Kabanata Kabanata 85 · 第85章

After his interview with his wife Pierre left for Petersburg. At the

Torzhók post station, either there were no horses or the postmaster

would not supply them. Pierre was obliged to wait. Without undressing,

he lay down on the leather sofa in front of a round table, put his big

feet in their overboots on the table, and began to reflect.

“Will you have the portmanteaus brought in? And a bed got ready, and

tea?” asked his valet.

Pierre gave no answer, for he neither heard nor saw anything. He had

begun to think of the last station and was still pondering on the same

question—one so important that he took no notice of what went

on around him. Not only was he indifferent as to whether he got to

Petersburg earlier or later, or whether he secured accommodation at this

station, but compared to the thoughts that now occupied him it was a

matter of indifference whether he remained there for a few hours or for

the rest of his life.

The postmaster, his wife, the valet, and a peasant woman selling

Torzhók embroidery came into the room offering their services.

Without changing his careless attitude, Pierre looked at them over his

spectacles unable to understand what they wanted or how they could go on

living without having solved the problems that so absorbed him. He had

been engrossed by the same thoughts ever since the day he returned from

Sokólniki after the duel and had spent that first agonizing, sleepless

night. But now, in the solitude of the journey, they seized him with

special force. No matter what he thought about, he always returned to

these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to

ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his

life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out,

but went on turning uselessly in the same place.

The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to

wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency

have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted

to get more money from the traveler.

“Is this good or bad?” Pierre asked himself. “It is good for me,

bad for another traveler, and for himself it’s unavoidable, because

he needs money for food; the man said an officer had once given him a

thrashing for letting a private traveler have the courier horses.

But the officer thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as

possible. And I,” continued Pierre, “shot Dólokhov because I

considered myself injured, and Louis XVI was executed because they

considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who

executed him—also for some reason. What is bad? What is good? What

should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I?

What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?”

There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that

not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was:

“You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease

asking.” But dying was also dreadful.

The Torzhók peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering her

wares, especially a pair of goatskin slippers. “I have hundreds of

rubles I don’t know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered

cloak looking timidly at me,” he thought. “And what does she

want the money for? As if that money could add a hair’s breadth to

happiness or peace of mind. Can anything in the world make her or me

less a prey to evil and death?—death which ends all and must come

today or tomorrow—at any rate, in an instant as compared with

eternity.” And again he twisted the screw with the stripped thread,

and again it turned uselessly in the same place.

His servant handed him a half-cut novel, in the form of letters, by

Madame de Souza. He began reading about the sufferings and virtuous

struggles of a certain Emilie de Mansfeld. “And why did she resist

her seducer when she loved him?” he thought. “God could not have put

into her heart an impulse that was against His will. My wife—as she

once was—did not struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been

found out, nothing discovered,” Pierre again said to himself. “All

we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human

wisdom.”

Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and

repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre

found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction.

“I make bold to ask your excellency to move a little for this

gentleman,” said the postmaster, entering the room followed by another

traveler, also detained for lack of horses.

The newcomer was a short, large-boned, yellow-faced, wrinkled old

man, with gray bushy eyebrows overhanging bright eyes of an indefinite

grayish color.

Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up, and lay down on a bed that

had been got ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who,

with a gloomy and tired face, was wearily taking off his wraps with the

aid of his servant, and not looking at Pierre. With a pair of felt boots

on his thin bony legs, and keeping on a worn, nankeen-covered, sheepskin

coat, the traveler sat down on the sofa, leaned back his big head with

its broad temples and close-cropped hair, and looked at Bezúkhov. The

stern, shrewd, and penetrating expression of that look struck Pierre. He

felt a wish to speak to the stranger, but by the time he had made up his

mind to ask him a question about the roads, the traveler had closed his

eyes. His shriveled old hands were folded and on the finger of one of

them Pierre noticed a large cast iron ring with a seal representing a

death’s head. The stranger sat without stirring, either resting or, as

it seemed to Pierre, sunk in profound and calm meditation. His servant

was also a yellow, wrinkled old man, without beard or mustache,

evidently not because he was shaven but because they had never grown.

This active old servant was unpacking the traveler’s canteen and

preparing tea. He brought in a boiling samovar. When everything was

ready, the stranger opened his eyes, moved to the table, filled a

tumbler with tea for himself and one for the beardless old man to whom

he passed it. Pierre began to feel a sense of uneasiness, and the

need, even the inevitability, of entering into conversation with this

stranger.

The servant brought back his tumbler turned upside down, * with an

unfinished bit of nibbled sugar, and asked if anything more would be

wanted.

* To indicate he did not want more tea.

“No. Give me the book,” said the stranger.

The servant handed him a book which Pierre took to be a devotional work,

and the traveler became absorbed in it. Pierre looked at him. All at

once the stranger closed the book, putting in a marker, and again,

leaning with his arms on the back of the sofa, sat in his former

position with his eyes shut. Pierre looked at him and had not time

to turn away when the old man, opening his eyes, fixed his steady and

severe gaze straight on Pierre’s face.

Pierre felt confused and wished to avoid that look, but the bright old

eyes attracted him irresistibly.