War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [33]
“So-o-onya! One word! How can you torment me and yourself so because of a fantasy?” said Nikolai, taking her hand.
Sonya did not pull her hand away and stopped crying.
Natasha, motionless and breathless, with shining eyes, watched from behind her ambush. “What will happen now?” she thought.
“Sonya! The whole world is no use to me! You alone are everything,” said Nikolai. “I’ll prove it to you.”
“I don’t like it when you talk like that.”
“Well, then I won’t, well, forgive me, Sonya!” He drew her to him and kissed her.
“Ah, how nice!” thought Natasha, and when Sonya and Nikolai left the room, she went out after them and called Boris.
“Boris, come here,” she said with a significant and sly air. “There’s something I must tell you. Here, here,” she said and led him to the conservatory, to the place between the tubs where she had been hiding. Boris, smiling, followed her.
“What is this something?” he asked.
She became embarrassed, looked around, and, seeing her doll abandoned on a tub, took it in her hands.
“Kiss the doll,” she said.
Boris looked into her animated face with attentive, gentle eyes and said nothing.
“You don’t want to? Well, come here, then,” she said and went deeper among the plants and dropped her doll. “Closer, closer!” she whispered. She caught the officer by the cuffs with both hands, and her flushed face showed solemnity and fear.
“And do you want to kiss me?” she whispered barely audibly, looking at him from under her eyebrows, smiling and almost weeping with excitement.
Boris blushed.
“You’re so funny!” he said, bending down to her, blushing still more, but not undertaking anything and waiting.
She suddenly jumped up onto a tub, becoming taller than he, embraced him with her thin, bare arms, which bent higher than his neck, and, tossing her hair back with a movement of the head, kissed him right on the lips.
She slipped between the pots to the other side of the plants and stopped, her head lowered.
“Natasha,” he said, “you know I love you, but…”
“You’re in love with me?” Natasha interrupted.
“Yes, I am, but, please, let’s not do like just now…Another four years…Then I’ll ask for your hand.”
Natasha reflected.
“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…” she said, counting on her thin little fingers. “All right! So it’s settled?”
And a smile of joy and reassurance lit up her animated face.
“Settled!” said Boris.
“Forever?” said the girl. “Till death?”
And, taking him under the arm, with a happy face she slowly walked beside him to the sitting room.
XI
The countess was so tired out from the visits that she ordered no one else to be received, and the porter was told simply to be sure to invite for dinner everyone who came by with congratulations. The countess wanted to talk personally with her childhood friend, Princess Anna Mikhailovna, whom she had not seen properly since her return from Petersburg. Anna Mikhailovna, with her weepy and pleasant face, moved closer to the countess’s armchair.
“I’ll be perfectly frank with you,” said Anna Mikhailovna. “There are few of us old friends left! That’s why I cherish your friendship so much.”
Anna Mikhailovna looked at Vera and stopped. The countess pressed her friend’s hand.
“Vera,” said the countess, turning to her older daughter, obviously not her favorite. “How is it you have no notion of anything? Can’t you feel that you’re not needed here? Go to your sisters, or…”
The beautiful Vera smiled disdainfully, apparently not feeling the slightest offense.
“If you had told me long ago, mama, I would have left at once,” she said and went to her room. But, passing through the sitting room, she noticed two couples sitting symmetrically by the two windows. She stopped and smiled disdainfully. Sonya was sitting close to Nikolai, who was writing out some verses for her, the first he had ever written. Boris and Natasha were sitting by the other window and fell silent when Vera came in. Sonya and Natasha looked at Vera with guilty and happy faces.
It was amusing and touching to look at these enamoured girls, but the sight of them evidently