War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [336]
“Got it?” asked Nikolai.
“What are you thinking about now, Nikolenka?” asked Natasha. They liked asking each other that.
“Me?” said Nikolai, trying to recall. “You see, first I was thinking that Rugai, the red dog, resembles uncle, and that if he were a man, he would always keep uncle with him, if not for the chase, then for his tunefulness. How tuneful uncle is! Isn’t it so? Well, and you?”
“Me? Wait, wait. Yes, at first I was thinking, here we are driving along and we think we’re driving home, but God knows where we’re going in this darkness, and suddenly we’ll arrive and see that we’re not in Otradnoe, but in a magic kingdom. And then I was also thinking…No, nothing else.”
“I know, you must have been thinking about him,” said Nikolai, smiling, as Natasha could tell from the sound of his voice.
“No,” said Natasha, though in fact she had also been thinking at the same time about Prince Andrei and how he would have liked their uncle. “And I’ve also been repeating, all the way I’ve been repeating: how well Anisyushka stepped out, how well…” said Natasha. And Nikolai heard her ringing, causeless, happy laughter.
“You know,” she suddenly said, “I know I’ll never again be as happy and peaceful as I am now.”
“That’s nonsense, silliness, rubbish,” said Nikolai, and thought: “How lovely my Natasha is! I have no other friend like her and never will. Why is she getting married? We could keep driving around together!”
“How lovely my Nikolai is!” thought Natasha.
“Ah! there’s still light in the drawing room,” she said, pointing to the windows of the house, shining beautifully in the wet, velvet darkness of the night.
VIII
Count Ilya Andreich resigned as marshal of the nobility because the post entailed very great expenses. But his affairs did not improve. Often Natasha and Nikolai saw secret, worried conversations between their parents and heard talk of selling the Rostovs’ magnificent ancestral house and the estate near Moscow. Without the marshalship, he did not have to have such large receptions, and life in Otradnoe took a quieter course than in former years; but still, the huge house and wing were full of people, and, as before, more than twenty sat down at table. These were all people who had been accustomed to the house, almost members of the family, or such as, it seemed, had necessarily to live in the count’s house. These were the musician Dimmler7 and his wife, the dancing master Iogel and his family, the old maiden lady Belov, who lived in the house, and many others as well: Petya’s teachers, the girls’ former governess, and simply people who for some reason found it better or more advantageous to live in the count’s house than in their own. There were not such big receptions as before, but they maintained the same way of life, for without it the count and countess could not imagine life at all. There was the same hunt, increased still more by Nikolai, the same fifty horses and fifteen coachmen in the stable; the same expensive presents to each other on name days and festive dinners for the whole district; the same whists and Bostons, during which the count, holding his cards fanlike for everyone to see, allowed himself to lose hundreds daily to his neighbors, who looked upon their right to play cards with Count Ilya Andreich as upon a most profitable source of income.
The count walked about in his affairs as in an enormous net, trying not to believe that he was entangled and with each step getting more and more entangled, and feeling himself unable either to break the meshes that ensnared him or to begin carefully and patiently to disentangle them. The countess felt with her loving heart that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count’s fault, that he could not help being what he was, that