War And Peace

In the unforgettably difficult days following the birth of their first, underweight baby, they had gone through three wet nurses one after another, and Natasha was sick with worry, when Pierre suddenly mentioned Rousseau’s ideas about the unnaturalness and great harm of giving babies over to wet nurses, and said he completely agreed with them. When the next baby came along Natasha defied her own mother, the doctors and even her husband himself, all of whom thought that nursing your own baby was an outrageously dangerous practice; she got her own way, and from that day forth had nursed all the children herself.

It sometimes happened that irritation between husband and wife led to long arguments, but later on Pierre would often notice to his surprise and delight that his wife was implementing in deed as well as in word the very thing she had been arguing against. There it was, his own idea, stripped of all the inessentials that had been added to it in the heat of the argument.

After seven years of married life Pierre felt happy and secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t a bad man, and he felt this because he could see himself reflected in his wife. In himself he could sense the good and bad all mixed up together, the one obscuring the other. But in his wife he could see a reflection of nothing but good; anything that fell short of that was discarded. And this reflection was not achieved by logical thought processes; it came from a different source, a mysterious realm of direct personal experience.

CHAPTER 11

Two months before this, when Pierre had already come to stay with the Rostovs, he received a letter from a certain Prince Fyodor, urging him to come to Petersburg to discuss a number of important questions that were exercising the Petersburg membership of a society which Pierre had served as one of its founding fathers.

Natasha was in the habit of reading all her husband’s letters, and she read this one. Much as she hated the idea of him going away, she took the lead in persuading him to go. Anything to do with her husband’s abstract, intellectual life she thought of as highly significant, though it was all beyond her, and she lived in constant fear of being an encumbrance to her husband in such matters. When Pierre gave her a timid and quizzical glance after reading the letter she responded by insisting that he go, as long as he told her exactly when he would be back. He was given four weeks’ leave of absence.

He was now two weeks overdue and ever since his leave ran out Natasha had been in a constant state of alarm, despondency and irritability.

Retired General Denisov, already frustrated at the current state of public affairs, had arrived during that fortnight, and now he looked at Natasha in sad surprise – it was like looking at a badly painted portrait of someone near and dear. A sad look of bored indifference, one or two irrelevant remarks and a constant stream of nursery talk was all he saw and heard from the seductive creature of days gone by.

Natasha had spent the whole time looking miserable and irritable, especially when her mother, her brother, Sonya or Countess Marya tried to soothe her by making excuses for Pierre, and thinking up reasons for his delay in returning.

‘It’s nothing but childish nonsense,’ Natasha would say. ‘All these grand ideas that never come to anything.’ And she would go on about ‘all these stupid societies of his’, referring to matters of the greatest importance, which she really believed in. And off she would go to the nursery to feed her only little boy, baby Petya.

No one could provide such soothing and sensible consolation as that little three-month-old creature when it lay at her breast, and she could feel its little mouth moving and its nose snuffling. That little creature would say to her, ‘You’re feeling angry and jealous, you’d like to get your own back, you’re worried, but I’m here – and I am him. Look, I am him.’ There was no answer to that. It was more than true.

Natasha had gone to her baby for comfort and fussed over him so often during those two restless weeks that she had overfed him and made him poorly. She was terrified at his illness, but it was just what she needed. She was so preoccupied with looking after him that her worries about her husband were easier to bear.

She was feeding the baby when Pierre’s sledge came grinding up to the entrance, whereupon the nurse, knowing how to please her mistress, hurried in quietly with her face all aglow.

‘Is that him?’ asked Natasha in a quick whisper, afraid to move for fear of waking the baby, who was just dropping off.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ whispered the nurse.

The blood rushed to Natasha’s face, and her feet moved instinctively, but she couldn’t just leap up and run away. The baby opened his little eyes again, glanced at her as if to say, ‘Oh, you’re still here,’ and gave another lazy smack of his lips.