/>With her refined sensitivity Princess Marya took this in with a single glance at Natasha's face, and wept with sweet sorrow on her shoulder.
'Come on, Marie, let's go and see him,' said Natasha, drawing her away into the next room.
Princess Marya looked up, wiped her eyes and turned to Natasha. She felt sure she would get to know everything from her and find out what was going on.
'What is . . .' she began to ask, only to stop short. She felt that no question and no answer could be put into words. Natasha's face and eyes would be sure to give her the clearest and deepest version of the truth.
Natasha glanced at her with a scared and doubtful look, wondering whether or not to tell all she knew. She seemed to sense that with those luminous eyes piercing her to the bottom of her heart, it was impossible not to tell the whole, whole truth as she saw it. Natasha's lip suddenly trembled, ugly creases came at the corners of her mouth, and she broke down in sobs, burying her face in her hands.
Princess Marya now knew.
But she went on hoping, and managed a few words, though she had little faith in them.
'But how is his wound? What sort of state is he in?'
'You . . . you'll see for yourself,' was all Natasha could say.
They sat for a while downstairs outside his room, to bring their tears under control and go in with calm faces.
'How has his illness progressed? When did it worsen? When did that happen?' Princess Marya asked.
Natasha told her that at first he had been in danger from a high temperature and a great deal of pain, but that that had passed away at Troitsa, and the doctor had only been worried about one possibility - gangrene. But even the risk of that had gone. When they had got to Yaroslavl the wound had begun to fester (by now Natasha knew all about festering wounds, and much more besides), and the doctor had said the festering might take its normal course. Fever had set in. The doctor had said that the fever itself wasn't too serious. 'But two days ago,' Natasha began, 'all of a sudden this thing came over him . . .' She struggled with her sobs. 'I don't know why, but you'll see what he's like.' 'Is he weaker? Has he lost weight? . . .' asked the princess.
'No, he hasn't. It's worse than that. You'll see. Oh, Marie, he's too good . . . he can't, he can't possibly live, because . . .'
CHAPTER 15
When Natasha opened the door with a practised hand for Princess Marya to go in first, the princess could feel the sobs rising in her throat. There was no way of preparing for the encounter or composing herself; she knew she wouldn't be able to see him without tears.
She understood what Natasha had meant when she had said, 'This thing came over him two days ago.' She took it to mean that a sudden relaxation had come over him, and this process of relaxing and mellowing was a harbinger of death. As she approached the door her imagination conjured up a picture of Andrey as a little boy, when his face had been so soft and sweet and full of feeling. On the rare occasions she had seen that look in later life it had always affected her deeply. She knew he would say some soft, loving words to her just as her father had done on his deathbed, and it would be unbearable, and she would break down in sobs when she heard them. But sooner or later it had to be, and she went into the room. Her sobs seemed to rise higher and higher in her throat as her short-sighted eyes began to make out his figure and his features more and more clearly, and now at last she saw his face, and their eyes met.
He was lying on a couch, propped up with cushions, wearing a dressing-gown lined with squirrel-fur. He looked thin and pale. One thin hand of transparent whiteness held on to a handkerchief; with the other he was softly fingering his delicate moustache, which had grown quite long. His eyes sought out the newcomers as they came in.
The moment she saw his face and met his eyes Princess Marya immediately checked her stride, her tears dried up and her sobbing stopped. As she caught the expression on his face and the look in his eyes she felt suddenly timid and guilty.
'What have I got to feel guilty about?' she asked herself. The answer came from him in a hard, icy stare: 'Being alive and thinking about the living world, while I . . .'
Andrey's deep stare, inward - rather than outward-looking, contained something not far from hostility as he slowly scanned his sister and Natasha. He kissed his sister while they held hands, something they had always done.
'Hello, Marie. How did you get here?' he said, and his voice was as flat and otherworldly as the look in his eyes. If he had screamed in sheer despair, the scream would have been less ghastly than the sound of his voice.
'Have you brought Nikolay?' he said in the same slow, flat tone, obviously finding it difficult to remember where he was.
'How are you now?' said Princess Marya, surprising herself by what she was saying.
'You'll have to ask the doctor, my dear,' he said. Making a big effort to put on a show of affection, he managed to mouth a few more words (obviously without the slightest idea of what he was saying): 'Thank you for coming, my dear.'
Princess Marya squeezed his hand. He winced at her touch, though his reaction was barely noticeable. He was silent now, and she couldn't think of anything to say. She understood what had happened to him two days before. In his words, in his tone of voice, above all in his eyes - so cold, verging on the hostile - there was that sense of remoteness from all earthly things that seems so horrible to a living person. Clearly, he was having the greatest difficulty in understanding anything to do with the living world, yet it seemed that his inability to understand the living world was not due to any loss of comprehension, it was because he could now comprehend something different, something beyond the understanding of living people, something that was gradually absorbing his whole being.
'Funny how fate has brought us together again,' he said, breaking the silence and pointing to Natasha. 'She's looking after me.'
