After reading the letter Natasha sat down to the writing-table to write back. She began by jotting down an automatic ‘Dear Princess . . .’ in French, and then stopped. How could she go on after all that had happened the day before? Yes, yes, it really had happened, and now everything was different, she thought, sitting over the letter she had barely begun. ‘Should I turn him down? Should I? Oh, it’s too awful!’ And to get away from horrible thoughts like these she went in to see Sonya and went through some embroidery patterns with her.
After dinner Natasha went back to her room and took up Princess Marya’s letter again. ‘Is it all over?’ she thought. ‘Has it all happened just like that and ruined everything that went before?’ She could remember the full force of her love for Prince Andrey, but she still felt she was in love with Kuragin. She conjured up a picture of herself living happily as Prince Andrey’s wife, a picture she had so often dwelt on in her imagination, but at the same time, burning with excitement, she brought back to mind every detail of yesterday’s encounter with Anatole.
‘Why couldn’t that happen too?’ she kept wondering in her fog of bewilderment. ‘That’s the only way I could be completely happy. With things as they are I have to choose, and I can’t be happy unless I have both of them. I know one thing,’ she thought. ‘Telling Prince Andrey what’s happened and hiding it from him are equally impossible. But with
‘Please, miss,’ whispered a maid, coming into the room looking all secretive, ‘a man told me to give you this.’ She handed her a letter. ‘But please, miss, for the love of Jesus . . .’ said the girl, as Natasha, not giving it a thought, broke the seal automatically and began reading a love-letter from Anatole, without taking in a word of it, aware of one thing only – it was a letter from him, the man she loved. Yes, she did love him. Otherwise, how could what had happened have happened? How could she have ended up with a love-letter from him in her hand?
Natasha’s hands were shaking as she held on to that passionate love-letter, composed for Anatole by Dolokhov, and as she read it through she discovered in it echoes of everything that she herself seemed to be feeling.
‘Since yesterday evening my fate is sealed: to be loved by you or to die. There is no other way . . .’ the letter began. He went on to say that he knew her family would never give her to him, for secret reasons that he could reveal only to her in private, but if she loved him, she had only to say the word
‘Yes, yes, I do love him!’ thought Natasha, reading the letter for the twentieth time and discovering some new deep meaning in every word.
That evening Marya Dmitriyevna was going to the Arkharovs’, and proposed taking the young ladies with her. Natasha pleaded a headache and stayed behind at home.
CHAPTER 15
Late that night when she got back Sonya went into Natasha’s room and to her surprise found her fast asleep on the sofa, still dressed. On the table next to her lay Anatole’s letter, open. Sonya picked it up and read it.
As she read she kept glancing down at Natasha, who was still asleep, watching her face in the hope of discovering some explanation of what she was reading, but finding nothing. Natasha’s face was peaceful, gentle and happy. Clutching at her chest to stop herself choking, Sonya sank down into an armchair, pale-faced and trembling with emotion and horror, and burst into tears.
‘Why didn’t I see this coming? How can it have gone so far? Has she lost all her love for Prince Andrey? And how could she have let Kuragin go as far as this? He’s a liar and a scoundrel, that’s for sure. What will Nikolay do – dear, noble Nikolay – when he gets to know? So that’s what it meant, that funny look on her face, all determined and excited, the other day, and yesterday, and today,’ thought Sonya. ‘But she can’t possibly have fallen in love with him! She’s probably opened that letter without knowing who it was from. She probably feels insulted by it. Surely she couldn’t do that!’
Sonya wiped away her tears and went over to Natasha, looking closely at her face again.
‘Natasha!’ she said in a barely audible voice.
Natasha woke up and saw Sonya.
‘Oh, you’re back.’
And with the warm impulsiveness that can come over people at the moment of waking she hugged her friend. But when she saw Sonya’s embarrassment she was embarrassed too, and suspicious.
‘Sonya, you’ve read the letter, haven’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Sonya softly.
Natasha gave a smile of triumph.
‘No, Sonya, I can’t go on like this!’ she said. ‘I can’t hide it from you any longer. You know we love each other! . . . Sonya, darling, he writes . . . Sonya . . .’
