War And Peace полностью

The day after little Nikolay went off the old prince got up early and put on his full dress uniform, fully intending to go and see the commander-in-chief. The carriage stood ready. Princess Marya watched as he strode out in his uniform resplendent with all his medals, and went down the garden to inspect an armed guard of peasants and house serfs. She sat by the window listening to his voice floating in from the garden. Suddenly some men came running up from the avenue with a terrified look on their faces.

Princess Marya ran down the steps, along the path through the flower-beds and out on to the avenue. There, coming towards her, was a great crowd of militiamen and servants, and in the midst of the crowd several men were supporting a little old man in a uniform and medals and helping him along. Princess Marya ran towards him, but in the play of sunlight filtering down through the shady lime-trees in tiny round patches she could not quite make out whether there had been any change in the way he looked. The one thing she could see was that his earlier expression of grim determination had changed into shrinking submissiveness. When he caught sight of his daughter he tried to move his lifeless lips and he gave a hoarse croak. It wasn’t clear what he wanted. He was lifted up, carried through into the study and laid out on the dreaded couch that had bothered him so much in recent days.

A carriage was sent to fetch the doctor, who bled him that evening and diagnosed a stroke with right-side paralysis.

Bald Hills was becoming a more and more dangerous place to stay in, so next day they moved the prince to Bogucharovo. The doctor went with him.

By the time they got to Bogucharovo Dessalles had already gone to Moscow with the little prince.

For three weeks the old prince lay there paralysed in the new house built by Prince Andrey and his condition showed no change for better or worse. Comatose, grotesque and corpse-like, he kept muttering non-stop, his eyebrows and lips twitching, and there was no telling whether or not he recognized where he was. Only one thing was certain: he was suffering and he urgently wanted to say something. What it was no one could tell: some quirky idea in a sick, half-crazy mind, perhaps, or something to do with public affairs, or was it a family matter?

The doctor said that this restlessness didn’t mean anything; it was pure physiology. But Princess Marya felt sure (and her suspicion was confirmed by the fact that her presence seemed to make things worse) that he wanted to tell her something. His sufferings were clearly both physical and mental.

There was no hope of recovery. He could not be moved. What if he died out on the road? ‘Wouldn’t it be better if it was all over and done with?’ Princess Marya sometimes thought. She watched him day and night, almost without sleeping, and the awful thing was that she often watched him not looking for signs of recovery, but often longing for signs that the end was near.

It came as a shock for the princess to admit this to herself, but this is what she felt. And Princess Marya was troubled by something even more terrible, the fact that ever since her father’s illness (if not before that, when she had decided to stay on in the vague expectation that something might happen) a series of long-forgotten hopes and desires slumbering within her had come to life again. Thoughts that had not entered her head for years – dreams of a new life free from the perpetual dread of her father, even of the possibility of love and a happy marriage – haunted her imagination like temptations of the devil. It was no good trying to banish these thoughts; her mind seethed with questions about the kind of life she would lead when it was all over. These were temptations sent by the devil, and Princess Marya knew it. She knew that the only weapon against him was prayer, and she tried to pray. She adopted a prayerful attitude, gazed at the holy icons, recited prayers, but she could not actually pray. She felt as if she had been transported into a new world of real life, hard work and freedom of movement, the complete opposite of the spiritual world where she had been incarcerated for so long with prayer as her only consolation. Prayers and tears were now beyond her, and her mind was full of practicalities.

The danger of staying on at Bogucharovo was increasing. On all sides there was word of the French getting near, and in one village, barely a dozen miles away, a house and estate had been looted by them. The doctor insisted that the prince must be moved on, and the local marshal sent one of his officials to persuade Princess Marya to get away as soon as possible. The police-chief called and said the same thing: the French were twenty or thirty miles away, French proclamations were circulating in the villages, and if the princess didn’t take her father away before the 15th, on their heads be it.