War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER XVII

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PIERRE was conducted into the big, lighted-up dining-room. In a few minutes

he heard footsteps and the princess and Natasha came into the room. Natasha was

calm, though the stern, unsmiling expression had come back again now into her

face. Princess Marya, Natasha, and Pierre all equally experienced that feeling

of awkwardness which usually follows when a serious and deeply felt conversation

is over. To continue on the same subject is impossible; to speak of trivial

matters seems desecration, and to be silent is unpleasant, because one wants to

talk, and this silence seems a sort of affectation. In silence they came to the

table. The footmen drew back and pushed up the chairs. Pierre unfolded his cold

dinner napkin, and making up his mind to break the silence he glanced at Natasha

and at Princess Marya. Both had plainly reached the same decision at the same

moment; in the eyes of both there gleamed a satisfaction with life, and an

admission that there was gladness in it as well as sorrow.

“Do you drink vodka?” said Princess Marya, and those words at once dispelled

the shadows of the past.

“Tell us about yourself,” said Princess Marya; “such incredibly marvellous

stories are being told about you.”

“Yes,” answered Pierre, with the gentle smile of irony that had now become

habitual with him. “I myself am told of marvels that I never dreamed of. Marya

Abramovna invited me to come and see her and kept telling me what had happened

to me, or ought to have happened. Stepan Stepanovitch too instructed me how I

was to tell my story. Altogether I have noticed that to be an interesting person

is a very easy position (I am now an interesting person); people invite me and

then tell me all about it.”

Natasha smiled and was about to say something.

“We have been told that you lost two millions in Moscow. Is that true?”

“Oh, I am three times as rich,” said Pierre. In spite of the strain on his

fortune, of his wife's debts, and the necessity of rebuilding, Pierre still said

that he had become three times as rich.

“What I have undoubtedly gained,” he said, “is freedom …” he was beginning

seriously; but on second thoughts he did not continue, feeling that it was too

egoistic a subject.

“And you are building?”

“Yes, such are Savelitch's orders.”

“Tell me, you had not heard of the countess's death when you stayed in

Moscow?” said Princess Marya; and she flushed crimson at once, conscious that in

putting this question to him after his mention of “freedom,” she was ascribing a

significance to his words which was possibly not intended.

“No,” answered Pierre, obviously unconscious of any awkwardness in the

interpretation Princess Marya had put on his allusion to his freedom. “I heard

of it in Orel, and you cannot imagine how it affected me. We were not an

exemplary couple,” he said quickly, glancing at Natasha and detecting in her

face curiosity as to how he would speak of his wife. “But her death affected me

greatly. When two people quarrel, both are always in fault. And one becomes

terribly aware of one's shortcomings towards any one who is no more. And then

such a death … apart from friends and consolation. I felt very sorry for her,”

he concluded, and noticed with satisfaction a glad look of approval on Natasha's

face.

“And so you are once more an eligible parti,” said Princess

Marya.

Pierre flushed suddenly crimson; and for a long while he tried not to look at

Natasha. When he did venture to glance at her, her face was cold and severe,

even, he fancied, disdainful.

“But did you really see and talk to Napoleon, as we have been told?” said

Princess Marya.

Pierre laughed.

“Not once, never. Every one always imagines that to be a prisoner is

equivalent to being on a visit to Napoleon. I never saw, never even heard

anything about him. I was in much lower company.”

Supper was over, and Pierre, who had at first refused to talk about his

captivity, was gradually drawn into telling them about it.

“But it is true that you stayed behind to kill Napoleon?” Natasha asked him

with a slight smile. “I guessed that at the time when we met you by the Suharev

Tower: do you remember?”

Pierre owned that it was so; and from that question was led on by Princess

Marya's, and still more by Natasha's, questions to give a detailed account of

his adventures.

At first he told his story with that tone of gentle irony that he always had

now towards men and especially towards himself. But as he came to describe the

horrors and sufferings he had seen, he was drawn on unawares, and began to speak

with the suppressed emotion of a man living again in imagination through the

intense impressions of the past.

Princess Marya looked from Pierre to Natasha with a gentle smile. In all he

told them she saw only Pierre and his goodness. Natasha, her head supported in

her hand, and her face changing continually with the story, watched Pierre,

never taking her eyes off him, and was in imagination passing through all he

told her with him. Not only her eyes, but her exclamations and the brief

questions she put showed Pierre that she understood from his words just what he

was trying to convey by them. It was evident that she understood, not only what

he said, but also what he would have liked to say and could not express in

words. The episode of the child and of the woman in whose defence he was taken

prisoner, Pierre described in this way. “It was an awful scene, children

abandoned, some in the midst of the fire … Children were dragged out before my

eyes … and women, who had their things pulled off them, earrings torn off

…”

Pierre flushed and hesitated. “Then a patrol came up and all who were not

pillaging, all the men, that is, they took prisoner. And me with them.”

