Prince Andrey didn’t answer. The coach and horses had long been taken over to the other bank and harnessed up again, the sun had half-set and the evening frost was sprinkling the pools near the ferry with stars, but – to the astonishment of the servants, coachmen and ferryhands – Pierre and Andrey were still on the boat, talking.
‘If there is a God and an after-life, then there is truth and there is goodness; and man’s greatest happiness lies in struggling to achieve them. We must live, love and believe,’ said Pierre, ‘believe that our life is not only here and now on this little patch of earth, but we have lived before and shall live for ever out there in the wholeness of things.’ (He pointed up to the sky.) Prince Andrey was still standing with his elbows on the rail of the ferry, and as he listened to Pierre he never took his eyes off the sun’s red reflection on the shining blue water. Pierre stopped talking. There was absolute stillness. The ferry had long since come to the bank, and the only sound came from the river, with waves plashing softly against the bottom of the boat. Prince Andrey half-imagined that the lapping of the water sounded like a chorus echoing what Pierre had been saying: ‘This is the truth. Believe it.’
Prince Andrey sighed, and with a tender, radiant, child-like glow in his eyes he glanced at Pierre, whose face was flushed with triumph, though he was still diffident, conscious of his friend’s superiority.
‘Yes, if only it was true!’ he said. ‘Anyway, let’s get back to the carriage,’ added Prince Andrey, and as he walked off the ferry he looked up at the sky where Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz he saw it again, the lofty, eternal sky, just as he had seen it when he lay on the battlefield, and suddenly something inside him that had long lain dormant, something better than before, awoke in his soul with a feeling of youth and joy. It was a feeling that would vanish as soon as Prince Andrey got back to the normal run of everyday life, but he was sure, without knowing what to do with it, that this feeling was still there inside him. Pierre’s visit marked a new age for Prince Andrey, a time when his life, although outwardly unchanged, began again in his own inner world.
CHAPTER 13
It was getting dark by the time Prince Andrey and Pierre drove up to the front entrance of the house at Bald Hills. As they were approaching, Prince Andrey had smiled and drawn Pierre’s attention to a commotion going on at the back of the house. A bent little old woman with a bag on her back, and a short man with long hair, dressed in black, had seen the carriage driving and scuttled off back to the gate. Two more women ran out and all four of them hurried up the steps of the back porch, looking round at the carriage with scared faces.
‘Those are the Servants of God. Masha’s friends,’ said Prince Andrey. ‘They thought it was my father coming back. It’s the one and only way she disobeys him. He says they’ve got to be sent away, these pilgrims, but she takes them in.’
‘What do you mean “Servants of God”?’ asked Pierre.
Prince Andrey had no time to answer. The house servants had come out to meet them, and he asked where the old prince was and whether he would be home soon. He was still in town, but expected back any minute.
Prince Andrey took Pierre to his own rooms, which were always waiting nicely prepared for him in his father’s house, and then went off to the nursery.
‘Let’s go and see my sister,’ he said to Pierre when he returned. ‘I haven’t seen her yet, she’s hiding away, tucked up with her Servants of God. Serve her right. She’s going to be really embarrassed, but you’ll see her Servants of God. I’m telling you, it’s something worth seeing.’
‘Who are these “Servants of God”?’ asked Pierre.
‘You’ll see.’
Princess Marya certainly was embarrassed, and her face went red and blotchy when she saw them coming in. Her room looked cosy, with the little lamps burning before the icon-stand, and next to her on the sofa, at the samovar, sat a young boy with a long nose and long hair, dressed in a monk’s cassock. In an easy chair near by sat a thin, wrinkled old woman, with a gentle look on her child-like face.
‘Andrey, why didn’t you warn me?’ she said in a tone of mild reproach, standing in front of her pilgrims like a mother hen with chickens.
‘Delighted to see you. I am so glad to see you,’ she said to Pierre, as he kissed her hand. She had known him as a child, and now his friendship with Andrey, his unhappy marriage and most of all his kindly, simple face, won her over. She looked at him with her lovely, luminous eyes, which seemed to say. ‘I like you very much, but please don’t laugh at
After the first exchanges of greeting, they sat down.
‘I see Ivanushka’s here,’ said Prince Andrey with a smile, nodding towards the young pilgrim.
‘Oh, Andrey, please!’ said Princess Marya imploringly.
‘I think you ought to know he’s a woman,’ Andrey informed Pierre in French.
