War And Peace полностью

That letter deeply affected Nikolay. He had an ordinary man’s common sense and this told him what he simply had to do. He had to retire from the army, or at least to go home on leave. He had no real idea of why he had to go, but straight after his lunch-time nap he ordered his horse to be saddled, a grey by the name of Mars, a brute of a stallion that he hadn’t ridden for ages. He galloped off, and when he returned, with the horse in a lather, he told Lavrushka, Denisov’s old valet who had stayed on with him, and the comrades who dropped in that evening, that he had applied for leave and was on his way home. It all seemed so difficult, strange, quite unimaginable: he was going away without hearing from the staff about the only things that really mattered to him – was he being made up to captain or getting the Order of St Anne for the last manoeuvres? – he was going away without clinching the sale of his three roans to the Polish Count Goluchowski after all that haggling (with Rostov placing a side-bet that he would get two thousand for them); the ball would go ahead without him, the ball given by the hussars in honour of their favourite Polish belle, Madame Przazdziecka (one in the eye for the Uhlans, who had given a ball for their favourite belle, Madame Borzozowska) – but despite all this he simply knew he had to leave this lovely, clear-cut world for one that was nothing but messy nonsense. A week later his leave came through. His comrades – not only from the regiment, but from the whole brigade – gave Rostov a subscription dinner at fifteen roubles a head. There were two bands playing and two choruses singing, Rostov danced the trepak with Major Basov, the drunken officers tossed him in the air, hugged him and dropped him on the floor, followed by the men of the third squadron, who tossed him up again with a great ‘Hurrah!’ Then they put him in his sledge and went with him as far as the first post-station.

During the first half of the journey, from Kremenchug to Kiev, Rostov spent the whole time thinking back, as always happens on these occasions, to what he had left behind – in his case, to the squadron. But once he had jolted his bumpy way past the half-way point, he stopped thinking about his three roans, his quartermaster and Panna Borzozowska, and started to wonder rather anxiously how he would find things at Otradnoye. The nearer he got, the more intensely, much more intensely, his thoughts turned to home (as if inner feelings were also subject to the law of gravitation, varying in inverse proportion to the square of the distance). At the last station before Otradnoye he gave the sledge-driver a three-rouble tip, and soon he was racing up the steps of his home, all out of breath like a little boy.

After the excitement of the first meeting, and the odd feeling of being let down by expectations (‘Everything’s the same. Why was I in such a hurry to get here?’), Nikolay began to settle down and get used to the old way of living at home. His father and mother were just the same, though they had aged a little. The only thing new about them was a certain uneasiness and the occasional disagreement that hadn’t been there before, deriving, as he was soon to learn, from the awful state of their affairs.

Sonya was now nearly twenty. She would grow no prettier than this; there was no more promise to be fulfilled, though what she had was quite enough. She had blossomed with love and happiness the moment Nikolay had come home, and this young girl’s faithful, unshakeable love for him gladdened his heart. It was Petya and Natasha who surprised Nikolay most of all. Petya had grown into a tall, handsome boy of thirteen, full of happy fun, and his voice was breaking. Nikolay marvelled at Natasha for quite some time, and gave a laugh as he looked at her.

‘My, how you’ve changed,’ he told her.

‘What do you mean “changed”? Am I uglier?’

‘No, just the opposite. But there’s a kind of dignity . . . A real princess!’ he whispered to her.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ cried Natasha gleefully.

Natasha ran through the story of her romantic attachment to Prince Andrey, and his visit to Otradnoye, and she produced his last letter.

‘Well, aren’t you pleased?’ asked Natasha. ‘I feel so calm and happy now.’

‘Yes,’ answered Nikolay. ‘He’s a splendid man. Are you very much in love with him?’

‘What can I say?’ answered Natasha. ‘I’ve been in love with Boris, my teacher and Denisov, but this is completely different. I feel calm, settled. I know there’s no better man in all the world, and so I feel calm and contented. It’s completely different . . .’

Nikolay expressed his dissatisfaction at the marriage being delayed for a year, but Natasha turned on him in exasperation, arguing that this was the only possible way, it would have been awful to enter a family against the father’s will, and anyway it was what she wanted herself.

‘You just don’t understand,’ she kept saying.

Nikolay hesitated, and then said he agreed with her.