War and Peace
had guarded and which is now no more. They reek of decay and death. Only
a few of them still move, rise, and feebly fly to settle on the enemy’s
hand, lacking the spirit to die stinging him; the rest are dead and fall
as lightly as fish scales. The beekeeper closes the hive, chalks a mark
on it, and when he has time tears out its contents and burns it clean.
So in the same way Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, uneasy, and
morose, paced up and down in front of the Kámmer-Kollézski rampart,
awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, if but formal, observance of
the proprieties—a deputation.
In various corners of Moscow there still remained a few people aimlessly
moving about, following their old habits and hardly aware of what they
were doing.
When with due circumspection Napoleon was informed that Moscow was
empty, he looked angrily at his informant, turned away, and silently
continued to walk to and fro.
“My carriage!” he said.
He took his seat beside the aide-de-camp on duty and drove into the
suburb. “Moscow deserted!” he said to himself. “What an incredible
event!”
He did not drive into the town, but put up at an inn in the Dorogomílov
suburb.
The coup de théâtre had not come off.
CHAPTER XXI
The Russian troops were passing through Moscow from two o’clock at night
till two in the afternoon and bore away with them the wounded and the
last of the inhabitants who were leaving.
The greatest crush during the movement of the troops took place at the
Stone, Moskvá, and Yaúza bridges.
While the troops, dividing into two parts when passing around the
Krémlin, were thronging the Moskvá and the Stone bridges, a great many
soldiers, taking advantage of the stoppage and congestion, turned back
from the bridges and slipped stealthily and silently past the church of
Vasíli the Beatified and under the Borovítski gate, back up the hill
to the Red Square where some instinct told them they could easily take
things not belonging to them. Crowds of the kind seen at cheap sales
filled all the passages and alleys of the Bazaar. But there were no
dealers with voices of ingratiating affability inviting customers to
enter; there were no hawkers, nor the usual motley crowd of female
purchasers—but only soldiers, in uniforms and overcoats though without
muskets, entering the Bazaar empty-handed and silently making their way
out through its passages with bundles. Tradesmen and their assistants
(of whom there were but few) moved about among the soldiers quite
bewildered. They unlocked their shops and locked them up again, and
themselves carried goods away with the help of their assistants. On the
square in front of the Bazaar were drummers beating the muster call.
But the roll of the drums did not make the looting soldiers run in the
direction of the drum as formerly, but made them, on the contrary, run
farther away. Among the soldiers in the shops and passages some men were
to be seen in gray coats, with closely shaven heads. Two officers, one
with a scarf over his uniform and mounted on a lean, dark-gray horse,
the other in an overcoat and on foot, stood at the corner of Ilyínka
Street, talking. A third officer galloped up to them.
“The general orders them all to be driven out at once, without fail.
This is outrageous! Half the men have dispersed.”
“Where are you off to?... Where?...” he shouted to three infantrymen
without muskets who, holding up the skirts of their overcoats, were
slipping past him into the Bazaar passage. “Stop, you rascals!”
“But how are you going to stop them?” replied another officer. “There is
no getting them together. The army should push on before the rest bolt,
that’s all!”
“How can one push on? They are stuck there, wedged on the bridge, and
don’t move. Shouldn’t we put a cordon round to prevent the rest from
running away?”
“Come, go in there and drive them out!” shouted the senior officer.
The officer in the scarf dismounted, called up a drummer, and went with
him into the arcade. Some soldiers started running away in a group. A
shopkeeper with red pimples on his cheeks near the nose, and a calm,
persistent, calculating expression on his plump face, hurriedly and
ostentatiously approached the officer, swinging his arms.
“Your honor!” said he. “Be so good as to protect us! We won’t grudge
trifles, you are welcome to anything—we shall be delighted! Pray!...
I’ll fetch a piece of cloth at once for such an honorable gentleman,
or even two pieces with pleasure. For we feel how it is; but what’s all
this—sheer robbery! If you please, could not guards be placed if only to
let us close the shop....”
Several shopkeepers crowded round the officer.
“Eh, what twaddle!” said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. “When
one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep for one’s hair! Take what any of you
like!” And flourishing his arm energetically he turned sideways to the
officer.
“It’s all very well for you, Iván Sidórych, to talk,” said the first
tradesman angrily. “Please step inside, your honor!”
“Talk indeed!” cried the thin one. “In my three shops here I have a
hundred thousand rubles’ worth of goods. Can they be saved when the army
has gone? Eh, what people! ‘Against God’s might our hands can’t fight.’”
“Come inside, your honor!” repeated the tradesman, bowing.
The officer stood perplexed and his face showed indecision.
“It’s not my business!” he exclaimed, and strode on quickly down one of
the passages.
From one open shop came the sound of blows and vituperation, and just
as the officer came up to it a man in a gray coat with a shaven head was
flung out violently.
This man, bent double, rushed past the tradesman and the officer. The
officer pounced on the soldiers who were in the shops, but at that
moment fearful screams reached them from the huge crowd on the Moskvá
bridge and the officer ran out into the square.
“What is it? What is it?” he asked, but his comrade was already
galloping off past Vasíli the Beatified in the direction from which the
screams came.
