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“Awfully angry!” he said, smiling and getting up. And smoothing his hair he began to pace the room.
“Do you know, Mary, what I’ve been thinking?” he began, immediately thinking aloud in his wife’s presence now that they had made it up.
He did not ask if she was ready to listen to him. He did not care. A thought had occurred to him and so it belonged to her also. And he told her of his intention to persuade Pierre to stay with them till spring.
Countess Mary listened till he had finished, made some remark, and in her turn began thinking aloud. Her thoughts were about the children.
“You can see the woman in her already,” she said in French, pointing to little Natsha. “You reproach us women with being illogical. Here is our logic. I say: ‘Papa wants to sleep!’ but she says, ‘No, he’s laughing.’ And she was right,” said Countess Mary with a happy smile.
“Yes, yes.” And Nicholas, taking his little daughter in his strong hand, lifted her high, placed her on his shoulder, held her by the legs, and paced the room with her. There was an expression of carefree happiness on the faces of both father and daughter.
“But you know you may be unfair. You are too fond of this one,” his wife whispered in French.
“Yes, but what am I to do?... I try not to show...”
At that moment they heard the sound of the door pulley and footsteps in the hall and anteroom, as if someone had arrived.
“Somebody has come.”
“I am sure it is Pierre. I will go and see,” said Countess Mary and left the room.
In her absence Nicholas allowed himself to give his little daughter a gallop round the room. Out of breath, he took the laughing child quickly from his shoulder and pressed her to his heart. His capers reminded him of dancing, and looking at the child’s round happy little face he thought of what she would be like when he was an old man, taking her into society and dancing the mazurka with her as his old father had danced Daniel Cooper with his daughter.
“It is he, it is he, Nicholas!” said Countess Mary, re-entering the room a few minutes later. “Now our Natsha has come to life. You should have seen her ecstasy, and how he caught it for having stayed away so long. Well, come along now, quick, quick! It’s time you two were parted,” she added, looking smilingly at the little girl who clung to her father.
Nicholas went out holding the child by the hand.
Countess Mary remained in the sitting room.
“I should never, never have believed that one could be so happy,” she whispered to herself. A smile lit up her face but at the same time she sighed, and her deep eyes expressed a quiet sadness as though she felt, through her happiness, that there is another sort of happiness unattainable in this life and of which she involuntarily thought at that instant.
Natsha had married in the early spring of 1813, and in 1820 already had three daughters besides a son for whom she had longed and whom she was now nursing. She had grown stouter and broader, so that it was difficult to recognize in this robust, motherly woman the slim, lively Natsha of former days. Her features were more defined and had a calm, soft, and serene expression. In her face there was none of the ever-glowing animation that had formerly burned there and constituted its charm. Now her face and body were often all that one saw, and her soul was not visible at all. All that struck the eye was a strong, handsome, and fertile woman. The old fire very rarely kindled in her face now. That happened only when, as was the case that day, her husband returned home, or a sick child was convalescent, or when she and Countess Mary spoke of Prince Andrew (she never mentioned him to her husband, who she imagined was jealous of Prince Andrew’s memory), or on the rare occasions when something happened to induce her to sing, a practice she had quite abandoned since her marriage. At the rare moments when the old fire did kindle in her handsome, fully developed body she was even more attractive than in former days.
Since their marriage Natsha and her husband had lived in Moscow, in Petersburg, on their estate near Moscow, or with her mother, that is to say, in Nicholas’ house. The young Countess Bezkhova was not often seen in society, and those who met her there were not pleased with her and found her neither attractive nor amiable. Not that Natsha liked solitude—she did not know whether she liked it or not, she even thought that she did not—but with her pregnancies, her confinements, the nursing of her children, and sharing every moment of her husband’s life, she had demands on her time which could be satisfied only by renouncing society. All who had known Natsha before her marriage wondered at the change in her as at something extraordinary. Only the old countess with her maternal instinct had realized that all Natsha’s outbursts had been due to her need of children and a husband—as she herself had once exclaimed at Otrdnoe not so much in fun as in earnest—and her mother was now surprised at the surprise expressed by those who had never understood Natsha, and she kept saying that she had always known that Natsha would make an exemplary wife and mother.
“Only she lets her love of her husband and children overflow all bounds,” said the countess, “so that it even becomes absurd.”
Natsha did not follow the golden rule advocated by clever folk, especially by the French, which says that a girl should not let herself go when she marries, should not neglect her accomplishments, should be even more careful of her appearance than when she was unmarried, and should fascinate her husband as much as she did before he became her husband. Natsha on the contrary had at once abandoned all her witchery, of which her singing had been an unusually powerful part. She gave it up just because it was so powerfully seductive. She took no pains with her manners or with delicacy of speech, or with her toilet, or to show herself to her husband in her most becoming attitudes, or to avoid inconveniencing him by being too exacting. She acted in contradiction to all those rules. She felt that the allurements instinct had formerly taught her to use would now be merely ridiculous in the eyes of her husband, to whom she had from the first moment given herself up entirely—that is, with her whole soul, leaving no corner of it hidden from him. She felt that her unity with her husband was not maintained by the poetic feelings that had attracted him to her, but by something else—indefinite but firm as the bond between her own body and soul.
To fluff out her curls, put on fashionable dresses, and sing romantic songs to fascinate her husband would have seemed as strange as to adorn herself to attract herself. To adorn herself for others might perhaps have been agreeable—she did not know—but she had no time at all for it. The chief reason for devoting no time either to singing, to dress, or to choosing her words was that she really had no time to spare for these things.
