War and peace ( Constance Garnett-1900) полностью

Only one who has had the same experience—that is, has spent sever, months continuously in the atmosphere of an army in the field—caj imagine the delight Nikolay felt when he got out of the region oversprea by the troops with their foraging parties, trains of provisions, and ho: pitals; when he saw no more soldiers, army waggons, and filthy traces

In the happiest frame of mind, Nikolay reached the hotel at Vorone2 at night, ordered everything of which he had so long been deprived in tl army, and next day, after shaving with special care and putting on tl

full-dress uniform he had not worn for so long past, he drove off to present himself to the authorities.

The commander of the militia of the district was a civilian general, an bid gentleman, who evidently found amusement in his military duties and rank. He gave Nikolay a brusque reception (supposing that this was the military manner), and cross-examining him with an important air, as though he had a right to do so, he expressed his approval and disapproval, as though called upon to give his verdict on the management of the war. Nikolay was in such high spirits that this only amused him.

; From the commander of militia, he went to the governor’s. The governor was a brisk little man, very affable and unpretentious. He mentioned -to Nikolay the stud-farms, where he might obtain horses, recommended him to a horse-dealer in the town, and a gentleman living twenty versts from the town, who had the best horses, and promised him every assistance.

‘You are Count Ilya Andreitch’s son? My wife was a great friend of lyour mamma’s. We receive on Thursdays: to-day is Thursday, pray come in, quite without ceremony,’ said the governor, as he took leave of him. j Nikolay took a posting carriage, and making his quartermaster get in beside him, galloped straight off from the governor’s to the gentleman with the stud of fine horses twenty versts away.

During the early days of his stay in Voronezh, everything seemed easy and pleasant to Nikolay, and, as is always the case, when a man is himself in a happy frame of mind, everything went well and prospered with him.

The country gentleman turned out to be an old cavalry officer, a bachelor, a great horse-fancier, a sportsman, and the owner of a smoking-room, of hundred-year-old herb-brandy, of some old Hungarian wine, and of superb horses.

In a couple of words, Nikolay had bought for six thousand roubles • seventeen stallions, all perfect examples of their several breeds (as he said), as show specimens of his remounts. After dining and drinking a glass or so too much of the Hungarian wine, Rostov, exchanging kisses with the country gentleman, with whom he was already on the friendliest terms, galloped back over the most atrociously bad road in the happiest frame of mind, continually urging the driver on, so that he might be in time for the soiree at the governor’s.

After dressing, scenting himself, and douching his head with cold water, Nikolay made his appearance at the governor’s, a little late, but with the phrase, ‘Better late than never,’ ready on the tip of his tongue.

It was not a ball, and nothing had been said about dancing; but every one knew that Katerina Petrovna would play waltzes and ecossaises on the clavichord, and that there would be dancing, and every one reckoning on it, had come dressed for a ball.

Provincial life in the year 1812 went on exactly the same as always, the only difference being that the provincial towns were livelier owing to the presence of many wealthy families from Moscow, that, as in everything going on at that time in Russia, there was perceptible in the gaiety a cer-

tain devil-may-care, desperate recklessness, and also that the small talk indispensable between people was now not about the weather and common acquaintances, but about Moscow and the army and Napoleon.

The gathering at the governor’s consisted of the best society in Voronezh.

There were a great many ladies, among them several Moscow acquaintances of Nikolay’s; but among the men there was no one who could be compared with the cavalier of St. George, the gallant hussar, and good- natured, well-bred Count Rostov. Among -the men there was an Italian prisoner—an officer of the French army; and Nikolay felt that the presence of this prisoner gave an added lustre to him—the Russian hero. He was, as it were, a trophy of victory. Nikolay felt this, and it seemed to him as though every one looked at the Italian in the same light, and he treated the foreign officer with gracious dignity and reserve.

As soon as Nikolay came in in his full-dress uniform of an officer of hussars, diffusing a fragrance of scent and wine about him, and said himself, and heard several times said to him, the words, ‘Better late than never,’ people clustered round him. All eyes were turned on him, and he felt at once that he had stepped into a position that just suited him in a provincial town—a position always agreeable, but now after his long privation of such gratifications, intoxicatingly delightful—that of a universal favourite. Not only at the posting-stations, at the taverns, and in the smoking-room of the horse-breeding gentleman, had he found servant- girls flattered by his attention, but here, at the governor’s assembly, there were (so it seemed to Nikolay) an inexhaustible multitude of young married ladies and pretty girls, who were only waiting with impatience for him to notice them. The ladies and the young girls flirted with him, and the old people began even from this first evening bestirring themselves to try and get this gallant young rake of an hussar married and settled down. Among the latter was the governor’s wife herself, who received Rostov as though he were a near kinsman, and called him ‘Nikolay.’

Katerina Petrovna did in fact proceed to play waltzes and ecossaises, and dancing began, in which Nikolay fascinated the company more than ever by his elegance. He surprised every one indeed by his peculiarly free and easy style in dancing. Nikolay was a little surprised himself at his own style of dancing at that soiree. He had never danced in that manner at Moscow, and would indeed have regarded such an extremely free and easy manner of dancing as not correct, as bad style; but here he felt it incumbent on him to astonish them all by something extraordinary, something that they would be sure to take for the usual thing in the capital, though new to them in the provinces.

All the evening Nikolay paid the most marked attention to a blue-eyed, plump, and pleasing little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials. With the naive conviction of young men who are enjoying themselves, that other men’s wives are created for their special benefit, Rostov never left this lady’s side, and treated her husband in a friendly way, almost as though there were a private understanding between them, as though

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they knew without speaking of it how capitally they, that is, how Nikolay and the wife, would get on. The husband did not, however, appear to share this conviction, and tried to take a gloomy tone with Rostov. But Nikolay’s good-humoured naivete was so limitless that at times the husband could not help being drawn into his gay humour. Towards the end of the evening, however, as the wife’s face grew more flushed and animated, the husband’s grew steadily more melancholy and stolid, as though they had a given allowance of liveliness between them, and as the wife’s increased, the husband’s dwindled.

V

With a smile that never left his lips, Nikolay sat bent a little forward on a low chair, and stooping close over his blonde beauty, he paid her mythological compliments.

Jauntily shifting the posture of his legs in his tight riding-breeches, diffusing a scent of perfume, and admiring his fair companion and himself and the fine lines of his legs in the tight breeches, Nikolay told the blonde lady that he wanted to elope with a lady here, in Voronezh.

‘What is she like?’

‘Charming, divine. Her eyes’ (Nikolay gazed at his companion) ‘are blue, her lips are coral, her whiteness . . .’he gazed at her shoulders,‘the shape of Diana . . .’

The husband came up to them and asked his wife gloomily what she was talking of.

‘Ah! Nikita Ivanitch,’ said Nikolay, rising courteously. And as though anxious for Nikita Ivanitch to take a share in his jests, he began to tell him too of his intention of running away with a blonde lady.

The husband smiled grimly, the wife gaily.

The good-natured governor’s wife came up to them with a disapproving air.

‘Anna Ignatyevna wants to see you, Nikolay,’ she said, pronouncing the name in such a way that Rostov was at once aware that Anna Ignatyevna was a very great lady. ‘Come, Nikolay. You let me call you so, don’t you?’

‘Oh, yes, ma tante. Who is she?’

‘Anna Ignatyevna Malvintsev. She has heard about you from her niece, how you rescued her . . . Do you guess? . . .’

‘Oh, I rescued so many! ’ cried Nikolay.

‘Her niece, Princess Bolkonsky. She is here in Voronezh with her aunt. Oho! how he blushes! Eh?’

‘Not a bit of it, nonsense, ma tante.’

‘Oh, very well, very well. Oh! oh! what a boy it is!’

The governor’s wife led him up to a tall and very stout lady in a blue toque, who had just finished a game of cards with the personages of greatest consequence in the town. This was Madame Malvintsev, Princess

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Marya’s aunt on her mother’s side, a wealthy, childless widow, who always lived in Voronezh. She was standing up, reckoning her losses, when Rostov came up to her.

She dropped her eyelids with a severe and dignified air, glanced at him. and went on upbraiding the general who had been winning from her.

‘Delighted, my dear boy,’ she said, holding out her hand to him. ‘Pray come and see me.’

After saying a few words about Princess Marya and her late father, whom Madame Malvintsev had evidently disliked, and inquiring what Nikolay knew about Prince Andrey, who was apparently also not in her good graces, the dignified old lady dismissed him, repeating her invitation to come and see her.

Nikolay promised to do so and blushed again as he took leave of Madame Malvintsev. At the mention of Princess Marya’s name, Rostov experienced a sensation of shyness, even of terror, which he could not have explained to himself.

On leaving Madame Malvintsev, Rostov would have gone back to the dance, but the little governor’s wife laid her plump little hand on his sleeve, and saying that she wanted to have a few words with him, led him into the divan-room; the persons in that room promptly withdrew that they might not be in her way.

‘Do you know, mon cher,’ said the governor’s wife with a serious expression on her good-natured, little face, ‘this is really the match for you; if you like, I will try and arrange it.’

‘Whom do you mean, ma tante?’ asked Nikolay.

‘I will make a match for you with the princess. Katerina Petrovna talks of Lili, but I say, no—the princess. Do you wish it? I am sure your mamma will be grateful. Really, she is such a splendid girl, charming! And she is by no means so very plain.’

‘Not at all so,’ said Nikolay, as though offended at the idea. ‘As for me, ma tante, as a soldier should, I don’t force myself on any one, nor refuse anything that turns up,’ said Rostov, before he had time to consider what he was saying.

‘So remember then; this is no jesting matter.’

‘How could it be! ’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the governor’s wife, as though talking to herself. ‘And entre autres, mon cher, you are too assiduous with the other—the blonde. One feels sorry for the husband, really . .

‘Oh no, we are quite friendly,’ said Nikolay in the simplicity of his heart: it had never occurred to him that such an agreeable pastime for him could be other than agreeable to any one else.

‘What a stupid thing I said to the governor’s wife though!’ suddenly came into Nikolay’s mind at supper. ‘She really will begin to arrange a match, and Sonya? . . .’

And on taking leave of the governor’s wife, as she said to him once more with a smile, ‘Well, remember then,’ he drew her aside.

‘But there is something ... To tell you the truth, ma tante . .

WAR AND PEACE ‘What is it, what is it, my dear? Come, let us sit down here.’

Nikolay had a sudden desire, an irresistible impulse to talk of all his ost secret feelings (such as he would never have spoken of to his mother,

> his sister, to an intimate friend) to this woman, who was almost a ranger. Whenever Nikolay thought afterwards of this uncalled-for out- urst of inexplicable frankness—though it had most important conse- aences for him—it seemed to him (as it always seems to people in such ises) that it had happened by chance, through a sudden fit of folly. But ; the same time this outburst of frankness, together with other insignifi- int events, had consequences of immense importance to him and to all is family.

‘It’s like this, ma tante. It has long been maman’s wish to marry me to a heiress; but the mere idea of it—marrying for money—is revolting

> me.’

‘Oh yes, I can understand that,’ said the governor’s wife.

‘But Princess Bolkonsky, that’s a different matter. In the first place, 11 tell you the truth, I like her very much, I feel drawn to her, and then, ver since I came across her in such a position, so strangely, it has often .ruck me, that it was fate. Only think: mamma has long been dreaming f it, but I had never happened to meet her before—it always so happened lat we didn’t meet. And then when my sister, Natasha, was engaged to er brother, of course it was impossible to think of a match between us len. It seems it was to happen that I met her first just when Natasha’s ngagement had been broken off; and well, everything afterwards . . . 0 you see how it is. I have never said all this to any one, and I never hall. I only say it to you.’

The governor’s wife pressed his elbow gratefully.

‘Do you know Sophie, my cousin? I love her; I have promised to larry her, and I am going to marry her ... So you see it’s no use liking of such a thing,’ Nikolay concluded lamely, flushing crimson.

‘My dearest boy, how can you talk so? Why, Sophie hasn’t a farthing, nd you told me yourself that your papa’s affairs are terribly straitened, .nd your maman ? It would kill her—for one thing. Then Sophie, if she ; a girl of any heart, what a life it would be for her! Your mother in espair, your position ruined . . . No, my dear, Sophie and you ought b realise that.’