“I am sure you are not telling us all; I am sure you did something,” said

Natasha, and after a moment's pause, “something good.”

Pierre went on with his story. When he came to the execution, he would have

passed over the horrible details of it, but Natasha insisted on his leaving

nothing out.

Pierre was beginning to tell them about Karataev; he had risen from the table

and was walking up and down, Natasha following him with her eyes.

“No,” he said, stopping short in his story, “you cannot understand what I

learned from that illiterate man—that simple creature.”

“No, no, tell us,” said Natasha. “Where is he now?”

“He was killed almost before my eyes.”

And Pierre began to describe the latter part of their retreat, Karataev's

illness (his voice shook continually) and then his death.

Pierre told the tale of his adventures as he had never thought of them

before. He saw now as it were a new significance in all he had been through. He

experienced now in telling it all to Natasha that rare happiness given to men by

women when they listen to them—not by clever women, who, as they listen, are

either trying to remember what they are told to enrich their intellect and on

occasion to repeat it, or to adapt what is told them to their own ideas and to

bring out in haste the clever comments elaborated in their little mental

factory. This rare happiness is given only by those real women, gifted with a

faculty for picking out and assimilating all that is best in what a man shows

them. Natasha, though herself unconscious of it, was all rapt attention; she did

not lost one word, one quaver of the voice, one glance, one twitching in the

facial muscles, one gesture of Pierre's. She caught the word before it was

uttered and bore it straight to her open heart, divining the secret import of

all Pierre's spiritual travail.

Princess Marya understood his story and sympathised with him, but she was

seeing now something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the

possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre. And this idea,

which struck her now for the first time, filled her heart with gladness.

It was three o'clock in the night. The footmen, with melancholy and severe

faces, came in with fresh candles, but no one noticed them.

Pierre finished his story. With shining, eager eyes Natasha still gazed

intently and persistently at him, as though she longed to understand something

more, that perhaps he had left unsaid. In shamefaced and happy confusion, Pierre

glanced at her now and then, and was thinking what to say now to change the

subject. Princess Marya was mute. It did not strike any of them that it was

three o'clock in the night, and time to be in bed.

“They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. “But if at once, this

minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or

go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a

prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of

our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and

good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a

great deal before us. That I say to you,” he said, turning to Natasha.

“Yes, yes,” she said, answering something altogether different, “and I too

would ask for nothing better than to go through it all again.”

Pierre looked intently at her.

“Yes, and nothing more,” Natasha declared.

“Not true, not true,” cried Pierre. “I am not to blame for being alive and

wanting to live; and you the same.”

All at once Natasha let her head drop into her hands, and burst into

tears.

“What is it, Natasha?” said Princess Marya.

“Nothing, nothing.” She smiled through her tears to Pierre. “Good-night, it's

bedtime.”

Pierre got up, and took leave.

Natasha, as she always did, went with Princess Marya into her bedroom. They

talked of what Pierre had told them. Princess Marya did not give her opinion of

Pierre. Natasha, too, did not talk of him.

“Well, good-night, Marie,” said Natasha. “Do you know I am often afraid that

we don't talk of him” (she meant Prince Andrey), “as though we were afraid of

desecrating our feelings, and so we forget him.”

Princess Marya sighed heavily, and by this sigh acknowledged the justice of

Natasha's words; but she did not in words agree with her.

“Is it possible to forget?” she said.

“I was so glad to tell all about it to-day; it was hard and painful, and yet

I was glad to … very glad,” said Natasha; “I am sure that he really loved him.

That was why I told him … it didn't matter my telling him?” she asked suddenly,

blushing.

“Pierre? Oh, no! How good he is,” said Princess Marya.

“Do you know, Marie,” said Natasha, suddenly, with a mischievous smile, such

as Princess Marya had not seen for a long while on her face. “He has become so

clean and smooth and fresh; as though he had just come out of a bath; do you

understand? Out of a moral bath. Isn't it so?”

“Yes,” said Princess Marya. “He has gained a great deal.”

“And his short jacket, and his cropped hair; exactly as though he had just

come out of a bath … papa used sometimes …”

“I can understand how he” (Prince Andrey) “cared for no one else as he

did for him,” said Princess Marya.

“Yes, and he is so different from him. They say men are better friends when

they are utterly different. That must be true; he is not a bit like him in

anything, is he?”

“Yes, and he is such a splendid fellow.”

“Well, good-night,” answered Natasha. And the same mischievous smile lingered

a long while as though forgotten on her face.

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