War And Peace: Book 11 - CHAPTER XXXIII

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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.

“Well, what does that fellow want?” one of the French soldiers shouted,

referring to Pierre.

“A child in the house. Haven't you seen a child?” said Pierre.

“What's the fellow singing? Get along, do!” shouted voices; and one of the

soldiers, evidently afraid Pierre might take it into his head to snatch the

silver and bronzes from them, pounced on him in a menacing fashion.

“A child?” shouted a Frenchman from above. “I did hear something crying in

the garden. Perhaps it's the fellow's brat. Must be humane you know.”

“Where is it?” asked Pierre.

“This way!” the French soldier shouted to him from the window pointing to the

garden behind the house. “Wait, I'll come down.”

And in a minute the Frenchman, a black-eyed fellow, with a patch on his

cheek, in his shirt-sleeves, did in fact jump out of a window on the ground

floor, and slapping Pierre on the shoulder, he ran with him to the garden. “Make

haste, you fellows,” he shouted to his comrades, “it's beginning to get hot.”

Running behind the house to a sanded path, the Frenchman pulled Pierre by the

arm, and pointed out to him a circular space. Under a garden seat lay a girl of

three years old, in a pink frock.

“Here's your brat. Ah, a little girl. So much the better,” said the

Frenchman. “Good-bye. Must be humane, we are all mortal, you know”; and the

Frenchman, with the patch on his cheek, ran back to his comrades.

Pierre, breathless with joy, ran up to the child, and would have taken her in

his arms. But seeing a stranger, the little girl—a scrofulous-looking,

unattractive child very like her mother—screamed and ran away. Pierre caught

her, however, and lifted her up in his arms; she squealed in desperate fury, and

tried to tear herself out of Pierre's arms with her little hands, and to bite

him with her dirty, dribbling mouth. Pierre had a sense of horror and disgust,

such as he had felt at contact with some little beast. But he made an effort to

overcome it, and not to drop the child, and ran with it back to the big house.

By now, however, it was impossible to get back by the same way; the

servant-girl, Aniska, was nowhere to be seen, and with a feeling of pity and

loathing, Pierre held close to him, as tenderly as he could, the piteously

howling, and sopping wet baby, and ran across the garden to seek some other way

out.

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