se duties as an obstacle in his life; they were beneath contempt because their purpose was the welfare of himself and his family. His mind was permanently obsessed with military, administrative, political and masonic affairs. And without attempting to change this view or even criticizing it, Pierre watched the whole phenomenon - so strange and yet so familiar - with the smile of gentle, amused irony that had now become second nature to him.
There was a new aspect to Pierre's relations with Willarski, the princess, the doctor and everyone he met nowadays that won them all over. This was an acknowledgement of everybody's capacity to think and feel for himself, to see things his way; an acknowledgement of the impossibility of ever changing anybody's mind by words. This individuality rightfully enjoyed by all people, something that had bothered Pierre and irritated him in earlier days, now formed the basis of the sympathetic interest he felt in other people. The disparities, sometimes the outright contradictions that existed between people's views and the way they lived, and between one man and another, were a source of delight for Pierre, constantly bringing to his lips a gentle smile of amusement.
In practical affairs Pierre suddenly sensed that he now had a centre of gravity that had been missing before. Before, every monetary question, especially requests for money, which came his way all the time because he was a wealthy man, had always left him worried and perplexed, not knowing which way to turn. 'To give, or not to give?' he used to ask himself. 'I have money and he needs it. But somebody else needs it more. Who needs it most? Maybe they're both crooks?' And in the old days he could never see any way out of all these speculations, so he ended up giving to all as long as he had money to give. In those days he had also had the same feeling of bafflement over every question that concerned his property, with one person telling him to do one thing and another recommending something different.
Nowadays, much to his own surprise, he found he had no more doubts or misgivings over any such questions. Now there was a judge within him determining what he must do and not do according to a set of laws of which he had no understanding. He was no more concerned about money matters than he had been before, but he was no longer troubled by doubts about what to do, or not do. The first assignment of this new judge sitting within him concerned a request from a prisoner, a French colonel, who called in one day, talked endlessly about his own splendid achievements, and ended up by issuing what amounted to a demand for four thousand francs to send to his wife and children. Pierre refused him effortlessly, without a qualm, and then wondered why something as easy and simple as this could once have seemed so impossibly difficult. And even as he refused the French colonel he made up his mind that when he left Oryol he would have to invent some subterfuge in order to induce the Italian officer to accept some money, which he obviously needed. A further demonstration to Pierre of his stronger grip on practical matters came with his resolution of two other issues: the problem of his wife's debts and the question of rebuilding, or not rebuilding, his Moscow house and his out-of-town properties.
His head steward came down to Oryol to see him, and the two of them conducted a general review of his much-changed financial situation. According to the steward's estimate the fire of Moscow had cost Pierre about two million roubles. By way of consolation for these losses the steward presented a calculation to the effect that Pierre's income, instead of being allowed to fall, could actually be increased as long as he refused to pay off the countess's debts - which he couldn't be forced to honour - and didn't restore his Moscow house or the country villa, which cost him eighty thousand a year and brought nothing in.
'Yes, yes, that's true,' said Pierre, with the broadest of smiles.
'No, no, I don't need any of them. The destruction of the city has made me a much richer man.'
But in January Savelich came down and after telling him about the situation in Moscow, he presented the architect's estimate for restoring the house and villa as if the whole thing was a foregone conclusion. At the same time Pierre received letters from Prince Vasily and other acquaintances in Petersburg. These referred to his wife's debts. And Pierre decided that the steward's plan, despite its great appeal, was not the right one, and he must travel to Petersburg to wind up his wife's affairs and see to the rebuilding in Moscow. Why this was so, he couldn't have said, but he knew beyond a shadow of doubt that this was what he had to do. His income would be down by three-quarters as a result of this decision. But it had to be. He could feel it in his bones.
Willarski was going to Moscow, and they arranged to travel together.
Throughout his entire convalescence in Oryol Pierre had been enjoying a new sense of freedom and joie de vivre, but once he found himself travelling the open road and seeing hundreds of new faces this feeling was intensified. During the journey he felt as happy as a schoolboy in the holidays. All the people he came across - his driver, the master of a posting-station, peasants out on the road or in the villages - all of them had a new significance for him. The presence of Willarski and all his comments as he constantly deplored the poverty, ignorance and backwardness of Russia compared with Europe only heightened Pierre's pleasure. Where Willarski saw deadness, Pierre saw vitality, an amazingly powerful force sustaining the life of this indivisible, special, unique people over that immense expanse of snow. Rather than objecting to anything Willarski said, he just smiled with delight as he took it all in and pretended to agree, this being the easiest way of avoiding arguments that were bound to lead nowhere.
