War and Peace (170 page)

Next day with the simple aim of not sparing himself and not doing less than
they
would do, he had gone out to the Three Hills barrier. But when he came back, convinced that Moscow would not be defended, he suddenly felt that what had only occurred to him before as a possibility had now become something necessary and inevitable. He must remain in Moscow, concealing his name, must meet Napoleon, and kill him, so as either to perish or to put an end to the misery of all Europe, which was in Pierre’s opinion entirely due to Napoleon alone.

Pierre knew all the details of the German student’s attempt on Napoleon’s life at Vienna in 1809, and knew that that student had been shot. And the danger to which he would be exposing his own life in carrying out his design excited him even more violently.

Two equally powerful feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to his design. The first was the craving for sacrifice and suffering through the sense of the common calamity, the feeling that had impelled him to go to Mozhaisk on the 25th, and to place himself in the very thick of the battle, and now to run away from his own house, to give up his accustomed luxury and comfort, to sleep without undressing on a hard sofa, and to
eat the same food as Gerasim. The other was that vague and exclusively Russian feeling of contempt for everything conventional, artificial, human, for everything that is regarded by the majority of men as the highest good in the world. Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort, is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.

It was the same feeling that impels the volunteer-recruit to drink up his last farthing, the drunken man to smash looking-glasses and window-panes for no apparent cause, though he knows it will cost him his little all; the feeling through which a man in doing things, vulgarly speaking, senseless, as it were, proves his personal force and power, by manifesting the presence of a higher standard of judging life, outside mere human limitations.

Ever since the day when Pierre first experienced this feeling in the Slobodsky palace, he had been continually under the influence of it, but it was only now that it found full satisfaction. Moreover at the present moment Pierre was supported in his design, and prevented from abandoning it, by the steps he had already taken in that direction. His flight from his own house, and his disguise, and his pistol, and his statement to the Rostovs that he should remain in Moscow,—all would have been devoid of meaning, would have been indeed absurd and laughable (a point to which Pierre was sensitive) if after all that he had simply gone out of Moscow like other people.

Pierre’s physical state, as is always the case, corresponded with his moral condition. The coarse fare to which he was unused, the vodka he drank during those days, the lack of wine and cigars, his dirty, unchanged linen, and two half-sleepless nights, spent on a short sofa without bedding, all reduced Pierre to a state of nervous irritability bordering on madness.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The French had already entered Moscow. Pierre knew this, but instead of acting, he only brooded over his enterprise, going over all the minutest details of it. In his dreams Pierre never clearly pictured the very act of striking the blow, nor the death of Napoleon, but with extraordinary vividness and mournful enjoyment dwelt on his own end and his heroic fortitude.

“Yes, one man for all, I must act or perish!” he thought. “Yes, I will approach … and then all at once … with a pistol or a dagger!” thought
Pierre. “But that doesn’t matter. It’s not I but the Hand of Providence punishes you.… I shall say” (Pierre pondered over the words he would utter as he killed Napoleon). “Well, take me, execute me!” Pierre would murmur to himself, bowing his head with a sad but firm expression on his face.

While Pierre was standing in the middle of the room, musing in this fashion, the door of the study opened, and Makar Alexyevitch—always hitherto so timid—appeared in the doorway, completely transformed.

His dressing-gown was hanging open. His face was red and distorted. He was unmistakably drunk. On seeing Pierre he was for the first minute disconcerted, but observing discomfiture in Pierre’s face too, he was at once emboldened by it; and with his thin, tottering legs walked into the middle of the room.

“They have grown fearful,” he said, in a husky and confidential voice. “I say: I will not surrender, I say … eh, sir?” He paused and suddenly catching sight of the pistol on the table, snatched it with surprising rapidity and ran out into the corridor.

Gerasim and the porter, who had followed Makar Alexyevitch, stopped him in the vestibule, and tried to get the pistol away from him. Pierre coming out of the study looked with repugnance and compassion at the half-insane old man. Makar Alexyevitch, frowning with effort, succeeded in keeping the pistol, and was shouting in a husky voice, evidently imagining some heroic scene.

