CHAPTER VII

Chinese

WHEN ILAGIN TOOK LEAVE of them in the evening, Nikolay found himself so great a distance from home that he accepted the uncle's invitation to stop hunting and to stay the night at the uncle's little place, Mihailovka.

“And if you all come to me—forward, quick march!” said the uncle, “it would be even better; you see, the weather's damp, you could rest, and the little countess could be driven back in a trap.” The invitation was accepted; a huntsman was sent to Otradnoe for a trap, and Nikolay, Natasha, and Petya rode to the uncle's house.

Five men servants—little and big—ran out on to the front steps to meet their master. Dozens of women, old and big and little, popped out at the back entrance to have a look at the huntsmen as they arrived. The presence of Natasha—a woman, a lady, on horseback—excited the curiosity of the uncle's house-serfs to such a pitch that many of them went up to her, stared her in the face, and, unrestrained by her presence, made remarks about her, as though she were some prodigy on show, not a human being, and not capable of hearing and understanding what was said about her.

“Arinka, look-ée, she sits sideways! Sits on so, while her skirt flies about.… And look at the little horn!”

“Sakes alive! and the knife too.…”

“A regular Tatar woman!”

“How do you manage not to tumble off?” said the forwardest of them, addressing Natasha boldly.

The uncle got off his horse at the steps of his little wooden house, which was shut in by an overgrown garden. Looking from one to another of his household, he shouted peremptorily to those who were not wanted to retire, and for the others to do all that was needed for the reception of his guests.

They all ran off in different directions. The uncle helped Natasha to dismount, and gave her his arm up the shaky, plank steps.

Inside, the house, with boarded, unplastered walls, was not very clean; there was nothing to show that the chief aim of the persons living in it was the removal of every spot, yet there were not signs of neglect. There was a smell of fresh apples in the entry, and the walls were hung with foxskins and wolfskins.

The uncle led his guests through the vestibule into a little hall with a folding-table and red chairs, then into a drawing-room with a round birchwood table and a sofa, and then into his study, with a ragged sofa, a threadbare carpet, and portraits of Suvorov, of his father and mother, and of himself in military uniform. The study smelt strongly of tobacco and dogs. In the study the uncle asked his guests to sit down and make themselves at home, and he left them. Rugay came in, his back still covered with mud, and lay on the sofa, cleaning himself with his tongue and his teeth. There was a corridor leading from the study, and in it they could see a screen with ragged curtains. Behind the screen they heard feminine laughter and whispering. Natasha, Nikolay, and Petya took off their wraps and sat down on the sofa. Petya leaned on his arm and fell asleep at once; Natasha and Nikolay sat without speaking. Their faces were burning; they were very hungry and very cheerful. They looked at one another—now that the hunt was over and they were indoors, Nikolay did not feel called upon to show his masculine superiority over his sister. Natasha winked at her brother; and they could neither of them restrain themselves long, and broke into a ringing laugh before they had time to invent a pretext for their mirth.

After a brief interval, the uncle came in wearing a Cossack coat, blue breeches, and little top-boots. And this very costume, at which Natasha had looked with surprise and amusement when the uncle wore it at Otradnoe, seemed to her now the right costume here, and in no way inferior to frock coats or ordinary jackets. The uncle, too, was in good spirits; far from feeling mortified at the laughter of the brother and sister (he was incapable of imagining that they could be laughing at his mode of life), he joined in their causeless mirth himself.

“Well, this young countess here—forward, quick march!—I have never seen her like!” he said, giving a long pipe to Rostov, while with a practised motion of three fingers he filled another—a short broken one—for himself.

“She's been in the saddle all day—something for a man to boast of—and she's just as fresh as if nothing had happened!”

Soon the door was opened obviously, from the sound, by a barefoot servant-girl, and a stout, red-cheeked, handsome woman of about forty, with a double chin and full red lips, walked in, with a big tray in her hands. With hospitable dignity and cordiality in her eyes and in every gesture, she looked round at the guests, and with a genial smile bowed to them respectfully.

