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When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror:
substance similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But
when it is a beloved and intimate human being that is dying, besides
this horror at the extinction of life there is a severance, a
spiritual wound, which like a physical wound is sometimes fatal
and sometimes heals, but always aches and shrinks at any external
irritating touch.
After Prince Andrew's death Natasha and Princess Mary alike
felt this. Drooping in spirit and closing their eyes before the
menacing cloud of death that overhung them, they dared not look
life in the face. They carefully guarded their open wounds from
any rough and painful contact. Everything: a carriage passing
rapidly in the street, a summons to dinner, the maid's inquiry
what dress to prepare, or worse still any word of insincere or
feeble sympathy, seemed an insult, painfully irritated the wound,
interrupting that necessary quiet in which they both tried to
listen to the stern and dreadful choir that still resounded in
their imagination, and hindered their gazing into those mysterious
limitless vistas that for an instant had opened out before them.
Only when alone together were they free from such outrage
and pain. They spoke little even to one another, and when they
did it was of very unimportant matters.
Both avoided any allusion to the future. To admit the possibility
of a future seemed to them to insult his memory. Still more carefully
did they avoid anything relating to him who was dead. It seemed
to them that what they had lived through and experienced could
not be expressed in words, and that any reference to the details
of his life infringed the majesty and sacredness of the mystery
that had been accomplished before their eyes.
Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of
everything that might lead up to the subject- this halting on
all sides at the boundary of what they might not mention- brought
before their minds with still greater purity and clearness what
they were both feeling.
But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and
complete joy. Princess Mary, in her position as absolute and independent
arbiter of her own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew,
was the first to be called back to life from that realm of sorrow
in which she had dwelt for the first fortnight. She received letters
from her relations to which she had to reply; the room in which
little Nicholas had been put was damp and he began to cough; Alpatych
came to Yaroslavl with reports on the state of their affairs and
with advice and suggestions that they should return to Moscow
to the house on the Vozdvizhenka Street, which had remained uninjured
and needed only slight repairs. Life did not stand still and it
was necessary to live. Hard as it was for Princess Mary to emerge
from the realm of secluded contemplation in which she had lived
till then, and sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave Natasha
alone, yet the cares of life demanded her attention and she involuntarily
yielded to them. She went through the accounts with Alpatych,
conferred with Dessalles about her nephew, and gave orders and
made preparations for the journey to Moscow.
Natasha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began
making preparations for departure, held aloof from her too.
Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natasha go with her
to Moscow, and both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they
saw their daughter losing strength every day and thought that
a change of scene and the advice of Moscow doctors would be good
for her.
"I am not going anywhere," Natasha replied when
this was proposed to her. "Do please just leave me alone!"
And she ran out of the room, with difficulty refraining from tears
of vexation and irritation rather than of sorrow.
After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone
in her grief, Natasha spent most of the time in her room by herself,
sitting huddled up feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing
and twisting something with her slender nervous fingers and gazing
intently and fixedly at whatever her eyes chanced to fall on.
This solitude exhausted and tormented her but she was in absolute
need of it. As soon as anyone entered she got up quickly, changed
her position and expression, and picked up a book or some sewing,
evidently waiting impatiently for the intruder to go.
She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate
that on which- with a terrible questioning too great for her strength-
her spiritual gaze was fixed.
One day toward the end of December Natasha, pale and thin,
dressed in a black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted
into a knot, was crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa,
nervously crumpling and smoothing out the end of her sash while
she looked at a corner of the door.
She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone- to the
other side of life. And that other side of life, of which she
had never before thought and which had formerly seemed to her
so far away and improbable, was now nearer and more akin and more
comprehensible than this side of life, where everything was either
emptiness and desolation or suffering and indignity.
She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not
imagine him otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him
again as he had been at Mytishchi, at Troitsa, and at Yaroslavl.
She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and
her own, and sometimes devised other words they might have spoken.
There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak,
leaning his head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully
hollow and his shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his
eyes glitter, and a wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead.
One of his legs twitches just perceptibly, but rapidly. Natasha
knows that he is struggling with terrible pain. "What is
that pain like? Why does he have that pain? What does he feel?
How does it hurt him?" thought Natasha. He noticed her watching
him, raised his eyes, and began to speak seriously:
"One thing would be terrible," said he: "to
bind oneself forever to a suffering man. It would be continual
torture." And he looked searchingly at her. Natasha as usual
answered before she had time to think what she would say. She
said: "This can't go on- it won't. You will get well- quite
well."
She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived
what she had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look
at those words and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair
in that protracted gaze.
"I agreed," Natasha now said to herself, "that
it would be dreadful if he always continued to suffer. I said
it then only because it would have been dreadful for him, but
he understood it differently. He thought it would be dreadful
for me. He then still wished to live and feared death. And I said
it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not say what I meant. I thought
quite differently. Had I said what I thought, I should have said:
even if he had to go on dying, to die continually before my eyes,
I should have been happy compared with what I am now. Now there
is nothing... nobody. Did he know that? No, he did not and never
will know it. And now it will never, never be possible to put
it right." And now he again seemed to be saying the same
words to her, only in her imagination Natasha this time gave him
a different answer. She stopped him and said: "Terrible for
you, but not for me! You know that for me there is nothing in
life but you, and to suffer with you is the greatest happiness
for me," and he took her hand and pressed it as he had pressed
it that terrible evening four days before his death. And in her
imagination she said other tender and loving words which she might
have said then but only spoke now: "I love thee!... thee!
I love, love..." she said, convulsively pressing her hands
and setting her teeth with a desperate effort...
She was overcome by sweet sorrow and tears were already rising
in her eyes; then she suddenly asked herself to whom she was saying
this. Again everything was shrouded in hard, dry perplexity, and
again with a strained frown she peered toward the world where
he was. And now, now it seemed to her she was penetrating the
mystery.... But at the instant when it seemed that the incomprehensible
was revealing itself to her a loud rattle of the door handle struck
painfully on her ears. Dunyasha, her maid, entered the room quickly
and abruptly with a frightened look on her face and showing no
concern for her mistress.
"Come to your Papa at once, please!" said she with
a strange, excited look. "A misfortune... about Peter Ilynich...
a letter," she finished with a sob.
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