War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [624]
“Yes, yes, precisely pink,” said Natasha, who also now seemed to remember the mention of “pink,” and in this she saw the chief extraordinariness and mysteriousness of the prediction.
“But what does it mean?” Natasha asked thoughtfully.
“Ah, I don’t know, it’s all so extraordinary!” said Sonya, clutching her head.
A few minutes later Prince Andrei rang, and Natasha went to his room; and Sonya, feeling an agitation and a tenderness she had rarely felt, stayed by the window, thinking over all the extraordinariness of what had happened.
On that day there was a chance to send letters to the army, and the countess was writing a letter to her son.
“Sonya,” said the countess, raising her head from the letter as her niece walked past her. “Sonya, why don’t you write to Nikolenka?” the countess said in a soft, quavering voice, and in the gaze of her weary eyes looking through her spectacles, Sonya read all that the countess implied by these words. That gaze expressed entreaty, and fear of refusal, and shame at having to ask, and a readiness for implacable hatred in case of refusal.
Sonya went up to the countess and, kneeling, kissed her hand.
“I will, maman,” she said.
Sonya was softened, agitated, and moved by all that had happened that day, especially by the mysterious fulfillment she had just seen of her divination. Now, when she knew that, because of the renewal of Natasha’s relations with Prince Andrei, Nikolai could not marry Princess Marya, she felt with joy the return of that mood of self-sacrifice in which she loved and was accustomed to live. And with tears in her eyes and a joyful awareness of performing a magnanimous act, she wrote, interrupted several times by the tears that clouded her velvety black eyes, that touching letter, the reception of which so struck Nikolai.
IX
In the guardhouse where Pierre was taken, the officers and soldiers who had arrested him treated him hostilely, but at the same time respectfully. In their attitude towards him, doubt could still be felt of who he was (perhaps a very important person), and hostility because of the still-fresh personal struggle with him.
But when another shift came the next morning, Pierre felt that for these new guards—both officers and soldiers—he did not have the same meaning he had had for those who arrested him. And indeed, in this large, fat man in a peasant kaftan the next day’s guards no longer saw the living man who had fought so desperately with a looter and the convoy soldiers, and had spoken the solemn phrase about saving a child, but saw only the seventeenth arrested Russian, kept there for some reason on orders from the high command. If there was anything special in Pierre, it was only his untimid, concentratedly thoughtful air and the French which, surprisingly for the French, he spoke very well. Despite which, on that same day, Pierre was put together with the other arrested suspects, because the separate room he had occupied was needed for an officer.
All the Russians held together with Pierre were people of the lowest estate. And all of them, recognizing Pierre as a gentleman, shunned him, the more so as he spoke French. Pierre listened with sadness to their mockery of him.
That evening Pierre learned that all these prisoners (and probably he among them) were to be tried for arson. On the third day Pierre was taken with the others to some house where a French general with white mustaches sat with two colonels and other Frenchmen with armbands. With that precision and definiteness which is supposedly above human weakness, and with which the accused are usually treated, Pierre, like the others, was questioned about who he was, where he had been, with what purpose, and so on.
These questions, leaving aside the essence of life’s business and excluding