A couple of years before this, at the beginning of 1808, Pierre had returned to Petersburg from visiting his estates, and had assumed (without seeking it) a prominent position among the freemasons of the city. He organized dinners and funerals in the lodges, recruited new members, took an active part in bringing different lodges together and in the acquisition of authentic charters. He paid for the building of temples, and did what he could to top up the collection of alms, since most of the members were stingy and late with their payments. He stood virtually alone in maintaining the poorhouse built by their order in Petersburg.
Meanwhile his life went on as before, with the same kind of sudden passions and dissipation. He liked a good dinner and a lot to drink, and although he thought it was all immoral and degrading, he couldn’t resist the temptations of the bachelor society in which he moved.
Although Pierre was thoroughly absorbed in his work and his life of pleasure, by the time a year had gone by he had begun to feel more and more as if the masonic ground on which he stood was giving way under his feet despite his best efforts to stand there ever more firmly. At the same time he felt that the more the ground gave way beneath his feet the more tightly he was trapped by it. When he had been working towards entry into the brotherhood he had felt like a man stepping confidently on to the flat surface of a bog. One foot down and in he went, so to convince himself he was still on firm ground he had stepped out with the other foot, sunk further in and got stuck in the mud. Now, despite himself, he was knee-deep in the bog and struggling.
Osip Bazdeyev was not in Petersburg. (He had recently withdrawn from all the activities of the Petersburg lodge and now stayed permanently in Moscow.) All his brother members in the lodge were people Pierre knew in everyday life, and it was difficult for him to see them as masonic brothers rather than Prince A or Ivan Vasilyevich B, most of them being, as he well knew from real-life encounters, weak and worthless personalities. For all their masonic aprons and secret signs he couldn’t help seeing them in the uniforms and decorations they were working towards in ordinary life. Often after collecting the alms and counting no more than twenty or thirty roubles – and most of it only promised – from a dozen members, half of them as well off as he was, he thought of the masonic vow by which every brother undertook to give up all his worldly goods for his neighbour, and doubts stirred in his soul, though he tried not to dwell on them.
He divided all the brothers he knew into four categories. First, brothers who took no active part in the affairs of the lodges or humanity in general, but were obsessed with the secret mysteries of the order, questions about the threefold designation of God, or the three primordial elements – sulphur, mercury and salt – or the significance of the Square and all the figures on the Temple of Solomon. Pierre respected this category of masons, to which, by Pierre’s reckoning, the elder brethren mainly belonged, including Osip Bazdeyev, though he didn’t share their interests. His heart was not in the mystical side of freemasonry.
In the second category Pierre included himself and brothers like him who were seeking and wavering; they had not yet discovered in freemasonry a straight and clear path to follow, but still hoped to do so.
In the third category he included all the brothers (the majority of them) who saw nothing but external form and ceremonial in freemasonry, and who valued the disciplined execution of that external form without bothering too much about its content or meaning. Willarski and even the Grand Master of the lodge were two such people.
The fourth category was also rich in numbers, especially among the recent recruits to the brotherhood. These were men who, as far as Pierre could tell, believed in nothing and wanted nothing, having entered the brotherhood just to make contact with the numerous lodge-members who were young and wealthy, high-ranking or well connected and therefore powerful men.
Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing. Freemasonry, at least in the form he knew here, sometimes seemed to rest on nothing but external show. He had no thoughts of doubting freemasonry itself, but he suspected that Russian freemasonry had taken a wrong turning and deviated from its source. So it was that at the end of the year he went abroad to devote himself to the higher mysteries of the order.
