The Weight of Unspoken Words — War and Peace

For a long time that night Princess Mary sits by the open window hearing peasant voices from the village, but it is not of them she thinks. She feels she could not understand them however much she thought. She thinks only of her sorrow, which after the break caused by present cares seems already to belong to the past. Now she can remember it and weep or pray.

After sunset the wind drops. The night is calm and fresh. Toward midnight voices subside, a cock crows, the full moon shows from behind the lime trees, a white dewy mist rises, and stillness reigns over village and house. Pictures of the near past, her father's illness and last moments, rise one after another. With mournful pleasure she lingers over them, repelling with horror only the last, his death, which she feels she cannot contemplate even in imagination at this still hour. The pictures seem now present, now past, now future.

She vividly recalls the first stroke, when he was dragged by the armpits through the garden at Bald Hills, muttering with a helpless tongue, twitching grey eyebrows, looking uneasily and timidly at her. Even then he wanted to tell me what he told me the day he died. He had always thought what he said then. She recalls the night at Bald Hills before the last stroke, when with a foreboding of disaster she remained against his will. She had not slept, had stolen downstairs, and listened at the conservatory door. In a suffering voice he was saying something to Tikhon of the Crimea and its warm nights and of the Empress. Evidently he had wanted to talk. Why didn't he call me? Why Tikhon instead of me? Now he will never tell anyone what he had in his soul. That moment will never return, when he might have said all he longed to say, and not Tikhon but I might have heard. While talking to Tikhon he asked about me twice. He wanted to see me, and I was standing close by, outside the door. It was sad for him to talk to Tikhon, who did not understand. He began speaking of Lise as if she were alive. Tikhon reminded him she was no more, and he shouted Fool! He lay down groaning and exclaimed My God! Why didn't I go in then? What could he have done to me? Perhaps he would have been comforted and would have said that word. She utters aloud the caressing word of the day he died. Dearest! She sobs with tears that relieve her. She sees not the distant face she had always known, but the timid, feeble face, with all its wrinkles, when she stooped near his mouth.

Dearest! What was he thinking when he uttered that word? What is he thinking now? In answer she sees him as in the coffin, chin bound with a white handkerchief. The horror that seized her when she touched him and knew that was not he, but something mysterious and horrible, seizes her again. She tries to think of something else and to pray, and can do neither. With wide-open eyes she gazes at moonlight and shadows, expecting every moment to see his dead face. The silence brooding over the house holds her fast. Dunyasha, she whispers. Dunyasha! she screams wildly, and tearing herself out of this silence she runs to the servants' quarters to meet her old nurse and the maidservants who come running toward her.