Princess Marya heard what he said, but she couldn't understand him. How could Prince Andrey, with all his warmth and sensitivity, talk like that in the presence of the girl he loved, and who loved him? If he had any thought of living he wouldn't have spoken in such a cold and offensive tone. If he didn't know he was dying, how could he have been so callous, talking like that while she was there? There was only one explanation: nothing mattered to him now, and the reason nothing mattered was that something new and much more important had been revealed to him.
The conversation was incoherent, lacking warmth, continually breaking down.
'Marie came round through Ryazan,' said Natasha.
Prince Andrey didn't notice she had called his sister Marie. And Natasha as she did so became aware of it for the first time.
'Did she?' he said.
'She had heard that Moscow has been burnt to the ground, every bit of it. It looks as though . . .'
Natasha stopped. Conversation was impossible. He was obviously straining to listen, but not managing to do so.
'Yes. Burnt down. That's what they say,' he said. 'Terrible pity,' and he stared straight ahead, his fingers playing distractedly with his moustache.
'So you met Count Nikolay, Marie?' said Prince Andrey all of a sudden, evidently trying to say something nice. 'He said in his letter how much he liked you,' he went on, speaking so frankly and easily; he was obviously incapable of understanding the complexity and deep significance his words would have for living people. 'If you ever found you liked him too, it might be a good idea . . . to get married,' he added, gabbling a little as if he was glad to hit on just the words he had been struggling to find. Princess Marya heard him speak, but his words didn't mean anything; they just showed how terribly remote he now was from anything to do with the living world.
'Don't talk about me,' she said calmly, with a glance across at Natasha. Natasha, could feel her eyes upon her, but she didn't look back. Another silence ensued.
'Andrey, would you . . .' Princess Marya began with a catch in her voice, 'would you like to see Nikolay? He never stops talking about you.'
For the first time Prince Andrey smiled the ghost of a smile, but Princess Marya, who knew his face so well, was horrified to realize it was not a smile of joy, not of tender affection for his son, it was a smile of quiet, gentle mockery as his sister made one last desperate attempt to bring him back to sensitivity.
'Yes, I would like to see little Nikolay. Is he well?'
When they brought the little boy in he was scared by the sight of his father, but he didn't cry, because nobody else was crying. Prince Andrey kissed him, but he obviously didn't know what to say.
When they had taken the child away Princess Marya went over to her brother once more, kissed him, finally lost all self-control, and burst into tears.
He stared at her.
'Are you sorry for Nikolay?' he asked.
Princess Marya nodded through her tears.
'Marie, you know it says in the Bib . . .' he began, but suddenly stopped.
'What were you saying?'
'Nothing. You can't cry in here,' he said, giving her the same icy look.
When Princess Marya had burst into tears Andrey knew she was weeping for little Nikolay, who was going to be left without a father. He made a huge effort to return to this life, and see things from their point of view.
'Yes, it must seem sad to them,' he thought. 'But it's really so straightforward! The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them,' he said to himself, and he wanted to say it to his sister. But no, they would only take it their way. They wouldn't understand at all! 'What they can't understand is that all these feelings they make so much of - all these thoughts and feelings of ours that seem so important - they're of no consequence! We can't understand each other!' And he said no more.
Prince Andrey's little son was seven years old. He could barely read, and he knew nothing. He would go on to see a lot more of life, gaining in knowledge, curiosity and experience. But if he had had access then to all the faculties acquired in later life, he couldn't have had a truer, deeper understanding of the drama he had just seen enacted between his father, Princess Marya and Natasha. He took in the whole thing, and left the room without shedding a tear. Without saying a word he went up to Natasha, who had followed him out, and glanced timidly up at her with his lovely dreamy eyes. His pink top lip with the little arch in it was trembling as he leant his head against her and burst into tears.
From that day on he gave Dessalles a wide berth, and also avoided the countess, who wanted to smother him with kindness, and either sat somewhere on his own, or timidly sought out Princess Marya or Natasha, whom he now seemed to love even more than his aunt, and cuddled up to them in his quiet, shy little way.
When Princess Marya left her brother's side she understood everything that Natasha's face had been trying to tell her. She and Natasha said nothing more about the possibility of his life being saved. They took turns at his bedside, and Princess Marya abandoned her tears in favour of continual prayer, turning in spirit to the immortal, invisible presence that could now be so palpably experienced as it hovered over the dying man.
CHAPTER 16
Prince Andrey not only knew he was going to die, he could feel himself dying; he already felt half dead. He was experiencing a sense of remoteness from all earthly things, and a strangely joyful lightness of being. Neither impatient nor anxious, he lay there waiting for what was to come . . . The ominous, eternal, remote and unknown presence he had been conscious of throughout the whole of his life was now closing in on him, and becoming - through the strange lightness of being that he was now experiencing - almost intelligible and tangible . . .
In the past he had dreaded the end. Twice in his life he had experienced that ghastly, agonizing feeling, the fear of death, the end, but now he couldn't understand why he had been so afraid of it.
