Princess Marya with her delicate intuition saw all that in the first glance at Natasha’s face, and with mournful relief wept on her shoulder.
“Come, let us go to him, Marie,” said Natasha, drawing her away into the next room.
Princess Marya lifted up her head, dried her eyes, and turned to Natasha. She felt that from her she would learn all, would understand all. “How …” she was beginning, but stopped short. She felt that no question nor answer could be put into words. Natasha’s face and eyes would be sure to tell her all more clearly and more profoundly.
Natasha looked at her, but seemed to be in dread and in doubt whether to say or not to say all she knew; she seemed to feel that before those luminous eyes, piercing to the very bottom of her heart, it was impossible not to tell the whole, whole truth as she saw it. Natasha’s lip suddenly twitched, ugly creases came round her mouth, and she broke into sobs, hiding her face in her hands.
Princess Marya knew everything.
But still she could not give up hope, and asked in words, though she put no faith in them:
“But how is his wound? What is his condition altogether?”
“You … you will see that,” was all Natasha could say.
They sat a little while below, near his room, to control their tears and go in to him with calm faces.
“How has the whole illness gone? Has he been worse for long? When did this happen?” Princess Marya asked.
Natasha told her that at first there had been danger from inflammation and the great pain, but that that had passed away at Troitsa, and the doctor had only been afraid of one thing — gangrene. But the risk of that, too, was almost over. When they reached Yaroslavl, the wound had begun to suppurate (Natasha knew all about suppuration and all the rest of it), and the doctor had said that the suppuration might follow the regular course. Fever had set in. The doctor had said this fever was not so serious. “But two days ago,” Natasha began, “all of a sudden this change came …” She struggled with her sobs. “I don’t know why, but you will see the change in him.”
“He is weaker? thinner? …” queried the princess.
“No, not that, but worse. You will see. O Marie, he is too good, he cannot, he cannot live, because …”
Chapter 15
WHEN NATASHA opened the door with her practised hands, letting her pass in before her, Princess Marya felt the sobs rising in her throat. However much she prepared herself, however much she tried to compose herself, she knew that she would not be able to see him without tears:
She understood what Natasha had meant by the words: two days ago this change came. She interpreted it as meaning that he had suddenly grown softer, and that that softening, that tenderness, was the sign of death. As she approached the door, she saw already in her imagination that face of the little Andryusha, as she had known it in childhood, tender, gentle, softened, as it was so rarely, and as it affected her so strongly. She felt sure he would say soft, tender words to her like those her father had uttered on his deathbed, and that she would not be able to bear it, and would break into sobs at them. But sooner or later, it must be, and she went into the room. Her sobs seemed rising higher and higher in her throat as with her short-sighted eyes she distinguished his figure more and more clearly, and now she saw his face and met his eyes.
He was lying on a couch, propped up with cushions, in a squirrel-lined dressing-gown. He was thin and pale. One thin, transparently white hand held a handkerchief, with the other he was softly fingering the delicate moustache that had grown long. His eyes gazed at them as they came in.
On seeing his face and meeting his eyes, Princess Marya at once slackened the rapidity of her step and felt the tears dried up and the sobs checked. As she caught the expression of his face and eyes, she felt suddenly shy and guilty.
“But how am I in fault?” she asked herself. “In being alive and thinking of the living while I! …” his cold, stern eyes seemed to answer.
In the profound, not outward- but inward-looking gaze there was something almost like hostility as he deliberately scanned his sister and Natasha. He kissed his sister’s hand, while she kissed his, as their habit was.
“How are you, Marie; how did you manage to get here?” he said, in a voice as even and as aloof as the look in his eyes. If he had uttered a shriek of despair, that shriek would have been to Princess Marya less awful than the sound of his voice.
“And you have brought Nikolushka?” he said, as evenly and deliberately, with an evident effort to recollect things.
“How are you now?” said Princess Marya, wondering herself at what she was saying.
“That, my dear, you must ask the doctor,” he said, and evidently making another effort to be affectionate, he said with his lips only (it was obvious he was not thinking of what he was saying):
“Thank you, my dear, for coming.”
