PRINCE ANDREY did not only know that he would die, but felt indeed that he was dying; that he was already half-dead. He experienced a sense of aloofness from everything earthly, and a strange and joyous lightness in his being. Neither impatient, nor troubled, he lay awaiting what was before him.… The menacing, the eternal, the unknown, and remote, the presence of which he had never ceased to feel during the whole course of his life, was now close to him, and—from that strange lightness of being, that he experienced—almost comprehensible and palpable.
In the past he had dreaded the end. Twice he had experienced that terribly agonising feeling of the dread of death, of the end, and now he had ceased to understand it.
The first time he had experienced that feeling when the grenade was rotating before him, and he looked at the stubble, at the bushes, at the sky, and knew that death was facing him. When he had come to himself after his wound, and instantly, as though set free from the cramping bondage of life, there had sprung up in his soul that flower of love, eternal, free, not dependent on this life, he had no more fear, and no more thought, of death.
In those hours of solitary suffering and half-delirium that he spent afterwards, the more he passed in thought into that new element of eternal love, revealed to him, the further he unconsciously travelled from earthly life. To love everything, every one, to sacrifice self always for love, meant to love no one, meant not to live this earthly life. And the further he penetrated into that element of love, the more he renounced life, and the more completely he annihilated that fearful barrier that love sets up between life and death. Whenever, during that first period, he remembered that he had to die, he said to himself： “Well, so much the better.”
But after that night at Mytishtchy, when in his half-delirium she, whom he had longed for, appeared before him, and when pressing her hand to his lips, he wept soft, happy tears, love for one woman stole unseen into his heart, and bound him again to life. And glad and disturbing thoughts began to come back to him. Recalling that moment at the ambulance station, when he had seen Kuragin, he could not now go back to his feeling then. He was fretted by the question whether he were alive. And he dared not ask.
His illness went through its regular physical course; but what Natasha had called “this change” had come upon him two days before Princess Marya’s arrival. It was the last moral struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the sudden consciousness that life, in the shape of his love for Natasha, was still precious to him, and the last and vanquished onslaught of terror before the unknown.
It happened in the evening. He was, as usually after dinner, in a slightly feverish condition, and his thoughts were particularly clear. Sonya was sitting at the table. He fell into a doze. He felt a sudden sense of happiness.
“Ah, she has come in！” he thought.
Natasha had, in fact, just come in with noiseless steps, and was sitting in Sonya’s place.
Ever since she had been looking after him he had always felt this physical sense of her presence. She was in a low chair beside him, knitting a stocking, and sitting so as to screen the light of the candle from him. She had learned to knit since Prince Andrey had once said to her that no one made such a good sick-nurse as an old nurse who knitted stockings, and that there was something soothing about knitting. Her slender fingers moved the needles rapidly with a slight click, and the dreamy profile of her drooping head could be clearly seen by him. She made a slight movement; the ball rolled off her knee. She started, glanced round at him, and, screening the light with her hand, bent over with a cautious, supple, and precise movement, picked up the ball, and sat back in the same attitude as before.
He gazed at her without stirring, and saw that after her movements she wanted to draw a deep breath, but did not dare to, and breathed with careful self-restraint.
At the Troitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told her that if he were to live he should thank God for ever for his wound, which had brought them together again; but since then they had never spoken of the future.
“Could it be, or could it not？” he was wondering now as he watched her and listened to the slight steel click of the needles. “Can fate have brought us together so strangely only for me to die？ … Can the truth of life have been revealed to me only for me to 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 said, and suddenly he unconsciously moaned from the habit he had fallen into in the course of his sufferings.
Hearing the sound, Natasha laid down her stocking, and bent down closer to him, and suddenly noticing his shining eyes, went up to him with a light step and stooped down.
“You are not asleep？”
“No; I have been looking at you for a long while. I felt when you came in. No one but you gives me the same soft peace … the same light. I want to weep with gladness！”
Natasha moved closer to him. Her face beamed with rapturous delight.
“Natasha, I love you too much！ More than everything in the world！”
“And I？” She turned away for a second. “Why too much？” she said.
“Why too much？ … Well, what do you think, what do you feel in your heart, your whole heart, am I going to live？ What do you think？”
“I am sure of it; sure of it！” Natasha almost cried out, taking both his hands with a passionate gesture.
He was silent for a while.
“How good it would be！” And taking her hand, he kissed it.
Natasha was happy and deeply stirred; and she recollected at once that this must not be, and that he must have quiet.
“But you are not asleep,” she said, subduing her joy. “Try and sleep … please do.”