The only person to come out with an opinion that departed from the general view was Marya Dmitriyevna Akhrosimov, who had come up to Petersburg that summer to see one of her sons. Chancing across Helene at a ball, this lady stopped her in the middle of the room, and spoke out in a harsh voice with everyone listening.
'So, I hear it's in order now for women to go from one living husband to another! I suppose you think this is something new. But they've beaten you to it, madam. It's a very old idea. It's done in every brothel.' This said, Marya Dmitriyevna fluffed up her capacious sleeves in a familiar gesture of intimidation, glared round at the company and strode off across the ballroom.
Although people were wary of Marya Dmitriyevna, she was looked on in Petersburg as a kind of comic figure, so the only word that got noticed was the last vulgar expression, which was passed on in whispers as if it was the only important thing that had been said.
Prince Vasily, who had become rather forgetful of late, tended to repeat a phrase over and over again, and every time he came across his daughter he would say the same thing.
'Helene, a word in your ear,' he would say, drawing her to one side and jerking her arm downwards. 'A little bird tells me about certain plans for . . . you know what. Well, my dear child, you know how my father's heart rejoices to hear you are . . . You've had so much suffering. But, my dear child, listen only to the promptings of your heart. That's all I have to say.' And each time, stifling the same surge of emotion, he would embrace his daughter cheek to cheek and then wander off on his own.
Bilibin, who had lost none of his reputation as a wit, was a friend of Helene's, one of those disinterested allies who can always be seen circulating round brilliant women, men friends who are never going to change into lovers. One day, in what he called 'a little sub-committee', Bilibin gave his friend Helene the benefit of his views on the subject.
'Listen here, Bilibin,' said Helene - she always addressed friends in the Bilibin category by their surnames - allowing her white fingers glittering with rings to brush against his jacket-sleeve. 'I want you to tell me what to do, as a brother would to a sister. Which one?'
Bilibin puckered up the skin just above his eyebrows, and gave it some thought with a smile hovering about his lips.
'This comes as no great surprise, you know,' he said. 'As a true friend of yours, I have been thinking, and rethinking, about this whole business. Look at it this way. If you marry the prince . . .' Bilibin bent one finger back to mark off the younger suitor '. . . you lose for ever the opportunity of marrying the other man, and you displease the court. (Some kind of connection there, as you well know.) But if you marry the count you'll be making an old man very happy, and eventually as the widow of the great . . . you would be no mismatch for the prince . . .' At this Bilibin dissolved the wrinkles on his brow.
'This is friendship indeed!' said Helene, beaming radiantly as she brushed Bilibin's sleeve again. 'But I do love them both, and I wouldn't want to hurt either of them. I would give up my life for the happiness of them both,' she declared.
Bilibin gave a shrug: for worries of this order even he had no cure to offer.
'Wife and mistress together!' thought Bilibin. 'That's what I call plain speaking. She wants to marry them all at once.'
'But do tell me - what will your husband's attitude be?' he said, relying on the strength of his reputation to save him from disaster in asking such a naive question. 'Will he give his consent?'
'Oh, he's so fond of me!' said Helene, who was under the strange impression that Pierre also adored her. 'He'll do anything for me.' Bilibin began a puckered wrinkle to indicate the imminent arrival of a telling phrase.
'Including divorce?' he said.
Helene gave a laugh.
One of the people bold enough to question the propriety of the proposed marriage was Helene's mother, Princess Kuragin. She had always been painfully jealous of her daughter, and now, with the subject of her jealousy so close to her own heart, she couldn't come to terms with even the thought of it.
She consulted a Russian priest about the extent to which divorce and remarriage during the husband's lifetime was feasible, and the priest said it was impossible. To her delight he referred her to a Gospel text in which (under his interpretation) remarriage during the lifetime of the husband was explicitly forbidden.
Furnished with these arguments, which she considered incontestable, Princess Kuragin drove round to see her daughter early one morning to make sure of finding her alone.
Helene listened patiently to her mother's objections, and then gave a smile of gentle irony.
