War and Peace (203 page)

“One thing would be awful,” he said: “to bind oneself for ever to a suffering invalid. It would be an everlasting torture.” And he had looked with searching eyes at her. Natasha, as she always did, had answered without giving herself time to think; she had said: “It can’t go on like this, it won’t be so, you will get well—quite well.”

She was seeing him now as though it were the first time, and going through all she had felt at that time. She recalled the long, mournful, stern gaze he had given her at those words, and she understood all the reproach and the despair in that prolonged gaze.

“I agreed,” Natasha said to herself now, “that it would be awful if he were to remain always suffering. I said that then only because it would
be so awful for him, but he did not understand it so. He thought that it would be awful
for me
. Then he still wanted to live, and was afraid of death. And I said it so clumsily, so stupidly. I was not thinking that. I was thinking something quite different. If I had said what I was thinking, I should have said: ‘Let him be dying, dying all the time before my eyes, and I should be happy in comparison with what I am now.’ Now … there is nothing, no one. Did he know that? No. He did not know, and never will know it. And now it can never, never be made up for.”

And again he was saying the same words; but this time Natasha in her imagination made him a different answer. She stopped him, and said: “Awful for you, but not for me. You know that I have nothing in life but you, and to suffer with you is the greatest happiness possible for me.” And he took her hand and pressed it, just as he had pressed it on that terrible evening four days before his death. And in her imagination she said to him other words of tenderness and love, which she might have said then, which she only said now … “I love thee!… thee … I love, love thee …” she said, wringing her hands convulsively, and setting her teeth with bitter violence.

And a sweeter mood of sorrow was coming over her, and tears were starting into her eyes; but all at once she asked herself: “To whom was she saying that? Where is he, and what is he now?”

And again everything was shrouded in chill, cruel doubt, and again, frowning nervously, she tried to gaze into that world where he was. And now, now, she thought, she was just penetrating the mystery … But at that instant, when the incomprehensible, it seemed, was being unveiled before her eyes, a loud rattle at the door handle broke with a painful shock on her hearing. Her maid, Dunyasha, rushed quickly and abruptly into the room with frightened eyes, that took no heed of her.

“Come to your papa, make haste,” Dunyasha said, with a strange excited expression. “A misfortune … Pyotr Ilyitch … a letter,” she gasped out, sobbing.

The feeling of aloofness from all the world, that Natasha experienced at this time, she felt in an even more marked degree with the members of her own family. All her own family, her father and mother and Sonya, were so near her, so everyday and ordinary that every word they uttered,
every feeling they expressed, was jarring in the world in which she had lived of late. She felt more than indifference, positive hostility to them. She heard Dunyasha’s words of Pyotr Ilyitch, of a misfortune, but she did not understand them.

“What misfortune could they have, what misfortune is possible to them? Everything goes on in its old, regular, easy way with them,” Natasha was saying inwardly.

As she went into the drawing-room, her father came quickly out of the countess’s room. His face was puckered up and wet with tears. He had evidently run out of the room to give vent to the sobs that were choking him. Seeing Natasha, he waved his arms in despair, and went off into violent, miserable sobs, that convulsed his soft, round face.

“Pet … Petya … Go, go in, she’s calling …” And sobbing like a child, he tottered with feeble legs to a chair, and almost dropped on to it, hiding his face in his hands.

An electric shock seemed to run all through Natasha. Some fearful pain seemed to stab her to the heart. She felt a poignant anguish; it seemed to her that something was being rent within her, and she was dying. But with the pain she felt an instant release from the seal that shut her out of life. At the sight of her father, and the sound of a fearful, husky scream from her mother through the door, she instantly forgot herself and her own sorrow.

She ran up to her father, but he feebly motioned her towards her mother’s door. Princess Marya, with a white face and quivering lower jaw, came out and took Natasha’s hand, saying something to her. Natasha neither saw nor heard her. With swift steps she went towards the door, stopped for an instant as though struggling with herself, and ran in to her mother.