Princess Marya pressed his hand. He gave a hardly perceptible frown at the pressure of her hand. She was silent, and she did not know what to say. She understood the change that had come over him two days ago. In his words, in his tone, above all in his eyes—those cold, almost antagonistic eyes—could be felt that aloofness from all things earthly that is so fearful to a living man. It was evidently with difficulty that he understood anything living; but yet it seemed that he did not understand what was living, not because he had lost the power of understanding, but because he understood something else that the living did not and could not understand, and that entirely absorbed him.
“Yes, see how strangely fate has brought us together again,” he said, breaking the silence, and pointing to Natasha. “She is nursing me.”
Princess Marya heard him, and could not understand what he was saying. He, Prince Andrey, with his delicate, tender intuition, how could he say that before the girl whom he loved, and who loved him! If he had any thought of living, he could not have said that in that slightingly cold tone. If he had not known he was going to die, how could he have failed to feel for her, how could he speak like that before her! There could be but one explanation of it—that was, that it was all of no moment to him now, and of no moment because something else, more important, had been revealed to him.
The conversation was frigid and disconnected, and broke off at every moment.
“Marie came by Ryazan,” said Natasha.
Prince Andrey did not notice that she called his sister Marie. And Natasha, calling her by that name before him, for the first time became aware of it herself.
“Well?” said he.
“She was told that Moscow had been burnt to the ground, all of it entirely. That it looks as though …”
Natasha stopped. It was impossible to talk. He was obviously making an effort to listen, and yet he could not.
“Yes; it’s burnt, they say,” he said. “That’s a great pity,” and he gazed straight before him, his fingers straying heedlessly about his moustache.
“And so you met Count Nikolay, Marie?” said Prince Andrey, suddenly, evidently trying to say something to please them. “He wrote here what a great liking he took to you,” he went on, simply and calmly, plainly unable to grasp all the complex significance his words had for living people. “If you liked him, too, it would be a very good thing … for you to get married,” he added, rather more quickly, apparently pleased at finding at last the words he had been seeking. Princess Marya heard his words, but they had no significance for her except as showing how terribly far away he was now from everything living.
“Why talk of me?” she said calmly, and glanced at Natasha. Natasha, feeling her eyes on her, did not look at her. Again all of them were silent.
“Andrey, would you …” Princess Marya said suddenly in a shaky voice, “would you like to see Nikolushka? He is always talking of you.”
For the first time Prince Andrey smiled a faintly perceptible smile, but Princess Marya, who knew his face so well, saw with horror that it was a smile not of joy, not of tenderness for his son, but of quiet, gentle irony at his sister’s trying what she believed to be the last resource for rousing him to feeling.
“Yes, I shall be very glad to see Nikolushka. Is he quite well?”
When they brought in little Nikolushka, who gazed in dismay at his father, but did not cry, because nobody else was crying, Prince Andrey kissed him, and obviously did not know what to say to him.
When they had taken the child away, Princess Marya went up to her brother once more, kissed him, and unable to control herself any longer, began to weep.
He looked at her intently.
“You weep for Nikolushka?” he asked.
Princess Marya nodded through her tears.
“Marie, you know the Gos …” he began, but suddenly paused.
“What do you say?”
“Nothing. You mustn’t weep here,” he said, looking at her with the same cold eyes.
When Princess Marya wept he knew that she was weeping that Nikolushka would be left without a father. With a great effort he tried to come back again to life, and to put himself at their point of view.
“Yes, it must seem sad to them,” he thought. “But how simple it is!”
“ ‘They sow not, neither do they reap, but your Father feedeth them,’ ” he said to himself, and he wanted to say it to his sister. But no, they would understand it in their own way; they would not understand! What they cannot understand is that these feelings that they set store by—all our feelings, all these thoughts, which seem of so much importance to us—that they are all not wanted! We cannot understand each other!” and he was silent.
