War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [304]
XIX
The next day Prince Andrei went to visit certain houses he had not been to yet, among them the house of the Rostovs, with whom he had renewed his acquaintance at the last ball. Besides the rules of courtesy, according to which he ought to call on the Rostovs, Prince Andrei wanted to see at home that special, animated girl who had left him with such a pleasant memory.
Natasha was one of the first to meet him. She was wearing a dark blue everyday dress, in which she seemed still better to Prince Andrei than in a ball gown. She and the whole Rostov family received Prince Andrei like an old friend, simply and cordially. The whole family, which Prince Andrei used to judge so severely, now seemed to him to consist of wonderful, simple, and kind people. The old count’s hospitality and good-nature, which struck one especially nicely in Petersburg, was such that Prince Andrei could not refuse to stay for dinner. “Yes, they’re kind, nice people,” thought Bolkonsky, “who of course don’t understand a whit of the treasure they have in Natasha; but kind people, who constitute the best backdrop for setting off this special girl, so poetic, lovely, and overflowing with life.”
Prince Andrei sensed in Natasha the presence of a special world, completely foreign to him, filled with joys of a sort as yet unknown to him, that foreign world which even then, in the Otradnoe avenue and at the window on that moonlit night, had enticed him so. Now that world no longer enticed him, it was no longer foreign; but he himself, having entered it, found in it a new delight.
After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrei’s request, went to the clavichord and began to sing. Prince Andrei stood by the window, talking with the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrei fell silent and suddenly felt choked with tears, which he did not know was possible for him. He looked at the singing Natasha and something new and happy occurred in his soul. He was happy, but at the same time he felt sad. He had decidedly nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. About what? His former love? The little princess? His disappointments?…His hopes for the future?…Yes and no. The main thing he wanted to weep about was a sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshly that he himself, and even she, was. This opposition tormented him and gladdened him while she sang.
As soon as Natasha finished singing, she went over to him and asked him how he liked her voice. She asked it and became embarrassed just after she said it, realizing that it was not a question to be asked. He smiled, looking at her, and said that he liked her singing just as he liked everything she did.
Prince Andrei left the Rostovs’ late in the evening. He went to bed as was his habit, but soon realized that he could not sleep. Lighting a candle, he would sit on the bed, then get up, then lie down again, not troubled in the least by his insomnia: he felt as joyful and new in his soul as if he had gone from a stuffy room into God’s open world. It did not occur to him that he was in love with Miss Rostov; he was not thinking of her; he only pictured her to himself, and owing to that his whole life appeared to him in a new light. “Why do I thrash about, why do I fuss inside this narrow, limited frame, when life, the whole of life, with all its joys, is open to me?” he said to himself. And for the first time in a long while he began making happy plans for the future. He decided that he must occupy himself with the education of his son, by finding a tutor for him and entrusting the boy to the tutor; then he must retire from the service and go abroad, to