Chapter Chapter 183 · 第183章

On receiving news of Natásha’s illness, the countess, though not quite

well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Pétya and the rest of the

household, and the whole family moved from Márya Dmítrievna’s house to

their own and settled down in town.

Natásha’s illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for

her parents, the consideration of all that had caused the illness,

her conduct and the breaking off of her engagement, receded into the

background. She was so ill that it was impossible for them to consider

in how far she was to blame for what had happened. She could not eat

or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them

feel, was in danger. They could not think of anything but how to help

her. Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in

French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great

variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple

idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease

Natásha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be

known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always

has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to

medicine—not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so

on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the

innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple

thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard

that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their

lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best

years of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought

was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were

really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostóv family. Their

usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for

the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they

were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and

indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and

of those who loved her—and that is why there are, and always will be,

pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied

that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that

something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They

satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it

wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself

and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching

spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child

cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no

remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its

mother’s sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were

of use to Natásha because they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her

that it would soon pass if only the coachman went to the chemist’s in

the Arbát and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box for a ruble

and seventy kopeks, and if she took those powders in boiled water at

intervals of precisely two hours, neither more nor less.

What would Sónya and the count and countess have done, how would they

have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills

to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the

other details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which

supplied an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would

the count have borne his dearly loved daughter’s illness had he not

known that it was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not

grudge thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her

illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and would take

her abroad for consultations there, and had he not been able to explain

the details of how Métivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms,

but Frise had, and Múdrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the

countess have done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid

for not strictly obeying the doctor’s orders?

“You’ll never get well like that,” she would say, forgetting her grief

in her vexation, “if you won’t obey the doctor and take your medicine at

the right time! You mustn’t trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to

pneumonia,” she would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of

that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.

What would Sónya have done without the glad consciousness that she had

not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to

carry out all the doctor’s injunctions with precision, and that she

still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time when the

slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had to be administered?

Even to Natásha herself it was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices

were being made for her sake, and to know that she had to take medicine

at certain hours, though she declared that no medicine would cure her

and that it was all nonsense. And it was even pleasant to be able to

show, by disregarding the orders, that she did not believe in medical

treatment and did not value her life.

The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and

regardless of her grief-stricken face joked with her. But when he had

gone into another room, to which the countess hurriedly followed him, he

assumed a grave air and thoughtfully shaking his head said that though

there was danger, he had hopes of the effect of this last medicine and

one must wait and see, that the malady was chiefly mental, but... And

the countess, trying to conceal the action from herself and from him,

slipped a gold coin into his hand and always returned to the patient

with a more tranquil mind.

The symptoms of Natásha’s illness were that she ate little, slept

little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that

she could not get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the

stifling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostóvs did not move to the

country that summer of 1812.

In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out

of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was fond of

such things made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of

the country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natásha’s

grief began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased

to press so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past,

and she began to recover physically.