For the first time Prince Andrey smiled the ghost of a smile, but Princess Marya, who knew his face so well, was horrified to realize it was not a smile of joy, not of tender affection for his son, it was a smile of quiet, gentle mockery as his sister made one last desperate attempt to bring him back to sensitivity.
‘Yes, I would like to see little Nikolay. Is he well?’
When they brought the little boy in he was scared by the sight of his father, but he didn’t cry, because nobody else was crying. Prince Andrey kissed him, but he obviously didn’t know what to say.
When they had taken the child away Princess Marya went over to her brother once more, kissed him, finally lost all self-control, and burst into tears.
He stared at her.
‘Are you sorry for Nikolay?’ he asked.
Princess Marya nodded through her tears.
‘Marie, you know it says in the Bib . . .’ he began, but suddenly stopped.
‘What were you saying?’
‘Nothing. You can’t cry in here,’ he said, giving her the same icy look.
When Princess Marya had burst into tears Andrey knew she was weeping for little Nikolay, who was going to be left without a father. He made a huge effort to return to this life, and see things from their point of view.
‘Yes, it must seem sad to them,’ he thought. ‘But it’s really so straightforward! The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them,’ he said to himself, and he wanted to say it to his sister. But no, they would only take it their way. They wouldn’t understand at all! ‘What they can’t understand is that all these feelings they make so much of – all these thoughts and feelings of ours that seem so important – they’re of no consequence! We can’t understand each other!’ And he said no more.
Prince Andrey’s little son was seven years old. He could barely read, and he knew nothing. He would go on to see a lot more of life, gaining in knowledge, curiosity and experience. But if he had had access then to all the faculties acquired in later life, he couldn’t have had a truer, deeper understanding of the drama he had just seen enacted between his father, Princess Marya and Natasha. He took in the whole thing, and left the room without shedding a tear. Without saying a word he went up to Natasha, who had followed him out, and glanced timidly up at her with his lovely dreamy eyes. His pink top lip with the little arch in it was trembling as he leant his head against her and burst into tears.
From that day on he gave Dessalles a wide berth, and also avoided the countess, who wanted to smother him with kindness, and either sat somewhere on his own, or timidly sought out Princess Marya or Natasha, whom he now seemed to love even more than his aunt, and cuddled up to them in his quiet, shy little way.
When Princess Marya left her brother’s side she understood everything that Natasha’s face had been trying to tell her. She and Natasha said nothing more about the possibility of his life being saved. They took turns at his bedside, and Princess Marya abandoned her tears in favour of continual prayer, turning in spirit to the immortal, invisible presence that could now be so palpably experienced as it hovered over the dying man.
CHAPTER 16
Prince Andrey not only knew he was going to die, he could feel himself dying; he already felt half dead. He was experiencing a sense of remoteness from all earthly things, and a strangely joyful lightness of being. Neither impatient nor anxious, he lay there waiting for what was to come . . . The ominous, eternal, remote and unknown presence he had been conscious of throughout the whole of his life was now closing in on him, and becoming – through the strange lightness of being that he was now experiencing – almost intelligible and tangible . . .
In the past he had dreaded the end. Twice in his life he had experienced that ghastly, agonizing feeling, the fear of death, the end, but now he couldn’t understand why he had been so afraid of it.
The first time he had had that feeling was when the shell was spinning like a top right in front of him, and he had looked round at the stubble and the bushes, and up at the sky, fully aware that he was staring death in the face. When he had come round after sustaining his wound it was as if he had been suddenly freed from the oppressive constraints of life, and he had felt love blossoming in his soul, a love that seemed to be eternal, free-ranging, invested with a life of its own, and from then on, far from fearing death, he had never even thought about it.
