She went up to him, took one look at his face and felt something snap inside her. Her eyes misted over. It wasn't that her father's face seemed sad or crestfallen, but it looked vicious and extraordinarily agitated, and it told her she was about to be swamped by some terrible calamity that was hanging over them, the worst of all calamities, one that she had never known before, a calamity that would prove to be irrevocable and beyond all understanding - the death of a loved one.
'What is it, father? Is it Andrey? . . .' The gawky, graceless princess spoke with a selfless sorrow of such ineffable beauty that it proved too much for her father, who turned away sobbing.
'I have some news . . . Not among the prisoners, not reported dead . . . It's from Kutuzov,' he shrieked at her as if hoping this would drive her away. 'He's dead!'
The princess did not collapse or faint away with sickness. When she heard these words her face, already pallid, was transformed, and a special glow came to her lovely luminous eyes. A kind of joy, a heavenly joy transcending all the joys and sorrows of the world, had drowned the sorrow within her. Forgetting any dread of her father, she went over and took him by the hand, drawing him into an embrace with one arm round his scraggy, sinewy neck.
'Father,' she said, 'please don't turn away from me. Let us weep for him together.'
'Blackguards, scoundrels!' screamed the old man, wrenching his face away. 'Army destroyed, men destroyed! What for? . . . Go on, go and tell Liza.'
Princess Marya sank down helplessly into an armchair beside her father and burst into tears. She could see her brother just as he had been at the moment of parting from her and Liza, with that look on his face, a mixture of affection and aloofness. She could see him amused and affectionate as he put on the icon. 'Was he a believer? Had he repented of his unbelief? Was he up there now? There in the realm of eternal peace and happiness?' she wondered.
'Father, tell me what happened,' she said through her tears.
'Go away, go away - killed in battle, the best men of Russia and the glory of Russia led to defeat and destruction. Go away, Princess Marya. Go and tell Liza. I'll come along soon.'
When Princess Marya came back from seeing her father the little princess was sitting at her work, and she glanced up with that pregnant woman's special look of inner peace and contentment. Her eyes were obviously not seeing Princess Marya; she was looking in at herself, at some sweet mystery building up within her.
'Marie,' she said, easing away from the embroidery frame and leaning back heavily, 'feel here.' She took the princess's hand and placed it on her belly. Her eyes smiled invitingly as her little downy lip rose and stayed up in childlike rapture. Princess Marya knelt down in front of her and buried her face in the folds of the young girl's dress.
'There it is. There. Can you feel it? It's a funny feeling. Oh, Marie, I'm going to love him so much!' said Liza, looking at her sister-in-law with a radiant happiness in her eyes. Princess Marya could not bring herself to look up; she was crying.
'What's wrong, Marie?'
'Nothing's wrong . . . I just felt sad . . . about Andrey,' she said, brushing away the tears on the folds of her sister-in-law's dress. Several times in the course of that morning Princess Marya made a move towards preparing her sister-in-law for the bad news, but every time she did so she broke down in tears. The little princess, although generally unobservant, was upset by all this weeping, which she couldn't understand. She didn't say anything, but she kept glancing round the room uneasily as if she was looking for something. Before dinner the old prince came into her room. She was always scared of him and this time he seemed unusually edgy and angry, though he walked out without saying a word. She glanced at Princess Marya with the same inwardly directed look of a pregnant woman, and suddenly burst into tears.
'You haven't heard from Andrey, have you?' she asked.
'No. You know we couldn't have heard anything yet, but father is a bit restless and it makes me feel frightened.'
'You really haven't?'
'No,' said Princess Marya, with a resolute look in her luminous eyes. She had decided not to tell her, and had persuaded her father to hide the terrible news from her until after the birth, which could be expected any day now. Princess Marya and the old prince managed in different ways to bear their grief and hide it. The old prince abandoned all hope, convinced in his own mind that Prince Andrey was dead, and although he dispatched an official to Austria to look for any signs of his son, he sent an order to Moscow for a monument in his memory which he could put up in the garden, and he went around telling everyone his son was dead. He tried to go on exactly as before, but his strength was failing. He took fewer walks, ate less, slept less and grew weaker with each passing day. But Princess Marya went on hoping. She prayed for her brother as if he was still alive and fully expected him to return at any moment.