Prince Andrey’s little son was seven years old. He could hardly read—he knew nothing. He passed through much after that day, gaining knowledge, observation, experience. But if he had possessed at that time all the mental faculties he acquired afterwards, he could not have had a truer, a deeper comprehension of all the significance of the scene he saw passing between his father, Princess Marya, and Natasha than he had now. He understood it all, and without weeping, went out of the room, in silence went up to Natasha, who had followed him out; glanced shyly at her with his beautiful, dreamy eyes: his uplifted, rosy upper lip quivered; he leaned his head against her, and burst into tears.
From that day he avoided Dessalle, avoided the countess, who would have petted him, and either sat alone, or shyly joined Princess Marya and Natasha, whom he seemed to love even more than his aunt, and bestowed shy and gentle caresses upon them.
When Princess Marya left her brother’s side, she fully understood all that Natasha’s face had told her. She spoke no more to Natasha of hope of saving his life. She took turns with her by his bedside, and she shed no more tears, but prayed without ceasing, turning in spirit to the Eternal and Unfathomable whose presence was palpable now, hovering over the dying man.
Chapter 16
PRINCE ANDREY did not only know that he would die, but felt indeed that he was dying; that he was already half-dead. He experienced a sense of aloofness from everything earthly, and a strange and joyous lightness in his being. Neither impatient, nor troubled, he lay awaiting what was before him.… The menacing, the eternal, the unknown, and remote, the presence of which he had never ceased to feel during the whole course of his life, was now close to him, and—from that strange lightness of being, that he experienced—almost comprehensible and palpable.
In the past he had dreaded the end. Twice he had experienced that terribly agonising feeling of the dread of death, of the end, and now he had ceased to understand it.
The first time he had experienced that feeling when the grenade was rotating before him, and he looked at the stubble, at the bushes, at the sky, and knew that death was facing him. When he had come to himself after his wound, and instantly, as though set free from the cramping bondage of life, there had sprung up in his soul that flower of love, eternal, free, not dependent on this life, he had no more fear, and no more thought, of death.
In those hours of solitary suffering and half-delirium that he spent afterwards, the more he passed in thought into that new element of eternal love, revealed to him, the further he unconsciously travelled from earthly life. To love everything, every one, to sacrifice self always for love, meant to love no one, meant not to live this earthly life. And the further he penetrated into that element of love, the more he renounced life, and the more completely he annihilated that fearful barrier that love sets up between life and death. Whenever, during that first period, he remembered that he had to die, he said to himself: “Well, so much the better.”
But after that night at Mytishtchy, when in his half-delirium she, whom he had longed for, appeared before him, and when pressing her hand to his lips, he wept soft, happy tears, love for one woman stole unseen into his heart, and bound him again to life. And glad and disturbing thoughts began to come back to him. Recalling that moment at the ambulance station, when he had seen Kuragin, he could not now go back to his feeling then. He was fretted by the question whether he were alive. And he dared not ask.
His illness went through its regular physical course; but what Natasha had called “this change” had come upon him two days before Princess Marya’s arrival. It was the last moral struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the sudden consciousness that life, in the shape of his love for Natasha, was still precious to him, and the last and vanquished onslaught of terror before the unknown.
It happened in the evening. He was, as usually after dinner, in a slightly feverish condition, and his thoughts were particularly clear. Sonya was sitting at the table. He fell into a doze. He felt a sudden sense of happiness.
“Ah, she has come in!” he thought.
Natasha had, in fact, just come in with noiseless steps, and was sitting in Sonya’s place.
Ever since she had been looking after him he had always felt this physical sense of her presence. She was in a low chair beside him, knitting a stocking, and sitting so as to screen the light of the candle from him. She had learned to knit since Prince Andrey had once said to her that no one made such a good sick-nurse as an old nurse who knitted stockings, and that there was something soothing about knitting. Her slender fingers moved the needles rapidly with a slight click, and the dreamy profile of her drooping head could be clearly seen by him. She made a slight movement; the ball rolled off her knee. She started, glanced round at him, and, screening the light with her hand, bent over with a cautious, supple, and precise movement, picked up the ball, and sat back in the same attitude as before.
He gazed at her without stirring, and saw that after her movements she wanted to draw a deep breath, but did not dare to, and breathed with careful self-restraint.