“To arms! Board them! You shan’t get it!” he was shouting.

“Give over, please, give over. Do me the favour, sir, please be quiet. There now, if you please, sir,…” Gerasim was saying, cautiously trying to steer Makar Alexyevitch by his elbows towards the door.

“Who are you? Bonaparte!…” yelled Makar Alexyevitch.

“That’s not the thing, sir. You come into your room and rest a little. Let me have the pistol now.”

“Away, base slave! Don’t touch me! Do you see?” screamed Makar Alexyevitch, brandishing the pistol. “Run them down!”

“Take hold!” Gerasim whispered to the porter.

They seized Makar Alexyevitch by the arms and dragged him towards the door.

The vestibule was filled with the unseemly sounds of scuffling and drunken, husky gasping.

Suddenly a new sound, a shrill, feminine shriek, was heard from the porch, and the cook ran into the vestibule.

“They! Merciful heavens!… My goodness, here they are! Four of them, horsemen!” she screamed.

Gerasim and the porter let Makar Alexyevitch go, and in the hush that followed in the corridor they could distinctly hear several hands knocking at the front door.

Having inwardly resolved that until the execution of his design, he ought to disguise his station and his knowledge of French, Pierre stood at the half-open door into the corridor, intending to conceal himself at once as soon as the French entered. But the French entered, and Pierre did not leave the door; an irresistible curiosity kept him there.

There were two of them. One—an officer, a tall, handsome man of gallant bearing; the other, obviously a soldier or officer’s servant, a squat, thin, sunburnt man, with hollow cheeks and a dull expression. The officer walked first, limping and leaning on a stick. After advancing a few steps, the officer apparently making up his mind that these would be good quarters, stopped, turned round and shouted in a loud, peremptory voice to the soldiers standing in the doorway to put up the horses. Having done this the officer, with a jaunty gesture, crooking his elbow high in the air, stroked his moustaches and put his hand to his hat.

“
Bonjour, la compagnie!
” he said gaily, smiling and looking about him.

No one made any reply.

“
Vous êtes le bourgeois?
” the officer asked, addressing Gerasim.

Gerasim looked back with scared inquiry at the officer.

“
Quartire, quartire, logement
,” said the officer, looking down with a condescending and good-humoured smile at the little man. “The French are good lads. Don’t let us be cross, old fellow,” he went on in French, clapping the scared and mute Gerasim on the shoulder. “I say, does no one speak French in this establishment?” he added, looking round and meeting Pierre’s eyes. Pierre withdrew from the door.

The officer turned again to Gerasim. He asked him to show him over the house.

“Master not here—no understand … me you …” said Gerasim, trying to make his words more comprehensible by saying them in reverse order.

The French officer, smiling, waved his hands in front of Gerasim’s nose, to give him to understand that he too failed to understand him, and walked with a limp towards the door where Pierre was standing. Pierre was about to retreat to conceal himself from him, but at that very second he caught sight of Makar Alexyevitch peeping out of the open kitchen door with a pistol in his hand. With a madman’s cunning, Makar Alexyevitch eyed the Frenchmen, and lifting the pistol, took aim. “Run them down!!!” yelled the drunkard, pressing the trigger. The French officer turned round at the scream, and at the same instant Pierre dashed at the drunken man. Just as Pierre snatched at the pistol and jerked it up, Makar Alexyevitch succeeded at last in pressing the trigger, and a deafening shot rang out, wrapping every one in a cloud of smoke. The Frenchman turned pale and rushed back to the door.

Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French, Pierre pulled away the pistol, and throwing it on the ground, ran to the officer and addressed him in French. “You are not wounded?” he said.

“I think not,” answered the officer, feeling himself; “but I have had a narrow escape this time,” he added, pointing to the broken plaster in the wall.

“Who is this man?” he asked, looking sternly at Pierre.

“Oh, I am really in despair at what has happened,” said Pierre quickly, quite forgetting his part. “It is a madman, an unhappy creature, who did not know what he was doing.”

