“It is not attained by the reason, but by life,” said the mason.
“I don’t understand,” said Pierre, feeling with dismay that doubt was stirring within him. He dreaded obscurity and feebleness in the freemason’s arguments, he dreaded being unable to believe in him. “I don’t understand,” he said, “in what way human reason cannot attain that knowledge of which you speak.”
The freemason smiled his mild, fatherly smile.
“The highest wisdom and truth is like the purest dew, which we try to hold within us,” said he. “Can I hold in an impure vessel that pure dew and judge of its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I bring that dew contained within me to some degree of purity.”
“Yes, yes; that’s so,” Pierre said joyfully.
“The highest wisdom is founded not on reason only, not on those worldly sciences, of physics, history, chemistry, etc., into which knowledge of the intellect is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom knows but one science—the science of the whole, the science that explains the whole creation and the place of man in it. To instil this science into one’s soul, it is needful to purify and renew one’s inner man, and so, before one can know, one must believe and be made perfect. And for the attainment of these aims there has been put into our souls the light of God, called the conscience.”
“Yes, yes,” Pierre assented.
“Look with the spiritual eye into thy inner man, and ask of thyself whether thou art content with thyself. What hast thou attained with the guidance of the intellect alone? What art thou? You are young, you are wealthy, you are cultured, sir. What have you made of all the blessings vouchsafed you? Are you satisfied with yourself and your life?”
“No, I hate my life,” said Pierre, frowning.
“Thou hatest it; then change it, purify thyself, and as thou art purified, thou wilt come to know wisdom. Look at your life, sir. How have you been spending it? In riotous orgies and debauchery, taking everything from society and giving nothing in return. You have received wealth. How have you used it? What have you done for your neighbour? Have you given a thought to the tens of thousands of your slaves, have you succoured them physically and morally? No. You have profited by their toil to lead a dissipated life. That’s what you have done. Have you chosen a post in the service where you might be of use to your neighbour? No. You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married, sir, took upon yourself the responsibility of guiding a young woman in life, and what have you done? You have not helped her, sir, to find the path of truth, but have cast her into an abyss of deception and misery. A man injured you, and you have killed him, and you say you do not know God, and that you hate your life. There is no wisdom in all that, sir.”
After these words the freemason leaned his elbow again on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes, as though weary of prolonged talking. Pierre gazed at that stern, immovable, old, almost death-like face, and moved his lips without uttering a sound. He wanted to say, “Yes, a vile, idle, vicious life,” and he dared not break the silence. The freemason cleared his throat huskily, as old men do, and called his servant.
“How about horses?” he asked, without looking at Pierre.
“They have brought round some that were given up,” answered the old man. “You won’t rest?”
“No, tell them to harness them.”
“Can he really be going away and leaving me all alone, without telling me everything and promising me help?” thought Pierre, getting up with downcast head, beginning to walk up and down the room, casting a glance from time to time at the freemason. “Yes, I had not thought of it, but I have led a contemptible, dissolute life, but I did not like it, and I didn’t want to,” thought Pierre, “and this man knows the truth, and if he liked he could reveal it to me.” Pierre wanted to say this to the freemason and dared not. After packing his things with his practised old hands, the traveller buttoned up his sheepskin. On finishing these preparations, he turned to Bezuhov, and in a polite, indifferent tone, said to him:
“Where are you going now, sir?”
“I? … I’m going to Petersburg,” answered Pierre in a tone of childish indecision. “I thank you. I agree with you in everything. But do not suppose that I have been so bad. With all my soul I have desired to be what you would wish me to be; but I have never met with help from any one.… Though I was myself most to blame for everything. Help me, instruct me, and perhaps I shall be able …”
Pierre could not say more; his voice broke and he turned away.
The freemason was silent, obviously pondering something.
“Help comes only from God,” he said, “but such measure of aid as it is in the power of our order to give you, it will give you, sir. You go to Petersburg, and give this to Count Villarsky” (he took out his notebook and wrote a few words on a large sheet of paper folded into four). “One piece of advice let me give you. When you reach the capital, devote your time at first there to solitude and to self-examination, and do not return to your old manner of life. Therewith I wish you a good journey, sir,” he added, noticing that his servant had entered the room, “and all success …”
The stranger was Osip Alexyevitch Bazdyev, as Pierre found out from the overseer’s book. Bazdyev had been one of the most well-known freemasons and Martinists even in Novikov’s day. For a long while after he had gone, Pierre walked about the station room, neither lying down to sleep nor asking for horses. He reviewed his vicious past, and with an ecstatic sense of beginning anew, pictured to himself a blissful, irreproachably virtuous future, which seemed to him easy of attainment. It seemed to him that he had been vicious, simply because he had accidentally forgotten how good it was to be virtuous. There was left in his soul not a trace of his former doubts. He firmly believed in the possibility of the brotherhood of man, united in the aim of supporting one another in the path of virtue. And freemasonry he pictured to himself as such a brotherhood.