CHAPTER 8
'Marie, my dear,' said the little princess shortly after breakfast on the morning of the 19th of March. Her little downy upper lip rose as always, but because of the sorrow that had pervaded everything in that house since the terrible news had come - every smile, every word spoken or step taken - and because the little princess was a prey to the general mood without knowing the reason behind it, her smile did little more than serve as a reminder of the general sorrow.
'Marie, my dear, I'm afraid this morning's breakfast, what the cook calls frustik,7 might have disagreed with me.'
'What is it, my darling? You do look pale. Very pale,' said Princess Marya in alarm, hurrying softly across the room to her sister-in-law with her heavy tread.
'Do you think we should fetch Marya Bogdanovna, your Excellency?' asked one of the maids who happened to be there. (Marya Bogdanovna was a midwife from a nearby town who had been living at Bald Hills for the last two weeks.)
'I think we should,' Princess Marya agreed. 'You could be right. I'll go and get her. Be brave, my angel.' She kissed Liza and turned to walk out of the room.
'Oh no, don't!' The little princess's face, already pallid, shone with a child's dread of inevitable physical pain.
'No, it's just indigestion, tell me it's indigestion, tell me, Marie, please!' And the little princess began to cry, wringing her little hands in girlish misery like a rather spoilt child and not without a touch of theatricality. Princess Marya ran out to fetch Marya Bogdanovna.
'Oh dear! Oh dear!' she heard behind her. But there was the midwife, already on her way, rubbing her small, plump white hands and wearing a knowing look of calm self-control.
'Marya Bogdanovna! I think she's started,' said Princess Marya, wide-eyed and frightened.
'God be praised,' said Marya Bogdanovna, refusing to be hurried. 'Now, you young ladies don't need to be involved in this.'
'But why is the doctor taking so long to get here from Moscow?' said the princess. (In accordance with the wishes of Liza and Prince Andrey they had sent for a Moscow doctor and he was expected at any moment.)
'It doesn't matter, Princess. You mustn't worry,' said Marya Bogdanovna. 'We can manage without a doctor.'
Five minutes later, from inside her room the princess heard something heavy being carried past. She peeped out. For some reason the footmen were moving a leather sofa from Prince Andrey's study into the bedroom. The men looked all solemn and subdued.
Princess Marya sat alone in her room, listening to the sounds of the house, opening the door from time to time if someone went past and watching any action in the corridor. Some of the female staff that kept padding to and fro would glance across at the princess and quickly turn away. Afraid to ask any questions, she would go back into her room closing the door behind her and sit down in an armchair, or pick up her prayer-book, or kneel down at the icon-stand. She was unpleasantly surprised to discover that prayer did nothing to calm her nerves. Suddenly her door opened softly and there in the doorway stood her old nurse, Praskovya Savishna, with a scarf over her head. The old prince was so strict that the old woman almost never entered her room.
'It's onl
y me, little Masha,' said the nurse. 'I've come to sit with you for a few minutes and look, I've brought the prince's wedding candles to light before his saint, my angel,' she said with a deep sigh.
'Oh, nurse, I'm so pleased to see you!'
'God is merciful, my darling.' The nurse lit the gilt candles, placed them before the icon-stand and sat down near the door with her knitting. Princess Marya picked up a book and started reading. Only when they heard footsteps or voices did they look up at each other, the princess anxiously wondering, the nurse full of reassurance. The emotions that Princess Marya was feeling as she sat in her room had spread through the whole house and taken possession of everyone in it. Acting on the old superstition that the fewer the people who know about the sufferings of a woman in labour, the less she suffers, everyone pretended to know nothing about it. Nobody said anything, but the usual steadiness and respectful sense of propriety that was always to be expected from servants in the prince's household had been overtaken by a general feeling of anxiety, a melting of hearts and an awareness that at this time they were in the presence of some great, unfathomable mystery. No laughter came from the large parlour assigned to the maids. In their hall the men sat in silence, ready to turn their hands to anything. Torches and candles were still burning in the serfs' quarters, and no one slept. The old prince paced up and down his study, banging down on his heels, and sent Tikhon to Marya Bogdanovna to ask for any news.
