War and Peace (174 page)

Prince Andrey drew a sigh of relief, smiled, and held out his hand.

“You?” he said. “What happiness!”

With a swift but circumspect movement, Natasha came nearer, still kneeling, and carefully taking his hand she bent her face over it and began kissing it, softly touching it with her lips.

“Forgive me!” she said in a whisper, lifting her head and glancing at him. “Forgive me!”

“I love you,” said Prince Andrey.

“Forgive …”

“Forgive what?” asked Prince Andrey.

“Forgive me for what I di … id,” Natasha murmured in a hardly audible, broken whisper, and again and again she softly put her lips to his hand.

“I love thee more, better than before,” said Prince Andrey, lifting her face with his hand so that he could look into her eyes.

Those eyes, swimming with happy tears, gazed at him with timid commiseration and joyful love. Natasha’s thin, pale face, with its swollen lips, was more than ugly—it looked terrible. But Prince Andrey did not see her face, he saw the shining eyes, which were beautiful. They heard talk behind them.

Pyotr, the valet, by now wide awake, had waked up the doctor. Timohin, who had not slept all night for the pain in his leg, had been long watching all that was happening, and huddled up on his bench, carefully wrapping his bare person up in the sheet.

“Why, what’s this?” said the doctor, getting up from his bed on the floor. “Kindly retire, madame.”

At that moment there was a knock at the door; a maid had been sent by the countess in search of her daughter.

Like a sleep-walker awakened in the midst of her trance, Natasha walked out of the room, and getting back to her hut, sank sobbing on her bed.

From that day at all the halts and resting-places on the remainder of the Rostovs’ journey, Natasha never left Bolkonsky’s side, and the doctor was forced to admit that he had not expected from a young girl so much fortitude, nor skill in nursing a wounded man.

Terrible as it was to the countess to think that Prince Andrey might (and very probably, too, from what the doctor said) die on the road in her daughter’s arms, she could not resist Natasha. Although with the renewal of affectionate relations between Prince Andrey and Natasha the idea did occur that in case he recovered their old engagement would be renewed, no one—least of all Natasha and Prince Andrey—spoke of this. The unsettled question of life and death hanging, not only over Prince Andrey, but over all Russia, shut off all other considerations.

Pierre waked up late on the 3rd of September. His head ached, the clothes in which he had slept without undressing fretted his body, and he had a vague sense in his heart of something shameful he had done the evening before. That something shameful was his talk with Captain Ramballe.

His watch told him it was eleven, but it seemed a particularly dull day. Pierre stood up, rubbed his eyes, and seeing the pistol with its engraved stock—Gerasim had put it back on the writing-table—Pierre remembered where he was and what was in store for him that day

“Am I not too late already?” Pierre wondered.

No, probably
he
would not make his entry into Moscow before twelve
o’clock. Pierre did not allow himself to reflect on what lay before him, but made haste to act.

Setting his clothes to rights, Pierre took up the pistol and was about to set off. But then for the first time it occurred to him to wonder how, if not in his hand, he was to carry the weapon in the street. Even under his full coat it would be hard to conceal a big pistol. It could not be put in his sash, nor under his arm, without being noticeable. Moreover, the pistol was now unloaded, and Pierre could not succeed in reloading it in time. “The dagger will do as well,” Pierre said to himself; though, in considering how he should carry out his design, he had more than once decided that the great mistake made by the student in 1809 was that he had tried to kill Napoleon with a dagger. But Pierre’s chief aim seemed to be, not so much to succeed in his project, as to prove to himself that he was not renouncing his design, but was doing everything to carry it out. Pierre hurriedly took the blunt, notched dagger in a green scabbard, which he had bought, together with the pistol, at the Suharev Tower, and hid it under his waistcoat.

Tying the sash round his peasant’s coat, and pulling his cap forward, Pierre walked along the corridor, trying to avoid making a noise and meeting the captain, and slipped out into the street.

The fire, at which he had gazed so indifferently the evening before, had sensibly increased during the night. Moscow was on fire at various points. There were fires at the same time in Carriage Row, Zamoskvoryetche, the Bazaar, and Povarsky, and the timber market near Dorogomilov bridge and the barges in the river Moskva were in a blaze.

