War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [375]
After several recitations, Mlle George left, and Countess Bezukhov invited the company to the reception room.
The count wanted to leave, but Hélène begged him not to ruin her improvised ball. The Rostovs stayed. Anatole invited Natasha for a waltz, and during the waltz he pressed her waist and her hand, told her that she was ravissante and that he loved her. During the écossaise, which she again danced with Kuragin, when they were left alone, Anatole said nothing and only looked at her. Natasha had doubts whether what he had said to her during the waltz was not a dream. At the end of the first figure, he again pressed her hand. Natasha raised her frightened eyes to him, but there was such a self-assured, tender expression in his affectionate gaze and smile that, looking at him, she could not tell him what she had to tell him. She lowered her eyes.
“Don’t say such things to me, I am betrothed and love another man,” she said quickly…She glanced at him. Anatole was not embarrassed or upset by what she told him.
“Don’t talk to me about that. What do I care?” he said. “I say that I’m madly, madly in love with you. Is it my fault that you’re exquisite?…It’s our turn.”
Natasha, animated and alarmed, looked around with wide-open, frightened eyes and seemed merrier than usual. She remembered almost nothing of what happened that evening. They danced the écossaise and the Grossvater, her father invited her to leave, she begged to stay. Wherever she was, whomever she talked with, she felt his eyes upon her. Then she remembered that she asked her father’s permission to go to the dressing room and straighten her dress, that Hélène came after her, spoke to her, laughingly, of her brother’s love, and that in a small sitting room she again met Anatole, that Hélène disappeared somewhere, the two of them were left alone, and Anatole, taking her hand, said in a tender voice:
“I cannot call on you, but can it be that I will never see you? I love you madly. Can it be never?…” And, blocking her way, he brought his face close to hers.
His shining, big, masculine eyes were so close to her eyes that she saw nothing except those eyes.
“Natalie?!” his voice whispered questioningly, and someone squeezed her hands painfully. “Natalie?!”
“I understand nothing, I have nothing to say,” her gaze said.
Hot lips pressed themselves to her lips, and at the same moment she felt herself released again, and heard the rustle of Hélène’s dress in the room and the sound of her footsteps. Natasha glanced at Hélène, then, red and trembling, gave him a fearfully questioning glance and went to the door.
“Un mot, un seul, au nom de dieu,”*384 Anatole was saying.
She stopped. She needed so much that he say that word which would explain to her what had happened and that she could answer him.
“Natalie, un mot, un seul,” he kept repeating, apparently not knowing what to say, and he repeated it until Hélène came up to them.
Hélène came out to the drawing room again together with Natasha. Without staying for supper, the Rostovs left.
Having returned home, Natasha did not sleep all night; an insoluble question tormented her: whom did she love, Anatole or Prince Andrei? She did love Prince Andrei—she clearly remembered how strongly she loved him. But she also loved Anatole, that was beyond doubt. “Otherwise how could all this have happened?” she wondered. “If, after that, in saying good-bye to him, I could respond to his smile with a smile, if I could let it go that far, it means that I loved him from the first moment. It means that he is kind, noble, and beautiful, and it was impossible not to love him. What am I to do, if I love him and love the other?” she said to herself, finding no answers to these terrible questions.
XIV
Morning came with its cares and bustle. Everybody got up, began to move, to talk, again the dressmakers came, again Marya Dmitrievna came out, and tea was served. Natasha looked at them all uneasily, with wide-open eyes, as if she wanted to catch every glance directed at her, and tried to seem