Chapter 3
ON REACHING PETERSBURG, Pierre let no one know of his arrival, went out to see nobody, and spent whole days in reading Thomas à Kempis, a book which had been sent him, he did not know from whom. One thing, and one thing only, Pierre thoroughly understood in reading that book; he understood what he had hitherto known nothing of, all the bliss of believing in the possibility of attaining perfection, and in the possibility of brotherly and active love between men, revealed to him by Osip Alexyevitch. A week after his arrival, the young Polish count, Villarsky, whom Pierre knew very slightly in Petersburg society, came one evening into his room with the same official and ceremonious air with which Dolohov’s second had called on him. Closing the door behind him, and assuring himself that there was nobody in the room but Pierre, he addressed him:
“I have come to you with a message and a suggestion, count,” he said to him, not sitting down. “A personage of very high standing in our brotherhood has been interceding for you to be admitted into our brotherhood before the usual term, and has asked me to be your sponsor. I regard it as a sacred duty to carry out that person’s wishes. Do you wish under my sponsorship to enter the brotherhood of freemasons?”
Pierre was impressed by the cold and austere tone of this man, whom he had almost always seen before at balls wearing an agreeable smile, in the society of the most brilliant women.
“Yes, I do wish it,” said Pierre.
Villarsky bent his head.
“One more question, count,” he said, “to which I beg you, not as a future mason, but as an honest man (galant homme) to answer me in all sincerity: have you renounced your former convictions? do you believe in God?”
Pierre thought a moment.
“Yes … yes, I do believe in God,” he said.
“In that case…” Villarsky was beginning, but Pierre interrupted him.
“Yes, I believe in God,” he said once more.
“In that case, we can go,” said Villarsky. “My carriage is at your disposal.”
Throughout the drive Villarsky was silent. In answer to Pierre’s inquiries, what he would have to do, and how he would have to answer, Villarsky simply said that brothers, more worthy than he, would prove him, and that Pierre need do nothing but tell the truth.
They drove in at the gates of a large house, where the lodge had its quarters, and, passing up a dark staircase, entered a small, lighted ante-room, where they took off their overcoats without the assistance of servants. From the ante-room they walked into another room. A man in strange attire appeared at the door. Villarsky, going in to meet him, said something to him in French in a low voice, and went up to a small cupboard, where Pierre noticed garments unlike any he had seen before. Taking a handkerchief from the cupboard, Villarsky put it over Pierre’s eyes and tied it in a knot behind, catching his hair painfully in the knot. Then he drew him towards himself, kissed him, and taking him by the hand led him away somewhere. Pierre had been hurt by his hair being pulled in the knot: he puckered up his face from the pain, and smiled with vague shame. His huge figure with his arms hanging at his sides, and his face puckered up and smiling, moved after Villarsky with timid and uncertain steps.
After leading him for about ten steps, Villarsky stopped.
“Whatever happens to you,” said he, “you must endure all with good courage if you are firmly resolved to enter our brotherhood.” (Pierre answered affirmatively by an inclination of his head.) “When you hear a knock at the door, you may uncover your eyes,” added Villarsky; “I wish you good courage and success,” and, pressing Pierre’s hand, Villarsky went away.
When he was left alone, Pierre still went on smiling in the same way. Twice he shrugged his shoulders and raised his hand to the handkerchief, as though he would have liked to take it off, but he let it drop again. The five minutes he had spent with his eyes bandaged seemed to him an hour. His arms felt numb, his legs tottered, he felt as though he were tired out. He was aware of the most complex and conflicting feelings. He was afraid of what would be done to him, and still more afraid of showing fear. He felt inquisitive to know what was coming, what would be revealed to him; but above everything, he felt joy that the moment had come when he would at last enter upon that path of regeneration and of an actively virtuous life, of which he had been dreaming ever since his meeting with Osip Alexyevitch.
