The countess, Madame Schoss and Sonya got undressed very quickly and were soon in bed. Only the icon-lamp was left burning. But outside, the fire at Little Mytyshchi lit up the landscape for more than a mile around, there was a lot of noise coming from some drunken peasants at the tavern across the street where Mamonov’s Cossacks had broken in, and the adjutant could still be heard moaning and groaning.
Natasha lay there for a long time listening to the sounds coming to her from within and without, and she never moved a muscle. First she heard her mother praying and sighing, then her bed creaking under her, then Madame Schoss whistling and snoring as she always did, then Sonya breathing softly. The countess called out to Natasha. Natasha didn’t respond.
‘I think she’s asleep, Mamma,’ whispered Sonya.
The countess waited for a while in silence and then spoke again, but this time nobody answered.
It wasn’t long before Natasha caught the sound of her mother’s steady breathing. Natasha still didn’t move, though her little bare foot, sticking out from under the blanket, felt frozen on the uncovered floor.
A cricket chirped in a cranny, as if he was king of the world. A cock crowed a long way away, and others answered close by. The shouting had died away in the tavern. Only the adjutant’s moaning went on as before. Natasha sat up.
‘Sonya! Are you asleep? Mamma!’ she whispered.
No answer. Slowly and cautiously Natasha got up, crossed herself and stepped cautiously with her slender, supple, bare feet on to the dirty, cold floor. A floorboard creaked. With nimble movements she skipped forward one or two steps like a little kitten, and took hold of the cold door-handle.
Something seemed to be thumping on every wall of the hut with a heavy, rhythmic thudding sound; it was the beating of her own heart, which was bursting with dread, love and panic.
She opened the door, stepped over the threshold and out on to the damp, cold earth of the passage beyond. She felt refreshed by the chill air that met her. Her bare foot brushed against a sleeping body; she stepped over it, and opened the door into the hut where Prince Andrey was lying. It was dark inside. There was a bed with something lying on it, and in the far corner on a little bench a guttering tallow candle with a huge wick.
Ever since yesterday morning when she had been told that Prince Andrey was with them, wounded, Natasha had decided she had to see him. She couldn’t have said why precisely, but she knew their meeting would be an agonizing experience, and this reinforced her certainty that it couldn’t be avoided.
All day long she had lived in the hope of seeing him that night. But now the moment had come she was horrified at the thought of what she might see. Had he been disfigured? What was left of him? Was he something like that never-ending moan of the adjutant? Yes, that’s what he was like. In her imagination he was the personification of that awful moaning. When she caught sight of a dark mass in the corner, and mistook a pair of raised knees under the blanket for someone’s shoulders, she imagined it to be some ghastly body, and she stopped in terror. But an irresistible urge drew her on. She took one cautious step, then another, and there she was in the middle of the small hut, which was cluttered with baggage. There was another figure (Timokhin), lying on a bench under the icons, and two more down on the floor (the doctor and the valet).
The valet sat up whispering. Timokhin couldn’t sleep because of a painful wound in his leg, and he goggled at this weird apparition – a girl in a white chemise, bed-jacket, and nightcap. The only effect of the valet’s scared and sleepy reaction, ‘Who’s that? What do you want?’ was to make Natasha hurry across to the object lying in the corner. Horribly inhuman though it looked, she simply had to see that body. As she slipped past the valet the guttering candle flared up a little, and she could see Prince Andrey quite clearly, lying there just as she had always seen him, with his arms stretched out on top of the blanket.
He was just the same as ever, but the feverish flush on his face, his glittering eyes, rapturously glued on her, and most of all his neck, as soft as child’s where his nightshirt collar was turned down, gave him a special look of boyish innocence that she had never before seen in Prince Andrey. She ran over to him and in one smooth, youthful movement dropped quickly down on her knees.
He smiled, and held out his hand to her.
CHAPTER 32
