“Teach me what to do, how to live my life, how to conquer my sins for ever, for ever!”…she prayed. The deacon came out to the steps before the altar screen; with his thumb held out apart from the rest, he pulled his long hair out from under his surplice, and laying the cross on his breast, he began in a loud voice solemnly reading the prayer:
“As one community let us pray to the Lord.”
“As one community, all together without distinction of class, free from enmity, all united in brotherly love, let us pray,” thought Natasha.
“For the world above and the salvation of our souls!”
“For the world of angels and the souls of all spiritual beings who live above us,” prayed Natasha.
When they prayed for the army, she thought of her brother and Denisov. When they prayed for all travelling by sea and by land, she thought of Prince Andrey, and prayed for him, and prayed that God would forgive her the wrong she had done him. When they prayed for all who love us, she prayed for all her family, her father and mother, and Sonya—for the first time feeling all the shortcomings in her behaviour to them, and all the strength of her own love for them. When they prayed for those who hate us, she tried to think of enemies, to pray for them. She reckoned as enemies all her father’s creditors, and every one who had business relations with him; and always at the thought of enemies who hated her she thought of Anatole, who had done her so cruel an injury, and though he had not hated her, she prayed gladly for him, as an enemy. It was only at her prayers that she felt able to think calmly and clearly either of Prince Andrey or of Anatole, with a sense that her feelings for them were as nothing compared with her feeling of worship and awe of God. When they prayed for the Imperial family and the Synod, she bowed and crossed herself more devoutly than ever, telling herself that if she did not comprehend, she could not doubt, and anyway loved the Holy Synod and prayed for it.
When the litany was over, the deacon crossed his stole over his breast and pronounced:
“Ourselves and our life we offer up to Christ the Lord!”
“Ourselves we offer up to God,” Natasha repeated in her heart. “My God, I give myself unto Thy keeping!” she thought. “I ask for nothing, I desire nothing; teach me how to act, how to do Thy will! Yes, take me; take me to Thee!” Natasha said, with devout impatience in her heart. She did not cross herself, but stood with her thin arms hanging down, as though in expectation every moment that an unseen force would come and carry her off and rescue her from herself, from her regrets and desires and remorse and hopes and sins.
Several times during the service the countess looked round at her daughter’s devout face and shining eyes, and prayed to God to help her.
To the general surprise, in the middle of the service, which Natasha knew so well, the deacon brought forward the little bench, from which they repeated the prayers, kneeling, on Trinity Day, and set it before the sanctuary doors. The priest advanced in his lilac velvet calotte, threw back his hair, and, with an effort, dropped on his knees. All the congregation did the same, looking at one another in surprise. There followed the prayer, which had just been received from the Synod, the prayer for the delivery of Russia out of the hands of the enemy.
“Lord God of our might, God of our salvation,” began the priest in that clear, mild, unemphatic voice, that is only used by the Slavonic priesthood, and has such an indescribable effect on the Russian heart.
“Lord God of might, God of our salvation! Look in grace and blessing on Thy humble people, and hear with loving-kindness, and spare and have mercy on us. The foe is confounding Thy land, and is fain to rise up against all the earth and lay it waste. These lawless men are gathered together to overwhelm Thy kingdom, to destroy Thy holy Jerusalem, Thy beloved Russia: to defile Thy temples, to overturn the altars and violate our holy shrines. How long, O Lord, how long shall the wicked prevail? How long shall they wreak their sinful will?
“Almighty God! Hear us when we pray to Thee, strengthen with Thy might our most gracious and supreme sovereign, Emperor Alexander Pavlovitch. Be mindful of his truth and mercy, recompense him according to his good deeds, and let them preserve Thy chosen Israel. Bless his counsels, his undertakings, and his deeds; fortify his kingdom with Thy Almighty hand, and vouchsafe him victory over the enemy, even as Thou gavest Moses victory over Amalek, and Gideon over Midian, and David over Goliath. Preserve his army; put weapons of brass in the hands that wage war in Thy name, and gird them about with strength for the battle. Take Thou the lance and shield, and rise up to succour us, and put to shame and to confusion them that devise evil against us, and let them be scattered before the face of Thy faithful armament like dust before the wind; and may Thy mighty angel put them to flight and to confusion. And let the net ensnare them when they wot not of it, and their plots that they have hatched in secret be turned against them. And let them be laid low before the feet of Thy servants and vanquished by our hosts. Lord! it is nought for Thee to save both great and small. Thou art God, and man can do nought against Thee!