The first time he had had that feeling was when the shell was spinning like a top right in front of him, and he had looked round at the stubble and the bushes, and up at the sky, fully aware that he was staring death in the face. When he had come round after sustaining his wound it was as if he had been suddenly freed from the oppressive constraints of life, and he had felt love blossoming in his soul, a love that seemed to be eternal, free-ranging, invested with a life of its own, and from then on, far from fearing death, he had never even thought about it.
During the hours that followed, hours of solitude, constant pain and semi-delirium, the more he edged his way mentally towards this newly discovered principle of eternal love, the stronger his unconscious renunciation of earthly life became. Loving everything and everybody, always sacrificing oneself for the sake of love, meant loving no one person, and not living this earthly life. And the more he absorbed this principle of love, the easier he found it to renounce life, and the more effectively he destroyed the dreadful barrier that the absence of love sets up between life and death. During that first period, whenever he remembered he was going to die, he said to himself, 'All right, then. Couldn't be better!'
But after that night at Mytishchi, when in his semi-delirious state the one woman he had been longing for had appeared before him, and he had pressed her hand to his lips and wept sweet tears of joy, the love for one woman had crept back unseen into his heart, and restored him to life. He began thinking again; some of his thoughts were pleasant, others disturbing. He remembered the moment at the ambulance station when he had caught sight of Kuragin, but he couldn't find his way back to the feelings he had experienced then. He was longing to know whether Kuragin was still alive or not. But he was too scared to ask.
His illness had been taking its normal physical course, but then suddenly, two days before Princess Marya's arrival, what Natasha called 'this thing' had come over him. It was the last spiritual struggle between life and death, with death coming out on top. It was a sudden awareness that life, seen through his love for Natasha, was still precious, and it came with a final shock of defeat mixed with fear of the unknown.
It happened in the evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, though his thoughts were remarkably clear. Sonya was sitting at the table. He fell into a doze. He was swept by a sudden surge of happiness.
'Oh good, she's here!' he thought.
And sure enough, Natasha had tiptoed in unheard and was sitting there in Sonya's place.
Ever since she had started looking after him he had always had a strong sense of her physical presence. She was sitting sideways-on in a low chair, screening him from the light of the candle, and she was knitting a stocking. (She had learnt to knit after hearing Prince Andrey once say that the best people to care for the sick are old nannies knitting stockings, because knitting always has such a soothing effect on people.) Her slender fingers flashed and the speeding needles clicked. He could clearly see the sharp silhouette of her pensive, lowered head. She made a slight movement, and the ball rolled down off her knee. She gave a start, glanced round at him, bent down to pick up the ball in one careful, smooth and deliberate movement, screening the light with her other hand, and sat back as before.
He watched her without stirring, and he could see that after this movement she needed to draw a deep breath, but was determined not to do so, forcing herself to breathe evenly.
At the Troitsa monastery they had talked about the past, and he had said that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound, because that had brought them together again, though since then they had never talked about the future.
'Could it have happened, or not?' he was wondering now as he watched her and listened to the slight clicking of the steel needles. 'Can fate have brought us together so strangely only for me to die? . . . Can the truth about life have been revealed to me only to show I've been living a lie? I love her more than anything in the world! But what can I do if I do love her?' he said, and suddenly he gave an instinctive groan, a habit he had fallen into while suffering so much pain.
Hearing the sound, Natasha put her knitting down, leant closer, and suddenly saw that his eyes were gleaming. She tripped across and bent over him.
'You're not asleep, are you?'
'No. I've been watching you for ages. I felt you come in. You're the only one who can give me that kind of gentle peace . . . and such lovely light. I could cry with happiness!'
Natasha moved closer. Her face was radiant with bliss.
'Natasha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world!'
'What about me?' She turned away for a second. 'But why do you say too much?' she said.
'Too much? . . . Well, what do you think, what do you feel in your heart, in your heart of hearts? Am I going to live? What do you think?'
'I'm sure you are. Yes, I'm sure!' Natasha almost cried out, seizing both of his hands in a passionate gesture.
It was some time before he spoke.
'Wouldn't it be wonderful?' He took her hand, and kissed it.
Natasha felt happy and deeply moved, but then she came to her senses. This wouldn't do; he had to be kept quiet.
'But you haven't had enough sleep,' she said, suppressing her feeling of joy. 'Do try to get some sleep. Please.'
He squeezed her hand and let it go, and she moved back near to the candle, where she sat down again as before. Twice she glanced across at him; he looked back with shining eyes. She fixed on a certain amount of stocking to knit, and told herself not to look round until it was done.
And sure enough, it was not long before his eyes closed and he dozed off. But his sleep did not last. He woke up suddenly in a cold sweat, deeply alarmed.
As he had been going to sleep he had been thinking about what now obsessed him all the time - living and dying. Most of all, dying. He felt closer than ever to death.
'Love? What is love?' he thought.
'Love gets in the way of death. Love is life. Every single thing I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is - everything exists - only because I love. Everything is bound up with love, and love alone. Love is God, and dying means me, a tiny particle of love, going back to its universal and eternal source.' These thoughts seemed comforting enough, but they were only thoughts. There was something missing. They seemed lop-sided, too personal, too rational;