Pierre’s way lay across a side street to Povarsky, and from there across Arbaty to the chapel of Nikola Yavlenny, where he had long before in his fancy fixed on the spot at which the deed ought to be done. Most of the houses had their gates and shutters closed. The streets and lanes were deserted; there was a smell of burning and smoke in the air. Now and then he met Russians with uneasy and timid faces, and Frenchmen with a look of the camp about them, walking in the middle of the road. Both looked at Pierre with surprise. Apart from his great height and stoutness, and the look of gloomy concentration and suffering in his face and whole figure, Russians stared at Pierre because they could not make out to what class he belonged. Frenchmen looked after him with surprise, because, while all other Russians stared timidly and inquisitively at them, Pierre walked by without noticing them. At the gates of a house, three Frenchmen, disputing about something with some Russians, who
did not understand their meaning, stopped Pierre to ask whether he knew French.

Pierre shook his head and walked on. In another lane a sentinel, on guard by a green caisson, shouted at him, and it was only at the repetition of his menacing shout, and the sound of his picking up his gun, that Pierre grasped that he ought to have passed the street on the other side. He heard and saw nothing around him. With haste and horror he bore within him his intention as something strange and fearful to him, fearing—from the experience of the previous night—to lose it. But Pierre was not destined to carry his design in safety to the spot to which he was bending his steps. Moreover, if he had not been detained on the road, his design could not have been carried out, because Napoleon had four hours earlier left the Dorogomilov suburb, and crossed Arbaty to the Kremlin; and he was by then sitting in the royal study in the Kremlin palace in the gloomiest temper, giving circumstantial orders for immediately extinguishing the fires, preventing pillage, and reassuring the inhabitants. But Pierre knew nothing of that; entirely engrossed in what lay before him, he was suffering the anguish men suffer when they persist in undertaking a task impossible for them—not from its inherent difficulties, but from its incompatibility with their own nature. He was tortured by the dread that he would be weak at the decisive moment, and so would lose his respect for himself.

Though he saw and heard nothing around him, he instinctively found his way, and took the right turning to reach Povarsky.

As Pierre got nearer to Povarsky Street, the smoke grew thicker and thicker, and the air was positively warm from the heat of the conflagration. Tongues of flame shot up here and there behind the house-tops. He met more people in the streets, and these people were in great excitement. But though Pierre felt that something unusual was happening around him, he did not grasp the fact that he was getting near the fire. As he walked along a path, across the large open space adjoining on one side Povarsky Street, and on the other side the gardens of Prince Gruzinsky, Pierre suddenly heard close by him the sound of a woman, crying desperately. He stood still, as though awakened from a dream, and raised his head.

On the dried-up, dusty grass on one side of the path lay heaps of household belongings piled up: feather-beds, a samovar, holy images, and boxes. On the ground, near the boxes, sat a thin woman, no longer young, with long, projecting front teeth, dressed in a black cloak and
cap. This woman was weeping violently, swaying to and fro, and muttering something. Two little girls, from ten to twelve years old, dressed in dirty, short frocks and cloaks, were gazing at their mother, with an expression of stupefaction on their pale, frightened faces. A little boy of seven, in a coat and a huge cap, obviously not his own, was crying in an old nurse’s arms. A bare-legged, dirty servant-girl was sitting on a chest; she had let down her flaxen hair, and was pulling out the singed hairs, sniffing at them. The husband, a short, stooping man, in a uniform, with little, wheel-shaped whiskers, and smooth locks of hair, peeping out from under his cap, which was stuck erect on his head, was moving the chests from under one another with an immovable face, dragging garments of some sort from under them.

The woman almost flung herself at Pierre’s feet as soon as she saw him.

“Merciful heavens, good Christian folk, save me, help me, kind sir!… somebody, help me,” she articulated through her sobs. “My little girl!… My daughter!… My youngest girl left behind!… She’s burnt! Oo … er! What a fate I have nursed thee for … Ooo!”

“Hush, Marya Nikolaevna,” the husband said in a low voice to his wife, evidently only to justify himself before an outsider.

