As Pierre got nearer, the smoke got thicker, and thicker, and he could actually feel the heat from the conflagration. Tongues of flame licked up here and there along the roof-tops. He came across more and more people in the streets, and they were getting more excited. But although Pierre could sense that something unusual was going on around him, he didn’t realize he was walking towards the fire. He was going along a path across a large open space which had Povarsky Street running down one side and Prince Gruzinsky’s gardens on the other when he suddenly heard a woman near by crying with despair. He stopped as if he had come round from a dream, and looked up.
On the parched and dusty grass down one side of the path lay piles of household things: feather-beds, a samovar, icons and some trunks. There on the ground by the boxes sat a skinny woman, no youngster, with long, protruding upper teeth, wearing a black cloak and cap. She was sobbing and weeping fit to burst, rocking to and fro and muttering to herself. Two little girls, ten – or twelve-year-olds, in dirty little dresses and cloaks were staring at their mother with fear written all over their pale faces, not knowing what to make of her. The youngest child, a little boy of about seven, in a thick coat and a huge cap, obviously somebody else’s, was howling in the arms of an old woman who was cradling him. A dirty, bare-legged servant-girl was sitting on a trunk; she had let down her blonde locks, and was tidying them up, sniffing at her singed hair. The husband, a stooping little man in uniform, with side-whiskers curling round like little wheels and smooth hair peeping out from under a square-set cap, looked impassive as he shifted the piled-up trunks and sorted through them to drag out some kind of clothing.
The woman almost threw herself down at Pierre’s feet the moment she saw him.
‘Mercy on us, good Christian folk! Save me. Help me, kind sir! . . . Please, somebody help!’ she managed to get out through her sobs. ‘It’s my little girl! . . . My daughter! . . . My youngest girl. She’s been left behind! . . . She’s in the fire! Oo-oh! After all that nursing! . . . Oh-oh-oh!’
‘Don’t go on about it, Marya Nikolayevna,’ the husband said softly to his wife, obviously wanting to justify himself in the presence of an outsider. ‘Your sister must have taken her. Where else could she be?’ he added.
‘You monster! You villain!’ the woman screamed furiously in mid-wail. ‘You’ve got no heart, no feeling for your own child. Any other man would have rescued her from the fire. He’s a monster, not a man, not a father. You’re a gentleman, sir,’ gabbled the woman, turning to Pierre and choking with sobs. ‘The whole row was on fire. It just came at us. The girl shouted, “Fire!” We grabbed a few things and ran out in what we stood up in . . . This is all we could bring . . . the holy icons, and my marriage bed. Everything else has gone. We grabbed the children too, but not little Katechka. Oh Lord! Oh-oh!’ and again she broke down sobbing. ‘My sweet little baby! She’s burnt to death! Burnt to death!’
‘But where? Where did you leave her?’ asked Pierre.
His face had lit up with sympathy, and the woman saw that this man might be able to help.
‘Good, kind sir!’ she howled, clutching at his legs. ‘Be kind to us! Set my mind at rest if you can’t do anything else . . . Aniska, you little slut, show him where to go,’ she screamed at the servant-girl, opening her mouth wide in her fury so that her long teeth stuck out even more.
‘Show me where to go. Just show me. I . . . I’ll go and do something about it,’ Pierre blurted out in a panic.
The dirty servant-girl came out from behind the trunk, put up her hair, gave a deep sigh and stumped off down the path ahead of him on her rough bare feet.
Pierre felt as if he had fainted away and suddenly come back to life. He raised his head higher, his eyes began to gleam with the light of life, and he hurried after the girl, overtook her and came out on to Povarsky Street. The entire street was enveloped in clouds of black smoke, with tongues of flame licking out here and there. A big crowd had gathered in front of the fire. In the middle of the street stood a French general, talking to some people standing round him. Pierre went with the servant-girl and they tried to get through to the place where the French general was standing, only to be stopped by some French soldiers.
‘No way through!’ shouted a voice.
‘This way, Uncle,’ bawled the girl. ‘Down that lane past the Nikulins.’
Pierre turned back, skipping into a trot now and then just to keep up with her. The girl ran across the street, turned left down a side-street, went past three houses and turned in through a gateway on the right.
