Chương Chương 279 · 第279章

Not only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he was

dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an aloofness from

everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness of existence.

Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. That inexorable,

eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which he had felt

continually all his life—was now near to him and, by the strange

lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable....

Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that terribly

tormenting fear of death—the end—but now he no longer understood that

fear.

He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top before

him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky, and

knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to himself after

being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love had instantly

unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of life that

had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased to think about

it.

During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he

spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new

principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously

detached himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and

always to sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not

to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that

principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he

destroyed that dreadful barrier which—in the absence of such love—stands

between life and death. When during those first days he remembered that

he would have to die, he said to himself: “Well, what of it? So much the

better!”

But after the night in Mytíshchi when, half delirious, he had seen her

for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his

lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again

crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And

joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind. Recalling the

moment at the ambulance station when he had seen Kurágin, he could not

now regain the feeling he then had, but was tormented by the question

whether Kurágin was alive. And he dared not inquire.

His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natásha

referred to when she said: “This suddenly happened,” had occurred two

days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual struggle

between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was

the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life as

presented to him in the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though

ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.

It was evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, and his

thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sónya was sitting by the table. He

began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness seized him.

“Ah, she has come!” thought he.

And so it was: in Sónya’s place sat Natásha who had just come in

noiselessly.

Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this

physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair

placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was

knitting a stocking. She had learned to knit stockings since Prince

Andrew had casually mentioned that no one nursed the sick so well as old

nurses who knit stockings, and that there is something soothing in

the knitting of stockings. The needles clicked lightly in her slender,

rapidly moving hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile

of her drooping face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She

started, glanced round at him, and screening the candle with her hand

stooped carefully with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball,

and regained her former position.

He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a

deep breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed

cautiously.

At the Tróitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told

her that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had

brought them together again, but after that they never spoke of the

future.

“Can it or can it not be?” he now thought as he looked at her and

listened to the light click of the steel needles. “Can fate have brought

me to her so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the

truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent

my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what

am I to do if I love her?” he thought, and he involuntarily groaned,

from a habit acquired during his sufferings.

On hearing that sound Natásha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to

him, and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him

and bent over him.

“You are not asleep?”

“No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one

else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light.

I want to weep for joy.”

Natásha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.

“Natásha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world.”

“And I!”—She turned away for an instant. “Why too much?” she asked.

“Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your

whole soul—shall I live? What do you think?”

“I am sure of it, sure!” Natásha almost shouted, taking hold of both his

hands with a passionate movement.

He remained silent awhile.

“How good it would be!” and taking her hand he kissed it.

Natásha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would

not do and that he had to be quiet.

“But you have not slept,” she said, repressing her joy. “Try to sleep...

please!”

He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and

sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at

him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her

stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.

Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep long and

suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration.

As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now

always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about death.

He felt himself nearer to it.

“Love? What is love?” he thought.

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I

understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only

because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to

die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and

eternal source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were

only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they

were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former

agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that

he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and

insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and

discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere.

Prince Andrew dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had

more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by

empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to

disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded

all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything

depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and

tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be

in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He

was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It

stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward

the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing

against it and forcing its way in. Something not human—death—was

breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the

door, making a final effort to hold it back—to lock it was no longer

possible—but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from

behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain

and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was

death, and Prince Andrew died.

But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was asleep,

and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.

“Yes, it was death! I died—and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!” And

all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then

concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as

if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that

strange lightness did not again leave him.

When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natásha went

up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at

her strangely, not understanding.

That was what had happened to him two days before Princess Mary’s

arrival. From that day, as the doctor expressed it, the wasting fever

assumed a malignant character, but what the doctor said did not interest

Natásha, she saw the terrible moral symptoms which to her were more

convincing.

From that day an awakening from life came to Prince Andrew together with

his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration of life it did

not seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep compared to the

duration of a dream.

There was nothing terrible or violent in this comparatively slow

awakening.

His last days and hours passed in an ordinary and simple way. Both

Princess Mary and Natásha, who did not leave him, felt this. They did

not weep or shudder and during these last days they themselves felt

that they were not attending on him (he was no longer there, he had left

them) but on what reminded them most closely of him—his body. Both felt

this so strongly that the outward and terrible side of death did not

affect them and they did not feel it necessary to foment their grief.

Neither in his presence nor out of it did they weep, nor did they ever

talk to one another about him. They felt that they could not express in

words what they understood.

They both saw that he was sinking slowly and quietly, deeper and deeper,

away from them, and they both knew that this had to be so and that it

was right.

He confessed, and received communion: everyone came to take leave of

him. When they brought his son to him, he pressed his lips to the boy’s

and turned away, not because he felt it hard and sad (Princess Mary and

Natásha understood that) but simply because he thought it was all that

was required of him, but when they told him to bless the boy, he did

what was demanded and looked round as if asking whether there was

anything else he should do.

When the last convulsions of the body, which the spirit was leaving,

occurred, Princess Mary and Natásha were present.

“Is it over?” said Princess Mary when his body had for a few minutes

lain motionless, growing cold before them. Natásha went up, looked at

the dead eyes, and hastened to close them. She closed them but did not

kiss them, but clung to that which reminded her most nearly of him—his

body.

“Where has he gone? Where is he now?...”

When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table,

everyone came to take leave of him and they all wept.

Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful perplexity.

The countess and Sónya cried from pity for Natásha and because he was

no more. The old count cried because he felt that before long, he, too,

must take the same terrible step.

Natásha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their own

personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which

had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the

simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their

presence.