War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (ebook reader for pc TXT) 📕

“Nothing. You mustn’t cry here,” he said, looking at her with the same cold expression.

When Princess Márya began to cry, he understood that she was crying at the thought that Nikolúshka 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 Márya; “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 Andréy’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, Márya, 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 Márya, or to Natásha of whom he seemed even fonder than of his aunt, and clung to them quietly and shyly.

When Princess Márya had left Prince Andréy 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.

Not only did Prince Andréy 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 Márya 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 Andréy 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