There came loud knocks at the door. Pierre took off the bandage and looked about him. It was black darkness in the room; only in one spot there was a little lamp burning before something white. Pierre went nearer and saw that the little lamp stood on a black table, on which there lay an open book. The book was the gospel: the white thing in which the lamp was burning was a human skull with its eyeholes and teeth. After reading the first words of the gospel, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,” Pierre went round the table and caught sight of a large open box filled with something. It was a coffin full of bones. He was not in the least surprised by what he saw. Hoping to enter upon a completely new life, utterly unlike the old life, he was ready for anything extraordinary, more extraordinary indeed than what he was seeing. The skull, the coffin, the gospel—it seemed to him that he had been expecting all that; had been expecting more, indeed. He tried to stir up a devotional feeling in himself; he looked about him. “God, death, love, the brotherhood of man,” he kept saying to himself, associating with those words vague but joyful conceptions of some sort. The door opened and some one came in. In the faint light, in which Pierre could, however, see a little by this time, a short man approached. Apparently dazed by coming out of the light into the darkness, the man stopped, then with cautious steps moved again towards the table, and laid on it both his small hands covered with leather gloves.
This short man was wearing a white leather apron, that covered his chest and part of his legs; upon his neck could be seen something like a necklace, and a high white ruffle stood up from under the necklace, framing his long face, on which the light fell from below.
“For what are you come hither?” asked the newcomer, turning towards Pierre at a faint rustle made by the latter. “For what are you, an unbeliever in the truth of the light, who have not seen the light, for what are you come here? What do you seek from us? Wisdom, virtue, enlightenment?”
At the moment when the door opened and the unknown person came in, Pierre had a sensation of awe and reverence, such as he had felt in childhood at confession; he felt himself alone with a man who was in the circumstances of life a complete stranger, and yet through the brotherhood of men so near. With a beating heart that made him gasp for breath, Pierre turned to the rhetor, as in the phraseology of freemasonry the man is called who prepares the seeker for entering the brotherhood. Going closer, Pierre recognised in the rhetor a man he knew, Smolyaninov, but it was mortifying to him to think that the newcomer was a familiar figure; he was to him only a brother and a guide in the path of virtue. For a long while Pierre could not utter a word, so that the rhetor was obliged to repeat his question.
“Yes; I…I… wish to begin anew,” Pierre articulated with difficulty.
“Very good,” said Smolyaninov, and went on at once.
“Have you any idea of the means by which our holy order will assist you in attaining your aim?…” said the rhetor calmly and rapidly.
“I…hope for…guidance…for help…in renewing…” said Pierre, with a tremble in his voice and a difficulty in utterance due both to emotion and to being unaccustomed to speak of abstract subjects in Russian.
“What idea have you of freemasonry?”
“I assume that freemasonry is the fraternité and equality of men with virtuous aims,” said Pierre, feeling ashamed as he spoke of the incongruity of his words with the solemnity of the moment. “I assume …”
“Very good,” said the rhetor hastily, apparently quite satisfied with the reply. “Have you sought the means of attaining your aim in religion?”
“No; I regarded it as untrue and have not followed it,” said Pierre, so softly that the rhetor did not catch it, and asked him what he was saying. “I was an atheist,” answered Pierre.
“You seek the truth in order to follow its laws in life; consequently, you seek wisdom and virtue, do you not?” said the rhetor, after a moment’s pause.
“Yes, yes,” assented Pierre.
The rhetor cleared his throat, folded his gloved hands across his chest, and began speaking.
“Now I must reveal to you the chief aim of our order,” he said, “and if that aim coincides with yours, you may with profit enter our brotherhood. The first and greatest aim and united basis of our order, on which it is established and which no human force can destroy, is the preservation and handing down to posterity of a certain important mystery … that has come down to us from the most ancient times, even from the first man—a mystery upon which, perhaps, the fate of the human race depends. But since this mystery is of such a kind that no one can know it and profit by it if he has not been prepared by a prolonged and diligent self-purification, not every one can hope to attain it quickly. Hence we have a second aim, which consists in preparing our members, as far as possible reforming their hearts, purifying and enlightening their intelligence by those means which have been revealed to us by tradition from men who have striven to attain this mystery, and thereby to render them fit for the reception of it. Purifying and regenerating our members, we endeavor, thirdly, to improve the whole human race, offering it in our members an example of piety and virtue, and thereby we strive with all our strength to combat the evil that is paramount in the world. Ponder on these things, and I will come again to you,” he said, and went out of the room.
