War And Peace

He heard that the Rostovs were in Kostroma, and thoughts of Natasha rarely entered his head. When they did they were limited to pleasant memories of times gone by. He felt a sense of freedom, not only from the demands of everyday life but also from that particular feeling which he seemed once to have brought upon himself.

On the third day after his arrival in Moscow he found out from the Drubetskoys that Princess Marya was back in town. Prince Andrey’s death, his suffering and his final days had been at the forefront of Pierre’s mind in recent times, and now they arose again with a new insistence. When he heard over dinner that Princess Marya was in Moscow, living in her own house on Vozdvizhenka, which had escaped the fire, he went round to see her the same evening.

On the way there Pierre’s mind was full of Prince Andrey, their friendship, the various occasions when they had met, and especially their last encounter at Borodino.

‘Can he really have died in the foul mood he was in then? Didn’t he get an inkling of the meaning of life before he died?’ Pierre wondered. He thought of Karatayev, and his death, and he found himself comparing these two men, so different and yet so similar in the love he had had for them both, and in the fact that both of them had been alive and were now dead.

Pierre was in a very serious frame of mind as he drove up to the old prince’s home. The house had survived. There were some signs of damage to the place, but the character of the house was just the same. The old footman who met Pierre had a stern look on his face, as if he wanted to convey to the new arrival an impression that the absence of the old prince made no difference to the strict running of the household, and he informed him that the princess, having retired to her rooms, received only on Sundays.

‘Tell her I’m here. She might just see me,’ said Pierre.

‘Certainly, sir,’ answered the footman. ‘Would you please come through into the portrait gallery?’

A few minutes later he returned with Dessalles. Dessalles brought a message from the princess: she would be very glad to see Pierre and invited him, if he would excuse her not standing on ceremony, to come up to her apartment.

In a low room lit by a single candle he found the princess, and there was someone else with her dressed in black. Pierre remembered that the princess had always had lady companions with her, but who they were and what they were like he didn’t know and couldn’t recall. ‘Must be one of her companions,’ he thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress.

The princess rose quickly to meet him, and offered her hand.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking closely at his much-changed face after he had kissed her hand. ‘So this is how we meet again. He often talked about you towards the end,’ she said, looking away from Pierre and at her companion with a sudden show of diffidence that took him by surprise.

‘I was so glad to hear of your salvation. It was the only piece of good news we had had for a long time.’

Again the princess, more unsettled than ever, glanced at her companion, and she was about to say more when Pierre interrupted her.

‘You can well imagine, I knew nothing about him,’ he said. ‘I thought he’d been killed. Everything I knew I got from other people, second hand. I do know now that he ended up with the Rostovs . . . Strange how things work out!’

Pierre was talking rapidly, eagerly. He glanced round once at her companion’s face, catching a glimpse of friendly, questioning eyes watching him closely, and, as often happens in mid-conversation, he felt a vague intimation that this lady companion in the black dress was a splendid person, full of goodness and kindness, who would be no embarrassment to him as he poured out his innermost feelings to Princess Marya.

But as he uttered the last words about the Rostovs, the uneasiness in Princess Marya’s face became even more noticeable. Again her eyes shifted from Pierre’s face to the face of the lady in the black dress, and she said, ‘Surely you know who this is?’

Pierre glanced again at the pale, thin face of her companion, with its black eyes and strange mouth. Something very dear to him, long forgotten and more than just pleasant gazed at him out of those carefully watching eyes.

‘No. It’s not possible,’ he thought. ‘That grim-looking face, all thin and pale and so much older than it was. It can’t be her. It’s somebody who reminds me of her . . .’ But at that moment Princess Marya said, ‘Natasha!’ And painfully, with all the strain of a rusty door opening, that carefully watching face smiled at him, and as the door opened Pierre was suddenly overwhelmed by a heady sensation of happiness long forgotten, something that couldn’t have been further from his mind at this time. His head swam as the feeling swept over him and enveloped his whole being. That smile of hers had left him in no doubt. It was Natasha, and he loved her.