya and looked at her with such eyes that not only was she unable to endure that gaze without turning red, but even the old countess and Natasha blushed when they noticed it.
It was clear that this strong, strange man was under the irresistible influence produced on him by this dark-haired, graceful girl who loved another.
Rostov noticed something new between Dolokhov and Sonya; but he did not define for himself what these new relations were. “They’re all in love with somebody,