Nikolay did not speak. It was comforting to him to hear these arguments.

‘All the same, ma tante, it cannot be,’ he said, with a sigh, after a brief lence. ‘And besides would the princess accept me? And again she is in lourning; can such a thing be thought of?’

‘Why, do you suppose I am going to marry you out of hand on the 3ot? There are ways of doing everything,’ said the governor’s wife. ‘What a match-maker you are, ma tante . . .’ said Nikolay, kissing er plump little hand.

VI

On reaching Moscow, after her meeting with Rostov at Bogutcharovc Princess Marya had found her nephew there with his tutor, and a lette from Prince Andrey, directing her what route to take to her aunt Madame Malvintsev’s at Voronezh. The arrangements for the journey anxiety about her brother, the organisation of her life in a new house new people, the education of her nephew—all of this smothered in Princes Marya’s heart that feeling as it were of temptation, which had tormentei her during her father’s illness and after his death, especially since he meeting with Rostov.

She was melancholy. Now after a month had passed in quiet, undis turbed conditions, she felt more and more deeply the loss of her fathei which was connected in her heart with the downfall of Russia. She wa anxious: the thought of the dangers to which her brother—the on creature near to her now left—was being exposed was a continual tortur to her. She was worried too by the education of her nephew, which sh was constantly feeling herself unfitted to control. But at the bottom c her heart there was an inward harmony, that arose from the sense tha she had conquered in herself those dreams and hopes of personal happi ness, that had sprung up in connection with Rostov.

When the governor’s wife called on Madame Malvintsev the day afte her soiree, and, talking over her plans with her, explaining that thougi under present circumstances a formal betrothal was of course not t be thought of, yet they might bring the young people together, and le them get to know one another, and having received the aunt’s approva began to speak of Rostov in Princess Marya’s presence, singing hi praises, and describing how he had blushed on hearing the princess 1 name, her emotion was not one of joy, but of pain. Her inner harmon was destroyed, and desires, doubts, self-reproach, and hope sprang u again.

In the course of the two days that followed before Rostov callec Princess Marya was continually considering what her behaviour ough to be in regard to Rostov. At one time, she made up her mind that sh would not come down into the drawing-room when he came to see he aunt, that it was not suitable for her in her deep mourning to receiv visitors. Then she thought this would be rude after what he had don for her. Then the idea struck her that her aunt and the governor’s wif had views of some sort upon her and Rostov; their words and glance had seemed at times to confirm this suspicion. Then she told herself the it was only her own depravity that could make her think this of them could they possibly fail to realise that in her position, still wearing th' heaviest mourning, such match-making would be an insult both to he and to her father’s memory? On the supposition that she would go dow to see him, Princess Marya imagined the words he would say to her, art she would say to him; and at one moment, those words seemed to h(

ndeservedly frigid, at the next, they struck her as carrying too much leaning. Above all she dreaded the embarrassment, which she felt would e sure to overcome her, and betray her, as soon as she saw him.

But when, on Sunday after matins, the footman came into the drawing- xmi to announce that Count Rostov had called, the princess showed no ign of embarrassment, only a faint Hush came into her cheeks, and her yes shone with a new, radiant light.

‘You have seen him, aunt?’ said Princess Marya, in a composed voice, ot knowing herself how she could be externally so calm and natural.

When Rostov came into the room, the princess dropped her head for n instant, as though to give time for their visitor to greet her aunt; nd then at the very moment when Nikolay turned to her, she raised her ead and met his gaze with shining eyes. With a movement full of ignity and grace, she rose with a joyous smile, held out her delicate, oft hand to him, and spoke in a voice in which for the first time there as the thrill of deep, womanly chest notes. Mademoiselle Bourienne, ho was in the drawing-room, gazed at Princess Marya with bewildered jrprise. The most accomplished coquette herself, she could not have mnoeuvred better on meeting a man whom she wanted to attract.

‘Either black suits her wonderfully, or she really has grown better look- lg without my noticing it. And above all, such tact and grace! ’ thought fademoiselle Bourienne.

Had Princess Marya been capable of reflection at that moment, she ’ould have been even more astonished than Mademoiselle Bourienne t the change that had taken place in her. From the moment she set eyes n that sweet, loved face, some new force of life seemed to take possession f her, and to drive her to speak and act apart from her own will. From le time Rostov entered the room, her face was transformed. Just as hen a light is kindled within a carved and painted lantern, the delicate, itricate, artistic tracery comes out in unexpected and impressive beauty, 'here all seemed coarse, dark, and meaningless before; so was Princess larya’s face transformed. For the first time all the pure, spiritual, inner •avail in which she had lived till then came out in her face. All her mer searchings of spirit, her self-reproach, her sufferings, her striving )r goodness, her resignation, her love, her self-sacrifice—all this was idiant now in those luminous eyes, in the delicate smile, in every feature f her tender face.

Rostov saw all this as clearly as though he had known her whole life, le felt that he was in the presence of a creature utterly different from nd better than all those he had met up to that moment, and, above all, ir better than he was himself.

The conversation was of the simplest and most insignificant kind, hey talked of the war, unconsciously, like every one else, exaggerating leir sadness on that subject; they talked of their last meeting—and jfikolay then tried to turn the subject; they talked of the kind-hearted wernor’s wife, of Nikolay’s relations, and of Princess Marya’s.

Princess Marya did not talk of her brother, but turned the conversa-

tion, as soon as her aunt mentioned Prince Andrey. It was evident tha of the troubles of Russia she could speak artificially, but her brothe was a subject too near her heart, and she neither would nor could speal lightly of him. Nikolay noticed this, as indeed with a keenness of ob servation not usual with him, he noticed every shade of Princess Marya’ character, and everything confirmed him in the conviction that she wa an altogether rare and original being.

Nikolay, like Princess Marya, had blushed and been embarrassed when he heard the princess spoken of, and even when he thought of her but in her presence he felt perfectly at ease, and he said to her not at al what he had prepared beforehand to say to her, but what came into hi mind at the moment, and always quite appropriately.

As visitors always do where there are children, Nikolay, in a mo mentary silence during his brief visit, had recourse to Prince Andrey’; little son, caressing him, and asking him if he would like to be ai hussar. He took the little boy in his arms, began gaily whirling hin round, and glanced at Princess Marya. With softened, happy, sh; eyes, she was watching the child she loved in the arms of the man sht loved. Nikolay caught that look too, and as though he divined its sig nificance, flushed with delight, and fell to kissing the child with simple hearted gaiety.

Princess Marya was not going into society at all on account of hei mourning, and Nikolay did not think it the proper thing to call on then again. But the governor’s wife still persisted in her match-making, anc repeating to Nikolay something flattering Princess Marya had said o: him, and vice versa, kept urging that Rostov should declare himself tc Princess Marya. With this object, she arranged that the young peopk should meet at the reverend father’s before Mass.

Though Rostov did tell the governor’s wife that he should make nc sort of declaration to Princess Marya, he promised to be there.

Just as at Tilsit Rostov had not allowed himself to doubt whethei what was accepted by every one as right were really right, so now after a brief but sincere struggle between the effort to order his life in accordance with his own sense of right, and humble submission to circumstances, he chose the latter, and yielded himself to the power, which he felt, was irresistibly carrying him away. He knew that to declare his feelings to Princess Marya after his promise to Sonya would be what he called base. And he knew that he would never do a base thing. But he knew too (it was not what he knew, but what he felt at the bottom of his heart), that in giving way now to the force of circumstances and of the people guiding him, he was not only doing nothing wrong, but was doing something very, very grave, something of more gravity than anything he had done in his life.

After seeing Princess Marya, though his manner of life remained externally the same, all his former pleasures lost their charm for him. and he often thought of her. But he never thought of her, as he had thought of all the young girls he had met in society, nor as he had long.

nd sometimes with enthusiasm, thought of Sonya. Like almost every tonest-hearted young man, he had thought of every young girl as of , possible future wife, had adapted to them in his imagination all the lictures of domestic felicity: the white morning wrapper, the wife jehind the samovar, the wife’s carriage, the little ones, mamma and ,iapa, their attitude to one another, and so on, and so on. And these >ictures of the future afforded him gratification. But when he thought f Princess Marya, to whom the match-makers were trying to betroth lim, he could never form any picture of his future married life with her. Even if he tried to do so, it all seemed incoherent and false. And it only died him with dread.

VII

Phe terrible news of the battle of Borodino, of our losses in killed and vounded, and the even more terrible news of the loss of Moscow reached /oronezh in the middle of September. Princess Marya, learning of her >rother’s wound only from the newspapers, and having no definite in- ormation about him, was preparing (so Nikolay heard, though he had lot seen her) to set off to try and reach Prince Andrey.

On hearing the news of the battle of Borodino and of the abandon- nent of Moscow, Rostov felt, not despair, rage, revenge, nor any such eeling, but a sudden weariness and vexation with everything at Voronezh, ind a sense of awkwardness and uneasy conscience. All the conversations lie listened to seemed to him insincere; he did not know what to think if it all, and felt that only in the regiment would all become clear to him igain. He made haste to conclude the purchase of horses, and was often without good cause ill-tempered with his servant and quartermaster.

Several days before Rostov’s departure there was a thanksgiving service n the cathedral for the victory gained by the Russian troops, and 'fikolay went to the service. He was a little behind the governor, and vas standing through the service meditating with befitting sedateness on he most various subjects. When the service was concluding, the gov- rnor’s wife beckoned him to her.

‘Did you see the princess?’ she said, with a motion of her hand towards . lady in black standing behind the choir.

Nikolay recognised Princess Marya at once, not so much from the irofile he saw under her hat as from the feeling of watchful solicitude, we, and pity which came over him at once. Princess Marya, obviously jiuried in her own thoughts, was making the last signs of the cross iefore leaving the church.

Nikolay gazed in wonder at her face. It was the same face he had ,een before; there was the same general look of refined, inner, spiritual ravail; but now there was an utterly different light in it. There was a ouching expression of sadness, of prayer and of hope in it. With the ame absence of hesitation as he had felt before in her presence, without

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waiting for the governor’s wife to urge him, without asking himsel whether it were right, whether it were proper for him to address he here in church, Nikolay went up to her, and said he had heard of he trouble and grieved with his whole heart to hear of it. As soon as she heari his voice, a vivid colour glowed in her face, lighting up at once her jo; and her sorrow.

‘One thing I wanted to tell you, princess,’ said Rostov, ‘that is, tha if Prince Andrey Nikolaevitch were not living, since he is a colonel, i would be announced immediately in the gazettes.’

The princess looked at him, not comprehending his words, but com forted by the expression of sympathetic suffering in his face.

‘And I know from so many instances that a wound from a splinter (the papers said it was from a grenade) ‘is either immediately fatal oi else very slight,’ Nikolay went on. ‘We must hope for the best, and ] i am certain . . .’

Princess Marya interrupted him.

‘Oh, it would be so aw . . .’ she began, and her emotion choking hei utterance, she bent her head with a graceful gesture, like everything she did in his presence, and glancing gratefully at him followed her aunt

That evening Nikolay did not go out anywhere, but stayed at home to finish some accounts with the horse-vendors. By the time he had finished his work it was rather late to go out anywhere, but still early tc go to bed, and Nikolay spent a long while walking up and down the room, thinking over his life, a thing that he rarely did.

Princess Marya had made an agreeable impression on him at Bogut- charovo. The fact of his meeting her then in such striking circumstances, and of his mother having at one time pitched precisely on her as the wealthy heiress suitable for him, had led him to look at her with special attention. During his stay at Voronezh, that impression had become, not merely a pleasing, but a very strong one. Nikolay was impressed by the peculiar, moral beauty which he discerned in her at this time. He had, however, been preparing to go away, and it had not entered his head to regret that in leaving Voronezh he was losing all chance of seeing her. But his meeting with Princess Marya that morning in church had, Nikolay felt, gone more deeply to his heart than he had anticipated and more deeply than he desired for his peace of mind. That pale, delicate, melancholy face, those luminous eyes, those soft, gracious gestures, and, above all, the deep and tender melancholy expressed in all her features, agitated him and drew his sympathy. In men Rostov could not bear an appearance of higher, spiritual life (it was why he did not like Prince Andrey), he spoke of it contemptuously as philosophy, idealism; but in Princess Marya it was just in that melancholy, showing all the depth of a spiritual world, strange and remote to Nikolay, that he found an irresistible attraction.

