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After that he avoided Dessalles and the countess who caressed him and either sat alone or came timidly to Princess Mary, or to Natsha of whom he seemed even fonder than of his aunt, and clung to them quietly and shyly.
When Princess Mary had left Prince Andrew she fully understood what Natsha’s face had told her. She did not speak any more to Natsha of hopes of saving his life. She took turns with her beside his sofa, and did not cry any more, but prayed continually, turning in soul to that Eternal and Unfathomable, whose presence above the dying man was now so evident.
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 Mytshchi 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 Kurgin, he could not now regain the feeling he then had, but was tormented by the question whether Kurgin was alive. And he dared not inquire.
His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natsha 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 Natsha, 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. Snya 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 Snya’s place sat Natsha 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 Tritsa 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 Natsha 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.”
Natsha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.
“Natsha, 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!” Natsha 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.
Natsha 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.
