When dinner was over the Tsar got to his feet, still munching a biscuit, and walked out on to the balcony. The crowd swept forward, taking Petya with it, and rushed towards the balcony.
‘Angel! Father! Hurrah! Lord and master!’ Petya roared along with the crowd. Some women and even a few of the more sensitive men, including Petya, wept for joy.
A fair-sized piece of biscuit fell from the Tsar’s hand, hit the balcony railing and bounced down to the ground. A coachman in a jerkin, who was nearest to it, pounced on the piece of biscuit and snatched it up. Several people surged towards the coachman. When he saw this the Tsar asked for a plate of biscuits, and started tossing them down from the balcony. Petya goggled at this and the blood rushed to his head. Exhilarated more than ever by the danger of the crush, he dived towards the biscuits. He couldn’t have said why, but he felt he must get one of the biscuits dropped from the Tsar’s hands, and nothing must stop him. He leapt forward, knocking over an old woman who was just about to grab a biscuit. Down on the ground the old woman wouldn’t admit defeat; she was still scrabbling after the biscuits but couldn’t quite get hold of one. Petya shoved her hand away with his knee, grabbed a biscuit, and roared a hoarse ‘Hurrah!’ as fast as he could so as not to miss the Tsar.
The Tsar went in, and after that most of the crowd began to disperse.
‘Told you it was worth waiting – and it was,’ came delighted voices from all parts of the crowd.
Happy as he was, Petya felt reluctant to go home, because this would mean admitting that his day’s pleasure was over. He walked away from the Kremlin, but instead of going home he went to see his pal, Obolensky, another fifteen-year-old who was keen to enlist. When he did get home, Petya made an announcement that brooked no denial: if they wouldn’t let him go he was going to run away. And the following day, without actually giving in, Count Ilya Rostov went and made a few inquiries to see whether there was somewhere not too dangerous that Petya might be posted to.
CHAPTER 22
Two days later, on the 15th of July, an endless line of carriages could be seen standing outside the Sloboda palace.
The great halls were teeming. The first one was full of uniformed noblemen, the second with bearded merchants in blue, full-skirted coats, wearing all their medals. The hall selected for the Council of the Nobility was abuzz with movement and noise. The real bigwigs were sitting on high-backed chairs round a large table under a portrait of the Tsar, but most of the other noblemen were strolling about the hall.
These noblemen, people Pierre was used to seeing every day at the club or in their homes, were all in uniform, some dating back to the ages of Catherine or Paul, some new ones belonging to Alexander’s reign, others nothing more than the standard uniform of the nobility, but the overall effect of these costumes was to impart a weird fantasy quality to this diverse assembly of faces, both young and old, many of them familiar. It was the older men who stood out with their half-seeing eyes, toothless mouths, bald heads, thin bodies, and faces all wrinkled, sallow or bloated. For the most part they just sat there in silence, and if they did get up to walk about and talk to people they would generally attach themselves to someone a bit younger. These faces were like the ones Petya had seen on the square, full of expectancy, waiting for some solemn event, totally different from their everyday selves and yesterday’s faces, when all that mattered was a game of boston, Petrushka the cook, the state of Zinaida Dmitriyevna’s health, and things like that.
Pierre was there. He had felt uncomfortable since early morning after squeezing himself into a nobleman’s uniform that wouldn’t fit. He was in a state of high excitement; this extraordinary assembly, of both nobles and merchants, the States General that transcended class, had reawakened in him a whole series of ideas about Rousseau’s
