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On receiving news of Natasha's illness, the countess, though
not quite well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Petya and
the rest of the household, and the whole family moved from Marya
Dmitrievna's house to their own and settled down in town.
Natasha's illness was so serious that, fortunately for her
and for her parents, the consideration of all that had caused
the illness, her conduct and the breaking off of her engagement,
receded into the background. She was so ill that it was impossible
for them to consider in how far she was to blame for what had
happened. She could not eat or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed,
and, as the doctors made them feel, was in danger. They could
not think of anything but how to help her. Doctors came to see
her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German,
and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety
of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple
idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the
disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by
a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities
and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated
disease, unknown to medicine- not a disease of the lungs, liver,
skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but
a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of
the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur
to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable
to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to
cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years
of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought
was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were
really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostov family.
Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow
substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible,
as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary,
and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the
invalid and of those who loved her- and that is why there are,
and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and
allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of
relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which
is felt by those who are suffering. They satisfied the need seen
in its most elementary form in a child, when it wants to have
a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself and runs
at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching
spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done.
The child cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its
people have no remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and
the expression of its mother's sympathy while she rubs the bump
comforts it. The doctors were of use to Natasha because they kissed
and rubbed her bump, assuring her that it would soon pass if only
the coachman went to the chemist's in the Arbat and got a powder
and some pills in a pretty box of a ruble and seventy kopeks,
and if she took those powders in boiled water at intervals of
precisely two hours, neither more nor less.
What would Sonya and the count and countess have done, how
would they have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had
not been those pills to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the
chicken cutlets, and all the other details of life ordered by
the doctors, the carrying out of which supplied an occupation
and consolation to the family circle? How would the count have
borne his dearly loved daughter's illness had he not known that
it was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not grudge
thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her
illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and
would take her abroad for consultations there, and had he not
been able to explain the details of how Metivier and Feller had
not understood the symptoms, but Frise had, and Mudrov had diagnosed
them even better? What would the countess have done had she not
been able sometimes to scold the invalid for not strictly obeying
the doctor's orders?
"You'll never get well like that," she would say,
forgetting her grief in her vexation, "if you won't obey
the doctor and take your medicine at the right time! You mustn't
trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to pneumonia," she
would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of that
foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.
What would Sonya have done without the glad consciousness
that she had not undressed during the first three nights, in order
to be ready to carry out all the doctor's injunctions with precision,
and that she still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper
time when the slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had
to be administered? Even to Natasha herself it was pleasant to
see that so many sacrifices were being made for her sake, and
to know that she had to take medicine at certain hours, though
she declared that no medicine would cure her and that it was all
nonsense. And it was even pleasant to be able to show, by disregarding
the orders, that she did not believe in medical treatment and
did not value her life.
The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue,
and regardless of her grief-stricken face joked with her. But
when he had gone into another room, to which the countess hurriedly
followed him, he assumed a grave air and thoughtfully shaking
his head said that though there was danger, he had hopes of the
effect of this last medicine and one must wait and see, that the
malady was chiefly mental, but... And the countess, trying to
conceal the action from herself and from him, slipped a gold coin
into his hand and always returned to the patient with a more tranquil
mind.
The symptoms of Natasha's illness were that she ate little,
slept little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors
said that she could not get on without medical treatment, so they
kept her in the stifling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostovs
did not move to the country that summer of 1812.
In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and
powders out of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss
who was fond of such things made a large collection, and in spite
of being deprived of the country life to which she was accustomed,
youth prevailed. Natasha's grief began to be overlaid by the impressions
of daily life, it ceased to press so painfully on her heart, it
gradually faded into the past, and she began to recover physically.
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