“God of our Fathers! Remember Thy mercy and loving-kindness, that are everlasting. Turn not Thy face away from us; be gracious to our unworthiness; but in the greatness of Thy mercy and the infinity of Thy goodness, overlook our transgressions and our iniquities. Purify our hearts, and renew the true spirit within us; strengthen us all by faith in Thee; fortify us with hope; breathe into us true love for one another; arm us with unity of spirit in the righteous defence of the heritage Thou hast given us and our fathers; and let not the sceptre of the unrighteous be exalted above the destinies of Thy holy people.
“O Lord our God, in Whom we believe, and in Whom we put our trust, let us not be confounded in our faith in Thy mercy, and give us a sign for our blessing that they that hate us and our holy faith may see it and be put to shame and confusion, and that all lands may know that the Lord is Thy Name, and we are Thy people. Show Thy mercy upon us this day, O Lord, and grant us Thy salvation. Rejoice the hearts of Thy servants with Thy mercy; strike down our enemies and trample them swiftly under the feet of Thy faithful. Thou art the defence, the succour, and the victory of them that put their trust in Thee; and to Thee be the glory, to Father, and to Son, and to Holy Ghost, now and ever has been, for ever and ever. Amen!”
In Natasha’s religiously impressionable state, this prayer affected her strongly. She heard every word about Moses’s victory over Amalek, and Gideon’s over Midian, and David’s over Goliath, and about the destruction of Thy Jerusalem; and she prayed to God with all the tenderness and fervour with which her heart was overflowing, but she had no distinct idea what she was asking for in this prayer. With all her soul she joined in the petition for the true spirit, for the strengthening of hearts with faith and hope, and the breathing into them of love. But she could not pray for the trampling of her enemies underfoot, when she had only a few minutes before been wishing she had more of them to forgive and pray for. But yet she could have no doubts of the righteousness of this prayer that had been read by the priest on his knees. She felt in her heart a thrill of awe and horror at the punishment in store for men’s sins, and especially for her sins, and prayed to God to forgive them all, and her too, and give them all and her peace and happiness. And it seemed to her that God heard her prayer.
Chapter 19
EVER SINCE THE DAY when Pierre had looked up at the comet in the sky on his way home from the Rostovs’, and recalling Natasha’s grateful look, had felt as though some new vista was opening before him, the haunting problem of the vanity and senselessness of all things earthly had ceased to torment him. That terrible question: Why? what for? which had till then haunted him in the midst of every occupation, was not now replaced by any other question, nor by an answer to the old question; its place was filled by the image of her. If he heard or talked of trivialities, or read or was told of some instance of human baseness or folly, he was not cast down as of old; he did not ask himself why people troubled, when all was so brief and uncertain. But he thought of her as he had seen her last, and all his doubts vanished; not because she had answered the questions that haunted him, but because her image lifted him instantly into another bright realm of spiritual activity, in which there could be neither right nor wrong, into a region of beauty and love which was worth living for. Whatever infamy he thought of, he said to himself, “Well, let so and so rob the state and the Tsar, while the state and the Tsar heap honours on him; but she smiled at me yesterday, and begged me to come, and I love her, and nobody will ever know it,” he thought.
Pierre still went into society, drank as much, and led the same idle and aimless life, because, apart from the hours he spent at the Rostovs’, he had to get through the rest of his time somehow, and the habits and the acquaintances he had made in Moscow drew him irresistibly into the same life. But of late, since the reports from the seat of war had become more and more disquieting, and Natasha’s health had improved, and she had ceased to call for the same tender pity, he had begun to be more and more possessed by a restlessness that he could not explain. He felt that the position he was in could not go on for long, that a catastrophe was coming that would change the whole course of his life, and he sought impatiently for signs of this impending catastrophe. One of his brother masons had revealed to Pierre the following prophecy relating to Napoleon, and taken from the Apocalypse of St. John.
In the Apocalypse, chapter thirteen, verse seventeen, it is written: “Here is wisdom; let him that hath understanding, count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred three-score and six.”
And in the fifth verse of the same chapter: “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies, and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.”
