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Volume I, Part Three, Chapter V

For a long time the Rostóvs had had no news of Nikolúshka; only in the middle of winter was a letter handed to the count, and on the address he recognized his son's hand. Having received the letter, the count, frightened and hurried, trying not to be noticed, ran on tiptoe to his study, locked himself in, and began to read. Anna Mikháylovna, having learned (as she knew everything that went on in the house) of the letter's arrival, quietly entered the count's study and found him with the letter in his hands, sobbing and laughing at the same time.

Anna Mikháylovna, despite the improvement in her affairs, continued to live with the Rostóvs.

"Mon bon ami?" Anna Mikháylovna said, questioningly and sadly, ready for any sympathy.

The count sobbed still more.

"Nikolúshka... a letter... wounded... would... was... ma chère... wounded... my darling... little countess... promoted to officer... thank God... How am I to tell the little countess?..."

Anna Mikháylovna sat down beside him, wiped with her handkerchief the tears from his eyes, from the letter spotted with them, and her own tears, read the letter, calmed the count, and decided that until dinner and until tea she would prepare the countess, and after tea would tell everything, if God helped her.

All through dinner Anna Mikháylovna talked about rumors of the war, about Nikolúshka; twice she asked when the last letter had been received from him, though she already knew this, and remarked that very easily, perhaps, a letter might arrive even today. Each time, at these hints, the countess began to grow uneasy and to look anxiously now at the count, now at Anna Mikháylovna, Anna Mikháylovna in the most imperceptible way brought the conversation around to insignificant subjects. Natásha, of the whole family the most gifted with the ability to feel shades of intonation, glances, and expressions of faces, had pricked up her ears from the beginning of dinner and knew that there was something between her father and Anna Mikháylovna, and something concerning her brother, and that Anna Mikháylovna was preparing something. Despite all her boldness (Natásha knew how sensitive her mother was to everything that concerned news of Nikolúshka), she did not dare ask a question at dinner, and from anxiety ate nothing and fidgeted in her chair, not listening to the remarks of her governess. After dinner she rushed headlong to catch Anna Mikháylovna and in the divan-room threw herself, at a run, on her neck.

"Auntie, darling, tell me what it is."

"Nothing, my friend."

"No, dear, darling, sweet one, peach, I will not leave you alone, I know that you know."

Anna Mikháylovna shook her head.

"Vous êtes une fine mouche, mon enfant," she said.

"A letter from Nikolinka? Surely!" cried Natásha, reading the affirmative answer in Anna Mikháylovna's face.

"But for God's sake, be careful: you know how this may strike your maman."

"I will, I will, only tell me. You will not tell me? Well then, I shall go and tell her this instant."

Anna Mikháylovna told Natásha in a few words the contents of the letter, on condition that she tell no one.

"On my honest, noble word," said Natásha, crossing herself, "I will tell no one," and immediately ran to Sónya.

"Nikolinka... wounded... a letter..." she uttered solemnly and joyfully.

"Nicolas!" Sónya only managed to say, instantly turning pale.

Natásha, seeing the impression made on Sónya by the news of her brother's wound, for the first time felt all the sorrowful side of this news.

She threw herself on Sónya, embraced her, and began to cry.

"Only slightly wounded, but promoted to officer; he is well now, he writes himself," she said through her tears.

"There, you can see that all you women are crybabies," said Pétya, pacing the room with resolute, big strides. "I am very glad, and truly very glad, that my brother has distinguished himself so. You are all ninnies! You understand nothing." Natásha smiled through her tears.

"You have not read the letter?" asked Sónya.

"I have not read it, but she said that it is all over, and that he is already an officer..."

"Thank God," said Sónya, crossing herself. "But perhaps she deceived you. Let us go to maman."

Pétya walked silently about the room.

"If I were in Nikolúshka's place, I would have killed still more of those Frenchmen," he said. "They are so vile! I would have beaten so many of them that they would have made a heap of them," continued Pétya.

"Be quiet, Pétya, what a fool you are!..."

"I am not a fool; the fools are those who cry over trifles," said Pétya.

"Do you remember him?" Natásha suddenly asked after a minute's silence. Sónya smiled.

"Do I remember Nicolas?"

"No, Sónya, do you remember him so that you remember him well, so that you remember everything?" said Natásha, with an earnest gesture, evidently wishing to give her words the most serious significance. "And I remember Nikolinka, I remember," she said. "But I do not remember Borís. I do not remember him at all..."

"What? You do not remember Borís?" asked Sónya in surprise.

"It is not that I do not remember him; I know what he is like, but I do not remember him as I remember Nikolinka. Him, I close my eyes and remember, but Borís no (she closed her eyes), like this, no — nothing!"

"Ah, Natásha!" said Sónya, looking at her friend with rapture and seriousness, as though she considered her unworthy to hear what she was intending to say, and as though she were saying it to someone else, with whom one could not joke. "I once fell in love with your brother, and whatever may happen to him, or to me, I shall never cease to love him all my life."

Natásha looked at Sónya with surprised, curious eyes and was silent. She felt that what Sónya was saying was true, that there was such a love as Sónya spoke of; but Natásha had not yet experienced anything of the kind. She believed that it could be, but did not understand it.

"Will you write to him?" she asked.