In spite of her exceptional stoutness, which made her hold her head flung back, while her bosom and all her portly person was thrust forward, this woman (the uncle's housekeeper) stepped with extreme lightness. She went to the table, put the tray down, and deftly with her plump, white hands set the bottles and dishes on the table. When she had finished this task she went away, standing for a moment in the doorway with a smile on her face. “Here I am—I am she! Now do you understand the uncle?” her appearance had said to Rostov. Who could fail to understand? Not Nikolay only, but even Natasha understood the uncle now and the significance of his knitted brows, and the happy, complacent smile, which puckered his lips as Anisya Fyodorovna came in. On the tray there were liqueurs, herb-brandy, mushrooms, biscuits of rye flour made with buttermilk, honey in the comb, foaming mead made from honey, apples, nuts raw and nuts baked, and nuts preserved in honey. Then Anisya Fyodorovna brought in preserves made with honey and with sugar, and ham and a chicken that had just been roasted.

All these delicacies were of Anisya Fyodorovna's preparing, cooking or preserving. All seemed to smell and taste, as it were, of Anisya Fyodorovna. All seemed to recall her buxomness, cleanliness, whiteness, and cordial smile.

“A little of this, please, little countess,” she kept saying, as she handed Natasha first one thing, then another. Natasha ate of everything, and it seemed to her that such buttermilk biscuits, such delicious preserves, such nuts in honey, such a chicken, she had never seen nor tasted anywhere. Anisya Fyodorovna withdrew. Rostov and the uncle, as they sipped cherry brandy after supper, talked of hunts past and to come, of Rugay and Ilagin's dogs. Natasha sat upright on the sofa, listening with sparkling eyes. She tried several times to waken Petya, and make him eat something, but he made incoherent replies, evidently in his sleep. Natasha felt so gay, so well content in these new surroundings, that her only fear was that the trap would come too soon for her. After a silence had chanced to fall upon them, as almost always happens when any one receives friends for the first time in his own house, the uncle said, in response to the thought in his guests' minds:

“Yes, so you see how I am finishing my days.… One dies—forward, quick march!—nothing is left. So why sin!”

The uncle's face was full of significance and even beauty as he said this. Rostov could not help recalling as he spoke all the good things he had heard said by his father and the neighbours about him. Through the whole district the uncle had the reputation of being a most generous and disinterested eccentric. He was asked to arbitrate in family quarrels; he was chosen executor; secrets were entrusted to him; he was elected a justice, and asked to fill other similar posts; but he had always persisted in refusing all public appointments, spending the autumn and spring in the fields on his bay horse, the winter sitting at home, and the summer lying in his overgrown garden.

“Why don't you enter the service, uncle?”

“I have been in the service, but I flung it up. I'm not fit for it. I can't make anything of it. That's your affair. I haven't the wit for it. The chase, now, is a very different matter; there it's all forward and quick march! Open the door there!” he shouted. “Why have you shut it?” A door at the end of the corridor (which word the uncle always pronounced collidor, like a peasant) led to the huntsmen's room, as the sitting-room for the huntsmen was called. There was a rapid patter of bare feet, and an unseen hand opened the door into the huntsmen's room. They could then hear distinctly from the corridor the sounds of the balalaika, unmistakably played by a master hand. Natasha had been for some time listening, and now she went out into the corridor to hear the music more clearly.

“That's Mitka, my coachman … I bought him a good balalaika; I'm fond of it,” said the uncle. It was his custom to get Mitka to play the balalaika in the men's room when he came home from the chase. He was fond of hearing that instrument.

“How well he plays! It's really very nice,” said Nikolay, with a certain unconscious superciliousness in his tone, as though he were ashamed to admit he liked this music.

“Very nice?” Natasha said reproachfully, feeling the tone in which her brother had spoken. “It's not nice, but splendid, really!” Just as the uncle's mushrooms and honey and liqueurs had seemed to her the most delicious in the world, this playing struck her at that moment as the very acme of musical expression.