If the French alphabet is treated like the Hebrew system of enumeration, by which the first ten letters represent the units, and the next the tens, and so on, the letters have the following value:—
abcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz
123456789102030405060708090100110120130140150160
Turning out the words l’empereur Napoléon into ciphers on this system, it happens that the sum of these numbers equals 666, and Napoleon is thereby seen to be the beast prophesied in the Apocalypse. Moreover, working out in the same way the words quarante-deux, that is, the term for which the beast was permitted to continue, the sum of these numbers again equals 666, from which it is deduced that the terms of Napoleon’s power had come in 1812, when the French Emperor reached his forty-second year. This prophecy made a great impression on Pierre. He frequently asked himself what would put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon; and he tried by the same system of turning letters into figures, and reckoning them up to find an answer to this question. He wrote down as an answer, l’empereur Alexandre? La nation russe? He reckoned out the figures, but their sum was far more or less than 666. Once he wrote down his own name “Comte Pierre Bezuhov,” but the sum of the figure was far from being right. He changed the spelling, putting s for z, added “de,” added the article “le,” and still could not obtain the desired result. Then it occurred to him that if the answer sought for were to be found in his name, his nationality ought surely to find a place in it too. He tried Le russe Besuhof, and adding up the figure made the sum 671. This was only five too much; the 5 was denoted by the letter “e,” the letter dropped in the article in the expression l’empereur Napoléon. Dropping the “e” in a similar way, though of course incorrectly, Pierre obtained the answer he sought in L’russe Besuhof, the letters of which on that system added up to 666. This discovery greatly excited him. How, by what connection, he was associated with the great event, foretold in the Apocalypse, he could not tell. But he did not for a moment doubt of that connection. His love for Natasha, Antichrist, Napoleon’s invasion, the comet, the number 666, l’empereur Napoléon, and l’russe Besuhof—all he thought were to develop, and come to some crisis together to extricate him from that spellbound, trivial round of Moscow habits, to which he felt himself in bondage, and to lead him to some great achievement and great happiness.
The day before that Sunday on which the new prayer had been read in the churches, Pierre had promised the Rostovs to call on Count Rastoptchin, whom he knew well, and to get from him the Tsar’s appeal to the country, and the last news from the army. On going to Count Rastoptchin’s in the morning, Pierre found there a special courier, who had only just arrived from the army. The courier was a man whom Pierre knew, and often saw at the Moscow balls.
“For mercy’s sake, couldn’t you relieve me of some of my burden,” said the courier; “I have a sack full of letters to parents.”
Among these letters was a letter from Nikolay Rostov to his father. Pierre took that; and Count Rastoptchin gave him a copy of the Tsar’s appeal to Moscow, which had just been printed, the last announcements in the army, and his own last placard. Looking through the army announcements, Pierre found in one of them, among lists of wounded, killed and promoted, the name of Nikolay Rostov, rewarded with the order of St. George, of the fourth degree, for distinguished bravery in the Ostrovna affair, and in the same announcement the appointment of Prince Andrey Bolkonsky to the command of a regiment of light cavalry. Though he did not want to remind the Rostovs of Bolkonsky’s existence, Pierre could not resist the inclination to rejoice their hearts with the news of their son’s decoration. Keeping the Tsar’s appeal, Rastoptchin’s placard, and the other announcement to bring with him at dinner-time, Pierre sent the printed announcement and Nikolay’s letter to the Rostovs.
The conversation with Rastoptchin, and his tone of anxiety and hurry, the meeting with the courier, who had casually alluded to the disastrous state of affairs in the army, the rumours of spies being caught in Moscow, of a sheet circulating in the town stating that Napoleon had sworn to be in both capitals before autumn, of the Tsar’s expected arrival next day—all combined to revive in Pierre with fresh intensity that feeling of excitement and expectation, that he had been conscious of ever since the appearance of the comet, and with even greater force since the beginning of the war.
The idea of entering the army had long before occurred to Pierre, and he would have acted upon it, but that, in the first place, he was pledged by his vow to the Masonic brotherhood, which preached universal peace and the abolition of war; and secondly, when he looked at the great mass of Moscow gentlemen, who put on uniforms, and professed themselves patriots, he felt somehow ashamed to take the same step. A cause that weighed with him even more in not entering the army was the obscure conception that he, l’russe Besuhof, had somehow the mystic value of the number of the beast, 666, that his share in putting a limit to the power of the beast, “speaking great things and blasphemies,” had been ordained from all eternity, and that therefore it was not for him to take any step whatever; it was for him to wait for what was bound to come to pass.