'Look, it spells it out: "Whoso marrieth her that is divorced. . ." ' said the old princess.
'Oh, Mamma, don't be so silly. You don't understand. In my position I have certain duties . . .' Helene began, switching from Russian to French, because in Russian she always felt her case lacked a certain clarity.
'But, darling . . .'
'Oh Mamma, surely you must understand that the Holy Father, who has the power to issue dispensations . . .'
At this point the lady companion who lived in with Helene came in to announce that his Highness was out in the hall, hoping to see her.
'No, tell him I won't see him. I'm furious with him for not keeping his word.'
'Countess, there is mercy for every sin,' said a fair-haired young man, long in face and nose, as he walked into the room.
The old princess rose politely and curtsied. The young man ignored her. Princess Kuragin nodded to her daughter, and floated across to the door.
'Yes, she's right,' thought the old princess, all of her certainties having dissolved at his Highness's sudden arrival. 'She is right, but how can our youth have gone by and been lost for ever without our knowing about it? And it was such a simple thing,' thought Princess Kuragin as she climbed into her carriage.
The issue was settled once and for all for Helene by early August, and she wrote to her husband (who was still very fond of her, or so she thought), informing him of her intention to marry N. N., and her conversion to the one true faith, and asking him to deal with the necessary formalities for obtaining a divorce, further details to be conveyed by the bearer of this letter.
'Whereupon, my dear friend, I pray to God that He may have you in His holy and powerful keeping. Your friend, Helene.'
This letter was delivered to Pierre's Moscow house while he was out on the field at Borodino.
CHAPTER 8
When the battle of Borodino was over Pierre ran down from the Rayevsky redoubt for the second time that day, and walked up the ravine leading to Knyazkovo along with hordes of soldiers. He came to the dressing-station, took one look at all the blood and heard all the men screaming and groaning, and hurried on, swept along in a mob of soldiers.
The one thing Pierre wanted now with all his heart and soul was to get away from the ghastly sensations he had lived through that day, to get back to his ordinary life-style, go indoors and settle down to sleep in his own bed. He could sense that life would have to get back to normal before he could begin to understand himself and all he had seen and experienced. But around him there were no signs of normality.
Although there were no bullets or shells whistling down on the road he was walking along, all the things he had seen and heard on the battlefield were still in evidence on every side. Everywhere he saw the same agonized, exhausted, sometimes curiously vacant faces, the same blood, the same soldiers' overcoats, the same sounds of firing no less horrifying for being a bit further away. Beyond that, it was all heat and dust.
Pierre walked a couple of miles down the Mozhaysk road and sat down at the side of the road.
It was dusky now, and the firing had stopped. Pierre stretched out, leaning on one elbow, and lay there for ages watching the shadows walk past in the evening twilight. He kept imagining a shell hurtling down on him with a weird screaming sound. This would give him the shudders and make him sit up. He had no idea how long he had been there. In the middle of the night, th
ree soldiers came up with firewood, settled down near by and lit a fire.
The soldiers kept glancing across at Pierre as they got the fire burning up, stuck a cooking-pot on it and dropped in their broken biscuits, followed by some lard. The delicious aroma of the greasy stew mingled with the smell of smoke. Pierre pulled himself half-way up and gave a sigh. The soldiers (there were three of them) were eating and chatting away, completely ignoring Pierre.
'What mob do you belong to, then?' one of the soldiers suddenly asked Pierre, the question clearly suggesting that he was thinking along the same lines as Pierre. He seemed to be saying, 'If you're hungry we'll give you some grub, only tell us if you're a good man first.'
'Who, me? . . .' said Pierre, sensing a need to lower his social standing as much as he could so he could feel closer to the soldiers and more within their range of experience.
'Actually, I'm an officer with the militia, but my men have disappeared. I went out on the battlefield and we got separated.'
'Is that right?' said one of the soldiers.
Another shook his head.
'Well, you can have some of this muck if you fancy it!' said the first man. He licked his wooden spoon clean and handed it to Pierre.
