him?. . . Yes, go to the yard and fetch a fowl, please, a cock, and you, Mísha, bring me some oats.”[1]
“Just a few oats?” said Mísha, cheerfully and readily.
“Go, go quickly,” the old man urged him.
“And you, Theodore, get me a piece of chalk.”
On her way past the butler's pantry she told them to set a samovar, though it was not at all the time for tea.
Fóka, the butler, was the most ill-tempered person in the house. Natásha liked to test her power over him. He distrusted the order and asked whether the samovar was really wanted.
“Oh clear, what a young lady!” said Fóka, pretending to frown at Natásha.
No one in the house sent people about or gave them as much trouble as Natásha did. She could not see people unconcernedly, but had to send them on some errand. She seemed to be trying whether any of them would get angry or sulky with her; but the serfs fulfilled no one's orders so readily as they did hers. “What can I do, where can I go?” thought she, as she went slowly along the passage.
“Nastásya Ivánovna, what sort of children shall I have?” she asked the buffoon, who was coming toward her in a woman's jacket.
“Why, fleas, crickets, grasshoppers,” answered the buffoon.
“O Lord, O Lord, it's always the same! Oh, where am I to go? What am I to do with myself?” And tapping with her heels, she ran quickly upstairs to see Vogel and his wife who lived on the upper story.
Two governesses were sitting with the Vogels at a table, on which were plates of raisins, walnuts, and almonds. The governesses were discussing whether it was cheaper to live in Moscow or Odessa. Natásha sat down, listened to their talk with a serious and thoughtful air, and then got up again.
“The island of Madagascar,” she said, “Mada-gas-car,” she repeated, articulating each syllable distinctly, and, not replying to Madame Schoss who asked her what she was saying, she went out of the room.
Her brother Pétya was upstairs too; with the man in attendance on him he was preparing fireworks to let off that night.
“Pétya! Pétya!” she called to him. “Carry me downstairs.”
Pétya ran up and offered her his back. She jumped on it, putting her arms round his neck, and he pranced along with her.
“No, don't. . . the island of Madagascar!” she said, and jumping off his back she went downstairs.
Having as it were reviewed her kingdom, tested her power, and made sure that everyone was submissive, but that all the same it was dull, Natásha betook herself to the ballroom, picked up her guitar, sat down in a dark corner behind a bookcase, and began to run her fingers over the strings in the bass, picking out a passage she recalled from an opera she had heard in Petersburg with Prince Andrew. What she drew from the guitar would have had no meaning for other listeners, but in her imagination a whole series of reminiscences arose from those sounds. She sat behind the bookcase with her eyes fixed on a streak of light escaping from the pantry door and listened to herself and pondered. She was in a mood for brooding on the past.
Sónya passed to the pantry with a glass in her hand. Natásha glanced at her and at the crack in the pantry door, and it seemed to her that she remembered the light falling through that crack once before and Sónya passing with a glass in her hand. “Yes, it was exactly the same,” thought Natásha.
“Sónya, what is this?” she cried, twanging a thick string.
“Oh, you are there!” said Sónya with a start, and came near and listened. “I don't know. A storm?” she ventured timidly, afraid of being wrong.
“There! That's just how she started and just how she came up smiling timidly when all this happened before,” thought Natásha, “and in just the same way I thought there was something lacking in her.”
“No, it's the chorus from The Water-Carrier, listen!” and Natásha sang the air of the chorus so that Sónya should catch it. “Where were you going?” she asked.
“To change the water in this glass. I am just finishing the design.”
“You always find something to do, but I can't,” said Natásha. “And where's Nicholas?”
“Asleep, I think.”
“Sónya, go and wake him,” said Natásha. “Tell him I want him to come and sing.”
She sat awhile, wondering what the meaning of it all having happened before could be, and without solving this problem, or at all regretting not having done so, she again passed
- ↑ Feeding a fowl with grain arranged on the floor is a way of telling fortunes at Christmastime.—Tr.
