War and Peace (173 page)

“I think she’s asleep, mamma,” answered Sonya.

The countess, after a brief silence, spoke again, but this time no one answered her.

Soon after this Natasha caught the sound of her mother’s even breathing. Natasha did not stir, though her little bare foot, poking out below the quilt, felt frozen against the uncovered floor.

A cricket chirped in a crack, as though celebrating a victory over all the world. A cock crowed far away, and another answered close by. The shouts had died away in the tavern, but the adjutant’s moaning went on still the same. Natasha sat up.

“Sonya! Are you asleep? Mamma!” she whispered. No one answered. Slowly and cautiously, Natasha got up, crossed herself, and stepped cautiously with her slender, supple, bare feet on to the dirty, cold floor. The boards creaked. With nimble feet she ran like a kitten a few steps, and took hold of the cold door-handle.

It seemed to her that something with heavy, rhythmical strokes was banging on all the walls of the hut; it was the beating of her own heart, torn with dread, with love and terror.

She opened the door, stepped over the lintel, and on to the damp,
cold earth of the passage outside. The cold all about her refreshed her. Her bare foot felt a man asleep; she stepped over him, and opened the door of the hut in which Prince Andrey was lying.

In that hut it was dark. A tallow candle with a great, smouldering wick stood on a bench in the further corner, by a bed, on which something was lying.

Ever since she had been told in the morning of Prince Andrey’s wound and his presence there, Natasha had resolved that she must see him. She could not have said why this must be, but she knew their meeting would be anguish to her, and that made her the more certain that it must be inevitable.

All day long she had lived in the hope that at night she would see him. But now when the moment had come, a terror came over her of what she would see. How had he been disfigured? What was left of him? Was he like that unceasing moan of the adjutant? Yes, he was all over like that. In her imagination he was that awful moan of pain personified. When she caught sight of an undefined mass in the corner, and took his raised knees under the quilt for his shoulders, she pictured some fearful body there, and stood still in terror. But an irresistible force drew her forward. She made one cautious step, another, and found herself in the middle of the small hut, cumbered up with baggage. On the bench, under the holy images, lay another man (this was Timohin), and on the floor were two more figures (the doctor and the valet).

The valet sat up and muttered something. Timohin, in pain from a wound in his leg, was not asleep, and gazed, all eyes, at the strange apparition of a girl in a white night-gown, dressing-jacket, and nightcap. The valet’s sleepy and frightened words “What is it? What do you want?” only made Natasha hasten towards the figure lying in the corner. However fearfully unlike a human shape that figure might be now, she must see him. She passed by the valet, the smouldering candle flickered up, and she saw clearly Prince Andrey, lying with his arms stretched out on the quilt, looking just as she had always seen him.

He was just the same as ever; but the flush on his face, his shining eyes, gazing passionately at her, and especially the soft, childlike neck, showing above the lay-down collar of the nightshirt, gave him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had never seen in him before. She ran up to him and with a swift, supple, youthful movement dropped on her knees.

He smiled, and held out his hand to her.

Seven days had passed since Prince Andrey had found himself in the ambulance station on the field of Borodino. All that time he had been in a state of almost continual unconsciousness. The fever and inflammation of the bowels, which had been injured, were, in the opinion of the doctor accompanying the wounded, certain to carry him off. But on the seventh day he ate with relish a piece of bread with some tea, and the doctor observed that the fever was going down. Prince Andrey had regained consciousness in the morning. The first night after leaving Moscow had been fairly warm, and Prince Andrey had spent the night in his carriage. But at Mytishtchy the wounded man had himself asked to be moved and given tea. The pain caused by moving him into the hut had made Prince Andrey groan aloud and lose consciousness again. When he had been laid on his camp bedstead, he lay a long while with closed eyes without moving. Then he opened his eyes and whispered softly, “How about the tea?” The doctor was struck by this instance of consciousness of the little details of daily life. He felt his pulse, and to his surprise and dissatisfaction found that the pulse was stronger. The doctor’s dissatisfaction was due to the fact that he felt certain from his experience that Prince Andrey could not live, and that if he did not die now, he would only die a little later with even greater suffering. With Prince Andrey was the red-nosed major of his regiment, Timohin, who had joined him in Moscow with a wound in his leg received at the same battle of Borodino. The doctor, the prince’s valet, and coachman, and two orderlies were in charge of them.

Tea was given to Prince Andrey. He drank it eagerly, looking with feverish eyes at the door in front of him, as though trying to understand and recall something.

“No more. Is Timohin here?” he asked.

Timohin edged along the bench towards him.

“I am here, your excellency.”

“How is your wound?”

“Mine? All right. But how are you?”

Prince Andrey pondered again, as though he were recollecting something.

“Could not one get a book here?” he said.

“What book?”

“The Gospel! I haven’t one.”

The doctor promised to get it, and began questioning the prince about his symptoms. Prince Andrey answered all the doctor’s questions rationally, though reluctantly, and then said that he wanted a support put under him, as it was uncomfortable and very painful for him as he was. The doctor and the valet took off the military cloak, with which he was covered, and puckering up their faces at the sickly smell of putrefying flesh that came from the wound, began to look into the terrible place. The doctor was very much troubled about something; he made some changes, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned again, and again lost consciousness from the pain when they turned him over. He began to be delirious, and kept asking for the book to be brought and to be put under him. “What trouble would it be to you?” he kept saying. “I haven’t it, get it me, please,—put it under me just for a minute,” he said in a piteous voice.

The doctor went outside to wash his hands.

“Ah, you have no conscience, you fellows really,” the doctor was saying to the valet, who was pouring water over his hands. “For one minute I didn’t look after you. Why, it’s such suffering that I wonder how he bears it.”

