Prince Andrey crooked his third finger.
“Oh, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit and dies, but you have him bled and cure him. He will drag about an invalid for ten years, a burden to every one. It would be ever so much simpler and more comfortable for him to die. Others are born, and there are always plenty. If you grudge losing a labourer—that’s how I look at him—but you want to cure him from love for him. But he has no need of that. And besides, what a notion that medicine has ever cured any one! Killed them—yes!” he said, scowling and turning away from Pierre.
Prince Andrey gave such a clear and precise utterance to his ideas that it was evident he had thought more than once of this already, and he talked rapidly and eagerly, as a man does who has long been silent. His eyes grew keener, the more pessimistic were the views he expressed.
“Oh, this is awful, awful!” said Pierre. “I don’t understand how one can live with such ideas. I have had moments of thinking like that; it was not long ago at Moscow and on a journey, but then I become so abject that I don’t live at all, everything’s hateful to me … myself, most of all. Then I don’t eat, I don’t wash … how can you go on? …”
“Why not wash, that’s not clean,” said Prince Andrey; “on the contrary, one has to try and make one’s life more agreeable as far as one can. I’m alive, and it’s not my fault that I am, and so I have to try without hurting others to get on as well as I can till death.”
“But what impulse have you to live with such ideas? You would sit still without stirring, taking no part in anything.…”
“Life won’t leave you in peace even so. I should be glad to do nothing, but here you see on one side, the local nobility have done me the honour of electing me a marshal; it was all I could do to get out of it. They could not understand that I haven’t what’s needed, haven’t that good-natured, fussy vulgarity we all know so well, that’s needed for it. Then there’s this house here, which had to be built that I might have a nook of my own where I could be quiet. Now there’s the militia.”
“Why aren’t you serving in the army?”
“After Austerlitz!” said Prince Andrey gloomily. “No, thank you; I swore to myself that I would never serve in the Russian army again. And I will not, if Bonaparte were stationed here at Smolensk, threatening Bleak Hills! even then I wouldn’t serve in the Russian army. Well, so I was saying,” Prince Andrey went on, regaining his composure. “Now, there’s the militia; my father’s commander-in-chief of the third circuit, and the only means for me to escape from active service is to serve under him.”
“So you are in the service, then?”
“Yes.” He was silent for a while.
“Then why do you serve?”
“I’ll tell you why. My father is one of the most remarkable men of his time. But he’s grown old, and he’s not cruel exactly, but he’s of too energetic a character. He’s terrible from his habit of unlimited power, and now with this authority given him by the Emperor as a commander-in-chief in the militia. If I had been two hours later a fortnight ago, he would have hanged the register-clerk at Yuhnovo,” said Prince Andrey with a smile. “So I serve under him now because no one except me has any influence over my father, and I sometimes save him from an act which would be a source of misery to him afterwards.”
“Ah, there you see!”
“Yes, it is not as you think,” Prince Andrey continued. “I didn’t, and I don’t wish well in the slightest to that scoundrelly register-clerk who had stolen boots or something from the militiamen; indeed, I would have been very glad to see him hanged, but I feel for my father, that is again myself.”
Prince Andrey grew more and more eager. His eyes glittered feverishly, as he tried to prove to Pierre that there was never the slightest desire to do good to his neighbour in his actions.
“Well, you want to liberate your serfs, too,” he pursued; “that’s a very good thing, but not for you—I expect you have never flogged a man nor sent one to Siberia—and still less for your peasants. If a peasant is beaten, flogged, sent to Siberia, I dare say he’s not a bit the worse for it. In Siberia he can lead the same brute existence; the stripes on the body heal, and he’s as happy as before. But it’s needed for the people who are ruined morally, who are devoured by remorse, who stifle that remorse and grow callous from being able to inflict punishment all round them. Perhaps you have not seen it, but I have seen good men, brought up in the traditions of unlimited power with years, as they grew more irritable, become cruel and brutal, conscious of it, and unable to control themselves, and growing more and more miserable.”
Prince Andrey spoke with such earnestness that Pierre could not help thinking those ideas were suggested to him by his father. He made him no reply.
“So that’s what I grieve for—for human dignity, for peace of conscience, for purity, and not for their backs or their heads, which always remain just the same backs and heads, however you thrash or shave them.”
“No, no, a thousand times no! I shall never agree with you,” said Pierre.