The countess was lying down on a low chair in a strange awkward attitude; she was beating her head against the wall. Sonya and some maid-servants were holding her by the arms.

“Natasha, Natasha!…” the countess was screaming. “It’s not true, not true … it’s false … Natasha!” she screamed, pushing the maids away. “All you go away, it’s not true! Killed!… ha, ha, ha!… not true!…”

Natasha knelt down on the low chair, bent over her mother, embraced her, with surprising strength lifted her up, turned her face to her, and pressed close to her.

“Mama!… darling!… I’m here, dearest mamma,” she whispered to her, never ceasing for a second.

She would not let her mother go; she struggled tenderly with her, asked for pillows and water, unbuttoned and tore open her mother’s dress. “Dearest … my darling … mamma … my precious,” she whispered without pausing, kissing her head, her hands, her face, and feeling the tears streaming in irrepressible floods over her nose and cheeks.

The countess squeezed her daughter’s hand, closed her eyes, and was quieter for a moment. All at once she sat up with unnatural swiftness, looked vacantly round, and seeing Natasha, began hugging her head to her with all her might. Natasha’s face involuntarily worked with the pain, as her mother turned it toward her, and gazed a long while into it. “Natasha, you love me,” she said, in a soft, confiding whisper. “Natasha, you won’t deceive me? You will tell me the whole truth?”

Natasha looked at her with eyes swimming with tears, and in her face seemed only imploring her love and forgiveness.

“Mamma … darling,” she kept repeating, putting forth all the strength of her love to try somehow to take a little of the crushing load of sorrow off her mother on to herself.

And again in the helpless struggle with reality, the mother, refusing to believe that she could live while her adored boy, just blossoming into life, was dead, took refuge from reality in the world of delirium.

Natasha had no recollection of how she spent that day and that night, and the following day and the following night. She did not sleep, and did not leave her mother’s side. Natasha’s love, patient and persistent, seemed to enfold the countess on all sides every second, offering no explanation, no consolation, simply beckoning her back to life.

On the third night the countess was quiet for a few minutes, and Natasha closed her eyes, her head propped on the arm of the chair. The bedstead creaked; Natasha opened her eyes. The countess was sitting up in bed, and talking softly.

“How glad I am you have come home. You are tired, won’t you have tea?” Natasha went up to her. “You have grown so handsome and manly,” the countess went on, taking her daughter’s hand.

“Mamma, what are you saying …?”

“Natasha, he is gone, he is no more.” And embracing her daughter, the countess for the first time began to weep.

Princess Marya put off her departure. Sonya and the count tried to take Natasha’s place, but they could not. They saw that she was the only one who could keep the mother from the frenzy of despair. For three weeks Natasha never left her mother’s side, slept on a lounge in her room, made her drink and eat, and without pause talked to her, talked because her tender, loving voice was the only thing that soothed the countess.

The wound in the mother’s heart could never be healed. Petya’s death had torn away half of her life. When the news of Petya’s death reached her, she was a fresh-looking, vigorous woman of fifty; a month later she came out of her room an old woman, half dead and with no more interest in life. But the wound that half killed the countess, that fresh wound, brought Natasha back to life.

A spiritual wound that comes from a rending of the spirit is like a physical wound, and after it has healed externally, and the torn edges are scarred over, yet, strange to say, like a deep physical injury, it only heals inwardly by the force of life pushing up from within.

So Natasha’s wound healed. She believed that her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of her life—love—was still alive within her. Love was awakened, and life waked with it.

The last days of Prince Andrey had been a close bond between Natasha and Princess Marya. This fresh trouble brought them even closer together. Princess Marya put off her departure, and for the last three weeks she had been looking after Natasha, as though she were a sick child. Those weeks spent by Natasha in her mother’s room had completely broken down her health.

One day Princess Marya noticed that Natasha was shivering with a feverish chill, and brought her away to her own room, and tucked her up in bed in the middle of the day. Natasha lay down, but when Princess Marya, having let down the blinds, was about to leave the room, Natasha called her to her.