‘She must be a marvellous girl! An angel, really!’ he said to himself. ‘Why am I not free? Why was I in such a hurry with Sonya?’ And involuntarily he compared the two: the poverty of the one and the wealth

if the other in those spiritual gifts, which Nikolay was himself without .nd therefore prized so highly. He tried to picture what would have Happened if he had been free, and in what way he would have made ier an offer and she would have become his wife. No, he could not imagine hat. A feeling of dread came over him and that picture would take no lefinite shape. With Sonya he had long ago made his picture of the uture, and it was all so simple and clear, just because it was all made ip and he knew all there was in Sonya. But with Princess Marya he :ould not picture his future life, because he did not understand her— ie simply loved her.

There was something light-hearted, something of child’s play in his Ireams of Sonya. But to dream of Princess Marya was difficult and a ittle terrible.

‘How she was praying! ’ he thought. ‘One could see that her whole soul vas in her prayer. Yes, it was that prayer that moves mountains, and I im convinced that her prayer will be answered. Why don’t I pray for vhat I want?’ he bethought himself. ‘What do I want? Freedom, release rom Sonya. She was right,’ he thought of what the governor’s wife had aid, ‘nothing but misery can come of my marrying her. Muddle, mam- na’s grief . . . our position ... a muddle, a fearful muddle! Besides,

don’t even love her. No, I don’t love her in the right way. My God! ake me out of this awful, hopeless position!’ he began praying all at ince. ‘Yes, prayer will move mountains, but one must believe, and not >ray, as Natasha and I prayed as children for the snow to turn into ugar, and then ran out into the yard to try whether it had become sugar. vTo; but I am not praying for trifles now,’ he said, putting his pipe down n the corner and standing with clasped hands before the holy picture. \nd softened by the thought of Princess Marya, he began to pray as he lad not prayed for a long while. Pie had tears in his eyes and a lump n his throat when Lavrushka came in at the door with papers.

‘Blockhead! bursting in when you’re not wanted!’ said Nikolay, [uickly changing his attitude.

‘A courier has come,’ said Lavrushka in a sleepy voice, ‘from the gov- rnor, a letter for you.’

‘Oh, very well, thanks, you can go! ’

Nikolay took the two letters. One was from his mother, the other from ionya. He knew them from the handwriting, and broke open Sonya’s etter first. He had hardly read a few lines when his face turned white nd his eyes opened wide in dismay and joy. ‘No, it’s not possible!’ he aid aloud. Unable to sit still, he began walking to and fro in the room, Holding the letter in both hands as he read it. He skimmed through the etter, then read it through once and again, and shrugging his shoulders nd flinging up his hands, he stood still in the middle of the room with vide-open mouth and staring eyes. What he had just been praying for vith the assurance that God would answer his prayer had come to pass; ;>ut Nikolay was astounded at it as though it were something extraordi- lary, and as though he had not expected it, and as though the very

SqS war and peace

fact of its coming to pass so quickly proved that it had not come fron God, to whom he had been praying, but was some ordinary coincidence

The knot fastening his freedom, that had seemed so impossible to dis entangle, had been undone by this unexpected and, as it seemed to Niko lay, uncalled-for letter from Sonya. She wrote that their late misfor tunes, the loss of almost the whole of the Rostovs’ property in Moscow and the countess’s frequently expressed desire that Nikolay should marrj Princess Bolkonsky, and his silence and coldness of late, all taken together led her to decide to set him free from his promise, and to give him back complete liberty.

‘It would be too painful to me to think that I could be a cause of sorrow and discord in the family which has overwhelmed me with benefits,’ she wrote; ‘and the one aim of my love is the happiness of those ]-, love, and therefore I beseech you, Nicolas, to consider yourself free, anc to know that in spite of everything, no one can love you more truly thar your— Sonya.’

Both letters were from Troitsa. The other letter was from the countess. It described the last days in Moscow, the departure, the fire and the loss of the whole of their property. The countess wrote too that Prince Andrey had been among the train of wounded soldiers who had travelled with them. He was still in a very critical condition, but that the doctor 1 said now that there was more hope. Sonya and Natasha were nursing; him.

With this letter Nikolay went next day to call on Princess Marya., Neither Nikolay nor Princess Marya said a word as to all that was implied by the words: ‘Natasha is nursing him’; but thanks to this letter,: Nikolay was brought suddenly into intimate relations, almost those of a kinsman, with the princess.

Next day Rostov escorted Princess Marya as far as Yaroslavl, and a few days later he set off himself to join his regiment.

VIII

Sonya’s letter to Nikolay, that had come as an answer to his prayer, was written at Troitsa. It had been called forth in the following way. The idea of marrying Nikolay to a wealthy heiress had taken more and more complete possession of the old countess’s mind. She knew that, Sonya was the great obstacle in the way of this. And Sonya’s life had of late, and especially after the letter in which Nikolay described his meeting with Princess Marya at Bogutcharovo, become more and more difficult in the countess’s house. The countess never let slip an opportunity for making some cruel or humiliating allusion to Sonya. But a few days before they set out from Moscow the countess, distressed and overwrought by all that was happening, sent for Sonya, and instead of insistence and upbraiding, besought her with tears and entreaties to repay all that had been done for her by sacrificing herself, and breaking off

er engagement to Nikolay. ‘I shall have no peace of mind till you make ne this promise,’ she said.

Sonya sobbed hysterically, answered through her sobs that she would 0 anything, that she was ready for anything; but she did not give a irect promise, and in her heart she could not bring herself to what was emanded of her. She had to sacrifice herself for the happiness of the amily that had brought her up and provided for her. To sacrifice herself Dr others was Sonya’s habit. Her position in the house was such that nly by way of sacrifice could she show her virtues, and she was used b sacrificing herself and liked it. But in every self-sacrificing action itherto she had been happily conscious that by her very self-sacrifice he was heightening her value in the eyes of herself and others, and ecoming worthier of Nikolay, whom she loved beyond everything in life, iut now her sacrifice would consist in the renunciation of what con- tituted for her the whole reward of sacrifice, and the whole meaning of fe. And for the first time in her life she felt bitterness against the people /ho had befriended her only to torment her more poignantly: she felt nvy of Natasha, who had never had any experience of the kind, who ad never been required to make sacrifices, and made other people sacri- ce themselves for her, and was yet loved by every one. And for the first ime Sonya felt that there was beginning to grow up out of her quiet, ure love for Nikolay a passionate feeling, which stood above all prin- iples, and virtue, and religion. And under the influence of that passion, onya, whose life of dependence had unconsciously trained her to reserve, ave the countess vague, indefinite answers, avoided talking with her, nd resolved to wait for a personal interview with Nikolay, not to set im free, but, on the contrary, to bind him to her for ever.

The fuss and the horror of the Rostovs’ last days in Moscow had mothered the gloomy thoughts that were weighing on Sonya. She was lad to find an escape from them in practical work. But when she heard f Prince Andrey’s presence in their house, in spite of all the genuine ompassion she felt for him, and for Natasha, a joyful and superstitious eeling that it was God’s will that she should not be parted from Nikolay ,00k possession of her. She knew Natasha loved no one but Prince mdrey, and had never ceased to love him. She knew that brought to- ether now, under such terrible circumstances, they would love one anther again; and that then, owing to the relationship that would (in ccordance with the laws of the Orthodox Church) exist between them, Nikolay could not be married to Princess Marya. In spite of all the wfulness of what was happening during the last day or two in Moscow nd the first days of the journey, that feeling, that consciousness of the Intervention of Providence in her personal affairs, was a source of joy 0 Sonya. At the Troitsa monastery the Rostovs made the first break p their journey.

In the hostel of the monastery three big rooms were assigned to the Rostovs, one of which was occupied by Prince Andrey. The wounded nan was by this time a great deal better. Natasha was sitting with him.

poo

WAR AND PEACE In the next room were the count and the countess reverently conversin with the superior, who was paying a visit to his old acquaintances anil patrons. Sonya was sitting with them, fretted by curiosity as to wha Prince Andrey and Natasha were saying. She heard the sounds of thei voices through the door. The door of Prince Andrey’s room opened Natasha came out with an excited face, and not noticing the monk, wb ( rose to meet her, and pulled back his wide sleeve off his right hand, sh went up to Sonya and took her by the arm.

‘Natasha, what are you about? Come here,’ said the countess.

Natasha went up to receive the blessing, and the superior counsellei her to turn for aid to God and to His saint.

Immediately after the superior had gone out, Natasha took her friem by the arm, and went with her into the empty third room.

‘Sonya, yes, he will live,’ she said. ‘Sonya, how happy I am, and ho\ wretched! Sonya, darling, everything is just as it used to be. If onh he were going to live. Pie cannot, . . . because . . . be . . . caus<

. . .’ and Natasha burst into tears.

‘Yes! I knew it would be! Thank God,’ said Sonya. ‘He will live.’

Sonya was no less excited than her friend, both by the latter’s grie and fears, and by her own personal reflections, of which she had spoke;; to no one. Sobbing, she kissed and comforted Natasha. ‘If only he wer to live!’ she thought. After weeping, talking a little, and wiping thei tears, the two friends went towards Prince Andrey’s door. Natasha, cau| tiously opening the door, glanced into the room, Sonya stood besidt her at the half-open door.

Prince Andrey was lying raised high on three pillows. His pale fao looked peaceful, his eyes were closed, and they could see his quiet, regu lar breathing.

‘Ah, Natasha! ’ Sonya almost shrieked all of a sudden, clutching at he cousin’s arm, and moving back away from the door.

‘What! what is it?’ asked Natasha.

‘It’s the same, the same, you know . . .’ said Sonya, with a whiti face and quivering lips.

Natasha softly closed the door and walked away with Sonya to tb window, not yet understanding what she was talking of.

‘Do you remember,’ said Sonya, with a scared and solemn face, ‘d< you remember when I looked into the mirror for you ... at Otradnoi at Christmas time ... Do you remember what I saw?’ . . .

‘Yes, yes,’ said Natasha, opening her eyes wide, and vaguely recallini that Sonya had said something then about seeing Prince Andrey lyin' down.

‘Do you remember?’ Sonya went on. ‘I saw him then, and told yoi all so at the time, you and Dunyasha. I saw him lying on a bed,’ sb said, at each detail making a gesture with her lifted finger, ‘and that hi had his eyes shut, and that he was covered with a pink quilt, and tha he had his hands folded,’ said Sonya, convinced as she described tb details she had just seen that they were the very details she had sea

WARANDPEACE 901

;hen. At the time she had seen nothing, but had said she was seeing the first thing that came into her head. But what she had invented then seemed to her now as real a memory as any other. She not only remem- oered that she had said at the time that he looked round at her and smiled, and was covered with something red, but was firmly convinced that she had seen and said at the time, that he was covered with a pink quilt—yes, pink—and that his eyes had been closed.

‘Yes, yes, pink it was,’ said Natasha, who began now to fancy too that she remembered her saying it was a pink quilt, and saw in that detail the most striking and mysterious point in the prediction.

‘But what does it mean?’ said Natasha dreamily.

‘Ah, I don’t know, how extraordinary it all is!’ said Sonya, clutching at her head.

A few minutes later, Prince Andrey rang his bell, and Natasha went in to him; while Sonya, in a state of excitement and emotion such as she had rarely experienced, remained in the window, pondering over all the strangeness of what was happening.

That day there was an opportunity of sending letters to the army, and the countess wrote a letter to her son.

‘Sonya,’ said the countess, raising her head from her letter, as her niece passed by her. ‘Sonya, won’t you write to Nikolenka?’ said the countess, in a soft and trembling voice; and in the tired eyes, that looked at her over the spectacles, Sonya read all that the countess meant by those words. Those eyes expressed entreaty and dread of a refusal and jshame at having to beg, and readiness for unforgiving hatred in case of refusal.

Sonya went up to the countess, and kneeling down, kissed her hand.

‘I will write, mamma,’ she said.

