Pierre ran round via many a back-street and courtyard, but when he got back to the Gruzinsky garden at the corner of Povarsky Street carrying his little burden, for a moment or two he didn’t recognize the place he had set out from to go and look for the baby; it was so crammed with people and all the bits and pieces they had carried out from the houses. Apart from Russian families who had run away from the fire with a few belongings, there were also one or two French soldiers wearing different uniforms. Pierre ignored them. He was anxious to find the civil servant’s family, and give the child back to its mother, so he could go off and save somebody else. Pierre somehow felt he had a lot more to do, and it must be done quickly. Well warmed up by the heat from the fire and all the running about, at this point Pierre was full of energy and determination, enjoying the same thrill of youth that had surged through him when he had rushed off to save the baby, but now it was even stronger. The baby had gone quiet, and she sat there on his arm hanging on to Pierre’s coat with her tiny hands, and looking round like a little wild animal. Pierre glanced at her once or twice with a half smile. He thought he could see something pathetically innocent and angelic in that frightened, sickly little face.
Neither the official nor his wife was anywhere to be seen in the place where he had left them. Pierre strode quickly through the crowd, scanning the various faces as he came across them. He couldn’t help noticing a Georgian or Armenian family consisting of a very old man with fine oriental features wearing a new, cloth-covered sheepskin coat and new boots, an old woman who looked rather similar and a much younger woman, the very image of an oriental beauty, with black eyebrows arching in sharp lines and a beautifully impassive oval face that looked remarkably soft and tender. Among the bits and pieces scattered all over the ground and all the people crowding into that open space, she stood there in her rich satin mantle with a bright lilac shawl over her head, looking for all the world like a tender hot-house plant that had been thrown out in the snow. She was sitting on some bundled up things just behind the old woman, and her big black almond eyes with their long lashes were glued to the ground. She seemed conscious of her beauty, and it scared her. Pierre was much taken by her face, and even though he was in a hurry he glanced round at her several times as he made his way over to the fence. When he got there and still couldn’t find the people he was looking for, he stopped and took a good look around.
Pierre stood out now with a baby in his arms, and several Russians, men and women, soon gathered round him.
‘Have you lost somebody, good sir? You’re a gentleman, aren’t you, sir? Whose baby is that?’ they asked him.
Pierre told them the baby belonged to a woman in a black cloak who had been sitting on this very spot with her children, and he asked who she was and where she might have gone.
‘Must be the Anferovs,’ said an old deacon to a peasant woman with a pockmarked face. ‘Lord, have mercy! Lord, have mercy!’ he added, in his characteristic bass growl.
‘No, not the Anferovs,’ said the woman. ‘Oh no, the Anferovs went off first thing this morning. It’ll either be Marya Nikolayevna’s or Ivanova’s.’
‘He called her a woman, and Marya Nikolayevna’s a lady,’ put in a house serf.
‘You know who she is, then? Thin woman. Long teeth,’ said Pierre.
‘Yes, that’s Marya Nikolayevna. Her lot moved out into the garden when we got attacked by these wolves,’ said the woman, nodding towards the French soldiers.
‘O Lord, have mercy upon us!’ the deacon added again.
‘Try down there. I’m sure it’s her. She was crying her eyes out,’ said the woman again. ‘I’m sure it’s her. Look, down there.’
But Pierre was no longer listening. For some seconds he had been absorbed in something that was going on only a few steps away. He was watching the Armenian family and two French soldiers who had come over to them. One of them, a fidgety little man, was wearing a blue greatcoat, with a piece of string tied round his middle. He had a nightcap on his head, and his feet were bare. The other soldier made a stronger impression on Pierre. A tall, skinny, round-shouldered man with fair hair, he lumbered about with a moronic look on his face. He was dressed in a rough tunic, blue trousers and big worn boots. The little Frenchman in the blue coat who had nothing on his feet had gone up to the Armenians, spoken to them, and grabbed at the old man’s legs, which soon had him pulling off his boots as fast as he could. The other soldier in the tunic had stopped right in front of the beautiful Armenian girl, and he stood there with his hands in his pockets, starting at her without saying a word or moving a muscle.
