“And is he in Moscow?” Pierre asked, hesitating and looking guilty.
The Frenchman gazed at Pierre’s guilty face, and grinned.
“No, he will make his entry to-morrow,” he said, and went on with his talk.
Their conversation was interrupted by several voices shouting at the gates, and Morel coming in to tell the captain that some Würtemberg hussars had come and wanted to put up their horses in the yard in which the captain’s had been put up. The difficulty arose chiefly from the hussars not understanding what was said to them.
The captain bade the senior sergeant be brought to him, and in a stern voice asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his commanding officer, and on what pretext he dared attempt to occupy quarters already occupied. The German, who knew very little French, succeeded in answering the first two questions, but in reply to the last one, which he did not understand, he answered in broken French and German that he was quartermaster of the regiment, and had received orders from his superior officer to occupy all the houses in the row. Pierre, who knew German, translated the German’s words to the captain, and translated the captain’s answer back for the Würtemberg hussar. On understanding what was said to him, the German gave in, and took his men away.
The captain went out to the entrance and gave some loud commands.
When he came back into the room, Pierre was sitting where he had been sitting before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed suffering. He really was at that moment suffering. As soon as the captain had gone out, and Pierre had been left alone, he suddenly came to himself, and recognised the position he was in. It was not that Moscow had been taken, not that these lucky conquerors were making themselves at home there and patronising him, bitterly as Pierre felt it, that tortured him at that moment. He was tortured by the consciousness of his own weakness. The few glasses of wine he had drunk, the chat with this good-natured fellow, had dissipated that mood of concentrated gloom, which he had been living in for the last few days, and which was essential for carrying out his design. The pistol and the dagger and the peasant’s coat were ready, Napoleon was making his entry on the morrow. Pierre felt it as praiseworthy and as beneficial as ever to slay the miscreant; but he felt now that he would not do it. He struggled against the consciousness of his own weakness, but he vaguely felt that he could not overcome it, that his past gloomy train of ideas, of vengeance, murder, and self-sacrifice, had been blown away like dust at contact with the first human being.
The captain came into the room, limping a little, and whistling some tune.
The Frenchman’s chatter that had amused Pierre struck him now as revolting. And his whistling a tune, and his gait, and his gesture in twisting his moustaches, all seemed insulting to Pierre now.
“I’ll go away at once, I won’t say another word to him,” thought Pierre. He thought this, yet went on sitting in the same place. Some strange feeling of weakness riveted him to his place; he longed to get up and go, and could not.
The captain, on the contrary, seemed in exceedingly good spirits. He walked a couple of times up and down the room. His eyes sparkled and his moustaches slightly twitched as though he were smiling to himself at some amusing notion.
“Charming fellow the colonel of these Würtembergers,” he said all at once. “He’s a German, but a good fellow if ever there was one. But a German.”
He sat down facing Pierre.
“By the way, you know German?”
Pierre looked at him in silence.
“How do you say ‘asile’ in German?”
“Asile?” repeated Pierre. “Asile in German is Unterkunft.”
“What do you say?” the captain queried quickly and doubtfully.
“Unterkunft,” repeated Pierre.
“Onterkoff,” said the captain, and for several seconds he looked at Pierre with his laughing eyes. “The Germans are awful fools, aren’t they, M. Pierre?” he concluded.
“Well, another bottle of this Moscow claret, eh? Morel, warm us another bottle!” the captain shouted gaily.
Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre in the candle-light, and was obviously struck by the troubled face of his companion. With genuine regret and sympathy in his face, Ramballe approached Pierre, and bent over him.
“Eh, we are sad!” he said, touching Pierre on the hand. “Can I have hurt you? No, really, have you anything against me?” he questioned. “Perhaps it is owing to the situation of affairs?”
Pierre made no reply, but looked cordially into the Frenchman’s eyes. This expression of sympathy was pleasant to him.
“My word of honour, to say nothing of what I owe you, I have a liking for you. Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and death. With my hand and my heart, I say so,” he said, slapping himself on the chest.
“Thank you,” said Pierre. The captain gazed at Pierre as he had gazed at him when he learnt the German for “refuge,” and his face suddenly brightened.
