War and Peace
countess knew so well and feared so much, and now she sat in the same
way on the bench where she had seated herself on arriving. She was
planning something and either deciding or had already decided something
in her mind. The countess knew this, but what it might be she did not
know, and this alarmed and tormented her.
“Natásha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed.”
A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame Schoss
and the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.
“No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor,” Natásha replied
irritably and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open
window the moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She put
her head out into the damp night air, and the countess saw her slim neck
shaking with sobs and throbbing against the window frame. Natásha knew
it was not Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince Andrew was in
the same yard as themselves and in a part of the hut across the passage;
but this dreadful incessant moaning made her sob. The countess exchanged
a look with Sónya.
“Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet,” said the countess, softly
touching Natásha’s shoulders. “Come, lie down.”
“Oh, yes... I’ll lie down at once,” said Natásha, and began hurriedly
undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat.
When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket, she sat
down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made up on the
floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the front,
and began replaiting it. Her long, thin, practiced fingers rapidly
unplaited, replaited, and tied up her plait. Her head moved from side
to side from habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked fixedly before
her. When her toilet for the night was finished she sank gently onto the
sheet spread over the hay on the side nearest the door.
“Natásha, you’d better lie in the middle,” said Sónya.
“I’ll stay here,” muttered Natásha. “Do lie down,” she added crossly,
and buried her face in the pillow.
The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sónya undressed hastily and lay down.
The small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left in
the room. But in the yard there was a light from the fire at Little
Mytíshchi a mile and a half away, and through the night came the noise
of people shouting at a tavern Mamónov’s Cossacks had set up across the
street, and the adjutant’s unceasing moans could still be heard.
For a long time Natásha listened attentively to the sounds that reached
her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First she heard
her mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed under
her, then Madame Schoss’ familiar whistling snore and Sónya’s gentle
breathing. Then the countess called to Natásha. Natásha did not answer.
“I think she’s asleep, Mamma,” said Sónya softly.
After a short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one
replied.
Soon after that Natásha heard her mother’s even breathing. Natásha did
not move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the quilt,
was growing cold on the bare floor.
As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a
crack in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near
by. The shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of the
adjutant was heard. Natásha sat up.
“Sónya, are you asleep? Mamma?” she whispered.
No one replied. Natásha rose slowly and carefully, crossed herself, and
stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her slim, supple,
bare feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping cautiously from one
foot to the other she ran like a kitten the few steps to the door and
grasped the cold door handle.
It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically against
all the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking with alarm and
terror and overflowing with love.
She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and onto the cold,
damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed her. With
her bare feet she touched a sleeping man, stepped over him, and opened
the door into the part of the hut where Prince Andrew lay. It was dark
in there. In the farthest corner, on a bench beside a bed on which
something was lying, stood a tallow candle with a long, thick, and
smoldering wick.
From the moment she had been told that morning of Prince Andrew’s wound
and his presence there, Natásha had resolved to see him. She did not
know why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but felt the
more convinced that it was necessary.
All day she had lived only in hope of seeing him that night. But now
that the moment had come she was filled with dread of what she might
see. How was he maimed? What was left of him? Was he like that incessant
moaning of the adjutant’s? Yes, he was altogether like that. In her
imagination he was that terrible moaning personified. When she saw an
indistinct shape in the corner, and mistook his knees raised under the
quilt for his shoulders, she imagined a horrible body there, and stood
still in terror. But an irresistible impulse drew her forward. She
cautiously took one step and then another, and found herself in the
middle of a small room containing baggage. Another man—Timókhin—was
lying in a corner on the benches beneath the icons, and two others—the
doctor and a valet—lay on the floor.
The valet sat up and whispered something. Timókhin, kept awake by the
pain in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange
apparition of a girl in a white chemise, dressing jacket, and nightcap.
The valet’s sleepy, frightened exclamation, “What do you want? What’s
the matter?” made Natásha approach more swiftly to what was lying in the
corner. Horribly unlike a man as that body looked, she must see him.
She passed the valet, the snuff fell from the candle wick, and she saw
Prince Andrew clearly with his arms outside the quilt, and such as she
had always seen him.
He was the same as ever, but the feverish color of his face, his
glittering eyes rapturously turned toward her, and especially his neck,
delicate as a child’s, revealed by the turn-down collar of his shirt,
gave him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had never
seen on him before. She went up to him and with a swift, flexible,
youthful movement dropped on her knees.