Pierre squatted down nearer the fire, and weighed into the brew in the pot. It tasted like the most delicious food he had ever eaten. As he bent over the pot, helping himself to huge spoonfuls and wolfing them down one after another, the soldiers watched him in silence. Then one of them spoke again.
'Where you off to, then, eh?'
'Mozhaysk.'
'You a gent, then?'
'Yes.'
'What's your name?'
'Pyotr Kirillovich.'
'All right, Pyotr Kirillovich, you come with us, we'll get you there.' In the dead of night the soldiers walked to Mozhaysk and Pierre went with them.
The cocks were crowing by the time they arrived and started climbing the uphill slope into the town. Pierre walked on with the soldiers oblivious to the fact that his inn was at the bottom of the hill and he had gone right past it. He might never have noticed - his thoughts were miles away - if he hadn't happened to run into his groom half-way up the hill. The groom had been out looking for him up in the town, and was on his way back to the inn when he recognized Pierre by the whiteness of his hat, which stood out in the dark.
'Your Excellency!' he cried. 'We was getting worried about you. What are you doing walking? And where are you heading for, for heaven's sake?'
'Er, yes . . .' said Pierre.
The soldiers came to a halt.
'Right, found your own people, have you?' said one of them.
'We'll say goodbye, then. Pyotr Kirillovich, wasn't it?'
'Goodbye, Pyotr Kirillovich!' came the other voices.
'Goodbye!' said Pierre, and he turned off towards the inn with the groom.
'Should I tip them?' thought Pierre, feeling for his pocket. 'No, better not,' an inner voice told him.
There wasn't a room to be had at the inn; every one was taken. Pierre went out into the yard, muffled his head up and lay down in his carriage.
CHAPTER 9
Pierre's head had hardly hit the cushion when he felt himself dropping off to sleep. Then immediately he could hear, just like the real thing, the cannons going boom, boom, boom , men groaning and screaming, and the thump of falling shells, he could smell the blood and gunpowder, and a feeling of horror, the fear of death, swept over him. He opened his eyes in panic and stuck his head out of the cloak. The yard was quiet. The only sounds came from somebody's servant chatting to the porter at the gate as he squelched through the mud. Over Pierre's head, under the dark, wooden eaves, he could hear pigeons fluttering, startled by the movement of him sitting up. The whole yard reeked as a tavern should, of hay, dung and tar, and the smell of it all lifted Pierre's spirits. Between two dark buildings he could see the pure, starlit sky.
'Thank God it's all over!' thought Pierre, burrowing down again. 'Fear - what a terrible thing it is. It got to me straightaway. I feel so ashamed! But they . . . they were rock-solid and perfectly calm all the way through,' he thought. They, in Pierre's mind, were the soldiers, soldiers on the battery, soldiers who had fed him, soldiers who had prayed to the icon. They - those strange people, completely unknown to him before - they stood out from everybody else, etched clearly and sharply in his mind.
'Oh, to be a soldier, just an ordinary soldier!' thought Pierre as he nodded off. 'To enter into that communal life with your whole being, to be absorbed into whatever it is that makes them what they are. But how can you cast off everything that doesn't matter, everything sent by the devil, the whole burden of the outer man? There was a time when I could have been one of them. I could have run away from my father. God knows I wanted to. And after that duel with Dolokhov I could have signed on as a soldier.'
And in his imagination Pierre pictured that dinner at the club when he had challenged Dolokhov, and then his benefactor at Torzhok. And in his mind he saw another picture: a grand dinner at the lodge. In the English Club. And someone he knew, someone close to him, some dear friend, was sitting at the end of the table. Yes, him! My benefactor. 'But isn't he dead?' thought Pierre. 'Yes, he did die, and I didn't know he was still alive. I'm so sorry he died, and I'm so glad he's alive again!' Down one side of the table sat Anatole, Dolokhov, Nesvitsky, Denisov and others of that ilk (this category of people was as sharply delineated in Pierre's dream as the other category of men that he had referred to as them), and that lot, Anatole and Dolokhov, were shouting and singing at the tops of their voices, but through all their racket he could just hear the voice of his benefactor that refused to be drowned out, and the sound of his voice was as insistent and meaningful as the roar of the battlefield, though also sweet and soothing. Pierre couldn't make out what his benefactor was saying, but he knew (the category of his ideas was also sharply delineated in his dream) that he was talking about virtue, and the possibility of being like them. And they with their simple, good, stolid faces stood all round his benefactor. They meant well, but they took no notice of Pierre; they didn't know him. Pierre wanted them to notice him, and he wanted to speak. He tried to get up, but instantly his legs felt cold and all exposed.
