War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [639]
Princess Marya, having left Prince Andrei, fully understood all that Natasha’s face had said to her. She did not talk anymore with Natasha about the hope of saving his life. She took turns with her by his sofa and did not cry anymore, but prayed constantly, in her soul addressing the eternal, the unfathomable, whose presence over the dying man was now so palpable.
XVI
Prince Andrei not only knew that he would die, but felt that he was dying, that he was already half dead. He experienced an awareness of estrangement from everything earthly and a joyful and strange lightness of being. Without haste or worry, he waited for what lay ahead of him. The dread, the eternal, the unknown and far off, of which he had never ceased to feel the presence throughout his life, was now close to him and—by that strange lightness of being he experienced—almost comprehensible and palpable.
Formerly he had been afraid of the end. Twice he had experienced that frightful, tormenting feeling of the fear of death, the end, and now he no longer understood it.
The first time he had experienced that feeling was when the shell was spinning before him like a top, and he looked at the harvested field, at the bushes, at the sky, and knew that death was before him. When he regained consciousness after being wounded, and in his soul, instantly, as if freed of the restraining weight of life, that flower of love opened, eternal, free, not bound to this life, he was no longer afraid of death and did not think of it.
In those hours of suffering solitude and half delirium that he spent after being wounded, the more he pondered the new principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more, though without feeling it himself, he renounced earthly life. To love everything, everybody, always to sacrifice oneself for love, meant to love no one, meant not to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he was with this principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he destroyed that dreadful barrier which, without love, stands between life and death. When, in that first time, he remembered that he had to die, he said to himself: “Well, so much the better.”
But after that night in Mytishchi, when in his half delirium she whom he wished for appeared before him, and when, pressing her hand to his lips, he wept quiet, joyful tears, love for one woman crept imperceptibly into his heart and again bound him to life. Joyful and worried thoughts started coming to him. Remembering that moment at the dressing station when he had seen Kuragin, he now could not return to that feeling: he was tormented by the question of whether the man was still alive. And he did not dare ask it.
His illness was following its physical course, but what Natasha called “this happened to him” occurred two days before Princess Marya’s arrival. It was the last moral struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the unexpected awareness that he still valued life, as it presented itself to him in his love for Natasha, and a last, finally surmounted, attack of terror before the unknown.
It was in the evening. As usual after dinner, he was in a slightly feverish state, and his thoughts were extremely clear. Sonya was sitting at the table. He dozed off. Suddenly a sense of happiness came over him.
“Ah, it’s that she’s come!” he thought.
Indeed, Natasha, who had just come in with inaudible steps, was sitting in Sonya’s place.
Since she had begun to take care of him, he had always experienced this physical sense of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair, turned sideways to him, shielding the light of the candle from him, and knitting a stocking. (She had learned to knit stockings since Prince Andrei told her that no one could take such good care of the sick as old nannies who knit stockings, and that there was something soothing about the knitting of stockings.) Her slender fingers moved quickly, occasionally clicking the needles, and he could see clearly the thoughtful profile of her lowered face.