He smiled and held out his hand to her.
CHAPTER XXXII
Seven days had passed since Prince Andrew found himself in the
ambulance station on the field of Borodinó. His feverish state and the
inflammation of his bowels, which were injured, were in the doctor’s
opinion sure to carry him off. But on the seventh day he ate with
pleasure a piece of bread with some tea, and the doctor noticed that his
temperature was lower. He had regained consciousness that morning.
The first night after they left Moscow had been fairly warm and he had
remained in the calèche, but at Mytíshchi the wounded man himself asked
to be taken out and given some tea. The pain caused by his removal into
the hut had made him groan aloud and again lose consciousness. When he
had been placed on his camp bed he lay for a long time motionless with
closed eyes. Then he opened them and whispered softly: “And the tea?”
His remembering such a small detail of everyday life astonished
the doctor. He felt Prince Andrew’s pulse, and to his surprise and
dissatisfaction found it had improved. He was dissatisfied because he
knew by experience that if his patient did not die now, he would do so
a little later with greater suffering. Timókhin, the red-nosed major of
Prince Andrew’s regiment, had joined him in Moscow and was being
taken along with him, having been wounded in the leg at the battle of
Borodinó. They were accompanied by a doctor, Prince Andrew’s valet, his
coachman, and two orderlies.
They gave Prince Andrew some tea. He drank it eagerly, looking with
feverish eyes at the door in front of him as if trying to understand and
remember something.
“I don’t want any more. Is Timókhin here?” he asked.
Timókhin crept along the bench to him.
“I am here, your excellency.”
“How’s your wound?”
“Mine, sir? All right. But how about you?”
Prince Andrew again pondered as if trying to remember something.
“Couldn’t one get a book?” he asked.
“What book?”
“The Gospels. I haven’t one.”
The doctor promised to procure it for him and began to ask how he
was feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly but
reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him as he was
uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted the cloak
with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the noisome smell of
mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began examining that dreadful
place. The doctor was very much displeased about something and made a
change in the dressings, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned
again and grew unconscious and delirious from the agony. He kept asking
them to get him the book and put it under him.
“What trouble would it be to you?” he said. “I have not got one. Please
get it for me and put it under for a moment,” he pleaded in a piteous
voice.
The doctor went into the passage to wash his hands.
“You fellows have no conscience,” said he to the valet who was pouring
water over his hands. “For just one moment I didn’t look after you...
It’s such pain, you know, that I wonder how he can bear it.”
“By the Lord Jesus Christ, I thought we had put something under him!”
said the valet.
The first time Prince Andrew understood where he was and what was the
matter with him and remembered being wounded and how was when he asked
to be carried into the hut after his calèche had stopped at Mytíshchi.
After growing confused from pain while being carried into the hut he
again regained consciousness, and while drinking tea once more recalled
all that had happened to him, and above all vividly remembered the
moment at the ambulance station when, at the sight of the sufferings of
a man he disliked, those new thoughts had come to him which promised him
happiness. And those thoughts, though now vague and indefinite, again
possessed his soul. He remembered that he had now a new source of
happiness and that this happiness had something to do with the Gospels.
That was why he asked for a copy of them. The uncomfortable position in
which they had put him and turned him over again confused his thoughts,
and when he came to himself a third time it was in the complete
stillness of the night. Everybody near him was sleeping. A cricket
chirped from across the passage; someone was shouting and singing in
the street; cockroaches rustled on the table, on the icons, and on
the walls, and a big fly flopped at the head of the bed and around the
candle beside him, the wick of which was charred and had shaped itself
like a mushroom.
His mind was not in a normal state. A healthy man usually thinks of,
feels, and remembers innumerable things simultaneously, but has the
power and will to select one sequence of thoughts or events on which to
fix his whole attention. A healthy man can tear himself away from the
deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in and can
then return again to his own thoughts. But Prince Andrew’s mind was not
in a normal state in that respect. All the powers of his mind were more
active and clearer than ever, but they acted apart from his will. Most
diverse thoughts and images occupied him simultaneously. At times his
brain suddenly began to work with a vigor, clearness, and depth it had
never reached when he was in health, but suddenly in the midst of its
work it would turn to some unexpected idea and he had not the strength
to turn it back again.