War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [346]
There was a patter of feet on the steps of the servants’ porch, a loud creak on the last step, where the snow lay drifted, and the old maid’s voice said:
“Straight, straight down that path, miss. Only don’t look back!”
“I’m not afraid,” Sonya’s voice replied, and her little feet, screeching and squeaking in their thin shoes, went down the path towards Nikolai.
Sonya walked wrapped in her fur coat. She was two steps away before she saw him; she also saw him not as she had known him and had always been a little afraid of him. He was in a woman’s dress, with tousled hair and a happy smile that was new for Sonya. Sonya quickly ran to him.
“Quite different and yet the same,” thought Nikolai, looking at her face all lit up by the moonlight. He slipped his hands under the coat that covered her head, embraced her, pressed her to him, and kissed her on the lips, which had a mustache on them and smelled of burnt cork. Sonya kissed him right in the middle of the lips and, freeing her small hands, put them to his cheeks.
“Sonya!…Nicolas!…” was all they said. They ran to the barn and came back, each by a separate porch.
XII
When they all set out for home from Pelageya Danilovna’s, Natasha, who always saw and noticed everything, arranged it so that she and Louisa Ivanovna got into the sleigh with Dimmler, and Sonya got in with Nikolai and the maids.
Nikolai, no longer racing, drove smoothly on the way back and, in that strange moonlight, kept peering at Sonya, seeking, in that ever-changing light, behind the eyebrows and mustache, the former and the present Sonya, from whom he had now resolved never to be parted. He peered, and, when he recognized the same one and the other and remembered the smell of cork mixed with the feeling of the kiss, he drew in the frosty air and, gazing at the earth speeding past and the brilliant sky, he again felt himself in a magical kingdom.
“Do you feel good, Sonya?” he asked now and then.
“Yes,” replied Sonya, “and you?”
In the middle of the way, Nikolai handed the horses over to the coachman, ran to Natasha’s sleigh for a moment, and stood on the fender.
“Natasha,” he whispered to her in French, “you know, I’ve made up my mind about Sonya.”
“Have you told her?” asked Natasha, suddenly all beaming with joy.
“Ah, Natasha, you’re so strange with that mustache and those eyebrows! Are you glad?”
“I’m so glad, so glad! I was getting angry with you. I didn’t tell you, but you behaved badly towards her. She’s such a heart, Nicolas, I’m so glad! I can be nasty, but I was ashamed to be happy alone, without Sonya,” Natasha went on. “Now I’m so glad! Well, run to her.”
“No, wait, ah, how funny you are!” said Nikolai, peering at her and finding in his sister as well something new, unusual, and enchantingly tender, which he had not seen in her before. “Natasha, it’s something magical, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, “you’ve done a wonderful thing.”
“If I’d seen her before as she is now,” thought Nikolai, “I’d have asked her long ago what I should do, and I’d have done whatever she told me, and everything would be right.”
“So you’re glad, and I’ve done right?”
“Oh, so right! I recently quarreled with mama about it. Mama said she was trying to snare you. How could she say that! I nearly had a fight with mama. And I’ll never let anybody say or think anything bad about her, because there’s nothing but good in her.”
“So it’s right?” said Nikolai, once more searching into the expression of his sister’s face to find out if it was true, and, his boots creaking, he jumped off the fender and ran to his sleigh. The same happy, smiling Circassian with a little mustache and shining eyes, looking from under a sable hood, sat there, and this Circassian was Sonya, and this Sonya was certainly his future happy and loving wife.
Having come home and told their mother how they spent the time at