War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (ebook reader for pc TXT) 📕

about it today. It was hard and painful, but good, very good!” said Natásha. “I am sure he really loved him. That is why I told him⁠ ⁠… Was it all right?” she added, suddenly blushing.

“To tell Pierre? Oh, yes. What a splendid man he is!” said Princess Márya.

“Do you know, Márya⁠ ⁠…” Natásha suddenly said with a mischievous smile such as Princess Márya had not seen on her face for a long time, “he has somehow grown so clean, smooth, and fresh⁠—as if he had just come out of a Russian bath; do you understand? Out of a moral bath. Isn’t it true?”

“Yes,” replied Princess Márya. “He has greatly improved.”

“With a short coat and his hair cropped; just as if, well, just as if he had come straight from the bath⁠ ⁠… Papa used to⁠ ⁠…”

“I understand why he” (Prince Andréy) “liked no one so much as him,” said Princess Márya.

“Yes, and yet he is quite different. They say men are friends when they are quite different. That must be true. Really he is quite unlike him⁠—in everything.”

“Yes, but he’s wonderful.”

“Well, good night,” said Natásha.

And the same mischievous smile lingered for a long time on her face as if it had been forgotten there.

XVIII

It was a long time before Pierre could fall asleep that night. He paced up and down his room, now turning his thoughts on a difficult problem and frowning, now suddenly shrugging his shoulders and wincing, and now smiling happily.

He was thinking of Prince Andréy, of Natásha, and of their love, at one moment jealous of her past, then reproaching himself for that feeling. It was already six in the morning and he still paced up and down the room.

“Well, what’s to be done if it cannot be avoided? What’s to be done? Evidently it has to be so,” said he to himself, and hastily undressing he got into bed, happy and agitated but free from hesitation or indecision.

“Strange and impossible as such happiness seems, I must do everything that she and I may be man and wife,” he told himself.

A few days previously Pierre had decided to go to Petersburg on the Friday. When he awoke on the Thursday, Savélich came to ask him about packing for the journey.

“What, to Petersburg? What is Petersburg? Who is there in Petersburg?” he asked involuntarily, though only to himself. “Oh, yes, long ago before this happened I did for some reason mean to go to Petersburg,” he reflected. “Why? But perhaps I shall go. What a good fellow he is and how attentive, and how he remembers everything,” he thought, looking at Savélich’s old face, “and what a pleasant smile he has!”

“Well, Savélich, do you still not wish to accept your freedom?” Pierre asked him.

“What’s the good of freedom to me, your excellency? We lived under the late count⁠—the kingdom of heaven be his!⁠—and we have lived under you too, without ever being wronged.”

“And your children?”

“The children will live just the same. With such masters one can live.”

“But what about my heirs?” said Pierre. “Supposing I suddenly marry⁠ ⁠… it might happen,” he added with an involuntary smile.

“If I may take the liberty, your excellency, it would be a good thing.”

“How easy he thinks it,” thought Pierre. “He doesn’t know how terrible it is and how dangerous. Too soon or too late⁠ ⁠… it is terrible!”

“So what are your orders? Are you starting tomorrow?” asked Savélich.

“No, I’ll put it off for a bit. I’ll tell you later. You must forgive the trouble I have put you to,” said Pierre, and seeing Savélich smile, he thought: “But how strange it is that he should not know that now there is no Petersburg for me, and that that must be settled first of all! But probably he knows it well enough and is only pretending. Shall I have a talk with him and see what he thinks?” Pierre reflected. “No, another time.”

At breakfast Pierre told the princess, his cousin, that he had been to see Princess Márya the day before and had there met⁠—“Whom do you think? Natásha Rostóva!”

The princess seemed to see nothing more extraordinary in that than if he had seen Anna Semënovna.

“Do you know her?” asked Pierre.

“I have seen the princess,” she replied. “I heard that they were arranging a match for her with young Rostóv. It would be a very good thing for the Rostóvs, they are said to be utterly ruined.”

“No; I mean do you know Natásha Rostóva?”

“I heard about that affair of hers at the time. It was a great pity.”

“No, she either doesn’t understand or is pretending,” thought Pierre. “Better not say anything to her either.”

The princess too had prepared provisions for Pierre’s journey.

“How kind they all are,” thought Pierre. “What is surprising is that they should trouble about these things now when it can no longer be of interest to them. And all for me!”

On the same day the Chief of Police came to Pierre, inviting him to send a representative to the Faceted Palace to recover things that were to be returned to their owners that day.

“And this man too,” thought Pierre, looking into the face of the Chief of Police. “What a fine, good-looking officer and how kind. Fancy bothering about such trifles now! And they actually say he is not honest and takes bribes. What nonsense! Besides, why shouldn’t he take bribes? That’s the way he was brought up, and everybody does it. But what a kind, pleasant face and how he smiles as he looks at me.”

Pierre went to Princess Márya’s to dinner.

As he drove through the streets past the houses that had been burned down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters cutting the timber for new houses with axes, the women hawkers, and the shopkeepers, all looked