Chapter 12
IN THE EVENING Prince Andrey and Pierre got into the coach and drove to Bleak Hills. Prince Andrey watched Pierre and broke the silence from time to time with speeches that showed he was in a good humour.
Pointing to the fields, he told him of the improvements he was making in the management of his land.
Pierre preserved a gloomy silence, replying only by monosyllables, and apparently plunged in his own thoughts.
Pierre was reflecting that Prince Andrey was unhappy, that he was in error, that he did not know the true light, and that he ought to come to his aid; enlighten him and lift him up. But as soon as he began to deliberate on what he would say, he foresaw that Prince Andrey with one word, one argument, would annihilate everything in his doctrine; and he was afraid to begin, afraid of exposing his most cherished and holiest ideas to possible ridicule.
“No, what makes you think so?” Pierre began all at once, lowering his head and looking like a butting bull; “what makes you think so? You ought not to think so.”
“Think so, about what?” asked Prince Andrey in surprise.
“About life. About the destination of man. It can’t be so. I used to think like that, and I have been saved, do you know by what?—freemasonry. No, you must not smile. Freemasonry is not a religious sect, nor mere ceremonial rites, as I used to suppose; freemasonry is the best, the only expression of the highest, eternal aspects of humanity.” And he began expounding to Prince Andrey freemasonry, as he understood it.
He said that freemasonry is the teaching of Christianity, freed from its political and religious fetters; the teaching of equality, fraternity, and love.
“Our holy brotherhood is the only thing that has real meaning in life; all the rest is a dream,” said Pierre. “You understand, my dear fellow, that outside this brotherhood all is filled with lying and falsehood, and I agree with you that there’s nothing left for an intelligent and good-hearted man but, like you, to get through his life, only trying not to hurt others. But make our fundamental convictions your own, enter into our brotherhood, give yourself up to us, let us guide you, and you will at once feel yourself, as I felt, a part of a vast, unseen chain, the origin of which is lost in the skies,” said Pierre, looking straight before him.
Prince Andrey listened to Pierre’s words in silence. Several times he did not catch words from the noise of the wheels, and he asked Pierre to repeat what he had missed. From the peculiar light that glowed in Prince Andrey’s eyes, and from his silence, Pierre saw that his words were not in vain, that Prince Andrey would not interrupt him nor laugh at what he said.
They reached a river that had overflowed its banks, and had to cross it by a ferry. While the coach and horses waited they crossed on the ferry. Prince Andrey with his elbow on the rail gazed mutely over the stretch of water shining in the setting sun.
“Well, what do you think about it?” asked Pierre. “Why are you silent?”
“What do I think? I have heard what you say. That’s all right,” said Prince Andrey. “But you say, enter into our brotherhood, and we will show you the object of life and the destination of man, and the laws that govern the universe. But who are we?—men? How do you know it all? Why is it I alone don’t see what you see? You see on earth the dominion of good and truth, but I don’t see it.”
Pierre interrupted him. “Do you believe in a future life?” he asked.
“In a future life?” repeated Prince Andrey.
But Pierre did not give him time to answer, and took this repetition as a negative reply, the more readily as he knew Prince Andrey’s atheistic views in the past. “You say that you can’t see the dominion of good and truth on the earth. I have not seen it either, and it cannot be seen if one looks upon our life as the end of everything. On earth, this earth here” (Pierre pointed to the open country), “there is no truth—all is deception and wickedness. But in the world, the whole world, there is a dominion of truth, and we are now the children of earth, but eternally the children of the whole universe. Don’t I feel in my soul that I am a part of that vast, harmonious whole? Don’t I feel that in that vast, innumerable multitude of beings, in which is made manifest the Godhead, the higher power—what you choose to call it—I constitute one grain, one step upward from lower beings to higher ones? If I see, see clearly that ladder that rises up from the vegetable to man, why should I suppose that ladder breaks off with me and does not go on further and further? I feel that I cannot disappear as nothing does disappear in the universe, that indeed I always shall be and always have been. I feel that beside me, above me, there are spirits, and that in their world there is truth.”
