Every day Pierre went into things with the head steward. But he felt that what he was doing did not advance matters one inch. He felt that : all he did was quite apart from the reality, that his efforts had no grip on the business, and would not set it in progress. On one side the head steward put matters in their worst light, proving to Pierre the necessity of paying his debts, and entering upon new undertakings with the labour of his serf peasants, to which Pierre would not agree. On the other side, j Pierre urged their entering upon the work of liberation, to which the head steward objected the necessity of first paying off the loans from the Land Bank, and the consequent impossibility of haste in the matter. The head i steward did not say that this was utterly impossible; he proposed as the | means for attaining this object, the sale of the forests in the Kostroma I province, the sale of the lands on the lower Volga, and of the Crimean estate. But all these operations were connected in the head steward’s talk with such a complexity of processes, the removal of certain prohibitory clauses, the obtaining of certain permissions, and so on, that Pierre lost the thread, and could only say: ‘Yes, yes, do so then.’
Pierre had none of that practical tenacity, which would have made it possible for him to undertake the business himself, and so he did not I like it, and only tried to keep up a pretence of going into business before the head steward. The steward too kept up a pretence before the count of regarding his participation in it as of great use to his master, and a great 1 inconvenience to himself.
In Kiev he had acquaintances: persons not acquaintances made haste to become so, and gave a warm welcome to the young man of fortune, the largest landowner of the province, who had come into their midst. | The temptations on the side of Pierre’s besetting weakness, the one to which he had given the first place at his initiation into the lodge, were so i strong that he could not resist them. Again whole days, weeks, and months
of his life were busily filled up with parties, dinners, breakfasts, and balls, giving him as little time to think as at Petersburg. Instead of the new life Pierre had hoped to lead, he was living just the same old life only in different surroundings.
Of the three precepts of freemasonry, Pierre had to admit that he had not fulfilled that one which prescribes for every mason the duty of being a model of moral life; and of the seven virtues he was entirely without two—morality and love of death. He comforted himself by reflecting that, on the other hand, he was fulfilling the other precept—the improvement of the human race; and had other virtues, love for his neighbour and liberality.
In the spring of 1807, Pierre made up,his mind to go back again to Petersburg. On the way back he intended to make the tour of all his estates, and to ascertain personally what had been done of what had been prescribed by him, and in what position the people now were who had been entrusted to him by God, and whom he had been striving to benefit.
The head steward, who regarded all the young count’s freaks as almost insanity—disastrous to him, to himself, and to his peasants — made concessions to his weaknesses. While continuing to represent the liberation of his serfs as impracticable, he made arrangements on all his estates for the building of schools, hospitals, and asylums on a large scale to be begun ready for the master’s visit, prepared everywhere for him to be met, not' with ceremonious processions, which he knew would not be to Pierre’s taste, but with just the devotionally grateful welcomes, with holy images and bread and salt, such as would, according to his understanding of the count, impress him and delude him.