“I’m not sleepy, Marie; stay with me.”

“You are tired; try and go to sleep.”

“No, no. Why did you bring me away? She will ask for me.”

“She is much better. She was talking much more like herself to-day,” said Princess Marya.

Natasha lay on the bed, and in the half-dark room she tried to make out Princess Marya’s face.

“Is she like him?” Natasha wondered. “Yes; like and unlike. But she is original, different, a quite new, unknown person. And she likes me. What is there in her heart? Everything good. But what is it like? What are her thoughts like? How does she look on me? Yes; she is nice!”

“Masha,” she said, shyly drawing her hand towards her. “Masha, you mustn’t think I’m horrid. No? Masha, darling! How I love you! Let us be quite, quite friends.” And embracing her, Natasha fell to kissing her hands and face.

Princess Marya was abashed and overjoyed at this demonstration of feeling.

From that day there sprang up between Princess Marya and Natasha one of those tender and passionate friendships which can only exist between women. They were continually kissing each other and saying tender things to one another, and they spent the greater part of their time together. If one went away, the other was uneasy and hastened to join her. They felt more harmony together with each other than apart, each with herself. There sprang up between them a feeling stronger than friendship; that was the feeling of life being only possible in each other’s company.

Sometimes they did not speak for hours together. Sometimes, as they lay in their beds, they would begin to talk, and talked till morning. They talked, for the most part, of their own remote past. Princess Marya told her of her childhood, of her mother, of her father, of her dreams. And Natasha, who had in the past turned away with calm acceptance of her non-comprehension of that life of devotion and resignation, of the idealism of Christian self-sacrifice, grew to love Princess Marya’s past, and to understand that side of life of which she had had no conception before. She had no thought of imitating that resignation and self-sacrifice in her own life, because she was accustomed to look for other joys in life; but she understood and loved in another that virtue that had been till now beyond her ken. Princess Marya, too, as she listened to Natasha’s stories of her childhood and early girlhood, had a glimpse of a side of life she had known nothing of, of faith in life and in the enjoyment of life.

They still refrained from talking of
him
, that they might not, as seemed to them, desecrate the exalted feeling in their hearts; but this reticence led them, though they would not have believed it, into gradually forgetting him.

Natasha had grown thin and pale, and was physically so weak that every one was continually talking about her health, and she was glad it was so. Yet sometimes she was suddenly seized, not simply by a dread of death, but by a dread of sickness, of ill-health, of losing her good looks; and sometimes she unconsciously examined her bare arm, marvelling at its thinness, or peeped in the looking-glass in the morning at her pinched face, and was touched by its piteous look. It seemed to her that this was as it should be, and yet she felt afraid and mournful at it.

One day she ran upstairs quickly, and was painfully short of breath. Immediately she made some pretext for going down again, and ran upstairs again, to try her strength and put herself to the test.

Another day she called Dunyasha, and her voice broke. She called her once more, though she heard her coming—called her in the deep chest voice with which she used to sing, and listened to the sound.

She knew it not, and would not have believed it yet though the layer of mould under which she fancied that her soul was buried seemed unbroken, the delicate, tender, young blades of grass were already pushing through it, and were destined to take root, and so to hide the grief that had crushed her under their living shoots that it would soon be unseen and forgotten. The wound was healing from within.

Towards the end of January Princess Marya set off for Moscow, and the count insisted on Natasha going with her to consult the doctors.

After the engagement at Vyazma, where Kutuzov could not restrain his troops in their desire to break through, to cut off and all the rest of it, the further march of the flying French, and of the Russians flying after them, continued as far as Krasnoe without a battle. The flight was so rapid that the Russian army racing after the French could not catch them up; the horses of the cavalry and artillery broke down, and information as to the movements of the French was always very uncertain.

The Russian soldiers were so exhausted by this unbroken march at the rate of forty versts a day that they were unable to quicken their pace.