“Sister must have taken her, nothing else can have happened to her!” he added.

“Monster, miscreant!” the woman screeched furiously, her tears suddenly ceasing. “There is no heart in you, you have no feeling for your own child. Any other man would have rescued her from the fire. But he is a monster, not a man, not a father. You are a noble man,” the woman turned to Pierre sobbing and talking rapidly. “The row was on fire—they rushed in to tell us. The girl screamed: Fire! We rushed to get our things out. Just as we were, we escaped.… This is all we could snatch up … the blessed images, we look at the children, and the bed that was my dowry, and all the rest is lost. Katitchka’s missing. Oooo! O Lord!…” and again she broke into sobs. “My darling babe! burnt! burnt!”

“But where, where was she left?” said Pierre.

From the expression of his interested face, the woman saw that this man might help her.

“Good, kind sir!” she screamed, clutching at his legs. “Benefactor, set my heart at rest anyway … Aniska, go, you slut, show the way,” she bawled to the servant-girl, opening her mouth wide in her anger, and displaying her long teeth more than ever.

“Show the way, show me, I … I … I’ll do something,” Pierre gasped hurriedly.

The dirty servant-girl came out from behind the box, put up her hair, and sighing, walked on in front along the path with her coarse, bare feet.

Pierre felt as though he had suddenly come back to life after a heavy swoon. He drew his head up, his eyes began to shine with the light of life, and with rapid steps he followed the girl, overtook her, and went into Povarsky Street. The whole street was full of clouds of black smoke. Tongues of flame shot up here and there out of these clouds. A great crowd had gathered in front of the fire. In the middle of the street stood a French general, saying something to those about him. Pierre, accompanied by the servant-girl, was approaching the place where the French general stood; but the French soldiers stopped him.

“Can’t pass,” a voice shouted to him.

“This way, master,” bawled the girl. “We’ll cut across Nikoliny by the lane.”

Pierre turned back, breaking into a run now and then to keep pace with her. The girl ran across the street, turned into a lane on the left, and passing three houses, turned in at a gate on the right.

“It’s just here,” she said, and running across a yard, she opened a little gate in a paling-fence, and stopping short, pointed out to Pierre a small wooden lodge, which was blazing away brightly. One side of it had fallen in, the other was on fire, and flames peeped out at the window-holes and under the roof.

As Pierre went in at the little gate, he felt the rush of heat, and involuntarily stopped short.

“Which, which is your house?” he asked.

“Oooh!” wailed the servant-girl, pointing to the lodge. “That’s it, that same was our lodging. Sure, you’re burnt to death, our treasure, Katitchka, my precious little missy, ooh!” wailed Aniska, at the sight of the fire feeling the necessity of giving expression to her feelings too.

Pierre darted up to the lodge, but the heat was so great that he could not help describing a curve round it, and found himself close to a big house, which was as yet only on fire on one side, at the roof. A group of French soldiers were swarming round it. Pierre could not at first make out what these Frenchmen were about, dragging something out of the house. But seeing a French soldier in front of him beating a peasant with a blunt cutlass, and taking from him a fur-lined coat, Pierre became
vaguely aware that pillaging was going on here—but he had no time to dwell on the idea.

The sound of the rumble and crash of falling walls and ceilings; the roar and hiss of the flames, and the excited shouts of the crowd; the sight of the hovering clouds of smoke—here folding over into black masses, there drawing out and lighted up by gleaming sparks; and the flames—here like a thick red sheaf, and there creeping like golden fish-scales over the walls; the sense of the heat and smoke and rapidity of movement, all produced on Pierre the usual stimulating effect of a conflagration. That effect was particularly strong on Pierre, because all at once, at the sight of the fire, he felt himself set free from the ideas weighing upon him. He felt young, gay, ready, and resolute. He ran round the lodge on the side of the house, and was about to run into that part which was still standing, when he heard several voices shouting immediately above his head, followed by the crash and bang of something heavy falling close by.

Pierre looked round, and saw at the windows of the house some French soldiers, who had just dropped out a drawer of a chest, filled with some metallic objects. Some more French soldiers standing below went up to the drawer.