War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [427]
Count Ostermann-Tolstoy met the returning hussars, sent for Rostov, thanked him, and said that he would report his daring action to the sovereign and request the St. George Cross for him. When Rostov was summoned to Count Ostermann, he, remembering that his attack had been begun without orders, was fully convinced that his superior had called for him in order to punish him for unwarranted action. Ostermann’s flattering words and the promise of a reward should therefore have been a joyful surprise for Rostov; yet the same unpleasant, unclear feeling nauseated him morally. “What on earth is tormenting me?” he asked himself, as he rode back from the general. “Ilyin? No, he’s safe. Did I disgrace myself somehow? No, it’s not that!” Something else tormented him, something like remorse. “Yes, yes, that French officer with the dimple. And I remember very well how my arm stopped as I raised it.”
Rostov saw the prisoners being taken away and rode after them to look at his Frenchman with the dimple in his chin. He was sitting in his strange uniform on a spare hussar horse and looking around uneasily. The wound on his arm was almost not a wound. He feigned a smile at Rostov and waved to him by way of greeting. Rostov still felt awkward and as if ashamed of something.
That whole day and the next, Rostov’s friends and comrades noticed that he was not dull, not angry, but silent, pensive, and concentrated. He drank reluctantly, tried to stay alone, and kept thinking about something.
Rostov kept thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man—and there was something in it that he was unable to understand. “So they’re even more afraid than we are!” he thought. “So that’s all there is to so-called heroism? And did I really do it for the fatherland? And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes? But how frightened he was! He thought I’d kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand faltered. And they gave me the St. George Cross. I understand nothing, nothing!”
But while Nikolai was working out all these questions within himself, still without giving himself a clear accounting of what confused him so much, the wheel of fortune of military service, as often happens, turned in his favor. After the Ostrovna action he was promoted, was given a battalion of hussars, and whenever a brave officer was called for, the mission was given to him.
XVI
On receiving the news of Natasha’s illness, the countess, though not quite recovered and still weak, went to Moscow with Petya and all the household, and the whole Rostov family moved from Marya Dmitrievna’s to their own house and settled in Moscow.
Natasha’s illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for her family, the thought of all that had been the cause of her illness—her act and the break with her fiancé—moved into the background. She was so ill that it was impossible to think of how much she was to blame in all that had happened, while she did not eat, did not sleep, grew noticeably thinner, coughed, and was, as the doctors let it be felt, in danger. They had to think only of how to help her. Doctors visited Natasha both singly and in consultation, spoke a good deal of French, German, and Latin, denounced one another, prescribed the most varied medications for all the illnesses known to them; but the simple thought never occurred to any of them that they could not know the illness Natasha was suffering from, as no illness that afflicts a living human being can be known: for each human being has his peculiarities, and always has his own peculiar, complex illness, unknown to medical science, not an illness of the lungs, the liver, the skin, the heart, the nerves, and so on, recorded in medicine, but an illness consisting in one of the countless combinations of afflictions of these organs. This simple thought did not occur to the doctors (just as it cannot