There was an awkward silence, during which Anatole, the personification of cool determination, never took his voracious eyes off her, and Natasha broke it by asking whether he liked living in Moscow. She coloured up the moment the question was out of her mouth. She couldn’t help feeling there was something improper about even talking to him. Anatole smiled an encouraging smile.
‘Oh, I didn’t like it much at first. Well, what is it that makes a town nice to live in? It’s the pretty women, isn’t it? Well, now I do like it, very much indeed,’ he said, with a meaningful stare. ‘You will come to the fancy-dress ball, Countess? Please come,’ he said. Putting his hand out to touch her bouquet he lowered his voice and added in French, ‘You’ll be the prettiest woman there. Do come, dear Countess, and give me this flower as your pledge.’
Natasha didn’t understand a word of this – any more than he did – but she felt that behind his incomprehensible words there was some dishonourable intention. Not knowing how to respond, she turned away as if she hadn’t heard him. But the moment she turned away she could feel him right behind her, very close.
‘Now what? Is he embarrassed? Is he angry? Should I put things right?’ she wondered. She couldn’t help turning round. She looked him straight in the eyes. One glance at him, standing so close, with all that self-assurance and the warmth of his sweet smile, and she was lost. She stared into his eyes, and her smile was the mirror-image of his. And again she sensed with horror there was no barrier between the two of them.
The curtain rose again. Anatole strolled out of the box, a picture of composure and contentment. Natasha went back to her father’s box, completely taken by the new world she found herself in. All that was happening before her eyes now seemed absolutely normal. By contrast, all previous thoughts of her fiancé, Princess Marya, her life in the country, never even crossed her mind. It was as if it all belonged to the distant past.
In the fourth act there was some sort of devil who sang and waved his arms about till the boards were taken away beneath him and he disappeared down below. That was all Natasha saw of the fourth act. She felt worried and excited, and the cause of all the excitement was – Kuragin; she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. As they came out of the theatre Anatole walked over to them, called their carriage and helped them into it. As he was assisting Natasha he squeezed her forearm just above the wrist. Natasha glanced round at him, thrilled and flushed with pleasure. He gazed at her with gleaming eyes and a tender smile.
Natasha was back home before she could form any clear impression of what had happened. Suddenly she had a horrible feeling as she remembered about Prince Andrey, and in front of them all as they sat there drinking a cup of tea after the theatre she gave a loud moan, blushed to the roots of her hair and rushed out of the room. ‘My God! It’s the end of me!’ she said to herself. ‘How could I have let him go as far as that?’ she thought. She sat there for some time, burying her crimson face in her hands, trying to get a firm grip on what had been happening but quite incapable of grasping anything, either what had happened or what she now felt. It all seemed dark, confusing and dreadful. Back in that huge open space under the bright lights, when Duport with his bare legs and his little spangled jacket had just finished leaping about to the music over those damp boards, and those young girls and the old men, and Hélène, too, beaming proudly and serenely in all her naked glory, had gone wild and roared ‘Bravo!’ – there, in the shadow of Hélène herself, everything had been plain and simple, but now, as she sat there in solitude, it was beyond all understanding. ‘What’s it all about? Why did I feel so scared of him? What are all these guilty feelings?’ she thought.
Her mother, the old countess, was the only person to whom Natasha could have confided all that was on her mind – at night and in bed. She knew Sonya was straight-laced and clear-minded about these things; she would either have got the wrong end of the stick or just been shocked by any confession. Natasha would have to try and solve these agonizing problems on her own.
