War And Peace: Book 15 - CHAPTER I

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WHEN A MAN sees an animal dying, a horror comes over him. What he is

himself—his essence, visibly before his eyes, perishes—ceases to exist. But when

the dying creature is a man and a man dearly loved, then, besides the horror at

the extinction of life, what is felt is a rending of the soul, a spiritual

wound, which, like a physical wound, is sometimes mortal, sometimes healed, but

always aches and shrinks from contact with the outer world, that sets it

smarting.

After Prince Andrey's death, Natasha and Princess Marya both alike felt this.

Crushed in spirit, they closed their eyes under the menacing cloud of death that

hovered about them, and dared not look life in the face. Carefully they guarded

their open wounds from every rough and painful touch. Everything—the carriage

driving along the street, the summons to dinner, the maid asking which dress to

get out; worse still—words of faint, feigned sympathy—set the wound smarting,

seemed an insult to it, and jarred on that needful silence in which both were

trying to listen to the stern, terrible litany that had not yet died away in

their ears, and to gaze into the mysterious, endless vistas that seemed for a

moment to have been unveiled before them.

Only alone together were they safe from such outrage and pain. They said

little to one another. When they did speak, it was about the most trivial

subjects. And both equally avoided all mention of anything connected with the

future.

To admit the possibility of a future seemed to them an insult to his memory.

Still more circumspectly did they avoid in their talk all that could be

connected with the dead man. It seemed to them that what they had felt and gone

through could not be expressed in words. It seemed to them that every allusion

in words to the details of his life was an outrage on the grandeur and holiness

of the mystery that had been accomplished before their eyes.

The constant restraint of speech and studious avoidance of everything that

might lead to words about him, these barriers, fencing off on all sides what

could not be spoken of, brought what they were feeling even more clearly and

vividly before their minds.

But pure and perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy. From

the isolation of her position, as the guardian and foster-mother of her nephew,

and independent mistress of her own destinies, Princess Marya was the first to

be called back to life from that world of mourning in which she lived for the

first fortnight. She received letters from her relations which had to be

answered; the room in which Nikolushka had been put was damp, and he had begun

to cough. Alpatitch came to Yaroslavl with accounts. He had suggestions to make,

and advised Princess Marya to move to Moscow to the house in Vozdvizhenka, which

was uninjured, and only needed some trifling repairs. Life would not stand

still, and she had to live. Painful as it was for Princess Marya to come out of

that world of solitary contemplation, in which she had been living till then,

and sorry, and, as it were, conscience-stricken, as she felt at leaving Natasha

alone, the duties of daily life claimed her attention, and against her own will

she had to give herself up to them. She went through the accounts with

Alpatitch, consulted Dessalle about her little nephew, and began to make

preparations for moving to Moscow.

Natasha was left alone, and from the time that Princess Marya began to busy

herself with preparations for her journey, she held aloof from her too.

Princess Marya asked the countess to let Natasha come to stay with her in

Moscow; and both mother and father eagerly agreed to her suggestion, for they

saw their daughter's physical strength failing every day, and they hoped that

change of scene and the advice of Moscow doctors might do her good.

“I am not going anywhere,” answered Natasha, when the suggestion was made to

her; “all I ask is, please let me alone,” she said, and she ran out of the room,

hardly able to restrain tears more of vexation and anger than of sorrow.

Since she felt herself deserted by Princess Marya, and alone in her grief,

Natasha had spent most of her time alone in her room, huddled up in a corner of

her sofa. While her slender, nervous fingers were busy twisting or tearing

something, she kept her eyes fixed in a set stare on the first object that met

them. This solitude exhausted and tortured her; but it was what she needed. As

soon as any one went in to her, she got up quickly, changed her attitude and

expression, and picked up a book or some needlework, obviously waiting with

impatience for the intruder to leave her.

It seemed to her continually that she was on the very verge of understanding,

of penetrating to the mystery on which her spiritual vision was fastened with a

question too terrible for her to bear.

One day towards the end of December, Natasha, thin and pale in a black

woollen gown, with her hair fastened up in a careless coil, sat perched up in

the corner of her sofa, her fingers nervously crumpling and smoothing out the

ends of her sash, while she gazed at the corner of the door.

She was inwardly gazing whither he had gone, to that further shore. And that

shore, of which she had never thought in old days, which had seemed to her so

far away, so incredible, was now closer to her, and more her own, more

comprehensible than this side of life, in which all was emptiness and desolation

or suffering and humiliation.

She was gazing into that world where she knew he was. But she could not see

him, except as he had been here on earth. She was seeing him again as he had

been at Mytishtchy, at Troitsa, at Yaroslavl.

She was seeing his face, hearing his voice, and repeating his words, and

words of her own that she had put into his mouth; and sometimes imagining fresh

phrases for herself and him which could only have been uttered in the

past.

Now she saw him as he had once been, lying on a low chair in his velvet,

fur-lined cloak, his head propped on his thin, pale hand. His chest looked

fearfully hollow, and his shoulders high. His lips were firmly closed, his eyes

shining, and there was a line on his white brow that came and vanished again.

There was a rapid tremor just perceptible in one foot. Natasha knew he was

struggling to bear horrible pain. “What was that pain like? Why was it there?

What was he feeling? How did it hurt?” Natasha had wondered. He had noticed her

attention, raised his eyes, and, without smiling, began to speak.

“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.

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1. Ebooks list page : 85
2. War And Peace: Book 4 - CHAPTER V
3. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER III
4. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER II
5. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER I
6. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER IV
7. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIX
8. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XVI
9. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XV
10. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIV
11. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER V
12. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER VI
13. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIX
14. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XVI
15. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIV
16. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XV