'Just say the prince has sent you to ask for any news, and come back and tell me what she says.'
'You may inform the prince that the princess has gone into labour,' said Marya Bogdanovna, with a knowing look at the messenger. Tikhon came back with the report.
'That's good,' said the prince, closing the door behind him, and from then on Tikhon heard not the slightest sound from the study. After a short interval Tikhon went in again on the pretext of checking the candles and saw the prince lying on the sofa. Tikhon looked at him, shook his head at the sight of the prince's worried face, went silently over and kissed him on the shoulder, and then left the room without touching the candles or saying why he had come. The world's most solemn mystery was now being slowly enacted. Evening passed, night came on, and the feeling of suspense and the melting of hearts before the great unknown, far from fading away, grew stronger and stronger. No one slept.
It was one of those March nights when winter, desperate for one last fling, hurls down its snows and slings its squalls with a special fury. A relay of horses had been sent out to the main road to meet the German doctor, who was expected at any moment, and several men had ridden out with lanterns to wait at the turn-off and guide him in past the deep ruts and watery hollows hidden by the snow.
Princess Marya, her book long since abandoned, sat in silence staring with her luminous eyes at the wrinkled face of her old nurse, which she knew in its every last detail, at the lock of grey hair that had dropped down from the headscarf and the baggy folds of skin under her chin.
Nurse Savishna held on to her knitting and rambled on in a soft voice without hearing her own words or following their meaning. For the hundredth time she described how the late princess had given birth to Princess Marya at Kishinyov with only a Moldavian peasant woman to assist instead of a midwife.
'God will provide. Don't need no doctors,' she said.
Suddenly a gust of wind buffeted one of the window-frames (the prince had decreed that one outer panel should be taken down in every room as soon as the larks returned), tore open a loose window catch, swirling the brocade curtain and whistling through with a cold, snowy draught that blew out the candle. Princess Marya shuddered. The nurse put down her knitting and went over to the window, where she put her head out and tried to get hold of the open frame. The cold wind flapped at the corners of her headscarf, and locks of grey hair slipped out and tumbled down.
'Princess, my love, someone be drivin' down the avenoo!' she said, holding on to the window-frame without closing it. 'Be lanterns there.'Tis the doctor . . .'
'Oh, thank God! Thanks be to God!' said Princess Marya. 'I must go and meet him. He doesn't speak Russian.'
Princess Marya flung a shawl over her shoulders and rushed off to meet the men who were riding up to the house. Hurrying across the top landing, she looked down through a window and saw a carriage with lanterns standing at the entrance. She went to the head of the stairs. On a banister-post stood a tallow candle guttering in the draught. Half-way down, the footman Filipp, a picture of alarm, was standing on the first landing holding another candle. Right at the bottom, around the turn of the stairs, someone could be heard coming up in thick boots. And then a voice spoke, and Princess Marya thought she knew whose it was.
'Thank God for that!' said the voice. 'And what about father?'
'He has retired for the night,' came the voice of the butler, Demyan, already downstairs.
Then the first voice spoke again, and Demyan's reply was followed by the sound of those thick boots coming up the unseen part of the staircase faster and faster.
'It's Andrey!' thought Princess Marya. 'No, it can't be, that would be too much.' And as she stood there thinking about it, down on the landing where the footman stood with his candle, the face and figure of Prince Andrey suddenly appeared. He was still wearing his fur coat, its collar covered in snow. Yes, it was him, but he had changed; he looked pale and thin, in a strange way gentler, and very worried. He came up the stairs to embrace his sister.
'Didn't you get my letter?' he asked, and without waiting for an answer which was never going to come from the speechless princess, he turned back to fetch the doctor who had arrived with him (they had met at the last posting station), and then flew back up the stairs and again embraced his sister.
