War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [47]
And she kissed her on the head. Sonya got up, the kitten revived, its eyes sparkled, and it seemed ready to raise its tail any moment, spring up on its soft paws, and play with a ball of yarn, as a kitten ought to do.
“Do you think so? Really? Swear to God?” she said, quickly straightening her dress and hair.
“Really! Swear to God!” replied Natasha, straightening a strand of stiff hair that had come loose from her friend’s braid.
And the two girls laughed.
“So, let’s go and sing ‘The Spring.’”
“Yes, let’s.”
“You know, that fat Pierre, who sat across from me, is so funny!” Natasha said suddenly, stopping. “I feel so merry!”
And Natasha went running down the corridor.
Sonya, brushing off feathers, and hiding the verses in her bosom, near her neck with its protruding collarbones, her face flushed, went running after Natasha with light, merry steps down the corridor to the sitting room. At the request of the guests, the young people sang the quartet “The Spring,” which everyone liked very much. Then Nikolai sang a song he had just learned:38
On a pleasant night beneath the moon
How happy is the reverie
That in this world there still is one
Whose thoughts do ever turn to thee!
And as her lovely hand, which she
Lets wander o’er the harp’s bright strings,
Plays in impassioned harmony,
So she to thee her summons sings!
One day, two days, then paradise…
But ah! thy friend is cold as ice!
And he had not finished singing the last words before the young people in the ballroom began preparing to dance, and the musicians began stamping their feet and coughing in the gallery.
Pierre was sitting in the drawing room, where Shinshin, knowing he had come from abroad, had started a boring political conversation with him, in which other people joined. When the music began to play, Natasha came into the drawing room and, going straight up to Pierre, blushing and with laughing eyes, said:
“Mama told me to ask you to dance.”
“I’m afraid I’ll confuse the figures,” said Pierre, “but if you’d like to be my teacher…”
And, lowering his fat arm, he offered it to the slender girl.
While the couples were being placed and the musicians were tuning up, Pierre sat with his little partner. Natasha was perfectly happy: she was dancing with a grown-up who had come from abroad. She sat in full view of everyone and talked to him like a grown-up. In her hand was a fan which a young lady had given her to hold. And, assuming a most worldly pose (God knows where and when she had learned it), fanning herself and smiling through the fan, she talked with her partner.
“Look at her! Just look at her!” said the old countess, walking through the room and pointing at Natasha.
Natasha blushed and laughed.
“Well, what is it, mama? What are you getting at? What’s so surprising?”
In the middle of the third écossaise, chairs began moving in the drawing room where the count and Marya Dmitrievna were playing, and the greater part of the honored guests and old folk, stretching after sitting so long and putting their wallets and purses in their pockets, came to the door of the ballroom. At their head came Marya Dmitrievna and the count—both with merry faces. The count, with jocular politeness, somehow in a ballet-like fashion, offered his rounded arm to Marya Dmitrievna. He drew himself up and his face brightened with a special dashingly sly smile, and as soon as the last figures of the écossaise came to an end, he clapped his hands and called out to the musicians in the gallery, addressing the first fiddle:
“Semyon! Do you know ‘Daniel Cooper’?”
That was the count’s favorite dance, which he used to dance while still in his youth. (“Daniel Cooper” was in fact one of the figures of the anglaise.)
“Look at papa,” Natasha shouted to the whole ballroom (completely forgetting that she was dancing with a grown-up), bending her curly head to her knees and dissolving into her ringing laughter for the