War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [225]
Denisov bent over her hand, and she heard strange, incomprehensible sounds. She kissed him on his black, tousled, curly head. At that moment there was a hasty rustle of the countess’s skirts. She went up to them.
“Vassily Dmitrich, I thank you for the honor,” the countess said in an embarrassed tone, which seemed stern to Denisov, “but my daughter is so young, and I thought that you, as my son’s friend, would have addressed me first. In that case, you would not have brought me to the necessity of a refusal.”
“Countess…” said Denisov, with lowered eyes and a guilty look, and he was about to say something more, but faltered.
Natasha could not calmly see him so pitiful. She began to sob loudly.
“Countess, I am to blame before you,” Denisov went on in a halting voice. “But know that I adore your daughter and your whole family so much that I would give two lives…” He looked at the countess and, noticing her stern face…“Good-bye, Countess,” he said, kissed her hand, and, without looking at Natasha, with quick, resolute steps, left the room.
The next day Rostov saw off Denisov, who did not want to remain in Moscow a day longer. All Denisov’s Moscow friends were seeing him off at the Gypsies’, and he did not remember how he was put in the sleigh and driven the first three posting stations.
After Denisov’s departure, Rostov, waiting for the money, which the old count could not raise all at once, spent two more weeks in Moscow without leaving the house, mostly in the young ladies’ room.
Sonya was more devoted and tender to him than ever. It was as if she wanted to show him that his loss at cards was a feat which made her love him still more; but Nikolai now considered himself unworthy of her.
He covered the girls’ albums with verses and music, and, without taking leave of any of his acquaintances, having finally sent off the entire forty-three thousand and received Dolokhov’s receipt, left at the end of November to catch up with his regiment, which was already in Poland.
Part Two
I
After his talk with his wife, Pierre went to Petersburg. At the Torzhok posting station there were no horses, or else the postmaster did not want to give them to him. Pierre had to wait. Without undressing, he lay down on a leather sofa in front of a round table, put his big feet in their warm boots on the table, and lapsed into thought.
“Would you like to have the suitcases brought in? Would you like to have the bed made, or tea served?” asked his valet.
Pierre did not reply, because he heard and saw nothing. He had lapsed into thought at the previous station and went on thinking about the same thing—so important that he paid no attention to what was happening around him. He not only was not interested in whether he would get to Petersburg sooner or later, or whether he would or would not find a place to rest in this station, but, compared with the thoughts that occupied him then, it was all the same to him whether he spent a few hours or his whole life in this station.
The postmaster, his wife, the valet, a peasant woman with Torzhok embroidery kept coming into the room, offering their services. Pierre, not changing the position of his raised legs, looked at them through his spectacles without understanding what they could possibly want or how they could possibly live without resolving the questions that occupied him. And he had been occupied with the same questions ever since the day when he came back from Sokolniki after the duel and spent the first tormenting, sleepless night; only now, in the solitude of the journey, they came over him with particular force. Whatever he started thinking about, he came back to the same questions, which he could not resolve and could not stop asking himself. It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.