Sónya became thoughtful. The question of how to write to Nicolas, and whether she ought to write, was a question that tormented her. Now that he was already an officer and a wounded hero, would it be right on her part to remind him of herself, and, as it were, of the obligation he had taken upon himself toward her?

"I do not know; I think, if he writes, then I shall write," she said, blushing.

"And will you not be ashamed to write to him?"

Sónya smiled. "No."

"But I should be ashamed to write to Borís; I will not write."

"But why ashamed?"

"Just so, I do not know. Awkward, shameful."

"And I know why she will be ashamed," said Pétya, offended by Natásha's first remark, "because she was in love with that fat one with the spectacles (that was what Pétya called his namesake, the new Count Bezúkhov); now she is in love with that singer (Pétya meant the Italian, Natásha's singing teacher): that is why she is ashamed."

"Pétya, you are stupid," said Natásha.

"No stupider than you, mother," said nine-year-old Pétya, exactly as if he were an old brigadier.

The countess had been prepared by Anna Mikháylovna's hints during dinner. Having gone to her own room, she sat in an armchair and did not take her eyes from the miniature portrait of her son set into a snuffbox, and tears welled up in her eyes. Anna Mikháylovna, with the letter, came on tiptoe to the countess's room and stopped.

"Do not come in," she said to the old count, who was following her, "afterward," and she shut the door behind her.

The count put his ear to the lock and began to listen.

At first he heard the sounds of indifferent speeches, then one sound of Anna Mikháylovna's voice making a long speech, then a cry, then silence, then again both voices speaking together with joyful intonations, and then footsteps, and Anna Mikháylovna opened the door for him. On Anna Mikháylovna's face there was the proud expression of a surgeon who has completed a difficult amputation and is admitting the public so that it may appreciate his skill.

"C'est fait!" she said to the count, pointing with a solemn gesture to the countess, who held in one hand the snuffbox with the portrait, in the other the letter, and pressed her lips now to one, now to the other.

Seeing the count, she stretched out her arms to him, embraced his bald head, and over the bald head again looked at the letter and portrait, and again, in order to press them to her lips, lightly pushed the bald head away. Véra, Natásha, Sónya, and Pétya came into the room, and the reading began. The letter briefly described the campaign and two battles in which Nikolúshka had taken part, his promotion to officer, and said that he kissed the hands of maman and papa, asking their blessing, and kissed Véra, Natásha, and Pétya. Besides this, he sent his regards to M. Schelling, Mme Schoss, and nurse, and, besides this, asked them to kiss dear Sónya, whom he loved just as before and of whom he thought just as before. Hearing this, Sónya blushed so much that tears came into her eyes. And, unable to bear the glances turned upon her, she ran into the hall, took a run, whirled around, and, puffing out her dress like a balloon, flushed and smiling, sat down on the floor. The countess was crying.

"Why are you crying, maman?" said Véra. "From everything he writes, one ought to rejoice, not cry."

This was perfectly true, but the count, the countess, and Natásha all looked at her reproachfully. "Whom does she take after!" thought the countess.

Nikolúshka's letter was read hundreds of times, and those who were considered worthy of hearing it had to come to the countess, who did not let it out of her hands. The tutors came, the nurses, Mítenka, some acquaintances, and the countess reread the letter each time with new enjoyment and each time discovered in this letter new virtues in her Nikolúshka. How strange, extraordinary, and joyful it was to her that her son — that son whose tiny limbs had moved faintly inside her own self twenty years before, that son over whom she had quarreled with the spoiled count, that son who had learned to say first "pear" and then "woman" — that this son was now there, in a foreign land, in a foreign milieu, a manly warrior, alone, without help or guidance, doing some man's work of his own there. All the universal age-old experience, which shows that children imperceptibly become men from the cradle onward, did not exist for the countess. Her son's maturing, at every stage of that maturing, had been as extraordinary to her as if there had never been millions upon millions of people who had matured in exactly the same way. Just as, twenty years before, she had not believed that the little being who lived somewhere there beneath her heart would cry out, begin to suck the breast, and begin to speak, so now she could not believe that this same being could be the strong, brave man, the model son and man, that he now was, judging by this letter.

"What style, how sweetly he describes!" she said, reading the descriptive part of the letter. "And what a soul! Nothing about himself... nothing! About some Denísov, while he himself is surely braver than all of them. He writes nothing of his sufferings. What a heart! How I recognize him! And how he remembered everyone! He forgot no one. I always, always said, even when he was this high, I always said..."

For more than a week they prepared, wrote drafts, and copied fair letters to Nikolúshka from the whole household; under the countess's supervision and the count's solicitude, the necessary little things and money were gathered for the uniform and outfit of the newly promoted officer. Anna Mikháylovna, a practical woman, had managed to arrange protection for herself and her son in the army even for correspondence. She had an opportunity to send her letters to Grand Duke Konstantín Pávlovich, who commanded the Guards. The Rostóvs supposed that the Russian Guards abroad was a perfectly definite address, and that if a letter reached the Grand Duke commanding the Guards, there was no reason why it should not reach the Pávlograd regiment, which must be somewhere nearby; and therefore it was decided to send the letters and money through the Grand Duke's courier to Borís, and Borís was then to deliver them to Nikolúshka. The letters were from the old count, from the countess, from Pétya, from Véra, from Natásha, from Sónya, and, finally, there were 6000 in money for the uniform and various things which the count was sending his son.