He felt embarrassed, and covered his legs with one arm. In the real world his coat had slipped down. As he pulled it back up Pierre opened his eyes for an instant and caught sight of the same roofs and posts, and the yard, but it was all bathed in a blueish light, and there was a twinkling of dew or frost.
'It's getting light,' thought Pierre. 'But that's not it. I've got to listen to the benefactor and understand what he's saying.'
Again he burrowed down under his coat, but the masonic dinner and his benefactor had gone. He was left with mere thoughts, coming out in words, ideas, a voice speaking them, or was it Pierre himself thinking them?
When he remembered these thoughts afterwards, although they had been stimulated by the impressions of that particular day, Pierre was certain they had come to him from outside. He really believed that in his waking moments he could never have thought those thoughts or expressed them in that form.
'War is the subjection of man's will to the law of God at its most agonizing extreme,' said the voice. 'Simplicity is submitting to God's will. You cannot escape Him. And they are simple. They don't talk, they do things. Spoken words are silver, unspoken words are gold. A man can be master of nothing while ever he fears death. And the man that fears not death possesses everything. Without suffering a man would know not his limits, would know not himself. The hardest thing . . .' (Pierre was thinking, or hearing, in his dream) '. . . is to know how to unite in your soul the meaning of the whole. Unite the whole?' Pierre said to himself. 'No, not unity. You can't unite your thoughts, you can harness thoughts, all of them together. Yes, that's what you have to do. Harness them together, harness them.' Pierre repeated the words with a thrill of delight, feeling that they, and they alone, said what he wanted to say, and solved the whole problem
he had been agonizing over.
'Yes, we must get them in harness. No time to lose.'
'Time to get them in harness. Time to harness the horses, your Excellency! Your Excellency . . .' A voice was saying it over and over again. 'Harness the horses, harness the horses . . . Time to go, sir . . .'
It was the groom waking Pierre. The sun was shining straight in Pierre's eyes. He glanced at the filthy inn and its yard, where soldiers were watering their skinny horses at the well, and wagons were trundling out through the gate.
He turned away in disgust, closed his eyes and quickly sank back down into the carriage-seat. 'No, I don't want that. I don't want to see that and understand it. I want to know what was coming out in my dream. In another second I would have seen it all. What can I do now? Harness things? How can I harness things together?' And Pierre was horrified to realize that the entire meaning of what he had seen and thought during his dream had slipped away.
And here were the groom, the coachman and the porter all telling Pierre the same story: an officer had brought word that the French were advancing on Mozhaysk and our troops were retreating.
Pierre got out, ordered them to pack the carriage and follow on and walked through the town on foot.
The troops were on the march, leaving behind not far from ten thousand wounded men. You could see the wounded sitting by the windows in the houses, and thronging the yards and streets. Out on the streets you could hear men screaming, swearing and banging on the carts detailed to take the wounded away. When Pierre's carriage caught up with him he gave a lift to a wounded general that he knew, all the way to Moscow. On the way he learnt that his brother-in-law, Anatole, and Prince Andrey had both been killed.
CHAPTER 10
Pierre got back to Moscow on the 30th. Almost at the city gates he was met by one of Count Rostopchin's adjutants.
'Hey, we've been looking for you everywhere,' said the adjutant. 'The count needs to see you as a matter of urgency. He wants you to come and see him straightaway. It's something very important.' Instead of going home, Pierre took a cab and drove round to the governor's.