ince Andrew she fully understood what
Natasha's face had told her. She did not speak any more to Natasha of
hopes of saving his life. She took turns with her beside his sofa, and
did not cry any more, but prayed continually, turning in soul to that
Eternal and Unfathomable, whose presence above the dying man was now so
evident.

CHAPTER XVI

Not only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he was
dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an aloofness from
everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness of existence.
Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. That inexorable,
eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which he had felt
continually all his life--was now near to him and, by the strange
lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable...

Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that terribly
tormenting fear of death--the end--but now he no longer understood that
fear.

He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top
before him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky,
and knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to himself
after being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love had
instantly unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of
life that had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased to
think about it.

During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he
spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new
principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously
detached himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and
always to sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not
to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that
principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely
he destroyed that dreadful barrier which--in the absence of such
love--stands between life and death. When during those first days he
remembered that he would have to die, he said to himself: "Well, what of
it? So much the better!"

But after the night in Mytishchi when, half delirious, he had seen her
for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his
lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again
crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And
joyful and agitating thoughts began to occup