CHAPTER 14
Just as it is difficult to explain why ants scurry about over a scattered ant-hill, and where they are off to when some of them drag bits of rubbish, eggs and corpses away from the ant-hill while others hurry back inside, or what object they could possibly have as they bump into each other, overtake and get into fights, so it would be hard to explain the reasons that induced the Russians, after the departure of the French, to swarm back to the place that had once been known as Moscow. But just as when you look at the ants scattered all over a ruined ant-heap you can see from the persistence and the energy of this heaving multitude of busy insects that even in the face of absolute destruction there remains something indestructible and intangible that has given the whole colony its strength, so too the city of Moscow in the month of October, without any government, without its churches and holy objects, without its wealth and its houses, was still the Moscow it had been in August. Everything had been destroyed except something intangible that was also hugely powerful and indestructible.
The motives of the people in rushing back to Moscow from all points of the compass once it had been cleared of the enemy were many and varied, though they were personal and, in the first instance, savage and brutal. Only one impulse was shared by all - they were drawn back home, to the place that had once been known as Moscow, in order to get their activities going again.
Within a week there were fifteen thousand inhabitants back in Moscow, within a fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so it went on. The total rose and rose until by the autumn of 1813 the population exceeded that of 1812.
The first Russians to enter central Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzengerode's detachment, along with a few peasants from the nearest villages and some residents who had fled from Moscow and hidden away in the outskirts. When they entered the ruined city and found it pillaged, the Russians went pillaging too. They carried on the work started by the French. Trains of peasants' carts drove into Moscow to take back to the villages everything that had been abandoned in the ruined Moscow houses and streets. The Cossacks took what they could back to their camps. Householders picked up anything available in other people's houses and took it home pretending it was their own property.
But the earliest pillaging parties were soon succeeded by a second lot, then a third, and with each passing day, as the numbers involved increased, the business of looting became more and more difficult and took on more specific forms.
The French had found Moscow deserted but with every outward form of organically functioning town life still in place, including all the various branches of commerce and craftsmanship, high life, political government and religion. These forms had no life in them, but they were there. There were markets, stalls, shops, corn-exchanges and bazaars - for the most part still stocked with goods; there were factories and workshops; there were palaces and wealthy houses filled with luxury items; there were hospitals, prisons, government offices, churches and cathedrals. The longer the French stayed on the more these forms of town life fell away, until finally everything collapsed into a single collective scene of pillage with no life left in it.
The longer the French looting continued the more completely it consumed the wealth of Moscow and the energies of the looters. The longer the Russian looting continued, as they began the reoccupation of the city, and the more looters there were, the more rapidly were the wealth of Moscow and normal city life restored.
Apart from the looters people of every kind were drawn back, some by curiosity, some by the duties of office, some out of self-interest - householders, clergy, officials high and low, traders, artisans and peasants - and they streamed back into Moscow from every corner, like blood rushing back to the heart.
Within a week any peasants arriving with empty carts to seize goods and take them away were stopped by the authorities and made to haul dead bodies out of town. Other peasants, hearing of companions down on their luck, drove into the town with wheat, oats and hay, undercutting each other's prices until they were lower than they had been before the war. Gangs of carpenters bent on rich pickings were arriving in Moscow by the day, and on every side you could see new houses going up, or old, half-burnt ones under repair. Tradesmen did business in booths. Cook-shops and taverns were opened in half-burnt houses. The clergy started holding services again in many churches that had escaped the fire. Stolen church goods were returned as donations. Government clerks set up their baize-covered tables and filing-cabinets in little rooms. The higher authorities worked with the police to organize the distribution of any goods left behind by the French. The owners of houses that still contained lots of goods looted from other premises complained about the unfairness of having to take everything to the Faceted Palace in the Kremlin. Others claimed that the French had taken things from all over the place into individual houses, so it was unfair to let the master of the house hang on to everything found in it. The police came in for abuse and were approached with bribes. Estimates for Crown property lost in the fire were inflated by a factor of ten. Appeals were launched. And Count Rostopchin started up again with his proclamations.
CHAPTER 15
At the end of January Pierre arrived in Moscow and settled in the one wing of his house that had emerged unscathed. He called on Count Rostopchin and several acquaintances who were back in town, and got things ready to leave for Petersburg in a couple of days' time. Everyone was full of a sense of victory; the thrill of new life ran through the shattered but rapidly reviving city. Everybody greeted Pierre warmly. They all wanted to see him, and ask about what he had seen. Pierre felt very well disposed towards everyone he met, but he was instinctively a little cautious in his dealings to avoid getting cornered in some way. To all the questions that came his way, important or trivial, he replied in the vaguest terms. Where was he going to live? Was he going in for rebuilding? When was he off to Petersburg? Would he mind taking a parcel for somebody? All he would say was, 'Yes, I might well . . . I have it in mind . . .' and so on.
He heard that the Rostovs were in Kostroma, and thoughts of Natasha rarely entered his head. When they did they were limited to pleasant memories of times gone by. He felt a sense of freedom, not only from the demands of everyday life but also from that particular feeling which he seemed once to have brought upon himself.
On the third day after his arrival in Moscow he found out from the Drubetskoys that Princess Marya was back in town. Prince Andrey's death, his suffering and his final days had been at the forefront of Pierre's mind in recent times, and now they arose again with a new insistence. When he heard over dinner that Princess Marya was in Moscow, living in her own house on Vozdvizhenka, which had escaped the fire, he went round to see her the same evening.