Sonya was softened, excited, and moved by all that had passed that day, especially by the mysterious fulfilment of her divination, which she had just seen. Now, when she knew that in case of the renewal of Natasha’s engagement to Prince Andrey, Nikolay could not be married to Princess Marya, she felt with delight a return of that self-sacrificing spirit in which she was accustomed and liked to live. And with tears in her eyes, and with a glad sense of performing a magnanimous action, she sat down, and several times interrupted by the tears that dimmed her velvety black eyes, she wrote the touching letter the reception of which had so impressed Nikolay.

IX

In the guard-room to which Pierre had been taken, the officer and soldiers in charge treated him with hostility, but at the same time with respect. Their attitude to him betrayed both doubt who he might be—perhaps

a person of great importance—and hostility, in consequence of the personal conflict they had so recently had with him.

But when on the morning of the next day the guard was relieved, Tierre felt that for his new guard—both officers and soldiers—he was no longer an object of the same interest as he had been to those who had taken him prisoner. And, indeed, in the big, stout man in a peasant’s coat, the sentinels in charge next day saw nothing of the vigorous person who had fought so desperately with the pillaging soldier and the convoy, and had uttered that solemn phrase about saving a child; they saw in him only number seventeen of the Russian prisoners who were to be detained for some reason by order of the higher authorities. If there were anything peculiar about Pierre, it lay only in his undaunted air of concentrated thought, and in the excellent French in which, to the surprise of the French, he expressed himself. In spite of that, Pierre was put that day with the other suspicious characters who had been apprehended, since the room he had occupied was wanted for an officer.

All the Russians detained with Pierre were persons of the lowest class. And all of them, recognising Pierre as a gentleman, held aloof from him all the more for his speaking French. Pierre mournfully heard their jeers at his expense.

On the following evening, Pierre learned that all the prisoners (and himself probably in the number) were to be tried for incendiarism. The day after, Pierre was taken with the rest to a house where were sitting a French general with white moustaches, two colonels, and other Frenchmen with scarfs on their shoulders. With that peculiar exactitude and definiteness, which is always employed in the examination of prisoners and is supposed to preclude all human weaknesses, they put questions to Pierre and the others, asking who he was, where he had been, with what object, and so on.

These questions, leaving on one side the essence of the living fact, and excluding all possibility of that essence being discovered, like all questions, indeed, in legal examinations, aimed only at directing the channel along which the examining officials desired the prisoner’s answers to flow, so as to lead him to the goal of the inquiry—that is, to conviction. So soon as he began to say anything that was not conducive to this aim, then they pulled up the channel, and the water might flow where it would. Moreover, Pierre felt, as the accused always do feel at all trials, a puzzled wonder why all these questions were asked him. He had a feeling that it was only out of condescension, out of a sort of civility, that this trick of directing the channel of their replies was made use of. He knew he was in the power of these men, that it was only by superior force that he had been brought here, that it was only superior force that gave them the right to. exact answers to their questions, that the whole aim of the proceeding Avas to convict him. And, therefore, since they had superior force, and they had the desire to convict him, there seemed no need of the network of questions and the trial. It was obvious that all the questions were bound to lead up to his conviction. To the inquiry what he was doing when

WARANDPEACE g °3

e was apprehended, Pierre replied with a certain tragic dignity that he was arrying back to its parents a child he had ‘rescued from the flames.’ Why yas he fighting with the soldieis? Pierre replied that he was defending ■* roman, that the defence of an insulted woman was the duty of every man, nd so on ... He was pulled up; this was irrelevant. With what object lad he been in the courtyard of a burning house where he had been seen >y several witnesses? He answered that he was going out to see what vas going on in Moscow. He was pulled up again. He had not been asked, le was told, where he was going, but with what object he was near the ire. Who was he? The first question was repeated, to which he had said ie did not want to answer. Again he replied that he could not answer that.

‘Write that down, that’s bad. Very bad,’ the general with the white vhiskers and the red, flushed face said to him sternly.

On the fourth day, fire broke out on the Zubovsky rampart.

Pierre was moved with thirteen of the others to a coach-house belong- ng to a merchant’s house on the Crimean Ford. As he passed through he street, Pierre could hardly breathe for the smoke, which seemed ranging over the whole city. Fires could be seen in various directions. Pierre did not at that time grasp what was implied by the burning of Moscow, and he gazed with horror at the fires.

In a coach-house behind a house in the Crimean Ford, Pierre spent another four days, and in the course of those four days he learned, from the conversation of the French soldiers, that all the prisoners in detention here were every day awaiting the decision of their fate by a marshal. Of what marshal, Pierre could not ascertain from the soldiers. For the soldiers, this marshal was evidently the highest and somewhat mysterious symbol of power.

These first days, up to the 8th of September, when the prisoners were brought up for a second examination, were the most painful for Pierre.

X

On the 8th of September, there came into the prisoners’ coach-house an officer of very great consequence, judging-by the respectfulness with which he was addressed by the soldiers on guard. This officer, probably some one on the staff, held a memorandum in his hand, and called over all the Russians’ names, giving Pierre the title of ‘the one who will not give his name.’ And with an indolent and indifferent glance at all the prisoners, he gave the officer on guard orders to have them decently dressed and in good order before bringing them before the marshal. In an hour a company of soldiers arrived, and Pierre with the thirteen others was taken to the Virgin’s Meadow. It was a fine day, sunny after rain, and the air was exceptionally clear. The smoke did not hang low over the town as on the day when Pierre had been taken from the guard-room of the Zubovsky rampart; the smoke rose up in columns into the pure air. Flames were nowhere to be seen; but columns of smoke were rising up on all sides,

904 WAR AND PEACE

and all Moscow, all that Pierre could see, was one conflagration. On a; sides he saw places laid waste, with stoves and pipes left standing i; them, and now and then the charred walls of a stone house.

Pierre stared at the fires, and did not recognise parts of the towi that he knew well. Here and there could be seen churches that had no been touched by the fire. The Kremlin uninjured, rose white in the dis tance, with towers and Ivan the Great. Close at hand, the cupola of tb Monastery of the New Virgin shone brightly, and the bells for servic rang out gaily from it. Those bells reminded Pierre that it was Sunda; and the festival of the birth of the Virgin Mother. But there seemed t< be no one to keep this holiday; on all sides they saw the ruin wrough by the fires, and the only Russians they met were a few tattered anc frightened-looking people, who hid themselves on seeing the French.

It was evident that the Russian nest was in ruins and destroyed; bir with this annihilation of the old Russian order of life, Pierre was uncon sciously aware that the French had raised up over this ruined nest ar utterly different but strong order of their own. He felt this at the sighi of the regular ranks of the boldly and gaily marching soldiers who wen escorting him and the other prisoners; he felt it at the sight of some im portant French official in a carriage and pair, driven by a soldier, whorr they met on their way. He felt it at the gay sounds of regimental music, which floated across from the left of the meadow; and he had felt it anc realised it particularly strongly from the memorandum the French officer had read in the morning when he called over the prisoners’ names. Pierre was taken by one set of soldiers, led off to one place, and thence to another, with dozens of different people. It seemed to him that they might have forgotten him, have mixed him up with other people. But no; his answers given at the examination came back to him in the form of the designation, ‘the one who will not give his name.’ And under this designation, which filled Pierre with dread, they led him away somewhere, with unhesitating conviction written on their faces that he and the other prisoners with him were the right ones, and that they were being taken to the proper place. Pierre felt himself an insignificant chip that had fallen under the wheel of a machine that worked without a hitch, though he did not understand it.

Pierre was led with the other prisoners to the right side of the Virgin’s Meadow, not far from the monastery, and taken up to a big, white house with an immense garden. It was the house of Prince Shtcherbatov, and Pierre had often been inside it in former days to see its owner. Now, as he learnt from the talk of the soldiers, it was occupied by the marshal, the Duke of Eckmiihl.

They were led up to the entrance, and taken into the house, one at a time. Pierre was the sixth to be led in. Through a glass-roofed gallery, a vestibule, and a hall, all familiar to Pierre, he was led to the long, low- pitched study, at the door of which stood an adjutant.

Davoust was sitting at a table at the end of the room, his spectacles on his nose. Pierre came close up to him. Davoust, without raising his eyes, was apparently engaged in looking up something in a document that

ay before him. Without raising his eyes, he asked softly: ‘Who are you?’

Pierre was mute because he was incapable of articulating a word. Davoust was not to Pierre simply a French general; to Pierre, Davoust vas a man notorious for his cruelty. Looking at the cold face of Davoust, vhich, like a stern teacher, seemed to consent for a time to have patience ind await a reply, Pierre felt that every second of delay might cost him his ife. But he did not know what to say. To say the same as he had said at the irst examination he did not dare; to disclose his name and his position vould be both dangerous and shameful. Pierre stood mute. But before ae had time to come to any decision, Davoust raised his head, thrust lis spectacles up on his forehead, screwed up his eyes, and looked intently it Pierre.

‘I know this man,’ he said, in a frigid, measured tone, obviously reckon- ng on frightening Pierre. The chill that had been running down Pierre’s jack seemed to clutch his head in a vice.

‘General, you cannot know me, I have never seen you.’

‘It is a Russian spy,’ Davoust interrupted, addressing another general n the room, whom Pierre had not noticed. And Devoust turned away. With an unexpected thrill in his voice, Pierre began speaking with sudden rapidity.

‘Non, monseigneur,’ he said, suddenly recalling that Davoust was a duke, ‘you could not know me. I am a militia officer, and I have not quitted Moscow.’

‘Your name?’ repeated Davoust.

‘Bezuhov.’

‘What proof is there that you are not lying?”

‘Monseigneur!’ cried Pierre in a voice not of offence but of supplication.

Davoust lifted his eyes and looked intently at Pierre. For several seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. In that glance, apart from all circumstances of warfare and of judgment, human relations arose between these two men. Both of them in that one instant were vaguely aware of an immense number of different things, and knew that they were both children of humanity, that they were brothers.

At the first glance when Davoust raised his head from his memorandum, where men’s lives and doings were marked off by numbers, Pierre was only a circumstance, and Davoust could have shot him with no sense of an evil deed on his conscience; but now he saw in him a man. He pondered an instant.

‘Plow will you prove to me the truth of what you say?’ said Davoust coldly.

Pierre thought of Ramballe, and mentioned his name and regiment and the street and house where he could be found.

‘You are not what you say,’ Davoust said again.

In a trembling, breaking voice, Pierre began to bring forward proofs of the truth of his testimony.

But at that moment an adjutant came in and said something to Davoust.

Davoust beamed at the news the adjutant brought him, and began

go6 WARANDPEACE

buttoning up his uniform. Apparently he had completely forgotten aboui Pierre. When an adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he nodded ir Pierre’s direction with a frown, and told them to take him away. Bui where were they to take him—Pierre did not know: whether back to the shed or the place prepared for their execution which his companions had pointed out to him as they passed through the Virgin’s Meadow.

He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was repeating some question.

‘Yes, of course! ’ said Davoust. But what that ‘yes’ meant, Pierre could not tell.

Pierre did not remember how or where he went, and how long he was going. In a condition of complete stupefaction and bewilderment, seeing nothing around him, he moved his legs in company with the others till they all stopped, and he stopped.

There was one idea all this time in Pierre’s head. It was the question: Who, who was it really that was condemning him to death? It was not the men who had questioned him at the first examination; of them not one would or obviously could do so. It was not Davoust, who had looked at him in such a human fashion. In another minute Davoust would have understood that they were doing wrong, but the adjutant who had come in at that moment had prevented it. And that adjutant had obviously had no evil intent, but he might have stayed away. Who was it, after all, who was punishing him, killing him, taking his life—his, Pierre’s, with all his memories, his strivings, his hopes, and his ideas? Who was doing it? And Pierre felt that it was no one’s doing. It was discipline, and ! the concatenation of circumstances. Some sort of discipline was killing him, Pierre, robbing him of life, of all, annihilating him.

