War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [621]
“She must be a wonderful girl! Precisely an angel!” he said to himself. “Why am I not free, why did I rush things with Sonya?” And involuntarily he pictured to himself a comparison between the two: the poorness of the one and the richness of the other in those spiritual gifts, which Nikolai did not have and which he therefore valued so highly. He tried to picture how it would be if he were free. How would he propose to her, and how would she become his wife? No, he could not picture it to himself. It made him feel eerie, and no clear images came to him. With Sonya he had already made up a future picture, and it was all simple and clear, precisely because it was all invented, and he knew everything there was in Sonya; but with Princess Marya it was impossible for him to picture a future life, because he did not understand her, but only loved her.
Dreams about Sonya had something gay and toylike about them. But to think about Princess Marya was always difficult and a little frightening.
“How she prayed!” he remembered. “You could see that her whole soul was in the prayer. Yes, that’s the kind of prayer that moves mountains, and I’m sure her prayer will be answered. Why don’t I pray for what I want?” he wondered. “What do I want? Freedom, release from Sonya. What she said was true,” he remembered the words of the governor’s wife, “there will be nothing but unhappiness if I marry her. A tangle, maman’s grief…our affairs…a tangle, an awful tangle! And anyhow I don’t love her. No, I don’t love her as I should. My God! lead me out of this terrible, hopeless situation!” he suddenly began to pray. “Yes, prayer can move mountains, but one must believe and not pray, the way Natasha and I did as children, that snow turn into sugar, and then run outside to see if it did turn into sugar. No, I’m not praying about trifles now,” he said, putting his pipe into a corner, crossing his arms, and standing before the icon. And, moved to tenderness by his memory of Princess Marya, he began to pray as he had not prayed for a long time. There were tears in his eyes and in his throat when Lavrushka came in with some papers.
“Fool! Why do you barge in unasked!” said Nikolai, quickly changing his position.
“From the governor,” Lavrushka said in a sleepy voice, “a messager came, there’s mail for you.”
“Well, all right, thanks, and off with you!”
Nikolai took the two letters. One was from his mother, the other from Sonya. He recognized them by the handwriting and opened Sonya’s letter first. He had read only a few lines when his face turned pale and his eyes widened fearfully and joyfully.
“No, it can’t be!” he said aloud.
Unable to sit still, he began pacing the room with the letter in his hand, reading it. He glanced through it, then read it once, twice, and, hunching his shoulders and spreading his arms, stopped in the middle of the room with gaping mouth and fixed eyes. The thing he had just prayed for with the certainty that God would grant his prayer, had been granted; but Nikolai was astonished by it, as if it was something extraordinary, and as if he had never expected it, and as if the fact that it had happened so quickly proved that it came not from God, whom he had asked, but from ordinary coincidence.
That seemingly indissoluble knot which had bound Rostov’s freedom was dissolved by this unexpected (as it seemed to Nikolai) and quite unprovoked letter from Sonya.