The officer went up to Makar Alexyevitch and took him by the collar.

Makar Alexyevitch pouting out his lips, nodded, as he leaned against the wall, as though dropping asleep.

“Brigand, you shall pay for it,” said the Frenchman, letting go of him. “We are clement after victory, but we do not pardon traitors,” he added, with gloomy dignity in his face, and a fine, vigorous gesture.

Pierre tried in French to persuade the officer not to be severe with this drunken imbecile. The Frenchman listened in silence, with the same gloomy air, and then suddenly turned with a smile to Pierre. For several seconds he gazed at him mutely. His handsome face assumed an expression of melodramatic feeling, and he held out his hand.

“You have saved my life. You are French,” he said. For a Frenchman, the deduction followed indubitably. An heroic action could only be performed by a Frenchman, and to save the life of him, M. Ramballe, captain of the 13th Light Brigade, was undoubtedly a most heroic action.

But however indubitable this logic, and well grounded the conviction
the officer based on it, Pierre thought well to disillusion him on the subject.

“I am Russian,” he said quickly.

“Tell that to others,” said the Frenchman, smiling and waving his finger before his nose. “You shall tell me all about it directly,” he said. “Charmed to meet a compatriot. Well, what are we to do with this man?” he added, applying to Pierre now as though to a comrade. If Pierre were indeed not a Frenchman, he would hardly on receiving that appellation—the most honourable in the world—care to disavow it, was what the expression and tone of the French officer suggested. To his last question Pierre explained once more who Makar Alexyevitch was. He explained that just before his arrival the drunken imbecile had carried off a loaded pistol, which they had not succeeded in getting from him, and he begged him to let his action go unpunished. The Frenchman arched his chest, and made a majestic gesture with his hand.

“You have saved my life! You are a Frenchman. You ask me to pardon him. I grant you his pardon. Let this man be released,” the French officer pronounced with rapidity and energy, and taking the arm of Pierre—promoted to be a Frenchman for saving his life—he was walking with him into the room.

The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, had come into the vestibule to ask what had happened, and to offer their services in punishing the offender; but the officer sternly checked them.

“You will be sent for when you are wanted,” he said. The soldiers withdrew. The orderly, who had meanwhile been in the kitchen, came in to the officer.

“Captain, they have soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen,” he said. “Shall I bring it up?”

“Yes, and the wine,” said the captain.

As the French officer drew Pierre with him into the room, the latter thought it his duty to assure the captain again that he was not a Frenchman, and would have withdrawn, but the French officer would not hear of it. He was so courteous, polite, good-humoured, and genuinely grateful to him for saving his life that Pierre had not the heart to refuse, and sat down with him in the dining-room, the first room they
entered. To Pierre’s asseveration that he was not a Frenchman, the captain, plainly unable to comprehend how any one could refuse so flattering a title, shrugged his shoulders, and said that if he insisted in passing for a Russian, so be it, but that in spite of that he should yet feel bound to him for ever by sentiments of gratitude for the defence of his life.

If this man had been endowed with even the slightest faculty of perceiving the feelings of others, and had had the faintest inkling of Pierre’s sentiments, the latter would probably have left him. But his lively impenetrability to everything not himself vanquished Pierre.

“Frenchman or Russian prince incognito,” said the Frenchman, looking at Pierre’s fine, though dirty linen, and the ring on his finger; “I owe my life to you, and I offer you my friendship. A Frenchman never forgets an insult or a service. I offer you my friendship. That’s all I say.”

In the tones of the voice, the expression of the face, and the gestures of the officer, there was so much naïve good nature and good breeding (in the French sense) that Pierre unconsciously responded with a smile to his smile, as he took his outstretched hand.

“Captain Ramballe of the 13th Light Brigade, decorated for the affair of the 7th September,” he introduced himself, an irrepressible smile of complacency lurking under his moustache. “Will you tell me now to whom I have the honour of speaking so agreeably, instead of remaining in the ambulance with that madman’s ball in my body?”