They could both see him slowly and gently slipping further and further down into another realm. They knew this had to be, and it was goodbye. He received absolution and was given communion. Everybody came in to say goodbye. When his son was brought in to see him he pressed his lips to the boy’s flesh and then turned away, not because he was in any pain or anguish (Princess Marya and Natasha could see this clearly), but simply because he thought he had done all that was necessary. When they told him to give the boy his blessing he did what was required of him and then looked round as if he was wondering whether there was anything else that needed to be done. When the body suffered its final spasms and gave up the ghost, Princess Marya and Natasha were there.
‘It’s all over, isn’t it?’ said Princess Marya, after the body had lain there, quite still, for some moments, going cold before their eyes. Natasha came up close, glanced down at the dead eyes, and closed them with a quick movement. She closed them without kissing them, hanging on to her closest memory of him.
‘Where has he gone? Where is he now? . . .’
When the body lay washed and dressed in the coffin on the table, everybody came in to take leave of him, and everybody wept. Little Nikolay wept from agonizing, heart-breaking bewilderment. The countess and Sonya wept because they were sorry for Natasha, and because he had gone from them. The old count wept because he could see himself taking the same terrible step before much longer.
Natasha and Princess Marya now also gave way to tears, but not from personal sorrow. They wept with a melting sensation of reverence gripping their very souls as they contemplated the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before their eyes.
PART II
CHAPTER 1
The human intellect cannot grasp the full range of causes that lie behind any phenomenon. But the need to discover causes is deeply ingrained in the spirit of man. And so the human intellect ignores the infinite permutations and sheer complexity of all the circumstances surrounding a phenomenon, any one of which could be individually construed as the thing that caused it, latches on to the first and easiest approximation, and says, ‘This is the cause!’ When it comes to historical events, where the actions of men are the object of study, the will of the gods used to serve as a primeval approximation to underlying cause, though this was eventually superseded by the will of a few men occupying the historical foreground – the heroes of history. But one glance below the surface of any historical event, one glance at the actions of the mass of humanity involved in it, is enough to show that the will of the historical hero, far from controlling the actions of the masses, is itself subject to continual outside control. You might think it doesn’t matter very much whether historical events are interpreted one way or another. But between the man who says that the peoples of the west marched on the east because Napoleon willed them to do so, and the man who says this movement took place because it was bound to take place, there is the same yawning gap as there is between men who used to claim that the earth stood still while the planets revolved around it, and other men who said they didn’t know what keeps the earth in place, but they did know there were laws controlling its motion and the motion of the other planets. There are no single causes behind historical events, and there never can be, other than the one grand cause behind all causes. But there are laws controlling events, some of them beyond our ken, some of them within our groping grasp. The discovery of these laws becomes possible only when we stop looking for causes in the will of individual men, just as the discovery of the laws of planetary motion became possible only when men stopped believing in the earth as a fixed entity.