XI

From Prince Shtcherbatov’s house the prisoners were taken straight downhill across the Virgin’s Meadow to the left of the monastery of the Virgin, and led to a kitchen garden, in which there stood a post. A big pit had been dug out near the post, and the freshly turned-up earth was heaped up by it. A great crowd of people formed a semicircle about the pit and the post. The crowd consisted of a small number of Russians and a great number of Napoleon’s soldiers not on duty: there were Germans, Italians, and Frenchmen in various uniforms. To the right and left of the post stood rows of French soldiers, in blue uniforms, with red epaulettes, in Hessians and shako. The prisoners were stood in a certain order, in accordance with a written list (Pierre was sixth) and led up to the post. Several drums suddenly began beating on both sides of them, and Pierre felt as though a part of his soul was being torn away from him by that sound. He lost all power of thought and reflection. He could only see and hear. And there was only one desire left in him, the desire that the

errible thing that was to be done should be done more quickly. Pierre Doked round at his companions and scrutinised them.

The two men at the end were shaven convicts; one tall and thin, the ther a swarthy, hirsute, muscular fellow with a flattened nose. The hird was a house-serf, a man of five-and-forty, with grey hair and a lump, well-fed figure. The fourth was a peasant, a very handsome fellow with a full, flaxen beard and black eyes. The fifth was a factory and, a thin, sallow lad of eighteen, in a dressing-gown.

Pierre heard the Frenchmen deliberating how they were to be shot, ingly, or two at a time. ‘Two at a time,’ a senior officer answered coldly, 'here was a stir in the ranks of the soldiers, and it was evident that every he was in haste and not making haste, not as people do when they are etting through some job every one can understand, but as men hasten to et something done that is inevitable, but is disagreeable and incompre- ensible.

A French official wearing a scarf came up to the right side of the file f prisoners, and read aloud the sentence in Russian and in French.

Then two couples of French soldiers came up to the prisoners by the istruction of an officer, and took the two convicts who stood at the head, 'he convicts went up to the post, stopped there, and while the sacks 'ere being brought, they looked dumbly about them, as a wild beast t bay looks at the approaching hunter. One of them kept on crossing imself, the other scratched his back and worked his lips into the sem- lance of a smile. The soldiers with hurrying fingers bandaged their eyes, ut the sacks over their heads and bound them to the post.

A dozen sharpshooters, with muskets, stepped out of the ranks with a ne, regular tread, and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned way not to see what was coming. There was a sudden bang and rattle hat seemed to Pierre louder than the most terrific clap of thunder, and e looked round. There was a cloud of smoke, and the French soldiers, |ith trembling hands and pale faces, were doing something in it by the it. The next two were led up. Those two, too, looked at every one in the ime way, with the same eyes, dumbly, and in vain, with their eyes only legging for protection, and plainly unable to understand or believe in r hat was coming. They could not believe in it, because they only knew hat their life was to them, and so could not understand, and could not elieve, that it could be taken from them.

Pierre tried not to look, and again turned away; but again a sort of wful crash smote his hearing, and with the sound he saw smoke, blood, nd the pale and frightened faces of the Frenchmen, again doing some- ling at the post, and balking each other with their trembling hands, ierre, breathing hard, looked about him as though asking. ‘What does mean?’ The same question was written in all the eyes that met Pierre’s yes. On all the faces of the Russians, on the faces of the French soldiers nd officers, all without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and pnflict as he felt in his own heart. ‘But who is it doing it there really? hey are all suffering as I am! Who is it? who?’ flashed for one second

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through Pierre’s mind. ‘Sharpshooters of the eighty-sixth, forward! some one shouted. The fifth prisoner standing beside Pierre was le forward—alone. Pierre did not understand that he was saved; that h and all the rest had been brought here simply to be present at the execu tion. With growing horror, with no sense of joy or relief, he gazed a what was being done. The fifth was the factory lad in the loose gown. A soon as they touched him, he darted away in terror and clutched at Pierr (Pierre shuddered and tore himself away from him). The factory la< could not walk. He was held up under the arms and dragged along, am he screamed something all the while. When they had brought him to th post he was suddenly quiet. He seemed suddenly to have grasped some thing. Whether he grasped that it was no use to scream, or that it wa impossible for men to kill him, he stood at the post, waiting to be bourn like the others, and like a wild beast under fire looked about him wit' glittering eyes.

Pierre could not make himself turn away and close his eyes. The curi osity and emotion he felt, and all the crowd with him, at this fifth murde reached its highest pitch. Like the rest, this fifth man seemed calm. H wrapped his dressing-gown round him, and scratched one bare foot wit! the other.

When they bound up his eyes, of himself he straightened the knot which hurt the back of his head; then, when they propped him agains the blood-stained post, he staggered back, and as he was uncomfortabl- in that position, he shifted his attitude, and leaned back quietly, with hi feet put down symmetrically. Pierre never took his eyes off him, am did not miss the slightest movement he made.

The word of command must have sounded, and after it the shots o the eight muskets. But Pierre, however earnestly he tried to recollect i afterwards, had not heard the slightest sound from the shots. He onl; saw the factory lad suddenly fall back on the cords, saw blood oozing ii two places, and saw the cords themselves work loose from the weight o the hanging body, and the factory lad sit down, his head falling unnatu rally, and one leg bent under him. Pierre ran up to the post. No om hindered him. Men with pale and frightened faces were doing something round the factory lad. There was one old whiskered Frenchman, whose lower jaw twitched all the while as he untied the cords. The body sanl down. The soldiers, with clumsy haste, dragged it from the post anc shoved it into the pit.

All of them clearly knew, beyond all doubt, that they were criminals who must make haste to hide the traces of their crime.

Pierre glanced into the pit and saw that the factory lad was lyin§ there with his knees up close to his head, and one shoulder higher thar the other. And that shoulder was convulsively, rhythmically rising anc falling. But spadefuls of earth were already falling all over the body One of the soldiers, in a voice of rage, exasperation, and pain, shouted to Pierre to stand aside. But Pierre did not understand him, and stil stood at the post, and no one drove him away.

When the pit was quite filled up, the word of command was heard, ierre was taken back to his place, and the French troops, standing in inks on both sides of the post, faced about, and began marching with a leasured step past the post. The twenty-four sharpshooters, standing i the middle of the circle, with uncharged muskets, ran back to their laces as their companies marched by them.

Pierre stared now with dazed eyes at these sharpshooters, who were jnning two together out of the circle. All of them had joined their impanies except one. A young soldier, with a face of deathly pallor, ill stood facing the pit on the spot upon which he had shot, his shako tiling backwards off his head, and his fuse dropping on to the ground, le staggered like a drunken man, taking a few steps forward, and then few back, to keep himself from falling. An old under-officer ran out of le ranks, and, seizing the young soldier by the shoulder, dragged him ) his company. The crowd of Frenchmen and Russians began to disperse. 11 walked in silence, with downcast eyes.

‘That will teach them to set fire to the places,’ said some one among le French. Pierre looked round at the speaker, and saw that it was a jldier who was trying to console himself somehow for what had been one, but could not. Without finishing his sentence, he waved his hand tid went on.

XII

fter the execution Pierre was separated from the other prisoners and ■ft alone in a small, despoiled, and filthy church.

Towards evening a patrol sergeant, with two soldiers, came into the hurch and informed Pierre that he was pardoned, and was now going o the barracks of the prisoners of war. Without understanding a word f what was said to him, Pierre got up and went with the soldiers. He as conducted to some sheds that had been rigged up in the upper part f the meadow out of charred boards, beams, and battens, and was taken ito one of them. Some twenty persons of various kinds thronged round ierre. He stared at them, with no idea of what these men were, why ley were here, and what they wanted of him. He heard the words they lid to him, but his mind made no kind of deduction or interpretation of lem; he had no idea of their meaning. He made some answer, too, to the uestions asked him, but without any notion who was hearing him, or ow they would understand his replies. He gazed at faces and figures, ad all seemed to him equally meaningless.

From the moment when Pierre saw that fearful murder committed by len who did not want to do it, it seemed as though the spring in his >ul, by which everything was held together and given the semblance of fe, had been wrenched out, and all seemed to have collapsed into a eap of meaningless refuse. Though he had no clear apprehension of it, had annihilated in his soul all faith in the beneficent ordering of the niverse, and in the soul of men, and in his own soul, and in God. This

state of mind Pierre had experienced before, but never with such intensi as now. When such doubts had come upon him in the past they had arise from his own fault. And at the very bottom of his heart Pierre had bet aware then that salvation from that despair and from these doubts k in his own hands. But now he felt that it was not his fault that the wor] was collapsing before his eyes, and that nothing was left but meaninglei ruins. He felt that to get back to faith in life was not in his power.

Around him in the darkness stood men. Probably they found sorm thing very entertaining in him. They were telling him something, askin him something, then leading him somewhere, and at last he found himse! in a corner of the shed beside men of some sort, who were talking o all sides, and laughing.

‘And so, mates . . . that same prince who’ (with a special emphas on the last word) . . . some voice was saying in the opposite corner c the shed.

Sitting in the straw against the wall, mute and motionless, Pierr! opened, and then closed, his eyes. As soon as he shut his eyes he saw th fearful face of the factory lad, fearful especially from its simplicity, an the faces of the involuntary murderers, still more fearful in their uneas' ness. And he opened his eyes again and stared blankly about him in th darkness.

Close by him a little man was sitting bent up, of whose presence Pierr was first aware from the strong smell of sweat that rose at every move! ment he made. This man was doing something with his feet in the dark ness, and although Pierre did not see his face, he was aware that he wa continually glancing at him. Peering intently at him in the dark, Pierr made out that the man was undoing his foot-gear. And the way he wa doing it began to interest Pierre.

Undoing the strings in which one foot was tied up, he wound ther neatly off, and at once set to work on the other leg, glancing at Pierre! While one hand hung up the first leg-binder, the other was already be ginning to untie the other leg. In this way, deftly, with rounded, effectiv movements following one another without delay, the man unrolled hi leg-wrappers and hung them up on pegs driven in over-head, took out; knife, cut off something, shut the knife up, put it under his bolster, am settling himself more at his ease, clasped his arms round his knees, am stared straight at Pierre. Pierre was conscious of something pleasant; soothing, and rounded off in those deft movements, in his comfortabl establishment of his belongings in the corner, and even in the very smel of the man, and he did not take his eyes off him.

‘And have you seen a lot of trouble, sir? Eh?’ said the little man sud denly. And there was a tone of such friendliness and simplicity in th sing-song voice that Pierre wanted to answer, but his jaw quivered, ant! he felt the tears rising. At the same second, leaving no time for Pierre’ embarrassment to appear, the little man said, in the same pleasant voice

‘Ay, darling, don’t grieve,’ he said, in that tender, caressing sing-sonj in which old Russian peasant women talk. ‘Don’t grieve, dearie; troubL

WARANDPEACE 911

ists an hour, but life lasts for ever! Ay, ay, my dear. And we get on ere finely, thank God; nothing to vex us. They’re men, too, and bad nd good among them,’ he said; and, while still speaking, got with a jpple movement on his knees to his feet, and clearing his throat walked way.

‘Hey, the hussy, here she is! ’ Pierre heard at the end of the shed the ime caressing voice. ‘Here she is, the hussy; she remembers me! There, rere, lie down!’ And the soldier, pushing down a dog that was jumping p on him, came back to his place and sat down. In his hands he had jmething wrapped up in a cloth.

‘Here, you taste this, sir,’ he said, returning to the respectful tone he ad used at first, and untying and handing to Pierre several baked po- itoes. ‘At dinner we had soup. But the potatoes are first rate!’

Pierre had eaten nothing the whole day, and the smell of the potatoes ;ruck him as extraordinarily pleasant. He thanked the soldier and egan eating.

‘But why so, eh?’ said the soldier smiling, and he took one of the po- jtoes. ‘You try them like this.’ He took out his clasp-knife again, cut le potato in his hand into two even halves, and sprinkled them with salt ;om the cloth, ar.d offered them to Pierre.

‘The potatoes are first-rate,' he repeated. ‘You taste them like that.’

It seemed to Pierre that he had never eaten anything so good.

‘No, I am all right,’ said Pierre; ‘but why did they shoot those poor allows? . . . The last was a lad of twenty.’

‘Tss . . . tss . . .’ said the little man. ‘Sin, indeed, . . . sin . . .’ he dded quickly, just as though the words were already in his mouth and ew out of it by accident; he went on: ‘How was it, sir, you came to stay 1 Moscow like this?’

‘I didn’t think they would come so soon. I stayed by accident,’ said ’ierre.

‘But how did they take you, darling; from your home?’

