War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [703]
“Masha,” she said, timidly drawing her hand towards her. “Masha, you don’t think I’m bad, do you? No? Masha, darling. How I love you. Let’s be best, best friends.”
And embracing Princess Marya, Natasha started kissing her hands and face. Princess Marya was abashed and overjoyed at this expression of Natasha’s feelings.
From that day on, a passionate and tender friendship was established between Princess Marya and Natasha such as occurs only between women. They constantly kissed each other, spoke tender words to each other, and spent most of their time together. If one went out, the other became uneasy and hastened to join her. The two felt a greater harmony between themselves than separately, each with herself. A feeling stronger than friendship was established between them: it was the exceptional feeling that life was possible only in each other’s presence.
Sometimes they were silent for hours at a time; sometimes, already in bed, they would start talking and talk till morning. They talked mostly about the distant past. Princess Marya told about her childhood, about her mother, her father, her dreams; and Natasha, who formerly turned away with calm incomprehension from that life of devotion, submission, from the poetry of Christian self-denial, now, feeling herself bound by love to Princess Marya, also came to love Princess Marya’s past and to understand a formerly incomprehensible side of life. She did not think of applying submission and self-denial to her own life, because she was used to seeking other joys, but she understood and came to love this formerly incomprehensible virtue in another. For Princess Marya, as she listened to the stories of Natasha’s childhood and early youth, a formerly incomprehensible side of life was also revealed, faith in life, in the pleasures of life.
As before, they still never spoke of him, so as not to violate with words, as it seemed to them, that lofty feeling that was in them, and this silence about him had the effect that little by little, without believing it, they began to forget him.
Natasha had grown thin, pale, and become so weak physically that everyone constantly spoke of her health, and that pleased her. But sometimes she was unexpectedly overcome not only by the fear of death, but by the fear of illness, weakness, the loss of beauty, and involuntarily she sometimes studied her bare arm, amazed at its thinness, or in the morning contemplated in the mirror her drawn and, as it seemed to her, pathetic face. It seemed to her that it ought to be so, but at the same time she felt afraid and sad.
One time she went quickly up the stairs and got completely out of breath. At once she involuntarily thought up for herself some business downstairs, and from there ran up again, testing her strength and observing herself.
Another time she called Dunyasha, and her voice sounded cracked. She called her once more, though she heard her footsteps—called in that chesty voice in which she used to sing, and listened attentively to it.
She did not know it, she would not have believed it, but under the seemingly impenetrable layer of silt that covered her soul, thin, tender young needles of grass were already breaking through, which were to take root and so cover with their living shoots the grief that oppressed her, that it would soon not be seen or noticed. The wound was healing from inside.
At the end of January, Princess Marya left for Moscow, and the count insisted that Natasha go with her so as to consult the doctors.
IV
After the clash at Vyazma, where Kutuzov could not hold back his troops from their wish to overrun, cut off, and so on, the further movement of the fleeing French and pursuing Russians, until Krasnoe, went without battles. The flight was so swift that the pursuing Russian army could not keep up with the French, the horses of the cavalry and artillery balked, and the information about the movement of the French was always wrong.
The men of the Russian army were so exhausted by this constant