War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [557]
Natasha was ashamed to be doing nothing in the house, when everybody was so busy, and since morning she had tried several times to do something, but her heart was not in it; and she could not and did not know how to do things if not with all her heart, with all her might. She stood over Sonya while she packed the china, wanted to help, but abandoned it at once and went to her room to pack her own things. At first she amused herself by giving her dresses and ribbons to the maids, but then, when she had to pack the rest of them, she found it boring.
“Dunyasha, darling, will you pack? Yes? Yes?”
And when Dunyasha willingly promised to do it all, Natasha sat on the floor, took her old ball gown in her hands, and fell to thinking of something that should not have concerned her at all now. She was brought out of her reverie by the talk of the girls in the maids’ room next door and the sound of their footsteps hurrying from the room to the back porch. Natasha got up and looked out the window. In the street an enormous train of wounded had stopped.
The girls, the footmen, the housekeeper, the nanny, the cooks, the coachmen, the postilions, the scullions, were standing at the gates, looking at the wounded.
Natasha covered her hair with a white kerchief and, holding it by the ends with both hands, went outside.
Their former housekeeper, old Mavra Kuzminishna, had separated from the crowd that stood by the gate and, going up to a cart with a bast hood over it, was talking with a pale young officer who lay in the cart. Natasha took several steps and stopped timidly, still holding her kerchief and listening to what the housekeeper was saying.
“What, have you got nobody in Moscow?” Mavra Kuzminishna was saying. “You’d be more comfortable staying somewhere…With us, even. The masters are leaving.”
“I don’t know if it’s allowed,” the officer said in a weak voice. “Here’s my superior…ask him.” And he pointed to a fat major who was coming back down the street along the row of carts.
Natasha peeked with frightened eyes into the wounded officer’s face and immediately went to meet the major.
“May the wounded stay in our house?” she asked.
The major put his hand to his visor with a smile.
“Whom do you want, Mamzelle?” he said, narrowing his eyes and smiling.
Natasha calmly repeated her question, and her face and her whole manner, even though she went on holding her kerchief by the corners, were so serious that the major stopped smiling and, reflecting at first, as if asking himself to what extent it was possible, replied in the affirmative.
“Oh, yes, why not, they may,” he said.
Natasha inclined her head slightly and with quick steps returned to Mavra Kuzminishna, who was standing over the officer, talking to him with pitying sympathy.
“They may, he says they may!” Natasha said in a whisper.
The officer in the hooded cart turned into the Rostovs’ courtyard, and dozens of carts with wounded, at the invitation of the town’s inhabitants, began turning into the yards and driving up to the entrances of houses on Povarskaya Street. Natasha clearly liked these relations with new people, outside the ordinary conditions of life. Together with Mavra Kuzminishna, she tried to get as many of the wounded as possible to turn into their courtyard.
“All the same you must tell your father,” said Mavra Kuzminishna.
“Never mind, never mind, it makes no difference! We’ll move into the drawing room for a day. We can let them have our whole half.”
“Well, miss, what an idea! Even if they just go to the wings, the spare room, and nanny’s room, you still must ask.”
“Well, I’ll ask then.”
Natasha ran into