War and Peace (183 page)

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

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

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

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

His face had an expression of innocence and youth in spite of the curving wrinkles on it; his voice had a pleasant sing-song note. But the great peculiarity of his talk was its spontaneity and readiness. It was evident that he never thought of what he was saying, or of what he was going to say; and that gave a peculiar, irresistible persuasiveness to his rapid and genuine intonations.

His physical powers and activity were such, during the first period of his imprisonment, that he seemed not to know what fatigue or sickness 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 morning 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 but 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 once playing with their toys. He 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 allowed himself to indulge in conversation, which he loved, and singing. He sang songs, not as singers do, who know they are listened to, but sang, as the 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 sounds were always thin, tender, almost feminine, melancholy notes, and his face as he uttered them was very serious.

Being in prison, and having let his beard grow, he had apparently cast off all the soldier’s ways that had been forced upon him and were not natural to him, and had unconsciously relapsed into his old peasant habits.

“A soldier discharged is the shirt outside the breeches again,” he used to say. He did not care to talk of his life as a soldier, though he never 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 preference 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, sayings 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 said before, but both sayings were equally true. He liked talking, and talked well, adorning his speech with caressing epithets and proverbial sayings, which Pierre fancied he often invented himself. But the great charm of his talk was that the simplest incidents—sometimes the same that Pierre had 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 and over again—in the evenings, but most of all he liked to listen to stories 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 on 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 end 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.

On 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 Andrey 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. Her
equipage consisted of her immense travelling coach in which she had 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, and the circuitous route which Princess Marya was obliged to take by Lipetsk, Ryazan, Vladimir, and Shuya was very long; from lack of posting horses 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, and 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 no difficulty could daunt her. Thanks to her activity and energy, which 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 soul and become an inseparable part of herself, and she no longer struggled against it. Of late Princess Marya was convinced—though she never 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 sometimes thought it. Princess Marya knew that she loved for the first and last 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 from hindering her from feeling intense grief on her brother’s account. On 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 but the journey itself, forgetting what was its object. But on approaching Yaroslavl, when what might await her—and not now at the end of many days, but that very evening—became clear to her mind again, her agitation reached its utmost limits.

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

“I have found out everything, your excellency: the Rostovs are staying in the square, in the house of a merchant, Bronnikov. Not far off, right above the Volga,” said the courier.

Princess Marya looked into his face with frightened inquiry, not understanding why he did not answer her chief question. How was her brother? 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 is he?”

“The servants say, ‘No change.’ ”

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

The carriage-door was opened. On the left was water—a broad river; on the right, entrance steps. At the entrance were people, servants, and a rosy-faced girl with a thick coil of black hair, who smiled at her in an unpleasantly affected way, as it seemed to Princess Marya (it was Sonya). The princess ran up the steps; the girl, smiling affectedly, said, “This way! this way!” and the princess found herself in the vestibule, facing an elderly woman of an Oriental type of face, who came rapidly to meet her, looking moved. It was the countess. She embraced Princess Marya and 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, and that she must say something to her. Not knowing how she did it, she uttered some polite French phrases in the tone in which she had been addressed, and asked, “How is he?”

“The doctor says there is no danger,” said the countess; but as she said 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 to Nikolushka, who came in with Dessalle. “We shall find room for every 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 child. The old count came into the room to welcome the princess. He was extraordinarily changed since Princess Marya had seen him last. Then he had been a jaunty, gay, self-confident old gentleman, now he seemed a pitiful, bewildered creature. As he talked to the princess, he was continually looking about him, as though asking every one if he were doing the right thing. After the destruction of Moscow and the loss of his property, driven out of his accustomed rut, he had visibly lost the sense of his own importance, and felt that there was no place for him in life.

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