‘No, I went out to see the fire, and then they took me up and brought le to judgment as an incendiary.’

‘Where there’s judgment, there there’s falsehood,’ put in the little man.

‘And have you been here long?’ asked Pierre, as he munched the last iotato.

‘I? On Sunday they took me out of the hospital in Moscow.’

‘Who are you, a soldier?’

‘We are soldiers of the Apsheron regiment. I was dying of fever. We 'ere never told anything. There were twenty of us lying sick. And we ad never a thought, never a guess of how it was.’

‘Well, and are you miserable here?’ asked Pierre.

‘Miserable, to be sure, darling. My name’s Platon, surname Karataev,’ e added, evidently to make it easier for Pierre to address him. ‘In the .agiment they called me “the little hawk.” How can one help being sad, iy dear? Moscow—she’s the mother of cities. One must be sad to see

912 WARANDPEACE

it. Yes, the maggot gnaws the cabbage, but it dies before it’s done; s the old folks used to say,’ he added quickly.

‘What, what was that you said?’ asked Pierre.

‘I?’ said Karataev. ‘I say it’s not by our wit, but as God thinks fit said he, supposing that he was repeating what he had said. And at one he went on: ‘Tell me, sir, and have you an estate from your fathers And a house of your own? To be sure, your cup was overflowing! And , wife, too? And are your old parents living?’ he asked, and though Pierr could not see him in the dark, he felt that the soldier’s lips were puckerei in a restrained smile of kindliness while he asked these questions. H was evidently disappointed that Pierre had no parents, especially tha he had not a mother.

‘Wife for good counsel, mother-in-law for kind welcome, but none dea as your own mother!’ said he. ‘And have you children?’ he went on t ask. Pierre’s negative reply seemed to disappoint him again, and he addei himself: ‘Oh well, you are young folks; please God, there will be. Onl; live in peace and concord.’

‘But it makes no difference now,’ Pierre could not help saying.

‘Ah, my dear man,’ rejoined Platon, ‘the beggar’s bag and the priso: walls none can be sure of escaping.’ He settled himself more comfortably and cleared his throat, evidently preparing himself for a long story. ‘Si it was like this, dear friend, when I used to be living at home,’ he began ‘we have a rich heritage, a great deal of land, the peasants were wel off, and our house—something to thank God for, indeed. Father used til go out to reap with six of us. We got along finely. Something like peasant we were. It came to pass . . .’ and Platon Karataev told a long stor; of how he had gone into another man’s copse for wood, and had beei caught by the keeper, how he had been flogged, tried, and sent for ; soldier. ‘And do you know, darling,’ said he, his voice changing fron the smile on his face, ‘we thought it was a misfortune, while it was al; for our happiness. My brother would have had to go if it hadn’t been fo my fault. And my younger brother had five little ones; while I, lool you, I left no one behind but my wife. I had a little girl, but God ha< taken her before I went for a soldier. I went home on leave, I must tel you. I find them all better off than ever. The yard full of beasts, tb women folk at home, two brothers out earning wages. Only Mihailo the youngest, at home. Father says all his children are alike; whicheve finger’s pricked, it hurts the same. And if they hadn’t shaved Platon fo a soldier, then Mihailo would have had to go. He called us all togethe —would you believe it—made us stand before the holy picture. Mihailo says he, come here, bend down to his feet; and you, women, bow down and you, grandchildren. Do you understand? says he. Yes, so you see my dear. Fate acts with reason. And we are always passing judgment that’s not right, and this doesn’t suit us. Our happiness, my dear, is liki water in a drag-net; you drag, and it is all puffed up, but pull it out anc there’s nothing. Yes, that’s it.’ And Platon moved to a fresh seat in tb straw.

After a short pause, Platon got up.

‘Well, I dare say, you are sleepy?’ he said, and he began rapidly cross- lg himself, murmuring:

‘Lord Jesus Christ, holy Saint Nikola, Frola and Lavra; Lord Jesus 'hrist, holy Saint Nikola, Frola and Lavra; Lord Jesus Christ—have lercy and save us!’ he concluded, bowed down to the ground, got up, ighed, and sat down on his straw. ‘That’s right. Let me lie down like a tone, O God, and rise up like new bread!’ he murmured, and lay down, lulling his military coat over him.

‘What prayer was that you recited?’ asked Pierre.

. ‘Eh?’ said Platon (he was already half asleep). ‘Recited? I prayed to Jod. Don’t you pray, too?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Pierre. ‘But what was it you said—Frola and Lavra?’

‘Eh, to be sure,’ Platon answered quickly. ‘They’re the horses’ saints. )ne must think of the poor beasts, too,’ he said. ‘Why, the little hussy, he’s curled up. You’re warm, child of a bitch!’ he said, feeling the dog t his feet; and, turning over again, he fell asleep at once.

Outside shouting and wailing could be heard somewhere far away, nd through the cracks in the walls could be seen the glow of fire; but vithin the shed all was dark and hushed. For a long while Pierre did tot sleep, and lay with open eyes in the darkness, listening to Platon noring rhythmically as he lay beside him, and he felt that the world hat had been shattered was rising up now in his soul, in new beauty, nd on new foundations that could not be shaken.

XIII

n this shed, where Pierre spent four weeks, there were twenty-three oldiers, three officers, and two civilian functionaries, all prisoners.

They were all misty figures to Pierre afterwards, but Platon Karataev emained for ever in his mind the strongest and most precious memory, nd the personification of everything Russian, kindly, and round. When text day at dawn Pierre saw his neighbour, his first impression of some- hing round was fully confirmed; Platon’s whole figure in his French nilitary coat, girt round the waist with cord, in his forage-cap and bast hoes, was roundish, his head was perfectly round, his back, his chest, lis shoulders, even his arms, which he always held as though he were bout to embrace something, were round in their lines; his friendly smile nd big, soft, brown eyes, too, were round.

Platon Karataev must have been over fifty to judge by his stories of he campaigns in which he had taken part. He did not himself know and ould not determine how old he was. But his strong, dazzlingly white eeth showed in two unbroken semicircles whenever he laughed, as he •ften did, and all were good and sound: there was not a grey hair in his ieard or on his head, and his whole frame had a look of suppleness and tf unusual hardiness and endurance.

9 i4 WAR A, ND PEACE

Ilis face had an expression of innocence and youth in spite of the cur\ ing wrinkles on it; his voice had a pleasant sing-song note. But the grea peculiarity of his talk was its spontaneity and readiness. It was eviden that he never thought of what he was saying, or of what he was goin to say; and that gave a peculiar, irresistible persuasiveness to his rapii and genuine intonations.

His physical powers and activity were such, during the first period o his imprisonment, that he seemed not to know what fatigue or sicknes meant. Every evening as he lay down to sleep, he said: ‘Let me lie down Lord, like a stone; let me rise up like new bread’; and every mornin : on getting up, he would shake his shoulder in the same way, saying ‘Lie down and curl up, get up and shake yourself.’ And he had, in fact only to lie down in order to sleep at once like a stone, and he had bu to shake himself to be ready at once, on'waking, without a second’s delay to set to work of some sort; just as children, on waking, begin at one playing with their toys. Lie knew how to do everything, not particularly well, but not badly either. He baked, and cooked, and sewed, and planed and cobbled boots. He was always busy, and only in the evenings allowee himself to indulge in conversation, which he loved, and singing. He san: songs, not as singers do, who know they are listened to, but sang, as tb birds sing, obviously, because it was necessary to him to utter those sounds, as it sometimes is to stretch or to walk about; and those sound: were always thin, tender, almost feminine, melancholy notes, and hi: face as he uttered them was very serious.

Being in prison, and having let his beard grow, he had apparently cas off all the soldier’s ways that had been forced upon him and were no natural to him, and had unconsciously relapsed into his old peasan habits.

‘A soldier discharged is the shirt outside the breeches again,’ he usee to say. He did not care to talk of his life as a soldier, though he neve- complained, and often repeated that he had never once been beaten since he had been in the service. When he told stories, it was always by prefer ence of his old and evidently precious memories of his life as a ‘Christian, as he pronounced the word ‘krestyan,’ or peasant. The proverbial sayings of which his talk was full, were not the bold, and mostly indecent, saying: common among soldiers, but those peasant saws, which seem of so little meaning looked at separately, and gain all at once a significance of profound wisdom when uttered appropriately.

Often he would say something directly contrary to what he had saic before, but both sayings were equally true. He liked talking, and talkec well, adorning his speech with caressing epithets and proverbial sayings which Pierre fancied he often invented himself. But the great charm of hi: talk was that the simplest incidents—sometimes the same that Pierre hac himself seen without noticing them—in his account of them gained a character of seemliness and solemn significance. He liked to listen to the fairy tales which one soldier used to tell—always the same ones over ane: over again—in the evenings, but most of all he liked to listen to storie:

of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none; but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man—not with any particular man, but with the men who happened to be before his eyes. He loved his dog, loved his comrades, loved the French, loved Pierre, who was his neighbour. But Pierre felt that in spite of Karataev’s affectionate tenderness to him (in which he involuntarily paid tribute to Pierre’s spiritual life), he would not suffer a moment’s grief at parting from him. And Pierre began 'to have the same feeling towards Karataev.

To all the other soldiers Platon Karataev was the most ordinary soldier; they called him ‘little hawk,’ or Platosha; made good-humoured jibes at his expense, sent him to fetch things. But to Pierre, such as he appeared an that first night—an unfathomable, rounded-off, and everlasting personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth—so he remained to him for ever.

Platon Karataev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he talked, he did not know on beginning a sentence how he was going to fend it.

When Pierre, struck sometimes by the force of his remarks, asked him to repeat what he had said, Platon could never recall what he had said the minute before, just as he could never repeat to Pierre the words of his favourite song. There came in, ‘My own little birch-tree,’ and ‘My heart is sick,’ but there was no meaning in the words. He did not understand, and could not grasp the significance of words taken apart from the sentence. Every word and every action of his was the expression of a force uncomprehended by him, which was his life. But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It had meaning only as a part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as smoothly, as inevitably, and as spontaneously, as the perfume rises from the flower. He could not understand any value or significance in an act or a word taken separately.

XIV

3n hearing from Nikolay that her brother was at Yaroslavl with the Rostovs, Princess Marya, in spite of her aunt’s efforts to dissuade her, .prepared at once to go to him and to go not alone, but with her nephew; whether this were difficult or not, whether it were possible or not, she did not inquire, and did not care to know: it was her duty not only to be herself at the side of her—perhaps, dying—brother, but to do everything possible to take his son to him, and she prepared to set off. If Prince ^ndrey had not himself communicated with her, Princess Marya put

that down either to his being too weak to write, or to his considering the long journey too difficult and dangerous for her and his son.

Within a few days Princess Marya was ready for the journey. Hei equipage consisted of her immense travelling coach in which she hac come to Voronezh, and a covered trap and a waggon. She was accompanied by Mademoiselle Bourienne, Nikolushka, with his tutor the old nurse, three maids, Tihon, a young valet, and a courier whom her aunt was sending with her.

To travel by the usual route to Moscow was not to be thought of, anc the circuitous route which Princess Marya was obliged to take by Lipetsk Ryazan, Vladimir, and Shuya was very long; from lack of posting horse; difficult; and in the neighbourhood of Ryazan, where they were told the French had begun to appear, positively dangerous.

During this difficult journey, Mademoiselle Bourienne, Dessalle, anc Princess Marya’s servants were astonished at the tenacity of her will and her energy. She was the last to go to rest, the first to rise, and nc difficulty could daunt her. Thanks to her activity and energy, whicl infected her companions, she was towards the end of the second week close upon Yaroslavl.

The latter part of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest period in Princess Marya’s life. Her love for Rostov was not then a source of torment or agitation to her. That love had by then filled her whole soulj and become an inseparable part of herself, and she no longer struggled against it. Of late Princess Marya was convinced—though she nevei clearly in so many words admitted it to herself—that she loved and was beloved. She had been convinced of this by her last interview with Nikolay when he came to tell her that her brother was with the Rostovs Nikolay did not by one word hint at the possibility now (in case of Prince Andrey’s recovery) of his engagement to Natasha being renewed but Princess Marya saw by his face that he knew and thought of it. And in spite of that, his attitude to her—solicitous, tender, and loving—was so far from being changed, that he seemed overjoyed indeed that now a sort of kinship between him and Princess Marya allowed him to give freer expression to his loving friendship, as Princess Marya sometime; thought it. Princess Marya knew that she loved for the first and Iasi time in her life, and felt that she was loved, and she was happy and at peace in that relation.