“More, more, please,” said Natasha in the doorway, as soon as the balalaika ceased. Mitka tuned up and began again gallantly twanging away at “My Lady,” with shakes and flourishes. The uncle sat listening with his head on one side, and a slight smile. The air of “My Lady” was repeated a hundred times over. Several times the balalaika was tuned up and the same notes were thrummed again, but the audience did not weary of it, and still longed to hear it again and again. Anisya Fyodorovna came in and stood with her portly person leaning against the doorpost.

“You are pleased to listen!” she said to Natasha, with a smile extra-ordinarily like the uncle's smile. “He does play nicely,” she said.

“That part he never plays right,” the uncle said suddenly with a vigorous gesture. “It ought to be taken more at a run—forward, quick march! … to be played lightly.”

“Why, can you do it?” asked Natasha.

The uncle smiled, and did not answer.

“Just you look, Anisyushka, whether the strings are all right on the guitar, eh? It's a long while since I have handled it. I had quite given it up!”

Anisya Fyodorovna went very readily with her light step to do her master's bidding, and brought him his guitar. Without looking at any one the uncle blew the dust off it, tapped on the case with his bony fingers, tuned it, and settled himself in a low chair. Arching his left elbow with a rather theatrical gesture, he held the guitar above the finger-board, and winking at Anisya Fyodorovna, he played, not the first notes of “My Lady,” but a single pure musical chord, and then smoothly, quietly, but confidently began playing in very slow time the well-known song, “As along the high road.” The air of the song thrilled in Nikolay's and Natasha's hearts in time, in tune with it, with the same sober gaiety—the same gaiety as was manifest in the whole personality of Anisya Fyodorovna. Anisya Fyodorovna flushed, and hiding her face in her kerchief, went laughing out of the room. The uncle still went on playing the song carefully, correctly, and vigorously, gazing with a transformed, inspired face at the spot where Anisya Fyodorovna had stood. Laughter came gradually into his face on one side under his grey moustache, and it grew stronger as the song went on, as the time quickened, and breaks came after a flourish.

“Splendid, splendid, uncle! Again, again!” cried Natasha, as soon as he had finished. She jumped up from her place and kissed and hugged the uncle. “Nikolenka, Nikolenka!” she said, looking round at her brother as though to ask, “What do you say to it?”

Nikolay, too, was much pleased by the uncle's playing. He played the song a second time. The smiling face of Anisya Fyodorovna appeared again in the doorway and other faces behind her.… “For the water from the well, a maiden calls to him to stay!” played the uncle. He made another dexterous flourish and broke off, twitching his shoulders.

“Oh, oh, uncle darling!” wailed Natasha, in a voice as imploring as though her life depended on it. The uncle got up, and there seemed to be two men in him at that moment—one smiled seriously at the antics of the merry player, while the merry player naïvely and carefully executed the steps preliminary to the dance.

“Come, little niece!” cried the uncle, waving to Natasha the hand that had struck the last chord.

Natasha flung off the shawl that had been wrapped round her, ran forward facing the uncle, and setting her arms akimbo, made the movements of her shoulder and waist.

Where, how, when had this young countess, educated by a French émigrée, sucked in with the Russian air she breathed the spirit of that dance? Where had she picked up these movements which the pas de châle would, one might have thought, long ago have eradicated? But the spirit, the motions were those inimitable, unteachable, Russian gestures the uncle had hoped for from her. As soon as she stood up, and smiled that triumphant, proud smile of sly gaiety, the dread that had come on Nikolay and all the spectators at the first moment, the dread that she would not dance it well, was at an end and they were already admiring her.

She danced the dance well, so well indeed, so perfectly, that Anisya Fyodorovna, who handed her at once the kerchief she needed in the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched that slender, graceful little countess, reared in silk and velvet, belonging to another world than hers, who was yet able to understand all that was in Anisya and her father and her mother and her aunt and every Russian soul.

“Well done, little countess—forward, quick march!” cried the uncle, laughing gleefully as he finished the dance. “Ah, that's a niece to be proud of! She only wants a fine fellow picked out now for her husband,—and then, forward, quick march!”

