War and Peace
thing. He, the sensitive, tender Prince Andrew, how could he say that,
before her whom he loved and who loved him? Had he expected to live he
could not have said those words in that offensively cold tone. If he had
not known that he was dying, how could he have failed to pity her and
how could he speak like that in her presence? The only explanation was
that he was indifferent, because something else, much more important,
had been revealed to him.
The conversation was cold and disconnected and continually broke off.
“Mary came by way of Ryazán,” said Natásha.
Prince Andrew did not notice that she called his sister Mary, and only
after calling her so in his presence did Natásha notice it herself.
“Really?” he asked.
“They told her that all Moscow has been burned down, and that...”
Natásha stopped. It was impossible to talk. It was plain that he was
making an effort to listen, but could not do so.
“Yes, they say it’s burned,” he said. “It’s a great pity,” and he gazed
straight before him, absently stroking his mustache with his fingers.
“And so you have met Count Nicholas, Mary?” Prince Andrew suddenly said,
evidently wishing to speak pleasantly to them. “He wrote here that he
took a great liking to you,” he went on simply and calmly, evidently
unable to understand all the complex significance his words had for
living people. “If you liked him too, it would be a good thing for you
to get married,” he added rather more quickly, as if pleased at having
found words he had long been seeking.
Princess Mary heard his words but they had no meaning for her, except as
a proof of how far away he now was from everything living.
“Why talk of me?” she said quietly and glanced at Natásha.
Natásha, who felt her glance, did not look at her. All three were again
silent.
“Andrew, would you like...” Princess Mary suddenly said in a trembling
voice, “would you like to see little Nicholas? He is always talking
about you!”
Prince Andrew smiled just perceptibly and for the first time, but
Princess Mary, who knew his face so well, saw with horror that he did
not smile with pleasure or affection for his son, but with quiet, gentle
irony because he thought she was trying what she believed to be the last
means of arousing him.
“Yes, I shall be very glad to see him. Is he quite well?”
When little Nicholas was brought into Prince Andrew’s room he looked at
his father with frightened eyes, but did not cry, because no one else
was crying. Prince Andrew kissed him and evidently did not know what to
say to him.
When Nicholas had been led away, Princess Mary again went up to her
brother, kissed him, and unable to restrain her tears any longer began
to cry.
He looked at her attentively.
“Is it about Nicholas?” he asked.
Princess Mary nodded her head, weeping.
“Mary, you know the Gosp...” but he broke off.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. You mustn’t cry here,” he said, looking at her with the same
cold expression.
When Princess Mary began to cry, he understood that she was crying at
the thought that little Nicholas would be left without a father. With
a great effort he tried to return to life and to see things from their
point of view.
“Yes, to them it must seem sad!” he thought. “But how simple it is.
“The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Father
feedeth them,” he said to himself and wished to say to Princess Mary;
“but no, they will take it their own way, they won’t understand! They
can’t understand that all those feelings they prize so—all our feelings,
all those ideas that seem so important to us, are unnecessary. We cannot
understand one another,” and he remained silent.
Prince Andrew’s little son was seven. He could scarcely read, and knew
nothing. After that day he lived through many things, gaining knowledge,
observation, and experience, but had he possessed all the faculties he
afterwards acquired, he could not have had a better or more profound
understanding of the meaning of the scene he had witnessed between
his father, Mary, and Natásha, than he had then. He understood it
completely, and, leaving the room without crying, went silently up
to Natásha who had come out with him and looked shyly at her with his
beautiful, thoughtful eyes, then his uplifted, rosy upper lip trembled
and leaning his head against her he began to cry.
After that he avoided Dessalles and the countess who caressed him and
either sat alone or came timidly to Princess Mary, or to Natásha of whom
he seemed even fonder than of his aunt, and clung to them quietly and
shyly.
When Princess Mary had left Prince Andrew she fully understood what
Natásha’s face had told her. She did not speak any more to Natásha of
hopes of saving his life. She took turns with her beside his sofa, and
did not cry any more, but prayed continually, turning in soul to that
Eternal and Unfathomable, whose presence above the dying man was now so
evident.
CHAPTER XVI
Not only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he was
dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an aloofness from
everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness of existence.
Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. That inexorable,
eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which he had felt
continually all his life—was now near to him and, by the strange
lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable....
Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that terribly
tormenting fear of death—the end—but now he no longer understood that
fear.
He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top before
him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky, and
knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to himself after
being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love had instantly
unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of life that
had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased to think about
it.
During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he
spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new
principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously
detached himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and
always to sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not
to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that
principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he
destroyed that dreadful barrier which—in the absence of such love—stands
between life and death. When during those first days he remembered that
he would have to die, he said to himself: “Well, what of it? So much the
better!”
But after the night in Mytíshchi when, half delirious, he had seen her
for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his
lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again
crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And
joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind. Recalling the
moment at the ambulance station when he had seen Kurágin, he could not
now regain the feeling he then had, but was tormented by the question
whether Kurágin was alive. And he dared not inquire.
His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natásha
referred to when she said: “This suddenly happened,” had occurred two
days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual struggle
between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was
the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life as
presented to him in the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though
ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.
It was evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, and his
thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sónya was sitting by the table. He
began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness seized him.
“Ah, she has come!” thought he.
And so it was: in Sónya’s place sat Natásha who had just come in
noiselessly.
Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this
physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair
placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was
knitting a stocking. She had learned to knit stockings since Prince
Andrew had casually mentioned that no one nursed the sick so well as old
nurses who knit stockings, and that there is something soothing in
the knitting of stockings. The needles clicked lightly in her slender,
rapidly moving hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile
of her drooping face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She
started, glanced round at him, and screening the candle with her hand
stooped carefully with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball,
and regained her former position.
He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a
deep breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed
cautiously.
At the Tróitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told
her that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had
brought them together again, but after that they never spoke of the
future.
“Can it or can it not be?” he now thought as he looked at her and
listened to the light click of the steel needles. “Can fate have brought
me to her so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the
truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent
my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what
am I to do if I love her?” he thought, and he involuntarily groaned,
from a habit acquired during his sufferings.
On hearing that sound Natásha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to
him, and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him
and bent over him.
“You are not asleep?”
“No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one
else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light.
I want to weep for joy.”
Natásha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.
“Natásha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world.”
“And I!”—She turned away for an instant. “Why too much?” she asked.
“Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your
whole soul—shall I live? What do you think?”
“I am sure of it, sure!” Natásha almost shouted, taking hold of both his
hands with a passionate movement.
He remained silent awhile.
“How good it would be!” and taking her hand he kissed it.
Natásha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would
not do and that he had to be quiet.
“But you have not slept,” she said, repressing her joy. “Try to sleep...
please!”
He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and
sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at
him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her
stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.
Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep long and
suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration.
As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now
always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about death.
He felt himself nearer to it.
“Love? What is love?” he thought.
“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I
understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only
because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to
die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and
eternal source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were