War and Peace (65 page)

Natasha could not see him in such a piteous plight without emotion. She began to whimper loudly.

“Countess, I have acted wrongly,” Denisov went on in a breaking voice, “but believe me, I so adore your daughter and all your family that I’d give my life twice over …” He looked at the countess and noticed her stern face.… “Well, good-bye, countess,” he said, kissing her hand, and without glancing at Natasha he walked with rapid and resolute steps out of the room.

Next day Rostov saw Denisov off, as he was unwilling to remain another day in Moscow. All his Moscow friends gave him a farewell entertainment at the Gypsies’, and he had no recollection of how they got him into his sledge, or of the first three stations he passed.

After Denisov’s departure Rostov spent another fortnight in Moscow, waiting for the money to pay his debt, which the count was unable to raise all at once. He hardly left the house, and spent most of his time in the young girls’ room.

Sonya was more affectionate and devoted to him then ever. She seemed to want to show him that his loss at cards was an exploit for which she loved him more than ever. But now Nikolay regarded himself as unworthy of her.

He copied music for the girls, and wrote verses in their albums, and after at last sending off all the forty-three thousand roubles, and receiving Dolohov’s receipt for it, he left Moscow towards the end of November without taking leave of any of his acquaintances, and overtook his regiment, which was already in Poland.

PART FIVE

A
fter his interview with his wife, Pierre had set off for Petersburg. At the station of Torzhok there were no horses, or the overseer was unwilling to let him have them. Pierre had to wait. Without removing his outdoor things, he lay down on a leather sofa, in front of a round table, put up his big feet in their thick overboots on this table and sank into thought.

“Shall I bring in the trunks? Make up a bed? Will you take tea?” the valet kept asking.

Pierre made no reply, for he heard nothing and said nothing. He had been deep in thought since he left the last station, and still went on thinking of the same thing—of something so important that he did not notice what was passing around him. Far from being concerned whether he reached Petersburg sooner or later, or whether there would or would not be a place for him to rest in at this station, in comparison with the thoughts that engrossed him now, it was a matter of utter indifference to him whether he spent a few hours or the rest of his life at that station.

The overseer and his wife, his valet, and a peasant woman with Torzhok embroidery for sale, came into the room, offering their services. Without changing the position of his raised feet, Pierre gazed at them over his spectacles, and did not understand what they could want and how they all managed to live, without having solved the questions that absorbed him. These same questions had possessed his mind ever since that day when he had come back after the duel from Sokolniky and had spent that first agonising, sleepless night. But now in the solitude of his journey they seized upon him with special force. Of whatever he began thinking he came back to the same questions, which he could not answer, and from which he could not escape. It was as though the chief screw in his brain upon which his whole life rested were loose. The screw moved no forwarder, no backwarder, but still it turned, catching on nothing, always in the same groove, and there was no making it cease turning.

The overseer came in and began humbly begging his excellency to wait only a couple of hours, after which he would (come what might of it) let his excellency have the special mail service horses. The overseer was unmistakably lying, with the sole aim of getting an extra tip from the
traveller. “Was that good or bad?” Pierre wondered. “For me good, for the next traveller bad, and for himself inevitable because he has nothing to eat; he said that an officer had thrashed him for it. And the officer thrashed him because he had to travel in haste. And I shot Dolohov because I considered myself injured. Louis XVI. was executed because they considered him to be a criminal, and a year later his judges were killed too for something. What is wrong? What is right? What must one love, what must one hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What force controls it all?” he asked himself. And there was no answer to one of these questions, except one illogical reply that was in no way an answer to any of them. That reply was: “One dies and it’s all over. One dies and finds it all out or ceases asking.” But dying too was terrible.

The Torzhok pedlar woman in a whining voice proffered her wares, especially some goatskin slippers. “I have hundreds of roubles I don’t know what to do with, and she’s standing in her torn cloak looking timidly at me,” thought Pierre. “And what does she want the money for? As though the money could give her one hairsbreadth of happiness, of peace of soul. Is there anything in the world that can make her and me less enslaved to evil and to death? Death, which ends all, and must come to-day or to-morrow—which beside eternity is the same as an instant’s time.” And again he turned the screw that did not bite in anything, and the screw still went on turning in the same place.

His servant handed him a half-cut volume of a novel in the form of letters by Madame Suza. He began reading of the sufferings and the virtuous struggles of a certain “Amélie de Mansfeld.” “And what did she struggle against her seducer for?” he thought, “when she loved him. God could not have put in her heart an impulse that was against His will. My wife—as she was once—didn’t struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been discovered,” Pierre said to himself again, “nothing has been invented. We can only know that we know nothing. And that’s the highest degree of human wisdom.”

Everything within himself and around him struck him as confused, meaningless, and loathsome. But in this very loathing of everything surrounding him Pierre found a sort of tantalising satisfaction.

“I make bold to beg your excellency to make room the least bit for this gentleman here,” said the overseer, coming into the room and ushering in after him another traveller, brought to a standstill from lack of horses. The traveller was a thickset, square-shouldered, yellow, wrinkled
old man, with grey eyelashes overhanging gleaming eyes of an indefinite grey colour.

Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up and went to lie down on the bed that had been made ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who, without looking at Pierre, with an air of surly fatigue was wearily taking off his outer wraps with the aid of his servant. The traveller, now clothed in a shabby nankin-covered sheepskin coat with felt highboots on his thin bony legs, sat down on the sofa, and leaning on its back his close-cropped head, which was very large and broad across the temples, he glanced at Bezuhov. The stern, shrewd, and penetrating expression in that glance impressed Pierre. He felt disposed to speak to the traveller, but by the time he had ready a question about the road with which to address him, the traveller had closed his eyes, and folded his wrinkled old hands, on one finger of which there was a large iron ring with a seal representing the head of Adam. He sat without stirring, either resting or sunk, as it seemed to Pierre, in profound and calm meditation. The newcomer’s servant was also a yellow old man, covered with wrinkles. He had neither moustache nor beard, not because he was shaved, but obviously had never had any. The old servant was active in unpacking a travelling-case, in setting the tea-table and in bringing in a boiling samovar. When everything was ready, the traveller opened his eyes, moved to the table, and pouring out a glass of tea for himself, poured out another for the beardless old man and gave it him. Pierre began to feel an uneasiness and a sense of the necessity, of the inevitability of entering into conversation with the traveller.

The servant brought back his empty glass turned upside down with an unfinished piece of nibbled sugar beside it, and asked if anything were wanted.

“Nothing. Give me my book,” said the traveller. The servant gave him a book, which seemed to Pierre to be of a devotional character, and the traveller became absorbed in its perusal. Pierre looked at him. All at once the stranger laid down the book, and putting a mark in it, shut it up. Then closing his eyes and leaning his arms on the back of the sofa, he fell back into his former attitude. Pierre stared at him, and had not time to look away when the old man opened his eyes and bent his resolute and stern glance upon Pierre. Pierre felt confused and tried to turn away from that glance, but the gleaming old eyes drew him irresistibly to them.

“I have the pleasure of speaking to Count Bezuhov, if I am not mistaken,” said the stranger, in a loud deliberate voice. Pierre looked in silence and inquiringly over his spectacles at the speaker. “I have heard of you,” continued the stranger, “and I have heard, sir, of what has happened to you, of your misfortune.” He underlined, as it were, the last word, as though to say: “Yes, misfortune, whatever you call it, I know that what happened to you in Moscow was a misfortune.”

“I am very sorry for it, sir.” Pierre reddened, and hurriedly dropping his legs over the edge of the bed, he bent forward towards the old man, smiling timidly and unnaturally.

“I have not mentioned this to you, sir, from curiosity, but from graver reasons.” He paused, not letting Pierre escape from his gaze, and moved aside on the sofa, inviting him by this movement to sit beside him. Pierre disliked entering into conversation with this old man, but involuntarily submitting to him, he came and sat down beside him.

“You are unhappy, sir,” he went on, “you are young, and I am old. I should like, as far as it is in my power, to help you.”

“Oh, yes,” said Pierre, with an unnatural smile. “Very much obliged to you … where have you been travelling from?” The stranger’s face was not cordial, it was even cold and severe, but in spite of that, both the speech and the face of his new acquaintance were irresistibly attractive to Pierre.

“But if for any reason you dislike conversing with me,” said the old man, “then you say so, sir.” And suddenly he smiled a quite unexpected smile of fatherly kindliness.

“Oh, no, not at all; on the contrary, I am very glad to make your acquaintance,” said Pierre, and glancing once more at the stranger’s hands, he examined the ring more closely. He saw the head of Adam, the token of masonry.

“Allow me to inquire,” he said, “are you a mason?”

“Yes, I belong to the brotherhood of the freemasons,” said the stranger, looking now more searchingly into Pierre’s eyes. “And from myself and in their name I hold out to you a brotherly hand.”

“I am afraid,” said Pierre, smiling and hesitating between the confidence inspired in him by the personality of the freemason and the habit of ridiculing the articles of the masons’ creed; “I am afraid that I am very far from a comprehension—how shall I say—I am afraid that my way
of thinking in regard to the whole theory of the universe is so opposed to yours that we shall not understand one another.”

“I am aware of your way of thinking,” said the freemason, “and that way of thinking of which you speak, which seems to you the result of your own thought, is the way of thinking of the majority of men, and is the invariable fruit of pride, indolence, and ignorance. Excuse my saying, sir, that if I had not been aware of it, I should not have addressed you. Your way of thinking is a melancholy error.”

“Just as I may take for granted that you are in error,” said Pierre, faintly smiling.

“I would never be so bold as to say I know the truth,” said the mason, the definiteness and decision of whose manner of speaking impressed Pierre more and more. “No one alone can attain truth; only stone upon stone, with the co-operation of all, by the millions of generations from our first father Adam down to our day is that temple being reared that should be a fitting dwelling-place of the Great God,” said the freemason, and he shut his eyes.

“I ought to tell you that I don’t believe, don’t … believe in God,” said Pierre regretfully and with effort, feeling it essential to speak the whole truth.