“Ah, in that case, I drink to our friendship,” he cried gaily, pouring out two glasses of wine.
Pierre took the glass and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his, pressed Pierre’s hand once more, and leaned his elbow on the table in a pose of pensive melancholy.
“Yes, my dear friend, such are the freaks of fortune,” he began. “Who would have said I should be a soldier and captain of dragoons in the service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him. And yet here I am at Moscow with him. I must tell you, my dear fellow,” he continued in the mournful and measured voice of a man who intends to tell a long story, “our name is one of the most ancient in France.”
And with the easy and na?ve unreserve of a Frenchman, the captain told Pierre the history of his forefathers, his childhood, boyhood, and manhood, and all his relations, his fortunes, and domestic affairs. “Ma pauvre mère,” took, of course, a prominent part in this recital.
“But all that is only the setting of life; the real thing is love. Love! Eh, M. Pierre?” he said, warming up. “Another glass.”
Pierre again emptied his glass, and filled himself a third.
“O women! women!” and the captain, gazing with moist eyes at Pierre, began talking of love and his adventures with the fair sex. They were very numerous, as might readily be believed, judging from the officer’s conceited, handsome face and the eager enthusiasm with which he talked of women. Although all Ramballe’s accounts of his love affairs were characterised by that peculiar nastiness in which the French find the unique charm and poetry of love, the captain told his stories with such genuine conviction that he was the only man who had tasted and known all the sweets of love, and he described the women he had known in such an alluring fashion that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.
It was evident that l’amour the Frenchman was so fond of was neither that low and simple kind of love Pierre had at one time felt for his wife, nor the romantic love, exaggerated by himself, that he felt for Natasha. For both those kinds of love Ramballe had an equal contempt—one was l’amour des charretiers, the other l’amour des nigauds. L’amour for which the Frenchman had a weakness consisted principally in an unnatural relation to the woman, and in combinations of monstrous circumstances which lent the chief charm to the feeling.
Thus the captain related the touching history of his love for a fascinating marquise of five-and-thirty, and at the same time for a charming, innocent child of seventeen, the daughter of the fascinating marquise. The conflict of generosity between mother and daughter, ending in the mother sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage to her lover, even now, though it was a memory in the remote past, moved the captain deeply. Then he related an episode in which the husband played the part of the lover, and he—the lover—the part of the husband, and several comic episodes among his reminiscences of Germany, where Unterkunft means asile, where the husbands eat cabbage soup, and where the young girls are too flaxen-haired.
The last episode was one in Poland, still fresh in the captain’s memory, and described by him with rapid gestures and a glowing face. The story was that he had saved the life of a Pole—the episode of saving life was continually cropping up in the captain’s anecdotes—and that Pole had intrusted to his care his bewitching wife, a Parisian in heart, while he himself entered the French service. The captain had been happy, the bewitching Polish lady had wanted to elope with him; but moved by a magnanimous impulse, the captain had restored the wife to the husband with the words: “I saved your life, and I save your honour.”
As he repeated these words, the captain wiped his eyes and shook himself, as though to shake off the weakness that overcame him at this touching recollection.
As men often do at a late hour at night, and under the influence of wine, Pierre listened to the captain’s stories, and while he followed and understood all he told him, he was also following a train of personal reminiscences which had for some reason risen to his imagination. As he listened to those love affairs, his own love for Natasha suddenly came into his mind, and going over all the pictures of that love in his imagination, he mentally compared them with Ramballe’s stories. As he heard the account of the conflict between love and duty, Pierre saw before him every detail of the meeting with the object of his love at the Suharev Tower. That meeting had not at the time made much impression on him; he had not once thought of it since. But now it seemed to him that there was something very significant and romantic in that meeting.
“Pyotr Kirillitch, come here, I recognise you”; he could hear her words now, could see her eyes, her smile, her travelling cap, and the curl peeping out below it … and he felt that there was something moving, touching in all that.
When he had finished his tale about the bewitching Polish lady, the captain turned to Pierre with the inquiry whether he had had any similar experience of self-sacrifice for love and envy of a lawful husband.
