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By Root 4109 0

and timidity, which, to her mind, must be the same with her as with everyone else. After those inadvertent words, that if he were free he would go on his knees and ask for her hand and her love, spoken at a moment of such intense emotion for her, Pierre had never said anything about his feelings for her; and it was obvious to her that the words which had comforted her so much then had been spoken the way all sorts of meaningless words are spoken to comfort a weeping child. Not because Pierre was a married man, but because Natasha felt in the highest degree the strength of the moral barriers between them—the absence of which she had felt with Kuragin—it never entered her head that her relations with Pierre might lead not only to love on her side, still less on his, but even to that sort of tender, self-aware, poetic friendship between a man and a woman, of which she knew several examples.

At the end of St. Peter’s fast, Agrafena Ivanovna Belov, the Rostovs’ neighbor in Otradnoe, came to Moscow to venerate the Moscow saints. She suggested that Natasha prepare for communion,24 and Natasha joyfully seized upon the idea. Despite the doctor’s prohibition on going out early in the morning, Natasha insisted on preparing, and preparing not as it was usually done in the Rostovs’ home, that is, by hearing three services at home, but as Agrafena Ivanovna did it, that is, for the whole week, without missing a single vespers, liturgy, or matins.

The countess liked this zeal of Natasha’s; after the unsuccessful medical treatment, she hoped in her heart that prayer would help her more than medications, and she consented to Natasha’s wish, though with fear and concealing it from the doctor, and entrusted her to Mrs. Belov. Agrafena Ivanovna would come at three o’clock in the morning to wake Natasha, and most often found her already up. Natasha was afraid to sleep through the time for matins. Washing hastily and dressing humbly in the poorest of her dresses and an old mantilla, shivering in the fresh air, Natasha would go out into the deserted streets, transparently lit up by the glow of dawn. On Agrafena Ivanovna’s advice, Natasha went to the services not in her own parish, but in a church in which, according to the pious Mrs. Belov, there was a priest of quite strict and lofty life. In the church there were always few people; Natasha and Mrs. Belov would stand in their usual place before the icon of the Mother of God, built into the back of the left-hand choir, and a new feeling of humility would come over Natasha before the great, the unknowable, when at this unaccustomed hour of morning, looking at the blackened face of the Mother of God lit by candles and the light of morning coming from the window, she listened to the words of the service, which she tried to follow and understand.25 When she understood them, her personal feeling, with its nuances, joined with her prayer; when she did not, the sweeter it was for her to think that the wish to understand everything was pride, that it was impossible to understand everything, that she only had to believe and give herself to God, who in those moments—she felt—was guiding her soul. She crossed herself, bowed, and, when she did not understand, only asked God, in horror at her own vileness, to forgive her for everything, everything, and to have mercy on her. The prayers she gave herself to most of all were prayers of repentance. Returning home at an early hour of the morning, when she met only masons going to work and yard porters sweeping the streets, and everyone in the houses was still asleep, Natasha experienced a new feeling of the possibility of correcting her vices and the possibility of a new, pure life and happiness.

During the whole week in which she led this life, that feeling grew every day. And the happiness of taking communion, or of “communicating,” as Agrafena Ivanovna used to say, playing joyfully with the word, seemed so great to her that she thought she would never survive till that blessed Sunday.

But the happy day came, and when Natasha, on that Sunday so memorable for