War and Peace
Sobbing, she kissed and comforted Natásha. “If only he lives!” she
thought. Having wept, talked, and wiped away their tears, the two
friends went together to Prince Andrew’s door. Natásha opened it
cautiously and glanced into the room, Sónya standing beside her at the
half-open door.
Prince Andrew was lying raised high on three pillows. His pale face was
calm, his eyes closed, and they could see his regular breathing.
“O, Natásha!” Sónya suddenly almost screamed, catching her companion’s
arm and stepping back from the door.
“What? What is it?” asked Natásha.
“It’s that, that...” said Sónya, with a white face and trembling lips.
Natásha softly closed the door and went with Sónya to the window, not
yet understanding what the latter was telling her.
“You remember,” said Sónya with a solemn and frightened expression.
“You remember when I looked in the mirror for you... at Otrádnoe at
Christmas? Do you remember what I saw?”
“Yes, yes!” cried Natásha opening her eyes wide, and vaguely recalling
that Sónya had told her something about Prince Andrew whom she had seen
lying down.
“You remember?” Sónya went on. “I saw it then and told everybody, you
and Dunyásha. I saw him lying on a bed,” said she, making a gesture with
her hand and a lifted finger at each detail, “and that he had his eyes
closed and was covered just with a pink quilt, and that his hands were
folded,” she concluded, convincing herself that the details she had just
seen were exactly what she had seen in the mirror.
She had in fact seen nothing then but had mentioned the first thing that
came into her head, but what she had invented then seemed to her now
as real as any other recollection. She not only remembered what she had
then said—that he turned to look at her and smiled and was covered with
something red—but was firmly convinced that she had then seen and said
that he was covered with a pink quilt and that his eyes were closed.
“Yes, yes, it really was pink!” cried Natásha, who now thought she
too remembered the word pink being used, and saw in this the most
extraordinary and mysterious part of the prediction.
“But what does it mean?” she added meditatively.
“Oh, I don’t know, it is all so strange,” replied Sónya, clutching at
her head.
A few minutes later Prince Andrew rang and Natásha went to him, but
Sónya, feeling unusually excited and touched, remained at the window
thinking about the strangeness of what had occurred.
They had an opportunity that day to send letters to the army, and the
countess was writing to her son.
“Sónya!” said the countess, raising her eyes from her letter as her
niece passed, “Sónya, won’t you write to Nicholas?” She spoke in a soft,
tremulous voice, and in the weary eyes that looked over her spectacles
Sónya read all that the countess meant to convey with these words. Those
eyes expressed entreaty, shame at having to ask, fear of a refusal, and
readiness for relentless hatred in case of such refusal.
Sónya went up to the countess and, kneeling down, kissed her hand.
“Yes, Mamma, I will write,” said she.
Sónya was softened, excited, and touched by all that had occurred that
day, especially by the mysterious fulfillment she had just seen of her
vision. Now that she knew that the renewal of Natásha’s relations with
Prince Andrew would prevent Nicholas from marrying Princess Mary, she
was joyfully conscious of a return of that self-sacrificing spirit in
which she was accustomed to live and loved to live. So with a joyful
consciousness of performing a magnanimous deed—interrupted several times
by the tears that dimmed her velvety black eyes—she wrote that touching
letter the arrival of which had so amazed Nicholas.
CHAPTER IX
The officer and soldiers who had arrested Pierre treated him with
hostility but yet with respect, in the guardhouse to which he was taken.
In their attitude toward him could still be felt both uncertainty as
to who he might be—perhaps a very important person—and hostility as a
result of their recent personal conflict with him.
But when the guard was relieved next morning, Pierre felt that for the
new guard—both officers and men—he was not as interesting as he had
been to his captors; and in fact the guard of the second day did not
recognize in this big, stout man in a peasant coat the vigorous person
who had fought so desperately with the marauder and the convoy and had
uttered those solemn words about saving a child; they saw in him only
No. 17 of the captured Russians, arrested and detained for some reason
by order of the Higher Command. If they noticed anything remarkable
about Pierre, it was only his unabashed, meditative concentration
and thoughtfulness, and the way he spoke French, which struck them as
surprisingly good. In spite of this he was placed that day with the
other arrested suspects, as the separate room he had occupied was
required by an officer.
All the Russians confined with Pierre were men of the lowest class and,
recognizing him as a gentleman, they all avoided him, more especially as
he spoke French. Pierre felt sad at hearing them making fun of him.
That evening he learned that all these prisoners (he, probably, among
them) were to be tried for incendiarism. On the third day he was taken
with the others to a house where a French general with a white mustache
sat with two colonels and other Frenchmen with scarves on their arms.
With the precision and definiteness customary in addressing prisoners,
and which is supposed to preclude human frailty, Pierre like the others
was questioned as to who he was, where he had been, with what object,
and so on.