“Yes, that’s Herder’s theory,” said Prince Andrey. “But it’s not that, my dear boy, convinces me; but life and death are what have convinced me. What convinces me is seeing a creature dear to me, and bound up with me, to whom one has done wrong, and hoped to make it right” (Prince Andrey’s voice shook and he turned away), “and all at once that creature suffers, is in agony, and ceases to be.… What for? It cannot be that there is no answer! And I believe there is.… That’s what convinces, that’s what has convinced me,” said Prince Andrey.
“Just so, just so,” said Pierre; “isn’t that the very thing I’m saying?”
“No. I only say that one is convinced of the necessity of a future life, not by argument, but when one goes hand-in-hand with some one, and all at once that some one slips away yonder into nowhere, and you are left facing that abyss and looking down into it. And I have looked into it …”
“Well, that’s it then! You know there is a yonder and there is some one. Yonder is the future life; Some One is God.”
Prince Andrey did not answer. The coach and horses had long been taken across to the other bank, and had been put back into the shafts, and the sun had half sunk below the horizon, and the frost of evening was starring the pools at the fording-place; but Pierre and Andrey, to the astonishment of the footmen, coachmen, and ferrymen, still stood in the ferry and were still talking.
“If there is God and there is a future life, then there is truth and there is goodness; and the highest happiness of man consists in striving for their attainment. We must live, we must love, we must believe,” said Pierre, “that we are not only living to-day on this clod of earth, but have lived and will live for ever there in everything” (he pointed to the sky). Prince Andrey stood with his elbow on the rail of the ferry, and as he listened to Pierre he kept his eyes fixed on the red reflection of the sun on the bluish stretch of water. Pierre ceased speaking. There was perfect stillness. The ferry had long since come to a standstill, and only the eddies of the current flapped with a faint sound on the bottom of the ferry boat. It seemed to Prince Andrey that the lapping of the water kept up a refrain to Pierre’s words: “It’s the truth, believe it.”
Prince Andrey sighed, and with a radiant, childlike, tender look in his eyes glanced at the face of Pierre—flushed and triumphant, though still timidly conscious of his friend’s superiority.
“Yes, if only it were so!” he said. “Let us go and get in, though,” added Prince Andrey, and as he got out of the ferry he looked up at the sky, to which Pierre had pointed him, and for the first time since Austerlitz he saw the lofty, eternal sky, as he had seen it lying on the field of Austerlitz, and something that had long been slumbering, something better that had been in him, suddenly awoke with a joyful, youthful feeling in his soul. That feeling vanished as soon as Prince Andrey returned again to the habitual conditions of life, but he knew that that feeling—though he knew not how to develop it—was still within him. Pierre’s visit was for Prince Andrey an epoch, from which there began, though outwardly unchanged, a new life in his inner world.
Chapter 13
IT WAS DARK by the time Prince Andrey and Pierre drove up to the principal entrance of the house at Bleak Hills. While they were driving in, Prince Andrey with a smile drew Pierre’s attention to a commotion that was taking place at the back entrance. A bent little old woman with a wallet on her back, and a short man with long hair, in a black garment, ran back to the gate on seeing the carriage driving up. Two women ran out after them, and all the four, looking round at the carriage with scared faces, ran in at the back entrance.
“Those are Masha’s God’s folk,” said Prince Andrey. “They took us for my father. It’s the one matter in which she does not obey him. He orders them to drive away these pilgrims, but she receives them.”
“But what are God’s folk?” asked Pierre.
Prince Andrey had not time to answer him. The servants came out to meet them, and he inquired where the old prince was and whether they expected him home soon. The old prince was still in the town, and they were expecting him every minute.
Prince Andrey led Pierre away to his own suite of rooms, which were always in perfect readiness for him in his father’s house, and went off himself to the nursery.
“Let us go to my sister,” said Prince Andrey, coming back to Pierre; “I have not seen her yet, she is in hiding now, sitting with her God’s folk. Serve her right; she will be put to shame, and you will see God’s folk. It’s curious, upon my word.”
“What are ‘God’s folk’?” asked Pierre.
“You shall see.”
Princess Marya certainly was disconcerted, and reddened in patches when they went in. In her snug room, with lamps before the holy picture stand, there was sitting, behind the samovar, on the sofa beside her, a young lad with a long nose and long hair, wearing a monk’s cassock. In a low chair near sat a wrinkled, thin, old woman, with a meek expression on her childlike face.
“Andrey, why did you not let me know?” she said with mild reproach, standing before her pilgrims like a hen before her chickens.
