‘Here’s your brat. Ah, a little girl. So much the better,’ said the Frenchman. ‘Good-bye. Must be humane, we are all mortal, you know’; and the Frenchman, with the patch on his cheek, ran back to his comrades.
Pierre, breathless with joy, ran up to the child, and would have taken her in his arms. But seeing a stranger, the little girl—a scrofulous-looking,
unattractive child, very like her mother—screamed and ran away. Pierre caught her, however, and lifted her up in his arms; she squealed in desperate fury, and tried to tear herself out of Pierre’s arms with her little hands, and to bite him with her dirty, dribbling mouth. Pierre had a sense of horror and disgust, such as he had felt at contact with some . little beast. But he made an effort to overcome it, and not to drop the : child, and ran with it back to the big house. By now, however, it was impossible to get back by the same way; the servant-girl, Aniska, was nowhere to be seen, and with a feeling of pity and loathing, Pierre held close to him, as tenderly as he could, the piteously howling, and sopping wet baby, and ran across the garden to seek some other way out.
XXXIV
When Pierre, after running across courtyards and by-lanes, got back with his burden to Prince Gruzinsky’s garden, at the corner of Povarsky, he did not for the first moment recognise the place from which he had set out to look for the baby: it was so packed with people and goods, dragged out of the houses. Besides the Russian families with their belongings saved from the fire, there were a good many French soldiers here too in various uniforms. Pierre took no notice of them. He was in haste to find the family, and to restore the child to its mother, so as to be able to go back and save some one else. It seemed to Pierre that he had a great deal more to do, and to do quickly. Warmed up by the heat and running, Pierre felt even more strongly at that minute the sense of youth, eagerness, and resolution, which had come upon him when he was running to save the baby.
The child was quiet now, and clinging to Pierre’s coat with her little hands, she sat on his arm, and looked about her like a little wild beast. Pierre glanced at her now and then, and smiled slightly. He fancied he saw something touchingly innocent in the frightened, sickly little face.
Neither the official nor his wife were in the place where he had left them. With rapid steps, Pierre walked about among the crowd, scanning the different faces he came across. He could not help noticing a Georgian or Armenian family, consisting of a very old man, of a handsome Oriental cast of face, dressed in a new cloth-faced sheepskin and new boots; an old woman of a similar type; and a young woman. The latter—a very young woman—struck Pierre as a perfect example of Oriental beauty, with her sharply marked, arched, black eyebrows, her extraordinarily soft, bright colour and beautiful, expressionless, oval face. Among the goods flung down in the crowd in the grass space, in her rich satin mantle, and the bright lilac kerchief on her head, she suggested a tender, tropical plant, thrown down in the snow. She was sitting on the baggage a little behind the old woman, and her big, black, long-shaped eyes, with their long lashes, were fixed immovably on the ground. Evidently she was aware of her beauty, and fearful because of it. Her face struck Pierre,
ind in his haste he looked round at her several times as he passed along Dy the fence. Reaching the fence, and still failing to find the people he vas looking for, Pierre stood still and looked round.
Pierre’s figure was more remarkable than ever now with the baby in his irms, and several Russians, both men and women, gathered about him.
‘Have you lost some one, good sir? Are you a gentleman yourself, or vhat? Whose baby is it?’ they asked him.
Pierre answered that the baby belonged to a woman in a black mantle, vho had been sitting at this spot with her children; and asked whether iny one knew her, and where she had gone.
‘Why, it must be the Anferovs,’ said an old deacon addressing a pock- narked peasant woman. ‘Lord, have mercy on us! Lord, have mercy m us!’ he added, in his professional bass.
‘The Anferovs,’ said the woman. ‘Why, the Anferovs have been gone ;ince early this morning. It will either be Marya Nikolaevna’s or vanova’s.’
‘He says a woman, and Marya Nikolaevna’s a lady,’ said a house-serf. ‘You know her, then; a thin woman—long teeth,’ said Pierre.
‘To be sure, Marya Nikolaevna. They moved off into the garden as ,oon as these wolves pounced down on us,’ said the woman, indicating the french soldiers.
‘0 Lord, have mercy on us!’ the deacon added again, j ‘You go on yonder, they are there. It’s she, for sure. She was quite beside herself with crying,’ said the woman again. ‘It’s she. Here this ,vay.’
