الفصل الفصل 329 · 第329章

As generally happens, Pierre did not feel the full effects of the

physical privation and strain he had suffered as prisoner until after

they were over. After his liberation he reached Orël, and on the third

day there, when preparing to go to Kiev, he fell ill and was laid up

for three months. He had what the doctors termed “bilious fever.” But

despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him

medicines to drink, he recovered.

Scarcely any impression was left on Pierre’s mind by all that happened

to him from the time of his rescue till his illness. He remembered

only the dull gray weather now rainy and now snowy, internal physical

distress, and pains in his feet and side. He remembered a general

impression of the misfortunes and sufferings of people and of being

worried by the curiosity of officers and generals who questioned him, he

also remembered his difficulty in procuring a conveyance and horses, and

above all he remembered his incapacity to think and feel all that time.

On the day of his rescue he had seen the body of Pétya Rostóv. That same

day he had learned that Prince Andrew, after surviving the battle of

Borodinó for more than a month had recently died in the Rostóvs’ house

at Yaroslávl, and Denísov who told him this news also mentioned Hélène’s

death, supposing that Pierre had heard of it long before. All this at

the time seemed merely strange to Pierre: he felt he could not grasp its

significance. Just then he was only anxious to get away as quickly as

possible from places where people were killing one another, to some

peaceful refuge where he could recover himself, rest, and think over

all the strange new facts he had learned; but on reaching Orël he

immediately fell ill. When he came to himself after his illness he saw

in attendance on him two of his servants, Terénty and Váska, who had

come from Moscow; and also his cousin the eldest princess, who had been

living on his estate at Eléts and hearing of his rescue and illness had

come to look after him.

It was only gradually during his convalescence that Pierre lost the

impressions he had become accustomed to during the last few months

and got used to the idea that no one would oblige him to go anywhere

tomorrow, that no one would deprive him of his warm bed, and that he

would be sure to get his dinner, tea, and supper. But for a long time in

his dreams he still saw himself in the conditions of captivity. In the

same way little by little he came to understand the news he had been

told after his rescue, about the death of Prince Andrew, the death of

his wife, and the destruction of the French.

A joyous feeling of freedom—that complete inalienable freedom natural

to man which he had first experienced at the first halt outside

Moscow—filled Pierre’s soul during his convalescence. He was surprised

to find that this inner freedom, which was independent of external

conditions, now had as it were an additional setting of external

liberty. He was alone in a strange town, without acquaintances. No one

demanded anything of him or sent him anywhere. He had all he wanted:

the thought of his wife which had been a continual torment to him was no

longer there, since she was no more.

“Oh, how good! How splendid!” said he to himself when a cleanly laid

table was moved up to him with savory beef tea, or when he lay down for

the night on a soft clean bed, or when he remembered that the French had

gone and that his wife was no more. “Oh, how good, how splendid!”

And by old habit he asked himself the question: “Well, and what then?

What am I going to do?” And he immediately gave himself the answer:

“Well, I shall live. Ah, how splendid!”

The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he had

continually sought to find—the aim of life—no longer existed for

him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared

temporarily—he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not

present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the

complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at

this time.

He could not see an aim, for he now had faith—not faith in any kind of

rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest

God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for

an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity

he had learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his

nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his

captivity he had learned that in Karatáev God was greater, more infinite

and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the

Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into

the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life

he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have

merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable

infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and

had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen

only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had

equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space,

where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to

him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such

had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy

seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted

them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen

the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he

had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and

therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away

the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and

gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and

infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and

happy he became. That dreadful question, “What for?” which had formerly

destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him. To that

question, “What for?” a simple answer was now always ready in his soul:

“Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls

from a man’s head.”