The guest, not knowing what to say, shook her head.
“Not at all out of friendship,” replied Nikolai, blushing and protesting, as if it was a shameful calumny. “It’s not friendship, I simply feel a calling for military service.”
He shot a glance at his cousin and the young lady guest: they both looked at him with a smile of approval.
“Tonight Schubert will be dining with us, a colonel in the Pavlogradsky hussar regiment. He’s been on leave here and is taking him along. What to do?” said the count, shrugging his shoulders and speaking jokingly about a matter that obviously cost him much grief.
“I’ve already told you, papa,” said his son, “that if you don’t want to let me go, I’ll stay. But I know I’m not good for anything but military service; I’m not a diplomat, not a functionary, I’m unable to hide my feelings,” he said, glancing all the while with the coquetry of a handsome youth at Sonya and the young lady guest.
The little cat fixed her eyes on him and seemed ready at any instant to begin playing and show all her cat nature.
“Well, well, all right!” said the old count. “He keeps getting heated up. It’s this Bonaparte who’s turned all their heads; they all wonder how it is that from the lieutenants he landed among the emperors. Well, God grant it,” he added, not noticing the guest’s mocking smile.
The adults began talking about Bonaparte. Julie, Mme Karagin’s daughter, turned to the young Rostov:
“What a pity you weren’t at the Arkharovs’ on Thursday. I was bored without you,” she said, smiling tenderly at him.
The flattered young man, with the coquettish smile of youth, sat closer to her and got into a separate conversation with the smiling Julie, completely unaware that his involuntary smile cut the heart of the blushing and falsely smiling Sonya with the knife of jealousy. In the middle of the conversation, he turned to look at her. Sonya gave him a passionately angry look and, barely holding back the tears in her eyes, with a false smile on her lips, got up and left the room. All of Nikolai’s animation vanished. He waited for the first lull in the conversaton and with an upset face left the room to look for Sonya.
“How crystal clear all these young ones’ secrets are!” said Anna Mikhailovna, pointing to Nikolai as he left. “Cousinage dangereux voisinage,”*88 she added.
“Yes,” said the countess, when the ray of sunlight that had penetrated the room with the young generation vanished, and as if answering a question no one had asked her, but which constantly preoccupied her. “So much suffering, so much anxiety endured so as to rejoice in them now! And now, too, there’s really more fear than joy. One is afraid, always afraid! It’s precisely the age when there are so many dangers both for girls and for boys.”
“Everything depends on upbringing,” said the guest.
“Yes, true for you,” the countess went on. “Up to now, thank God, I’ve been a friend to my children and have enjoyed their full trust,” said the countess, repeating the error of many parents who suppose that their children have no secrets from them. “I know that I’ll always be my daughters’ first confidente and that if Nikolenka, with his fiery character, gets up to some mischief (boys can’t do without it), it still won’t be the same as with these Petersburg gentlemen.”
“Yes, nice, nice children,” agreed the count, who always resolved all tangled questions by finding everything nice. “Just look at him! Decided to be a hussar! Well, what do you want, ma chère!”
“What a sweet creature your younger one is!” said the guest. “A ball of fire!”
“Yes, a ball of fire,” said the count. “She takes after me! And what a voice! Though she’s my daughter, I’ll tell you the truth: she’ll be a singer, another Salomoni. We’ve hired an Italian to teach her.”
“Isn’t it too early? They say it harms the voice to study at that age.”
“Oh, no, not too early at all!” said the count. “How is it, then, that our mothers got married when they were twelve or thirteen?”
“She’s already in love with Boris now! What a one!” said the countess, smiling quietly, looking at Boris’s mother, and, evidently responding to the thought that always preoccupied her, she went on: “Well, so you see, if I were strict with her, if I forbade her…God knows what they’d do on the sly” (the countess meant they would be kissing), “but now I know her every word. She’ll come running to me herself in the evening and tell me everything. I may be spoiling her, but it really seems better. I was strict with the elder one.”
“Yes, I was brought up quite differently,” said the elder one, the beautiful Countess Vera, smiling.
But the smile did not embellish Vera’s face, as usually happens; on the contrary, her face became unnatural and therefore unpleasant. The elder one, Vera, was good-looking, far from stupid, an excellent student, well-brought-up, had a pleasant voice, and what she said was correct and appropriate; but, strangely, everyone, both the guest and the countess, turned to look at her, as if wondering why she had said it, and they felt awkward.
“One is always too clever with the older children, wanting to do something extraordinary,” said the guest.
“There’s no use denying it, ma chère! The dear countess was too clever with Vera,” said the count. “Well, so what! She still turned out nice,” he added, winking at Vera approvingly.
The guests got up and left, promising to come for dinner.
“What manners! They sat and sat!” said the countess, after seeing the guests off.
X
When Natasha left the drawing room and ran off, she ran no further than the conservatory. In that room she stopped, listening to the talk in the drawing room and waiting for Boris to come out. She was already growing impatient and, stamping her little foot, was about to cry because he did not come at once, when she heard the neither slow nor quick, but proper footsteps of the young man. Natasha quickly darted among the tubs of plants and hid herself.
Boris stopped in the middle of the room, looking around, brushed some specks of dust off the sleeve of his uniform with his hand, and went up to a mirror, studying his handsome face. Natasha kept still, peeking from her ambush, waiting to see what he would do. He stood for some time before the mirror, smiled, and walked to the other door. Natasha was about to call him, but then changed her mind.
“Let him search,” she said to herself. As soon as Boris left, the flushed Sonya came from the other door, whispering something spitefully through her tears. Natasha restrained her first impulse to rush out to her and remained in her ambush, as if under the cap of invisibility, observing what went on in the world. She experienced a special new pleasure. Sonya was whispering something and kept looking back at the door of the drawing room. Nikolai came out of that door.
“Sonya! what’s wrong? how can you?” said Nikolai, rushing to her.
“Never mind, never mind, leave me alone!” Sonya burst into sobs.
“No, I know what it is.”
“So you know, and that’s wonderful, and so go to her.”
“So-o-onya! One word! How can you torment me and yourself so because of a fantasy?” said Nikolai, taking her hand.
Sonya did not pull her hand away and stopped crying.
Natasha, motionless and breathless, with shining eyes, watched from behind her ambush. “What will happen now?” she thought.
“Sonya! The whole world is no use to me! You alone are everything,” said Nikolai. “I’ll prove it to you.”
“I don’t like it when you talk like that.”
“Well, then I won’t, well, forgive me, Sonya!” He drew her to him and kissed her.
“Ah, how nice!” thought Natasha, and when Sonya and Nikolai left the room, she went out after them and called Boris.