“Boris, come here,” she said with a significant and sly air. “There’s something I must tell you. Here, here,” she said and led him to the conservatory, to the place between the tubs where she had been hiding. Boris, smiling, followed her.
“What is this something?” he asked.
She became embarrassed, looked around, and, seeing her doll abandoned on a tub, took it in her hands.
“Kiss the doll,” she said.
Boris looked into her animated face with attentive, gentle eyes and said nothing.
“You don’t want to? Well, come here, then,” she said and went deeper among the plants and dropped her doll. “Closer, closer!” she whispered. She caught the officer by the cuffs with both hands, and her flushed face showed solemnity and fear.
“And do you want to kiss me?” she whispered barely audibly, looking at him from under her eyebrows, smiling and almost weeping with excitement.
Boris blushed.
“You’re so funny!” he said, bending down to her, blushing still more, but not undertaking anything and waiting.
She suddenly jumped up onto a tub, becoming taller than he, embraced him with her thin, bare arms, which bent higher than his neck, and, tossing her hair back with a movement of the head, kissed him right on the lips.
She slipped between the pots to the other side of the plants and stopped, her head lowered.
“Natasha,” he said, “you know I love you, but…”
“You’re in love with me?” Natasha interrupted.
“Yes, I am, but, please, let’s not do like just now…Another four years…Then I’ll ask for your hand.”
Natasha reflected.
“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…” she said, counting on her thin little fingers. “All right! So it’s settled?”
And a smile of joy and reassurance lit up her animated face.
“Settled!” said Boris.
“Forever?” said the girl. “Till death?”
And, taking him under the arm, with a happy face she slowly walked beside him to the sitting room.
XI
The countess was so tired out from the visits that she ordered no one else to be received, and the porter was told simply to be sure to invite for dinner everyone who came by with congratulations. The countess wanted to talk personally with her childhood friend, Princess Anna Mikhailovna, whom she had not seen properly since her return from Petersburg. Anna Mikhailovna, with her weepy and pleasant face, moved closer to the countess’s armchair.
“I’ll be perfectly frank with you,” said Anna Mikhailovna. “There are few of us old friends left! That’s why I cherish your friendship so much.”
Anna Mikhailovna looked at Vera and stopped. The countess pressed her friend’s hand.
“Vera,” said the countess, turning to her older daughter, obviously not her favorite. “How is it you have no notion of anything? Can’t you feel that you’re not needed here? Go to your sisters, or…”
The beautiful Vera smiled disdainfully, apparently not feeling the slightest offense.
“If you had told me long ago, mama, I would have left at once,” she said and went to her room. But, passing through the sitting room, she noticed two couples sitting symmetrically by the two windows. She stopped and smiled disdainfully. Sonya was sitting close to Nikolai, who was writing out some verses for her, the first he had ever written. Boris and Natasha were sitting by the other window and fell silent when Vera came in. Sonya and Natasha looked at Vera with guilty and happy faces.
It was amusing and touching to look at these enamoured girls, but the sight of them evidently did not arouse any pleasant feelings in Vera.
“How many times have I asked you not to take my things,” she said. “You have a room of your own.” She took the inkstand from Nikolai.
“Just a moment,” he said, dipping his pen.
“You manage to do everything at the wrong time,” said Vera. “The way you came running into the drawing room just now, everyone was ashamed of you.”
In spite of, or precisely because of, the fact that what she said was perfectly correct, no one answered her, and the four only exchanged glances with each other. She lingered in the room, with the inkstand in her hand.
“And what secrets can there be at your age between Natasha and Boris and between you two? It’s all silliness!”
“Well, what does it matter to you, Vera?” Natasha said pleadingly in a quiet little voice.
Clearly, that day she was being kinder and more affectionate with everyone than ever.
“Very silly,” said Vera. “I’m ashamed of you. Why secrets?”
“We all have our secrets. We don’t bother you and Berg,” Natasha said, flaring up.
“Of course you don’t,” said Vera, “because there can never be anything bad in my actions. But I shall tell mama how you behave with Boris.”
“Natalya Ilyinichna behaves very well with me,” said Boris. “I can’t complain,” he said.
“Stop it, Boris, you’re such a diplomat” (the word diplomat was much in vogue among children in that special sense they endowed it with); “it’s even boring,” Natasha said in an offended, trembling voice. “Why is she pestering me?”
“You’ll never understand it,” she said, turning to Vera, “because you’ve never loved anybody, you have no heart, you’re just a Madame de Genlis” (this nickname, considered very offensive, had been given to Vera by Nikolai), “and your highest pleasure is to do unpleasant things to others. Go and flirt with Berg as much as you like,” she said quickly.
“I certainly won’t go running after a young man in front of guests…”
“Well, she’s done it,” Nikolai mixed in, “she’s said unpleasant things to everybody and upset everybody. Let’s go to the nursery.”
All four, like a frightened flock of birds, got up and left.
“They said unpleasant things to me, but I said nothing to anybody,” said Vera.
“Madame de Genlis, Madame de Genlis!” laughing voices said behind the door.
The beautiful Vera, who had such an irritating, unpleasant effect on everyone, smiled and, apparently untouched by what had been said to her, went up to the mirror and straightened her scarf and hair. Looking at her beautiful face, she appeared to become even colder and calmer.
In the drawing room the conversation was still going on.
“Ah! chère,” said the countess, “in my life, too, tout n’est pas rose. Don’t I see that, du train que nous allons,*89 our fortune won’t last long! It’s all his club and his kindness. Our life in the country—is that any respite? Theater, hunting, God knows what. Ah, why talk about me! Well, how did you arrange it all? I often marvel at you, Annette, how at your age you can gallop off in a carriage, by yourself, to Moscow, to Petersburg, to all the ministers, to all the nobility, and you know how to deal with them all—I marvel at it! Well, how did it get arranged? I don’t know how to do any of it.”
“Ah, my dear heart!” Princess Anna Mikhailovna replied. “God forbid that you ever learn how hard it is to be left a widow without support and with a son whom you love to distraction. One learns everything,” she went on with a certain pride. “My lawsuit has taught me. If I need to see one of these trumps, I write a note: ‘Princesse une telle†90 wishes to see so and so’—and I go in person, in a hired cab two, even three times, even four—until I get what I want. It’s all the same to me what they think of me.”
“Well, whom did you solicit for Borenka?” asked the countess. “Here your son is an officer in the guards, and Nikolushka is going as a junker.28 There’s no one to solicit. Who did you ask?”
“Prince Vassily. He was very nice. He agreed at once to do everything and reported to the emperor,” Princess Anna Mikhailovna said with rapture, forgetting entirely about all the humiliation she had gone through to achieve her goal.