But this happiness on one side of her spiritual nature was far froir hindering her from feeling intense grief on her brother’s account. Or the contrary, her spiritual peace on that side enabled her to give herself more completely to her feeling for her brother. This feeling was so strong at the moment of setting out from Voronezh that all her retinue were persuaded, looking at her careworn, despairing face, that she would certainly fall ill on the journey. But the very difficulties and anxieties of the journey, which Princess Marya tackled with such energy, saved her for the time from her sorrow and gave her strength.

As is always the case on a journey, Princess Marya thought of nothing

lit the journey itself, forgetting what was its object. But on approaching aroslavl, when what might await her—and not now at the end of many ays, but that very evening—became clear to her mind again, her agita- on reached its utmost limits.

When the courier, whom she had sent on ahead to find out in Yaro- :ivl where the Rostovs were staying, and in what condition Prince ndrey was, met the great travelling coach at the city gate he was fright- led at the terribly pale face that looked out at him from the window.

‘I have found out everything, your excellency: the Rostovs are stay- g in the square, in the house of a merchant, Bronnikov. Not far off, right oove the Volga,’ said the courier.

Princess Marya looked into his face with frightened inquiry, not un- jrstanding why he did not answer her chief question. How was her tother? Mademoiselle Bourienne put this question for the princess.

‘How is the prince?’ she asked.

‘His excellency is staying in the same house with them.’

‘He is living, then,’ thought the princess; and she softly asked, ‘How he?’

‘The servants say, “No change.” ’

What was meant by ‘no change’ the princess did not inquire, and with passing, hardly perceptible, glance at little seven-year-old Nikolushka, tting before her, delighted at the sight of the town, she bowed her head, id did not raise it again till the heavy carriage—rumbling, jolting, nd swaying from side to side—came to a standstill. The carriage-steps ere let down with a crash.

The carriage-door was opened. On the left was water—a broad river; n the right, entrance steps. At the entrance were people, servants, and rosy-faced girl with a thick coil of black hair, who smiled at her in an npleasantly affected way, as it seemed to Princess Marya (it was Sonya), he princess ran up the steps; the girl, smiling afiectedly, said, ‘This 'ay! this way!’ and the princess found herself in the vestibule, facing n elderly woman of an Oriental type of face, who came rapidly to meet er, looking moved. It was the countess. She embraced Princess Marya, nd proceeded to kiss her.

‘My child,’ she said, ‘I love you, and have known you a long while.’

In spite of her emotion, Princess Marya knew it was the countess, nd that she must say something to her. Not knowing how she did it, he uttered some polite French phrases in the tone in which she had een addressed, and asked, ‘How is he?’

‘The doctor says there is no danger,’ said the countess; but as she aid it she sighed, and turned her eyes upwards, and this gesture contradicted her words.

‘Where is he? Can I see him; can I?’ asked the princess.

‘In a minute; in a minute, my dear. Is this his son?’ she said, turning 0 Nikolushka, who came in with Dessalle. ‘We shall find room for very one; the house is large. Oh, what a charming boy!’

The countess led the princess into the drawing-room. Sonya began to

converse with Mademoiselle Bourienne. The countess caressed the chili The old count came into the room to welcome the princess. He was e: traordinarily changed since Princess Marya had seen him last. The he had been a jaunty, gay, self-confident old gentleman, now he seeme a pitiful, bewildered creature. As he talked to the princess, he was coi tinually looking about him, as though asking every one if he were doin the right thing. After the destruction of Moscow and the loss of hi property, driven out of his accustomed rut, he had visibly lost th sense of his own importance, and felt that there was no place for hir in life.

In spite of her one desire to see her brother without loss of time, an her vexation that at that moment, when all she wanted was to see hirr they should entertain her conventionally with praises of her nephew the princess observed all that was passing around her, and felt it inevi table for the time to fall in with the new order of things into which sh had entered. She knew that all this was inevitable, and it was hard fo her, but she felt no grudge against them for it.

‘This is my niece,’ said the countess, presenting Sonya; ‘you do no know her, princess?’

Princess Marya turned to her, and trying to smother the feeling c- hostility that rose up within her at the sight of this girl, she kissed her But she felt painfully how out of keeping was the mood of every on around her with what was filling her own breast.

‘Where is he?’ she asked once more, addressing them all.

‘He is downstairs; Natasha is with him,’ answered Sonya, flushing : ‘We have sent to ask. You are tired, I expect, princess?’

Tears of vexation came into Princess Marya’s eyes. She turned awaj; and was about to ask the countess again where she could see him, wher she heard at the door light, eager steps that sounded to her full of gaiety She looked round and saw, almost running in, Natasha—that Natashs whom she had so disliked when they met long before in Moscow.

But Princess Marya had hardly glanced at Natasha’s face before sht understood that here was one who sincerely shared her grief, and wa: therefore her friend. She flew to meet her, and embracing her, bursf into tears on her shoulder.

As soon as Natasha, sitting by Prince Audrey’s bedside, heard oi Princess Marya’s arrival, she went softly out of the room with those swift steps that to Princess Marya sounded so light-hearted, and ran to see her.

As she ran into the room, her agitated face wore one expression—an expression of love, of boundless love for him, for her, for all that was near to the man she loved—an expression of pity, of suffering for others: and of passionate desire to give herself up entirely to helping them. It was clear that at that moment there was not one thought of self, of hefi own relation to him, in Natasha’s heart.

Princess Marya with her delicate intuition saw all that in the first glance at Natasha’s face, and with mournful relief wept on her shoulder.

! ‘Come, let us go to him, Marie,’ said Natasha, drawing her away into ie next room.

Princess Marya lifted up her head, dried her eyes, and turned to atasha. She felt that from her she would learn all, would understand 1. ‘How . . she was beginning, but stopped short. She felt that no jestion nor answer could be put into words. Natasha’s face and eyes :ould be sure to tell her all more clearly and more profoundly.

Natasha looked at her, but seemed to be in dread and in doubt whether ) say or not to say all she knew; she seemed to feel that before those iminous eyes, piercing to the very bottom of her heart, it was impossible Ot to tell the whole, whole truth as she saw it. Natasha’s lip suddenly vitched, ugly creases came round her mouth, and she broke into sobs, iding her face in her hands.

Princess Marya knew everything.

But still she could not give up hope, and asked in words, though she ut no faith in them:

‘But how is his wound? What is his condition altogether?’

‘You . . . you will see that,’ was all Natasha could say.

They sat a little while below, near his room, to control their tears nd go in to him with calm faces.

‘How has the whole illness gone? Has he been worse for long? When id this happen?’ Princess Marya asked.

Natasha told her that at first there had been danger from inOamma- on and the great pain, but that that had passed away at Troitsa, and re doctor had only been afraid of one thing—gangrene. But the risk f that, too, was almost over. When they reached Yaroslavl, the wound ad begun to suppurate (Natasha knew all about suppuration and all he rest of it), and the doctor had said that the suppuration might allow the regular course. Fever had set in. The doctor had said this ever was not so serious. ‘But two days ago,’ Natasha began, ‘all of a sud- en this change came . . .’ She struggled with her sobs. ‘I don't know 7 hy, but you will see the change in him.’

‘He is weaker? thinner? . . .’ queried the princess.

‘No, not that, but worse. You will see. O Marie, he is too good, he annot, he cannot live, because . . .’

XV

Then Natasha opened the door with her practised hands, letting her ass in before her, Princess Marya felt the sobs rising in her throat, lowever much she prepared herself, however much she tried to com- ose herself, she knew that she would not be able to see him without ;sars.

She understood what Natasha had meant by the words: two days ago his change came. She interpreted it as meaning that he had suddenly rown softer, and that that softening, that tenderness, was the sign of

death. As she approached the door, she saw already in her irnaginatio: that face of the little Andryusha, as she had known it in childhood tender, gentle, softened, as it was so rarely, and as it affected her so strongly. She felt sure he would say soft, tender words to her like thos her father had uttered on his deathbed, and that she would not be abl to bear it, and would break into sobs at them. But sooner or later, i must be, and she went into the room. Her sobs seemed rising higher am higher in her throat as with her short-sighted eyes she distinguished hi figure more and more clearly, and now she saw his face and met his eyes

He was lying on a couch, propped up with cushions, in a squirrel lined dressing-gown. He was thin and pale. One thin, transparently whit hand held a handkerchief, with the other he was softly fingering thi delicate moustache that had grown long. His eyes gazed at them a they came in.

On seeing his face and meeting his eyes, Princess Marya at onci slackened the rapidity of her step and felt the tears dried up and th< sobs checked. As she caught the expression of his face and eyes, she fel suddenly shy and guilty.

‘But how am I in fault?’ she asked herself. ‘In being alive and thinkin; of the living while I! . . .’ his cold, stern eyes seemed to answer

In the profound, not outward- but inward-looking gaze there wai something almost like hostility as he deliberately scanned his sister anc Natasha. Pie kissed his sister’s hand, while she kissed his, as theii habit was.

‘How are you, Marie; how did you manage to get here?’ he said, in & voice as even and as aloof as the look in his eyes. If he had uttered aj shriek of despair, that shriek would have been to Princess Marya less awful than the sound of his voice.

‘And you have brought Nikolushka?’ he said, as evenly and deliber ately, with an evident effort to recollect things.

‘How are you now?’ said Princess Marya, wondering herself at whal she was saying.

‘That, my dear, you must ask the doctor,’ he said, and evidently making another effort to be affectionate, he said with his lips only (it was obvious he was not thinking of what he was saying):

‘Thank you, my dear, for coming.’

Princess Marya pressed his hand. He gave a hardly perceptible frowr at the pressure of her hand. She was silent, and she did not know what to say. She understood the change that had come over him two days ago In his words, in his tone, above all in his eyes—those cold, almost antagonistic eyes—could be felt that aloofness from all things earthly that is so fearful to a living man. It was evidently with difficulty that he understood anything living; but yet it seemed that he did not understand whal was living, not because he had lost the power of understanding, but because he understood something else that the living did not and could not understand, and that entirely absorbed him.

‘Yes, see how strangely fate has brought us together again,’ he said.

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reaking the silence, and pointing to Natasha. ‘She is nursing me.’

Princess Marya heard him, and could not understand what he was lying. He, Prince Andrey, with his delicate, tender intuition, how could e say that before the girl whom he loved, and who loved him! If he ad any thought of living, he could not have said that in that slightingly old tone. If he had not known he was going to die, how could he have ailed to feel for her, how could he speak like that before her! There ould be but one explanation of it—that was, that it was all of no mo- lent to him now, and of no moment because something else, more im- ortant, had been revealed to him.

The conversation was frigid and disconnected, and broke off at every poment.

1 ‘Marie came by Ryazan,’ said Natasha.

Prince Andrey did not notice that she called his sister Marie. And ■latasha, calling her by that name before him, for the first time became ware of it herself.

‘Well?’ said he.

‘She was told that Moscow had been burnt to the ground, all of it, ntirely. That it looks as though . . .’

Natasha stopped. It was impossible to talk. He was obviously making n effort to listen, and yet he could not.

‘Yes; it’s burnt, they say,’ he said. ‘That’s a great pity,’ and he gazed traight before him, his fingers straying heedlessly about his moustache.

‘And so you met Count Nikolay, Marie?’ said Prince Andrey, suddenly, vidently trying to say something to please them. ‘He wrote here what 1 great liking he took to you,’ he went on, simply and calmly, plainly inable to grasp all the complex significance his words had for living •eople. ‘If you liked him, too, it would be a very good thing ... for 'ou to get married,’ he added, rather more quickly, apparently pleased it finding at last the words he had been seeking. Princess Marya heard lis words, but they had no significance for her except as showing how erribly far away he was now from everything living.

‘Why talk of me?’ she said calmly, and glanced at Natasha. Natasha, eeling her eyes on her, did not look at her. Again all of them were silent.