“One has been picked out already,” said Nikolay, smiling.

“Oh!” said the uncle in surprise, looking inquiringly at Natasha. Natasha nodded her head with a happy smile.

“And such an one!” she said. But as soon as she said it a different, new series of ideas and feelings rose up within her. “What was the meaning of Nikolay's smile when he said: ‘One has been picked out already'? Was he glad of it, or not glad? He seemed to think my Bolkonsky would not approve, would not understand our gaiety now. No, he would quite understand it. Where is he now?” Natasha wondered, and her face became serious at once. But that lasted only one second. “I mustn't think, I mustn't dare to think about that,” she said to herself; and smiling, she sat down again near the uncle, begging him to play them something more.

The uncle sang, as peasants sing, in full and naive conviction that in a song the whole value rests in the words, that the tune comes of itself and that a tune apart is nothing, that the tune is only for the sake of the verse. And this gave the uncle's unself-conscious singing a peculiar charm, like the song of birds. Natasha was in ecstasies over the uncle's singing. She made up her mind not to learn the harp any longer, but to play only on the guitar. She asked the uncle for the guitar and at once struck the chords of the song.

At ten o'clock there arrived the wagonette, a trap, and three men on horseback, who had been sent to look for Natasha and Petya. The count and countess did not know where they were and were very anxious, so said one of the men.

Petya was carried out and laid in the wagonette as though he had been a corpse. Natasha and Nikolay got into the trap. The uncle wrapped Natasha up, and said good-bye to her with quite a new tenderness. He accompanied them on foot as far as the bridge which they had to ride round, fording the stream, and bade his huntsmen ride in front with lanterns.

“Farewell, dear little niece!” they heard called in the darkness by his voice, not the one Natasha had been familiar with before, but the voice that had sung “When there fall at evening glow.”

There were red lights in the village they drove through and a cheerful smell of smoke.

“What a darling that uncle is!” said Natasha as they drove out into the highroad.

“Yes,” said Nikolay. “You're not cold?”

“No, I'm very comfortable; very. I am so happy,” said Natasha, positively perplexed at her own well-being. They were silent for a long while.

The night was dark and damp. They could not see the horses, but could only hear them splashing through the unseen mud.

What was passing in that childlike, responsive soul, that so eagerly caught and made its own all the varied impressions of life? How were they all stored away in her heart? But she was very happy. They were getting near home when she suddenly hummed the air of “When there fall at evening glow,” which she had been trying to get all the way, and had only just succeeded in catching.

“Have you caught it?” said Nikolay.

“What are you thinking of just now, Nikolay?” asked Natasha. They were fond of asking each other that question.

“I?” said Nikolay, trying to recall. “Well, you see, at first I was thinking that Rugay, the red dog, is like the uncle, and that if he were a man he would keep uncle always in the house with him, if not for racing, for music he'd keep him anyway. How jolly uncle is! Isn't he? Well, and you?”

“I? Wait a minute; wait a minute! Oh, I was thinking at first that here we are driving and supposing that we are going home, but God knows where we are going in this darkness, and all of a sudden we shall arrive and see we are not at Otradnoe but in fairyland. And then I thought, too … no; nothing more.”

“I know, of course, you thought of him,” said Nikolay, smiling, as Natasha could tell by his voice.

“No,” Natasha answered, though she really had been thinking at the same time of Prince Andrey and how he would like the uncle. “And I keep repeating, too, all the way I keep repeating: how nicely Anisyushka walked; how nicely…” said Natasha. And Nikolay heard her musical, causeless, happy laugh.

“And do you know?” she said suddenly. “I know I shall never be as happy, as peaceful as I am now…”

“What nonsense, idiocy, rubbish!” said Nikolay, and he thought: “What a darling this Natasha of mine is! I have never had, and never shall have, another friend like her. Why should she be married? I could drive like this with her for ever!”

“What a darling this Nikolay of mine is!” Natasha was thinking.

“Ah! Still a light in the drawing-room,” she said, pointing to the windows of their house gleaming attractively in the wet, velvety darkness of the night.

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