These questions, like questions put at trials generally, left the
essence of the matter aside, shut out the possibility of that essence’s
being revealed, and were designed only to form a channel through which
the judges wished the answers of the accused to flow so as to lead to
the desired result, namely a conviction. As soon as Pierre began to say
anything that did not fit in with that aim, the channel was removed and
the water could flow to waste. Pierre felt, moreover, what the accused
always feel at their trial, perplexity as to why these questions were
put to him. He had a feeling that it was only out of condescension or a
kind of civility that this device of placing a channel was employed. He
knew he was in these men’s power, that only by force had they brought
him there, that force alone gave them the right to demand answers
to their questions, and that the sole object of that assembly was to
inculpate him. And so, as they had the power and wish to inculpate
him, this expedient of an inquiry and trial seemed unnecessary. It was
evident that any answer would lead to conviction. When asked what he
was doing when he was arrested, Pierre replied in a rather tragic manner
that he was restoring to its parents a child he had saved from the
flames. Why had he fought the marauder? Pierre answered that he “was
protecting a woman,” and that “to protect a woman who was being insulted
was the duty of every man; that...” They interrupted him, for this
was not to the point. Why was he in the yard of a burning house where
witnesses had seen him? He replied that he had gone out to see what
was happening in Moscow. Again they interrupted him: they had not asked
where he was going, but why he was found near the fire? Who was he? they
asked, repeating their first question, which he had declined to answer.
Again he replied that he could not answer it.
“Put that down, that’s bad... very bad,” sternly remarked the general
with the white mustache and red flushed face.
On the fourth day fires broke out on the Zúbovski rampart.
Pierre and thirteen others were moved to the coach house of a merchant’s
house near the Crimean bridge. On his way through the streets Pierre
felt stifled by the smoke which seemed to hang over the whole
city. Fires were visible on all sides. He did not then realize the
significance of the burning of Moscow, and looked at the fires with
horror.
He passed four days in the coach house near the Crimean bridge and
during that time learned, from the talk of the French soldiers, that all
those confined there were awaiting a decision which might come any day
from the marshal. What marshal this was, Pierre could not learn from the
soldiers. Evidently for them “the marshal” represented a very high and
rather mysterious power.
These first days, before the eighth of September when the prisoners were
had up for a second examination, were the hardest of all for Pierre.
CHAPTER X
On the eighth of September an officer—a very important one judging by
the respect the guards showed him—entered the coach house where the
prisoners were. This officer, probably someone on the staff, was holding
a paper in his hand, and called over all the Russians there, naming
Pierre as “the man who does not give his name.” Glancing indolently and
indifferently at all the prisoners, he ordered the officer in charge
to have them decently dressed and tidied up before taking them to the
marshal. An hour later a squad of soldiers arrived and Pierre with
thirteen others was led to the Virgin’s Field. It was a fine day, sunny
after rain, and the air was unusually pure. The smoke did not hang low
as on the day when Pierre had been taken from the guardhouse on the
Zúbovski rampart, but rose through the pure air in columns. No flames
were seen, but columns of smoke rose on all sides, and all Moscow as far
as Pierre could see was one vast charred ruin. On all sides there were
waste spaces with only stoves and chimney stacks still standing, and
here and there the blackened walls of some brick houses. Pierre gazed
at the ruins and did not recognize districts he had known well. Here and
there he could see churches that had not been burned. The Krémlin, which
was not destroyed, gleamed white in the distance with its towers and
the belfry of Iván the Great. The domes of the New Convent of the Virgin
glittered brightly and its bells were ringing particularly clearly.
These bells reminded Pierre that it was Sunday and the feast of the
Nativity of the Virgin. But there seemed to be no one to celebrate this
holiday: everywhere were blackened ruins, and the few Russians to be
seen were tattered and frightened people who tried to hide when they saw
the French.
It was plain that the Russian nest was ruined and destroyed, but in
place of the Russian order of life that had been destroyed, Pierre
unconsciously felt that a quite different, firm, French order had been
established over this ruined nest. He felt this in the looks of
the soldiers who, marching in regular ranks briskly and gaily, were
escorting him and the other criminals; he felt it in the looks of an
important French official in a carriage and pair driven by a soldier,
whom they met on the way. He felt it in the merry sounds of regimental
music he heard from the left side of the field, and felt and realized
it especially from the list of prisoners the French officer had read out
when he came that morning. Pierre had been taken by one set of soldiers
and led first to one and then to another place with dozens of other men,
and it seemed that they might have forgotten him, or confused him with
the others. But no: the answers he had given when questioned had come
back to him in his designation as “the man who does not give his name,”
and under that appellation, which to Pierre seemed terrible, they were
now leading him somewhere with unhesitating assurance on their faces
that he and all the other prisoners were exactly the ones they wanted
and that they were being taken to the proper place. Pierre felt himself
to be an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of a machine whose
action he did not understand but which was working well.