'How strange fate is!' he said. 'Dear Masha!' Slipping out of his coat and boots, he set off for the little princess's apartment.
CHAPTER 9
The little princess in her white night-cap was lying propped up with pillows. A wave of pain had just passed. Her black hair curled in thick strands around her feverish, perspiring cheeks; her pretty pink mouth, with its downy lip, was open, and she was smiling with joy. Prince Andrey came in and stood facing her at the foot of the couch where she lay. Her eyes shone like a child's, full of fear and anxiety, and when they rested on him they didn't change. 'I love all of you. I've never done anybody any harm. Why should I suffer like this? Help me,' was the message in them. She saw her husband but couldn't take in the meaning of his sudden appearance. Prince Andrey walked around the couch and kissed her on the forehead.
'My little darling,' he said, never having called her that before, 'God is merciful . . .'
Her little girl's eyes looked at him wondering, full of reproach, as if trying to say to him, 'I turned to you for help and you did nothing. Even you did nothing!' It wasn't that she was surprised to see him; she just didn't realize he had come. His arrival had nothing to do with her labour pains or any relief from them. Another wave was coming, and Marya Bogdanovna advised Prince Andrey to leave the room.
The doctor came in as he went out. There was Princess Marya, and they went back to her room together. When they spoke it was in whispers, and the conversation kept breaking down. They waited and they listened.
'Go and see her, my dear,' said Princess Marya. Prince Andrey went back to see his wife and sat down in the next room waiting to be summoned. A woman ran out of the bedroom looking very frightened, and she was most disconcerted to see Prince Andrey. He buried his face in his hands and sat like that for several minutes. The most pitiful, helpless, animal cries could be heard from inside the room. Prince Andrey stood up, went across to the door and tried to open it. Someone was holding it shut.
'Go away! You can't come in!' said a frightened voice on the other side. He paced up and down the room. The screams died down, and a few seconds passed. Then suddenly the most fearful scream - it couldn't be hers, she couldn't have screamed like that - came from inside the room. Prince Andrey ran to the door. The screaming stopped and
he heard a different sound, the wail of a baby.
'Why have they taken a baby in there?' Prince Andrey wondered for a split-second. 'A baby? Whose baby is it? . . . What's a baby doing in there? Has it been born?'
When the delightful meaning of the baby's wail dawned on him he choked with tears, leant on the window-sill with both elbows and cried like a child sobbing his heart out. The door opened. The doctor came out of the room with no coat on and his shirt-sleeves rolled up; he looked pale and his jaw was trembling. Prince Andrey turned to speak to him, but the doctor walked past with a far-away look in his eye and said nothing. A woman came running out and stopped in the doorway, hesitating, when she saw Prince Andrey. He went into his wife's room. She was dead, still lying in the same position he had seen her in five minutes earlier, and despite the staring eyes and the white cheeks the same expression still haunted that lovely, shy little girl's face with its tiny upper lip covered with fine dark hair. 'I loved all of you, I never hurt anybody, and look what you have done to me, just look what you have done to me,' was the message on her dead face in all its pitiful beauty. In one corner of the room something small and red lay mewling and snuffling in the trembling white hands of Marya Bogdanovna.
Two hours later Prince Andrey walked quietly in to see his father. The old man knew what had happened. He was standing near the door, and the moment it opened he put his rough old arms round his son's neck in a vice-like grip, and without a word sobbed like a child.
Three days later at the little princess's funeral, Prince Andrey climbed the steps of the bier to say a last goodbye to her. Even in the coffin her face was the same, though the eyes were closed. 'Look what you have done to me,' was still the message for Prince Andrey and something seemed to rend his soul; he felt guilty of a crime that he could neither expiate nor ever forget. He was incapable of tears. The old man came in too and kissed the little waxen hand that lay so peacefully and prominently crossed over the other one, and to him too her face said, 'Look what you have done to me. Why did you do it?' And the old man turned away angrily when he saw the look on her face.