‘Countess, I do wegwet this,’ he stammered out, ‘but I weally do adore your daughter and all your family and I’d sacwifice more than one life . . .’ He looked at the countess and took in her stern face. ‘Wight then, I weally must say goodbye, Countess,’ he said, kissing her hand, and without a glance at Natasha he strode quickly out of the room with an air of great determination.
The following day Rostov went to Denisov, who wasn’t prepared to spend another day in Moscow, to see him on his way. All his Moscow friends gave him a grand send-off at the Gypsies’, and he had no memory of being stowed in his sledge or of travelling the first three stations.
With Denisov gone Rostov hung on for another two weeks in Moscow waiting for his money, which the count needed some time to get together. He never went out, and he spent most of his time in the young girls’ room.
Sonya was more attentive and affectionate than ever. She seemed anxious to show him that his loss at cards was a splendid achievement that made her love him more than ever. But Nikolay now felt unworthy of her.
He filled the girls’ albums with poetry and music, and then at last, having sent off the entire sum of forty-three thousand roubles to Dolokhov and got his receipt, he left Moscow at the end of November without saying goodbye to any of his acquaintances, to rejoin his regiment, which was already in Poland.
PART II
CHAPTER 1
After having things out with his wife, Pierre left for Petersburg. At Torzhok, either there were no horses, or the station-master would not release any. Pierre had to wait. Without removing his overcoat, he lay down on a leather sofa in front of a round table, put his big feet up on it, still wearing his thick boots, and sank into thought.
‘Shall I fetch the bags in? Should I make up a bed for you? Would you like some tea?’ his valet kept asking.
No reply came from Pierre, who was hearing and saying nothing. He had been deep in thought since the last station and was still thinking about something so important that he had no idea of anything that was going on around him. He was quite unconcerned about arriving in Petersburg sooner rather than later, or whether there would or would not be somewhere for him to rest at this station. Compared with all that was going through his mind at the moment, it was a matter of complete indifference to him whether he spent a few hours or the rest of his life here.
The station-master and his wife, his valet and a peasant woman selling Torzhok embroidery kept coming in and out offering their services. Without shifting his raised feet, Pierre stared at them over his spectacles, wondering what they could possibly want and how they could go on living without answering the questions that were worrying him. They were the same questions that had worried him ever since the day he had returned from the duel at Sokolniki and had spent that first agonizing, sleepless night, but now, all alone and on the road, he had become obsessed by them. Whatever the direction of his thoughts he kept coming back to the same unanswerable but inescapable questions. It was as if the working of his head had stripped the main screw that held his life together. The screw wouldn’t go in or come out; it just turned without biting on anything, always in the same hole, and he couldn’t stop it turning.
The station-master came in and asked his Excellency obsequiously whether he would mind waiting just a while, only an hour or two, by which time – come what might – he would let his Excellency have the special post-horses. He was lying, of course, in the hope of squeezing more money out of the traveller.
‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’ Pierre wondered. ‘Good for me, but bad for the next traveller, and anyway he can’t help it – he has to eat. He told me an officer thrashed him for that. But the officer thrashed him because he was in a hurry. And I shot Dolokhov because I considered myself insulted. Louis XVI was executed because he was considered a criminal, and within a year the men who executed him were killed as well for doing something or other. What’s bad and what’s good? What should we love and what should we hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What kind of force is it that directs everything?’ he kept asking himself. And there were no answers to any of these questions, except one illogical response that didn’t answer any of them. And that response was: ‘You’re going to die, and it will be over and done with. You’re going to die and you’ll either come to know everything or stop asking.’ But dying was horrible too.
