Every day Pierre ‘got down to business’ with the head steward. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that what he was doing didn’t improve things one iota. He felt that what he was doing didn’t affect the business side of things at all, business was beyond his grip and he wasn’t making anything happen. On the one hand, the head steward put the bleakest construction on everything, insisting that Pierre had to go on paying his debts and starting up new projects based on serf labour, though this was something Pierre couldn’t accept. On the other hand, Pierre kept demanding that they proceed with the business of liberating the serfs, to which the head steward objected by further insistence on the need to pay off debts to the Land Bank, which meant that things could not be hurried. He didn’t say it was out of the question. He proposed to solve the problem by selling things off: the forests in the Kostroma province, some of the land lower down the river and the Crimean estate. But the way he put it, all these operations involved such complicated procedures concerned with the removal of distraints, proper authorization and all the rest that Pierre soon lost the thread and was reduced to saying lamely, ‘Yes, do that then.’
Lacking any practical ability or tenacity that might have made it possible for him to go into things properly, Pierre never took to management, and all he could do was keep up a pretence of businesslike interest to impress the head steward. The steward maintained his own fiction, that what he was doing was of great benefit to the count, but a great nuisance to him.
Pierre knew some people in Kiev, where unacquainted persons moved quickly to make themselves acquainted by extending a warm welcome to the wealthy new arrival, the biggest landowner in the province. Temptations in the area of Pierre’s major weakness, the one he had confessed to during his initiation into the lodge, proved quite irresistible. Once again whole days, weeks and months of his life went by with him busily doing the rounds of parties, dinners, lunches and balls. It was as bad as Petersburg for leaving him no time to think. Instead of the new life Pierre had hoped to lead, he was still living the old one, but in new surroundings.
Of the three precepts of freemasonry Pierre had to admit falling down on the one that said every mason must become a model of morality; and of the seven virtues he was completely deficient in two – good living and the love of death. He found some consolation in the belief that he was working on one of the other precepts, the improvement of the human race, and he did have other virtues such as loving his neighbour and generosity.
In the spring of 1807 Pierre made up his mind to go back to Petersburg. Along the way it was his intention to call in at each one of his estates to check for himself how far they had got with what he had told them to do and what was the current situation of the people whom God had entrusted to his care and whom he had been trying so hard to benefit.
The head steward, who thought that all the young count’s silly schemes were bordering on madness and useless to them all – him, his master and all the peasants – had nevertheless made some concessions. While still insisting that liberation was impracticable, he did make arrangements on all the estates for the building of decent-sized schools, hospitals and alms-houses. During the master’s various visits he arranged for him to be met not with pomp and ceremony, which he knew Pierre wouldn’t like, but by little groups of religious and charitable people, with plenty of icons and bread-and-salt hospitality, the sort of thing that would, according to his reading of the count, impress him and pull the wool over his eyes.