On the way there Pierre's mind was full of Prince Andrey, their friendship, the various occasions when they had met, and especially their last encounter at Borodino.
'Can he really have died in the foul mood he was in then? Didn't he get an inkling of the meaning of life before he died?' Pierre wondered. He thought of Karatayev, and his death, and he found himself comparing these two men, so different and yet so similar in the love he had had for them both, and in the fact that both of them had been alive and were now dead.
Pierre was in a very serious frame of mind as he drove up to the old prince's home. The house had survived. There were some signs of damage to the place, but the character of the house was just the same. The old footman who met Pierre had a stern look on his face, as if he wanted to convey to the new arrival an impression that the absence of the old prince made no difference to the strict running of the household, and he informed him that the princess, having retired to her rooms, received only on Sundays.
'Tell her I'm here. She might just see me,' said Pierre.
'Certainly, sir,' answered the footman. 'Would you please come through into the portrait gallery?'
A few minutes later he returned with Dessalles. Dessalles brought a message from the princess: she would be very glad to see Pierre and invited him, if he would excuse her not standing on ceremony, to come up to her apartment.
In a low room lit by a single candle he found the princess, and there was someone else with her dressed in black. Pierre remembered that the princess had always had lady companions with her, but who they were and what they were like he didn't know and couldn't recall. 'Must be one of her companions,' he thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress.
The princess rose quickly to meet him, and offered her hand.
'Yes,' she said, looking closely at his much-changed face after he had kissed her hand. 'So this is how we meet again. He often talked about you towards the end,' she said, looking away from Pierre and at her companion with a sudden show of diffidence that took him by surprise.
'I was so glad to hear of your salvation. It was the only piece of good news we had had for a long time.'
Again the princess, more unsettled than ever, glanced at her companion, and she was about to say more when Pierre interrupted her.
'You can well imagine, I knew nothing about him,' he said. 'I thought he'd been killed. Everything I knew I got from other people, second hand. I do know now that he ended up with the Rostovs . . . Strange how things work out!'
Pierre was talking rapidly, eagerly. He glanced round once at her companion's face, catching a glimpse of friendly, questioning eyes watching him closely, and, as often happens in mid-conversation, he felt a vague intimation that this lady companion in the black dress was a splendid person, full of goodness and kindness, who would be no embarrassment to him as he poured out his innermost feelings to Princess Marya.
But as he uttered the last words about the Rostovs, the uneasiness in Princess Marya's face became even more noticeable. Again her eyes shifted from Pierre's face to the face of the lady in the black dress, and she said, 'Surely you know who this is?'
Pierre glanced again at the pale, thin face of her companion, with its black eyes and strange mouth. Something very dear to him, long forgotten and more than just pleasant gazed at him out of those carefully watching eyes.
'No. It's not possible,' he thought. 'That grim-looking face, all thin and pale and so much older than it was. It can't be her. It's somebody who reminds me of her . . .' But at that moment Princess Marya said, 'Natasha!' And painfully, with all the strain of a rusty door opening, that carefully watching face smiled at him, and as the door opened Pierre was suddenly overwhelmed by a heady sensation of happiness long forgotten, something that couldn't have been further from his mind at this time. His head swam as the feeling swept over him and enveloped his whole being. That smile of hers had left him in no doubt. It was Natasha, and he loved her.
In that first minute Pierre unwittingly revealed to them all, to her and Princess Marya and most of all to himself, a secret that even he had been unaware of. He blushed with delight and squirmed with anguish. He tried to hide his excitement. But the more he tried to hide it, the more clearly - more clearly than the sharpest words could have done - he was telling himself, her and Princess Marya that he loved her.
'No, it's nothing. It's the sudden shock,' Pierre thought. But the moment he tried to go back to the conversation with Princess Marya he glanced again at Natasha and an even deeper blush spread over his face, and his heart was flooded with an even more violent surge of rapture and terror. He stammered and stuttered, and stopped in mid-sentence.
Pierre had not noticed Natasha because she was the last person he had expected to see here, but he had failed to recognize her because of the immense change that had taken place in her since their last meeting. She was much thinner and paler. But it wasn't this that made her unrecognizable. No one would have recognized her when he entered the room because when he had first glanced at her the face and eyes that in days gone by had always glowed with a half-suppressed smile of sheer joie de vivre had held no trace of a smile. They were anybody's eyes, kindly, brooding, quizzical and sad.
Pierre's discomfort aroused no similar discomfort in Natasha; all it prompted was a look of pleasure, barely perceptible as it lit up her whole face.
CHAPTER 16
'She's come to stay with me,' said Princess Marya. 'The count and countess will be here in a day or two. The countess is in a terrible state. But Natasha had to see a doctor. They made her come with me.'
'Oh yes. Is any family free from sorrow?' said Pierre, turning to Natasha. 'You know it happened the day we were rescued. I saw him. He was a lovely boy!'
Natasha was looking