War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [477]
“What, us abandon everything? We don’t agree. We don’t agree…We’re sorry for you, but we’re not in agreement. You go by yourself…” came from different sides of the crowd. And again one and the same expression appeared on all the faces in this crowd, and now it was certainly not an expression of curiosity and gratitude, but of angry resolve.
“But surely you haven’t understood,” Princess Marya said with a sad smile. “Why don’t you want to leave? I promise to house you, to feed you. And here the enemy will devastate you…”
But her voice was drowned out by the voices of the crowd.
“We’re not in agreement, let them devastate us! We don’t take your grain, we’re not in agreement!”
Princess Marya again tried to catch someone’s eyes in the crowd, but not a single gaze was directed at her; they obviously avoided her eyes. She felt strange and awkward.
“See what clever teaching, follow her into bondage! Wreck your houses and go into servitude! What else! I’ll give you my grain, she says!” voices said in the crowd.
Princess Marya, lowering her head, left the circle and went to the house. After repeating the order to Dron to have the horses ready for departure, she went to her room and remained alone with her thoughts.
XII
That night Princess Marya sat for a long time by the open window in her room, listening to the sounds of the muzhiks’ talk, which reached her from the village, but she was not thinking about them. She felt that, however much she thought about them, she could not understand them. She kept thinking about one thing—her grief, which, after the interruption caused by the cares of the present, had already become her past. Now she could remember, she could weep, and she could pray. As the sun set, the wind died down. The night was still and fresh. Towards midnight the voices began to subside, a cock crowed, the full moon began to appear from behind the lindens, a fresh, white, dewy mist rose, and silence now reigned over the village and the house.
One after another she imagined pictures of the recent past—her father’s illness and his last moments. And with sad joy she now dwelt on those images, driving away from her with horror only the one last picture of his death, which she felt unable to contemplate even in her imagination at this still and mysterious hour of the night. And these pictures appeared before her with such clarity and detail that they seemed to her now a reality, now the past, now the future.
Then she vividly pictured the moment when he had had the stroke and had been dragged under the arms from the garden in Bald Hills, and had muttered something with his strengthless tongue, twitched his gray eyebrows, and looked at her anxiously and timidly.
“He wanted to tell me even then what he told me on the day of his death,” she thought. “He had always thought what he told me.” And here Princess Marya remembered in all its details that night at Bald Hills, on the eve of his stroke, when, having a foreboding of disaster, she had stayed with him against his will. She had not slept and at night had tiptoed downstairs and, going to the door of the flower room, where her father was spending that night, had listened to his voice. In a suffering, weary voice he was saying something to Tikhon. He evidently wanted to talk. “Why didn’t he call me? Why didn’t he allow me to be there instead of Tikhon?” Princess Marya wondered then and now. “Now he’ll never tell anyone all that was in his soul. Neither for him nor for me will the moment ever come back when he could say everything he wanted to say, and I, not Tikhon, could listen and understand him. Why didn’t I go into the room then?” she wondered. “Maybe he would have told me then what he said on the day of his death. He did ask twice about me then, during his talk with Tikhon. He wanted to see me, and I stood there outside the door. It was sad, it was hard for him to talk with Tikhon, who didn’t understand him. I remember he mentioned Liza to him, as though she were alive—he had forgotten she had died, and Tikhon reminded him that she was no more,