ilations which had to be answered; the room in which Nikolushka had ten put was damp, and he had begun to cough. Alpatitch came to Yaro- uvl with accounts. He had suggestions to make, and advised Princess ; arya to move to Moscow to the house in Vozdvizhenka, which was unin- red, and only needed some trifling repairs. Life would not stand still, ad she had to live. Painful as it was for Princess Marya to come out of ’at world of solitary contemplation, in which she had been living till ien, and sorry, and, as it were, conscience-stricken, as she felt at leaving Natasha alone, the duties of daily life claimed her attention, and against j:r own will she had to give herself up to them. She went through the ; counts with Alpatitch, consulted Dessalle about her little nephew, and -gan to make preparations for moving to Moscow.
Natasha was left alone, and from the time that Princess Marya began busy herself with preparations for her journey, she held aloof from her 0.
Princess Marya asked the countess to let Natasha come to stay with her : Moscow; and both mother and father eagerly agreed to her suggestion, r they saw their daughter’s physical strength failing every day, and they >ped that change of scene and the advice of Moscow doctors might do tx good.
‘I am not going anywhere,’ answered Natasha, when the suggestion as made to her; ‘all I ask is, please let me alone,’ she said, and she ran it of the room, hardly able to restrain tears more of vexation and anger ,tan of sorrow.
Since she felt herself deserted by Princess Marya, and alone in her ief, Natasha had spent most of her time alone in her room, huddled up a corner of her sofa. While her slender, nervous fingers were busy listing or tearing something, she kept her eyes fixed in a set stare on the ’•st object that met them. This solitude exhausted and tortured her; but was what she needed. As soon as any one went in to her, she got up jickly, changed her attitude and expression, and picked up a book or ime needlework, obviously waiting with impatience for the intruder to ave her.
It seemed to her continually that she was on the very verge of under- anding, of penetrating to the mystery on which her spiritual vision was istened with a question too terrible for her to bear.
One day towards the end of December, Natasha, thin and pale in a ack woollen gown, with her hair fastened up in a careless coil, sat perched p in the corner of her sofa, her fingers nervously crumpling and smooth- ig out the ends of her sash, while she gazed at the corner of the door.
She was inwardly gazing whither he had gone, to that further shore, nd that shore, of which she had never thought in old days, which had 'emed to her so far away, so incredible, vras now closer to her, and more ;r own, more comprehensible than this side of life, in which all was 2mpti- ;ss and desolation or suffering and humiliation.
She was gazing into that world where she knew he was. But she could
1014 WAR AND PEACE
not see him, except as he had been here on earth. She was seeing him agai as he had been at Mytishtchy, at Troitsa, at Yaroslavl.
She was seeing his face, hearing his voice, and repeating his words, an words of her own that she had put into his mouth; and sometimes imagir ing fresh phrases for herself and him which could only have been uttere in the past.
Now she saw him as he had once been, lying on a low chair in his velve fur-lined cloak, his head propped on his thin, pale hand. His chest looke fearfully hollow, and his shoulders high. His lips were firmly closed, hi eyes shining, and there was a line on his white brow that came and var ished again. There was a rapid tremor just perceptible in one foot. Natash knew he was struggling to bear horrible pain. ‘What was that pain like Why was it there? What was he feeling? How did it hurt?’ Natasha ha wondered. He had noticed her attention, raised his eyes, and, withoi smiling, began to speak.
‘One thing would be awful,’ he said: ‘to bind oneself for ever to suffering invalid. It would be an everlasting torture.’ And he had looke with searching eyes at her. Natasha, as she always did, had answere without giving herself time to think; she had said: ‘It can’t go on like thi: it won’t be so, you will get well—quite well.’
She was seeing him now as though it were the first time, and goin through all she had felt at that time. She recalled the long, mournful, ster gaze he had given her at those words, and she understood all the reproac and the despair in that prolonged gaze.