The officer mounted his horse and rode after him. When he reached the
bridge he saw two unlimbered guns, the infantry crossing the bridge,
several overturned carts, and frightened and laughing faces among the
troops. Beside the cannon a cart was standing to which two horses were
harnessed. Four borzois with collars were pressing close to the wheels.
The cart was loaded high, and at the very top, beside a child’s chair
with its legs in the air, sat a peasant woman uttering piercing and
desperate shrieks. He was told by his fellow officers that the screams
of the crowd and the shrieks of the woman were due to the fact that
General Ermólov, coming up to the crowd and learning that soldiers were
dispersing among the shops while crowds of civilians blocked the bridge,
had ordered two guns to be unlimbered and made a show of firing at the
bridge. The crowd, crushing one another, upsetting carts, and shouting
and squeezing desperately, had cleared off the bridge and the troops
were now moving forward.
CHAPTER XXII
Meanwhile, the city itself was deserted. There was hardly anyone in the
streets. The gates and shops were all closed, only here and there round
the taverns solitary shouts or drunken songs could be heard. Nobody
drove through the streets and footsteps were rarely heard. The
Povarskáya was quite still and deserted. The huge courtyard of the
Rostóvs’ house was littered with wisps of hay and with dung from the
horses, and not a soul was to be seen there. In the great drawing
room of the house, which had been left with all it contained, were
two people. They were the yard porter Ignát, and the page boy Míshka,
Vasílich’s grandson who had stayed in Moscow with his grandfather.
Míshka had opened the clavichord and was strumming on it with
one finger. The yard porter, his arms akimbo, stood smiling with
satisfaction before the large mirror.
“Isn’t it fine, eh, Uncle Ignát?” said the boy, suddenly beginning to
strike the keyboard with both hands.
“Only fancy!” answered Ignát, surprised at the broadening grin on his
face in the mirror.
“Impudence! Impudence!” they heard behind them the voice of Mávra
Kuzmínichna who had entered silently. “How he’s grinning, the fat mug!
Is that what you’re here for? Nothing’s cleared away down there and
Vasílich is worn out. Just you wait a bit!”
Ignát left off smiling, adjusted his belt, and went out of the room with
meekly downcast eyes.
“Aunt, I did it gently,” said the boy.
“I’ll give you something gently, you monkey you!” cried Mávra
Kuzmínichna, raising her arm threateningly. “Go and get the samovar to
boil for your grandfather.”
Mávra Kuzmínichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, and
with a deep sigh left the drawing room and locked its main door.
Going out into the yard she paused to consider where she should go
next—to drink tea in the servants’ wing with Vasílich, or into the
storeroom to put away what still lay about.
She heard the sound of quick footsteps in the quiet street. Someone
stopped at the gate, and the latch rattled as someone tried to open it.
Mávra Kuzmínichna went to the gate.
“Who do you want?”
“The count—Count Ilyá Andréevich Rostóv.”
“And who are you?”
“An officer, I have to see him,” came the reply in a pleasant, well-bred
Russian voice.
Mávra Kuzmínichna opened the gate and an officer of eighteen, with the
round face of a Rostóv, entered the yard.
“They have gone away, sir. Went away yesterday at vespertime,” said
Mávra Kuzmínichna cordially.
The young officer standing in the gateway, as if hesitating whether to
enter or not, clicked his tongue.
“Ah, how annoying!” he muttered. “I should have come yesterday.... Ah,
what a pity.”
Meanwhile, Mávra Kuzmínichna was attentively and sympathetically
examining the familiar Rostóv features of the young man’s face, his
tattered coat and trodden-down boots.
“What did you want to see the count for?” she asked.
“Oh well... it can’t be helped!” said he in a tone of vexation and
placed his hand on the gate as if to leave.
He again paused in indecision.
“You see,” he suddenly said, “I am a kinsman of the count’s and he has
been very kind to me. As you see” (he glanced with an amused air and
good-natured smile at his coat and boots) “my things are worn out and I
have no money, so I was going to ask the count...”
Mávra Kuzmínichna did not let him finish.
“Just wait a minute, sir. One little moment,” said she.
And as soon as the officer let go of the gate handle she turned and,
hurrying away on her old legs, went through the back yard to the
servants’ quarters.
While Mávra Kuzmínichna was running to her room the officer walked about
the yard gazing at his worn-out boots with lowered head and a faint
smile on his lips. “What a pity I’ve missed Uncle! What a nice old
woman! Where has she run off to? And how am I to find the nearest way
to overtake my regiment, which must by now be getting near the Rogózhski
gate?” thought he. Just then Mávra Kuzmínichna appeared from behind
the corner of the house with a frightened yet resolute look, carrying a
rolled-up check kerchief in her hand. While still a few steps from
the officer she unfolded the kerchief and took out of it a white
twenty-five-ruble assignat and hastily handed it to him.
“If his excellency had been at home, as a kinsman he would of course...
but as it is...”
Mávra Kuzmínichna grew abashed and confused. The officer did not
decline, but took the note quietly and thanked her.
“If the count had been at home...” Mávra Kuzmínichna went on
apologetically. “Christ be with you, sir! May God preserve you!” said
she, bowing as she saw him out.
Swaying his head and smiling as if amused at himself, the officer ran