LITMIR.BIZ

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as did the others after the word had been uttered, that it was too exalted and grandiloquent for the present occasion and therefore embarrassing, but the fine, impressionable youthfulness of his open-hearted face made his outburst moving to the others rather than comic.

      “That is glorious, what you said, glorious,” said Julie, sighing and lowering her eyelids in the depth of her feeling. Sonya began to tremble all over and blushed up to her ears, behind her ears and down to her neck and shoulders as Nikolai was speaking. Pierre listened carefully to what the colonel said and nodded his head approvingly, although, by his own reasoning, he believed that patriotism was stupidity. Yet involuntarily he sympathised with every sincerely spoken word.

      “That is splendid. Very good, very good,” he said.

      “A genuine hussar, young man,” cried the colonel, thumping the table again.

      “What are you making so much noise about?” Marya Dmitrievna’s rich voice suddenly asked across the table. “Why are you banging on the table?” she said to the hussar, as always saying out loud what others were only thinking. “Who are you getting so angry with? Perhaps you think you have the French in front of you?”

      “I am speaking the truth,” said the hussar, smiling.

      “It is all about the war,” the count shouted across the table. “My son is going, Marya Dmitrievna, my son is going.”

      “And I have four sons in the army, but I’m not grieving. Everything is God’s will, you can die lying on the stove in your own hut, and God can spare you in battle,” said Marya Dmitrievna’s rich voice, audible without the slightest effort from the other end of the table.

      “That’s right.”

      The conversation became more focused once again, the ladies’ at their end of the table, the men’s at theirs.

      “I bet you won’t ask,” said Natasha’s little brother, “I bet you won’t ask!”

      “I will,” replied Natasha.

      Her face suddenly became flushed, expressing a desperate and gay determination, the determination that an ensign has when he throws himself into the assault. Half rising to her feet, with eyes sparkling and her smile barely contained, she addressed her mother:

      “Mama!” her full-throated voice rang the entire length of the table.

      “What is it?” the countess asked in fright but, seeing from her daughter’s face that it was a piece of mischief, she waved her hand at her strictly, making a threatening and forbidding movement with her head.

      The conversation fell silent.

      “Mama! What will it be for dessert?” the little voice rang out even more decisively, without breaking, naïvely but with an awareness of its own naïvety.

      The countess tried to frown, but an involuntary smile of love for her favourite child had already sprung to her lips. Marya Dmitrievna wagged a thick finger.

      “Cossack!” she said menacingly.

      Most of the guests looked at the heads of the table, not knowing how they should take this prank.

      “I’ll teach you!” said the countess.

      “Mama, what will it be for dessert?” Natasha cried, boldly and with capricious merriment now, confident in advance that her prank would be well received. Sonya and fat Petya hid laughing faces.

      “See, I did ask,” Natasha whispered to her little brother without taking her eyes off her mother and without altering the naïve expression on her face.

      “Ices! Only they won’t give you any,” said Marya Dmitrievna. Natasha saw that she had nothing to be afraid of, and so this time she wasn’t even afraid of Marya Dmitrievna.

      “Marya Dmitrievna, what kind of ices? I don’t like ice cream.”

      “Carrot ices.”

      “No, what kind? Marya Dmitrievna, what kind?” she almost shouted. “I want to know.”

      Marya Dmitrievna and the countess laughed, and then all the guests laughed too. They all laughed, not at Marya Dmitrievna’s answer, but at the inconceivable boldness and smartness of this little girl who knew how to talk to Marya Dmitrievna like that and dared to do it.

      “Your sister is charming,” said Julie.

      Natasha only desisted when she was told there would be pineapple ices. Before the ices they served champagne. The music started up again, the count kissed his little countess and as they rose, the guests congratulated the countess and clinked glasses across the table with the count, the children and each other. Julie clinked glasses with Nikolai, letting him know with her glances that this clinking had another important meaning. Footmen began bustling about again, chairs clattered, and in the same order as before, but now with redder faces, the guests returned to the drawing room and to the count’s study.

      XXV

      The card tables had all been set up, parties sat down to play boston, and the count’s guests settled themselves throughout the two drawing rooms, the sitting room and the library. Marya Dmitrievna scolded Shinshin, with whom she was playing.

      “You’re so good at criticising everybody else, but you couldn’t even guess that with the queen of hearts you should lead a heart.”

      The count, fanning out his cards, struggled to abstain from his customary after-dinner sleep and laughed at everything. The young people, encouraged by the countess, gathered around the clavichord and harp. At everybody’s request Julie first played a little piece with variations on the harp and then, together with the other girls began asking Natasha and Nikolai, known for their musicality, to sing something. Natasha, to whom they appealed more than anyone else, neither agreed nor refused.

      “Wait, I’ll try,” she said, moving to the other side of the clavichord and, trying out her voice, she quietly sang several pure full-throated notes that were surprisingly moving. Everyone fell silent as the sounds faded away in the lofty, high-ceilinged room.

      “I can, I can do it,” she said, happily tossing back her curls, which were tumbling over her eyes.

      Pierre, very red in the face after dinner, went over to her. He wanted to look at her from closer up and see how she would talk to him.

      “And why might you not be able to?” he asked as simply as if they had known each other for a hundred years.

      “There are some days when the voice just isn’t any good,” she said and moved over towards the clavichord.

      “And today?”

      “It’s excellent,” she said, addressing him with as much enthusiasm as if she were praising somebody else’s voice. Pierre, pleased to have seen how she spoke, went over to Boris, whom he liked almost as much today as Natasha.

      “What a lovely child, that little black-haired girl,” he said. “Even though she isn’t good-looking.”

      After the boredom of isolation in his father’s big house, Pierre found himself in that happy, young man’s state of loving everyone and seeing nothing but good in everyone. At dinner he had still unwittingly despised the Moscow public from the elevated height of St. Petersburg. But now he already felt that only here in Moscow did people know how to live and he even thought how good it would be to visit this house every day, and listen to this little black-haired girl sing and talk, and look at her.

      “Nikolai,” said Natasha, going up to the clavichord, “what shall we sing?”

      “Perhaps ‘The Spring’,” replied Nikolai. He was clearly beginning to find it impossible to put up with the importunate Julie, who thought he ought to be overjoyed at her attentions.

      “Well come on, come on, Boris, come over here,” Natasha called.

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