War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [308]
But just then Berg came up to Pierre, insistently begging him to take part in an argument between the general and the colonel about Spanish affairs.
Berg was pleased and happy. The smile of joy never left his face. The soirée went very well and exactly like other soirées he had seen. Everything was similar. The ladies’ subtle conversation, and the cards, and the general raising his voice over cards, and the samovar, and the cakes; but there was one thing missing that he had always seen at the soirées he wished to imitate. The missing thing was loud conversation among the men and an argument about something important and intellectual. The general began that conversation, and Berg drew Pierre into it.
XXII
The next day Prince Andrei went to the Rostovs’ for dinner, as Count Ilya Andreich had invited him, and spent the whole day with them.
Everyone in the house sensed for whose sake Prince Andrei had come, and he, without concealing it, tried to be with Natasha the whole day. Not only in Natasha’s soul, frightened, but happy and enraptured, but in all the house there was a sense of fear in the face of something important that was about to be accomplished. The countess looked at Prince Andrei with her sad and sternly serious eyes as he talked with Natasha, and timidly pretended to begin some insignificant conversation as soon as he turned to look at her. Sonya was afraid to leave Natasha and afraid of being a nuisance when she was with them. Natasha turned pale from fearful expectation when she was left alone with him for a moment. Prince Andrei amazed her by his timidity. She felt that he had to tell her something, but could not resolve to do it.
When Prince Andrei left in the evening, the countess went over to Natasha and said in a whisper:
“Well?”
“Mama, for God’s sake, don’t ask me anything now. It’s impossible to talk about it,” said Natasha.
But in spite of that, Natasha, now excited, now frightened, her eyes staring, lay for a long time in her mother’s bed that evening. She told her how he had praised her, then how he had said he would be going abroad, then had asked where they would spend the summer, then how he had asked her about Boris.
“But nothing, nothing like this…has ever happened to me before!” she said. “Only I’m frightened, I’m always frightened with him—what does it mean? It means it’s something real, doesn’t it? Mama, are you asleep?”
“No, dearest, I’m frightened myself,” her mother replied. “Go.”
“I won’t sleep anyway. How stupid it is to sleep! Mama, mama, nothing like this has ever happened to me!” she repeated with astonishment and fear before the feeling she was aware of within her. “Who could have thought!…”
It seemed to Natasha that when she had first seen Prince Andrei in Otradnoe, she had fallen in love with him. She was as if frightened by this strange, unexpected happiness, that the one she had already chosen then (she was firmly convinced of it), that that same one had now met her again and seemed not to be indifferent to her. “Why did he have to come to Petersburg precisely now, when we’re here? Why did we have to meet at that ball? It’s all fate. It’s clearly fate, everything has been leading up to it. Back then, when I’d only just seen him, I felt something special.”
“What else did he say to you? There were some verses? Read them…” her mother said pensively, asking about the verses that Prince Andrei had written in Natasha’s album.
“Mama, it’s not shameful that he’s a widower?”
“Enough, Natasha. Pray to God. Les mariages se font dans les cieux.”*353
“Mama, darling, how I love you, how good I feel!” Natasha cried, shedding tears of happiness and excitement and embracing her mother.
At that same time, Andrei was sitting with