“I thought we did put it under him right, by the Lord Jesus Christ,” said the valet.

Prince Andrey had for the first time grasped where he was and what was happening to him, and had recollected that he had been wounded and how at the moment when the carriage had stopped at Mytishtchy, and he had asked to be taken into the hut. Losing consciousness again from the pain, he came fully to himself once more in the hut while he was drinking tea. And thereupon again, going over in his memory all that had happened to him, the most vivid picture in his mind was of that moment at the ambulance station when at the sight of the sufferings of a man he had not liked, those new thoughts had come to him with such promise of happiness. And those thoughts—though vague now and shapeless—took possession of his soul again. He remembered that he had now some new happiness, and that that happiness had something to do with the Gospel. That was why he asked for the Gospel. But the position he had been laid in, without support under his wound, and the new change of position, put his thoughts to confusion again; and it was only in the complete stillness of the night that he came to himself again for the third time. Every one was asleep around him. A cricket was chirping across the passage; some one was shouting and singing in the
street; cockroaches were rustling over the table, the holy images and the walls; a big fly flopped on his pillow and about the tallow candle that stood with a great, smouldering wick beside him.

His soul was not in its normal state. A man in health usually thinks, feels and remembers simultaneously an immense number of different things, but he has the power and the faculty of selecting one series of ideas or phenomena and concentrating all his attention on that series. A man in health can at the moment of the profoundest thought break off to say a civil word to any one who comes in, and then return again to his thoughts. Prince Andrey’s soul was not in a normal condition in this respect. All the faculties of his soul were clearer and more active than ever, but they acted apart from his will. The most diverse ideas and images had possession of his mind at the same time. Sometimes his brain suddenly began to work, and with a force, clearness, and depth with which it had never been capable of working in health. But suddenly the train of thought broke off in the midst, to be replaced by some unexpected image, and the power to go back to it was wanting. “Yes, a new happiness was revealed to me, that could not be taken away from man,” he thought, as he lay in the still, half-dark hut, gazing before him with feverishly wide, staring eyes. “Happiness beyond the reach of material forces, outside material, external influences on man, the happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of love! To feel it is in every man’s power, but God alone can know it and ordain it. But how did God ordain this law? Why the Son?…” And all at once that train of thought broke off, and Prince Andrey heard (not knowing whether in delirium or in actual fact he heard it) a kind of soft, whispering voice, incessantly beating time: “Piti-pitt-piti,” and then “i-ti-ti,” and again, “ipiti-piti-piti,” and again “i-ti-ti.” And to the sound of this murmuring music Prince Andrey felt as though a strange, ethereal edifice of delicate needles or splinters were being raised over his face, over the very middle of it. He felt that (hard though it was for him) he must studiously preserve his balance that this rising edifice might not fall to pieces; but yet it was falling to pieces, and slowly rising up again to the rhythmic beat of the murmuring music.

“It is stretching out, stretching out, and spreading and stretching out!” Prince Andrey said to himself. While he listened to the murmur and felt that edifice of needles stretching out, and rising up, Prince Andrey saw by glimpses a red ring of light round the candle, and heard the rustling of the cockroaches and the buzzing of the fly as it flopped against his pillow and his face. And every time the fly touched his face,
it gave him a stinging sensation, but yet it surprised him that though the fly struck him in the very centre of the rising edifice it did not shatter it. But, apart from all this, there was one other thing of importance. That was the white thing at the door; that was a statue of the sphinx, which oppressed him too.

“But perhaps it is my shirt on the table,” thought Prince Andrey, “and that’s my legs, and that’s the door, but why this straining and moving and piti-piti-piti and ti-ti and piti-piti-piti … Enough, cease, be still, please,” Prince Andrey besought some one wearily. And all at once thought and feeling floated to the surface again with extraordinary clearness and force.

“Yes, love (he thought again with perfect distinctness), but not that love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one’s neighbours; to love one’s enemies. To love everything—to love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive?… Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, nothing can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.” And he vividly pictured Natasha to himself, not as he had pictured her in the past, only with the charm that had been a joy to him; for the first time he pictured to himself her soul. And he understood her feeling, her sufferings, her shame, and her penitence. Now, for the first time, he felt all the cruelty of his abandonment, saw all the cruelty of his rupture with her. “If it were only possible for me to see her once more … once, looking into those eyes, to say …”

Piti-piti-piti iti-ti, ipiti-piti—boom, the fly flapped … And his attention passed all at once into another world of reality and delirium, in which something peculiar was taking place. In that place the edifice was still rising, unshattered; something was still stretching out, the candle was still burning, with a red ring round it; the same shirt-sphinx still lay by the door. But beside all this, something creaked, there was a whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx appeared standing before the doorway.
And that sphinx had the white face and shining eyes of that very Natasha he had been dreaming of just now.

“Oh, how wearisome this everlasting delirium is!” thought Prince Andrey, trying to dispel that face from his vision. But that face stood before him with the face of reality, and that face was coming closer. Prince Andrey tried to go back to the world of pure thought, but he could not, and he was drawn back into the realm of delirium. The soft murmuring voice kept up its rhythmic whisper, something was oppressing him, and rising up, and the strange face stood before him. Prince Andrey rallied all his forces to regain his senses; he stirred a little, and suddenly there was a ringing in his ears and a dimness before his eyes, and like a man sinking under water, he lost consciousness.

When he came to himself, Natasha, the very living Natasha, whom of all people in the world he most longed to love with that new, pure, divine love that had now been revealed to him, was on her knees before him. He knew that it was the real, living Natasha, and did not wonder, but quietly rejoiced. Natasha, on her knees, in terror, but without moving (she could not have moved), gazed at him, restraining her sobs. Her face was white and rigid. There was only a sort of quiver in the lower part of it.