‘Andrey, would you . . .’ Princess Marya said suddenly in a shaky 'oice, ‘would you like to see Nikolushka? He is always talking of you.’

For the first time Prince Andrey smiled a faintly perceptible smile, >ut Princess Marya, who knew his face so well, saw with horror that it vas a smile not of joy, not of tenderness for his son, but of quiet, gentle rony at his sister’s trying what she believed to be the last resource for ousing him to feeling.

‘Yes, I shall be very glad to see Nikolushka. Is he quite well?’

When they brought in little Nikolushka, who gazed in dismay at his ather, but did not cry, because nobody else was crying, Prince Andrey dssed him, and obviously did not know what to say to him.

When they had taken the child away, Princess Marya went up to her

brother once more, kissed him, and unable to control herself any longer began to weep.

He looked at her intently.

‘You weep for Nikolushka?’ he asked.

Princess Marya nodded through her tears.

‘Marie, you know the Gos . . .’ he began, but suddenly paused.

‘What do you say?’

‘Nothing. You mustn’t weep here,’ he said, looking at her with th same cold eyes.

When Princess Marya wept he knew that she was weeping that Niko lushka would be left without a father. With a great effort he tried t< come back again to life, and to put himself at their point of view.

‘Yes, it must seem sad to them,’ he thought. ‘But how simple it is!

‘ “They sow not, neither do they reap, but your Father feedeth them,” he said to himself, and he wanted to say it to his sister. But no, the] would understand it in their own way; they would not understand! Wha they cannot understand is that these feelings that they set store by—al our feelings, all these thoughts, which seem of so much importance to u: —that they are all not wanted! We cannot understand each other!’ am he was silent.

Prince Andrey’s little son was seven years old. He could hardly read— he knew nothing. He passed through much after that day, gaining know! edge, observation, experience. But if he had possessed at that time al the mental faculties he acquired afterwards, he could not have had £| truer, a deeper comprehension of all the significance of the scene he saw passing between his father, Princess Marya, and Natasha than he hac now. He understood it all, and without weeping, went out of the room in silence went up to Natasha, who had followed him out; glanced shyly at her with his beautiful, dreamy eyes: his uplifted, rosy upper lip quivered; he leaned his head against her, and burst into tears.

From that day he avoided Dessalle, avoided the countess, who woulc have petted him, and either sat alone, or shyly joined Princess Marys and Natasha, whom he seemed to love even more than his aunt, and bestowed shy and gentle caresses upon them.

When Princess Marya left her brother’s side, she fully understood all that Natasha’s face had told her. She spoke no more to Natasha of hope of saving his life. She took turns with her by his bedside, and she shed nc more tears, but prayed without ceasing, turning in spirit to the Eternal and Unfathomable whose presence was palpable now, hovering over the dying man.

XVI

Prince Andrey did not only know that he would die, but felt indeed that he was dying; that he was already half-dead. He experienced a sense of aloofness from everything earthly, and a strange and joyous lightness

imis being. Neither impatient, nor troubled, he lay awaiting what was bibre him. . . . The menacing, the eternal, the unknown, and remote, tf presence of which he had never ceased to feel during the whole course of his life, was now close to him, and—from that strange lightness of brig, that he experienced—almost comprehensible and palpable.

n the past he had dreaded the end. Twice he had experienced that teribly agonising feeling of the dread of death, of the end, and now he h.l ceased to understand it.

The first time he had experienced that feeling when the grenade was rating before him, and he looked at the stubble, at the bushes, at the sh, and knew that death was facing him. When he had come to himself aer his wound, and instantly, as though set free from the cramping bidage of life, there had sprung up in his soul that tlower of love, eternal, fie, not dependent on this life, he had no more fear, and no more thought, 0 death.

In those hours of solitary suffering and half-delirium that he spent aerwards, the more he passed in thought into that new element of ernal love, revealed to him, the further he unconsciously travelled from e thly life. To love everything, every one, to sacrifice self always for love, nant to love no one, meant not to live this earthly life. And the further h penetrated into that element of love, the more he renounced life, and t 1 more completely he annihilated that fearful barrier that love sets up biween life and death. Whenever, during that first period, he remembered t it he had to die, he said to himself: ‘Well, so much the better.’

But after that night at Mytishtchy, when in his half-delirium she, vom he had longed for, appeared before him, and when pressing her bnd to his lips, he wept soft, happy tears, love for one woman stole unseen i 0 his heart, and bound him again to life. And glad and disturbing tmghts began to come back to him. Recalling that moment at the aibulance station, when he had seen Kuragin, he could not now go back this feeling then. He was fretted by the question whether he were alive, /id he dared not ask.

His illness went through its regular physical course; but what Natasha Id called ‘this change’ had come upon him two days before Princess larya’s arrival. It was the last moral struggle between life and death, i which death gained the victory. It was the sudden consciousness that le, in the shape of his love for Natasha, was still precious to him, and te last and vanquished onslaught of terror before the unknown.

Tt happened in the evening. He was, as usually after dinner, in a slightly i/erish condition, and his thoughts were particularly clear. Sonya was i ting at the table. He fell into a doze. He felt a sudden sense of happi- sss.

‘Ah, she has come in! ’ he thought.

Natasha had, in fact, just come in with noiseless steps, and was sitting i Sonya’s place.

Ever since she had been looking after him he had always felt t; physical sense of her presence. She was in a low chair beside him, knitt > a stocking, and sitting so as to screen the light of the candle from h, She had learned to knit since Prince Andrey had once said to her that i one made such a good sick-nurse as an old nurse who knitted stockin i and that there was something soothing about knitting. Her slender fing; moved the needles rapidly with a slight click, and the dreamy profile! her drooping head could be clearly seen by him. She made a slight mo • ment; the ball rolled off her knee. She started, glanced round at him, a;, screening the light with her hand, bent over with a cautious, supple, a I precise movement, picked up the ball, and sat back in the same attitude; before.

He gazed at her without stirring, and saw that after her movements si; wanted to draw a deep breath, but did not dare to, and breathed wi careful self-restraint.

At the Troitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he M told her that if he were to live he should thank God for ever for his woui, which had brought them together again; but since then they had ne v spoken of the future.

‘Could it be, or could it not?’ he was wondering now as he watched b and listened to the slight steel click of the needles. ‘Can fate have broug us together so strangely only for me to die? . . . Can the truth of h have been revealed to me only for me to have spent my life in falsity love her more than anything in the world! But what am I to do if I lei; her?’ he said, and suddenly he unconsciously moaned from the habit ; had fallen into in the course of his sufferings.

Hearing the sound, Natasha laid down her stocking, and bent do\ closer to him, and suddenly noticing his shining eyes, went up to hi with a light step and stooped down.

‘You are not asleep?’

‘No; I have been looking at you for a long while. I felt when you can in. No one but you gives me the same soft peace . . . the same ligi, I want to weep with gladness! ’

Natasha moved closer to him. Her face beamed with rapturous deligl,

‘Natasha, I love you too much! More than everything in the world!’

‘And I?’ She turned away for a second. ‘Why too much?’ she said.

‘Why too much? . . . Well, what do you think, what do you feel i your heart, your whole heart, am I going to live? What do you think?’

‘I am sure of it; sure of it!’ Natasha almost cried out, taking both 1 , hands with a passionate gesture.

He was silent for a while.

‘How good it would be! ’ And taking her hand, he kissed it.

Natasha was happy and deeply stirred; and she recollected at once tl: this must not be, and that he must have quiet.

‘But you are not asleep,’ she said, subduing her joy. ‘Try and sle) . . . please do.’

He pressed her hand and let it go, and she moved back to the cand,

ad sat down in the same position as before. Twice she glanced round at Im; his eyes were bright as she met them. She set herself a task on her Peking, and told herself she would not look round till she had finished it. He did, in fact, soon after shut his eyes and fall asleep. He did not ;;ep long, and woke up suddenly in a cold sweat of alarm.

As he fell asleep he was still thinking of what he had been thinking aout all the time—of life and of death. And most of death. He felt he ns closer to it.

‘Love? What is love?’ he thought.

‘Love hinders death. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I undersand only because I love. All is, all exists only because I love. All is bund up in love alone. Love is God, and dying means for me a particle of Ire, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.’ These thoughts semed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was Anting in them; there was something one-sided and personal, some- ting intellectual; they were not self-evident. And there was uneasiness, lo, and obscurity. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the very room in which he was lying i reality, but that he was not ill, but quite well. Many people of various srts, indifferent people of no importance, were present. He was talking ; d disputing with them about some trivial matter. They seemed to be j.eparing to set off somewhere. Prince Andrey had a dim feeling that a this was of no consequence, and that he had other matters of graver lament to think of, but still he went on uttering empty witticisms of some art that surprised them. By degrees all these people began to disappear,

; d the one thing left was the question of closing the door. He got up and |nt towards the door to close it and bolt it. Everything depended on nether he were in time to shut it or not. He was going, he was hurrying, It his legs would not move, and he knew that he would not have time (shut the door, but still he was painfully straining every effort to do so. Ad an agonising terror came-upon him. And that terror was the fear of cath; behind the door stood It. But while he is helplessly and clumsily s uggling towards the door, that something awful is already pressing lainst the other side of it, and forcing the door open. Something not lman—death—is forcing the door open, and he must hold it to. b clutches at the door with a last straining effort—to shut it is ipossible, at least to hold it—but his efforts are feeble and awkward;

Once more It was pressing on the door from without. His last, super- l tural efforts are vain, and both leaves of the door are noiselessly (ened. It comes in, and it is death. And Prince Andrey died.

But at the instant whea in his dream he died, Prince Andrey recol- l:ted that he was asleep; and at the instant when he was dying, he made ; effort and waked up.

‘Yes, that was death. I died and I waked up. Yes, death is an awaken- ig/ flashed with sudden light into his soul, and the veil that had till

926 WARANDPEACE

then hidden the unknown was lifted before his spiritual vision. He felt, a; it were, set free from some force that held him in bondage, and was awan of that strange lightness of being that had not left him since.

When he waked up in a cold sweat and moved on the couch, Natashf went up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer, anc looked at her with strange eyes, not understanding her.

That was the change that had come over him two days before Princes; Marya’s arrival. The doctor said that from that day the wasting fevet had assumed a more serious aspect, but Natasha paid little heed to wha the doctor said; she saw the terrible moral symptoms, that for her wen far more convincing.

With his awakening from sleep that day there began for Prince Andre; an awakening from life. And in relation to the duration of life it seemet to him not more prolonged than the awakening from sleep in relation ti the duration of a dream. There was nothing violent or terrible in thi; relatively slow awakening.

His last days and hours passed in a simple and commonplace way Princess Marya and Natasha, who never left his side, both felt that. The; did not weep nor shudder, and towards the last they both felt they wer waiting not on him (he was no more; he had gone far away from them) but on the nearest memory of him—his body. The feelings of both o them were so strong that the external, horrible side of death did no affect them, and they did not find it needful to work up their grief. The; did not weep either in his presence nor away from him, and they neve even talked of him together. They felt that they could not express ii words what they understood.

They both saw that he was slowly and quietly slipping further am further away from them, and both knew that this must be so, and that i was well. He received absolution and extreme unction; every one came t bid him good-bye. When his son was brought in to him, he pressed hi lips to him and turned away, not because' it was painful or sad to hir (Princess Marya and Natasha saw that), but simply because he suppose he had done all that was required of him. But he was told to give him hi blessing, he did what was required, and looked round as though to as! whether there was anything else he must do. When the body, deserted b the spirit, passed through its last struggles, Princess Marya and Natash were there.

‘It is over!’ said Princess Marya, after the body had lain for som moments motionless, and growing cold before them. Natasha went closf glanced at the dead eyes, and made haste to shut them. She closed then and did not kiss them, but hung over what was the nearest memory c him. ‘Where has he gone? Where is he now?. . . .’

When the body lay, dressed and washed, in the coffin on the table, ever one came to take leave of him, and every one cried. Nikolushka crie from the agonising bewilderment that was rending his heart. The counte: and Sonya cried from pity for Natasha, and from grief that he was gon

jhe old count cried because he felt that he too must soon take the same terrible step.

Natasha and Princess Marya wept too now. But they did not weep for their personal sorrow; they wept from the emotion and awe that filled their souls before the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before their eyes.

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