Pierre, roused by this question, lifted his head and felt an irresistible impulse to give expression to the ideas in his mind. He began to explain that he looked upon love for woman somewhat differently. He said he had all his life long loved one woman, and still loved her, and that that woman could never be his.
“Tiens!” said the captain.
Then Pierre explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest youth, but had not dared to think of her because she was too young, and he had been an illegitimate son, with no name of his own. Then when he had received a name and wealth, he had not dared think of her because he loved her too much, because he set her too high above all the world, and so even more above himself. On reaching this point, Pierre asked the captain, did he understand that.
The captain made a gesture expressing that whether he understood it or not, he begged him to proceed.
“Platonic love; moonshine…” he muttered. The wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness, or the thought that this man did not know and never would know, any of the persons concerned in his story, or all together loosened Pierre’s tongue. With faltering lips and with a faraway look in his moist eye, he told all his story; his marriage and the story of Natasha’s love for his dearest friend and her betrayal of him, and all his own simple relations with her. In response to questions from Ramballe, he told him, too, what he had at first concealed—his position in society—and even disclosed his name.
What impressed the captain more than anything else in Pierre’s story was the fact that Pierre was very wealthy, that he had two palatial houses in Moscow, and that he had abandoned everything, and yet had not left Moscow, but was staying in the town concealing his name and station.
Late in the night they went out together into the street. The night was warm and clear. On the left there was the glow of the first fire that broke out in Moscow, in Petrovka. On the right a young crescent moon stood high in the sky, and in the opposite quarter of the heavens hung the brilliant comet which was connected in Pierre’s heart with his love. At the gates of the yard stood Gerasim, the cook, and two Frenchmen. Pierre could hear their laughter and talk, incomprehensible to one another. They were looking at the glow of the fire burning in the town.
There was nothing alarming in a small remote fire in the immense city.
Gazing at the lofty, starlit sky, at the moon, at the comet and the glow of the fire, Pierre felt a thrill of joyous and tender emotion. “How fair it all is! what more does one want?” he thought. And all at once, when he recalled his design, his head seemed going round; he felt so giddy that he leaned against the fence so as not to fall.
Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate with unsteady steps, and going back to his room lay down on the sofa and at once fell asleep.
Chapter 30
FROM VARIOUS ROADS, and with various feelings, the inhabitants running and driving away from Moscow, and the retreating troops, gazed at the glow of the first fire that broke out in the city on the 2nd of September.
The Rostovs’ party stopped for that night at Mytishtchy, twenty versts from Moscow. They had started so late on the 1st of September, the road had been so blocked by waggons and troops, so many things had been forgotten, and servants sent back to get them, that they had decided to halt for the first night five versts from Moscow. The next morning they walked late, and there were again so many delays that they only reached Great Mytishtchy. At ten o’clock the Rostov family, and the wounded soldiers travelling with them, had all found places for the night in the yards and huts of the greater village. The servants, the Rostovs’ coachmen, and the orderlies of the wounded officers, after settling their masters for the night, supped, fed their horses, and came out into the porch of a hut.
In the next hut lay Raevsky’s adjutant with a broken wrist, and the terrible pain made him moan incessantly, and these moans had a grue-some sound in the autumn darkness of the night. On the first night this adjutant had spent the night in a building in the same yard as the hut in which the Rostovs slept. The countess declared that she had not closed her eyes all night from that moaning, and at Mytishtchy she had moved into a less comfortable hut simply to get further away from the wounded man. One of the servants noticed in the dark night sky, above the high carriage standing at the entry, another small glow of fire. One such glow had been seen long before, and every one knew it was Little Mytishtchy, which had been set on fire by Mamonov’s Cossacks.
“I say, mates, there’s another fire,” said the man. All of them looked towards the glow.
“Why, they told us Mamonov’s Cossacks had fired Little Mytishtchy.” “Nay! that’s not Mytishtchy, it’s further.” “Look’ee, it’s in Moscow seemingly.” Two of the men left the porch, went to a carriage and squatted on the step. “It’s more to the left! Why, Mytishtchy is away yonder, and that’s quite the other side.”
