the ruts in streams.
Pierre walked along, looking from side to side, counting
his steps in threes, and reckoning them off on his fingers.
Mentally addressing the rain, he repeated: ‘Now then, now
then, go on! Pelt harder!’
It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, but
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far down and deep within him his soul was occupied with
something important and comforting. This something was
a most subtle spiritual deduction from a conversation with
Karataev the day before.
At their yesterday’s halting place, feeling chilly by a dying campfire, Pierre had got up and gone to the next one,
which was burning better. There Platon Karataev was sitting covered uphead and allwith his greatcoat as if it were
a vestment, telling the soldiers in his effective and pleasant
though now feeble voice a story Pierre knew. It was already
past midnight, the hour when Karataev was usually free of
his fever and particularly lively. When Pierre reached the
fire and heard Platon’s voice enfeebled by illness, and saw
his pathetic face brightly lit up by the blaze, he felt a painful
prick at his heart. His feeling of pity for this man frightened
him and he wished to go away, but there was no other fire,
and Pierre sat down, trying not to look at Platon.
‘Well, how are you?’ he asked.
‘How am I? If we grumble at sickness, God won’t grant
us death,’ replied Platon, and at once resumed the story he
had begun.
‘And so, brother,’ he continued, with a smile on his pale
emaciated face and a particularly happy light in his eyes, ‘
you see, brother..’
Pierre had long been familiar with that story. Karataev
had told it to him alone some half-dozen times and always
with a specially joyful emotion. But well as he knew it, Pierre
now listened to that tale as to something new, and the quiet
rapture Karataev evidently felt as he told it communicated
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itself also to Pierre. The story was of an old merchant who
lived a good and God-fearing life with his family, and who
went once to the Nizhni fair with a companiona rich merchant.
Having put up at an inn they both went to sleep, and
next morning his companion was found robbed and with
his throat cut. A bloodstained knife was found under the
old merchant’s pillow. He was tried, knouted, and his nostrils having been torn off, ‘all in due form’ as Karataev put
it, he was sent to hard labor in Siberia.
‘And so, brother’ (it was at this point that Pierre came
up), ‘ten years or more passed by. The old man was living
as a convict, submitting as he should and doing no wrong.
Only he prayed to God for death. Well, one night the convicts were gathered just as we are, with the old man among
them. And they began telling what each was suffering for,
and how they had sinned against God. One told how he had
taken a life, another had taken two, a third had set a house
on fire, while another had simply been a vagrant and had
done nothing. So they asked the old man: ‘What are you being punished for, Daddy?’‘I, my dear brothers,’ said he, ‘am
being punished for my own and other men’s sins. But I have
not killed anyone or taken anything that was not mine, but
have only helped my poorer brothers. I was a merchant, my
dear brothers, and had much property. ‘And he went on to
tell them all about it in due order. ‘I don’t grieve for myself,’
he says, ‘God, it seems, has chastened me. Only I am sorry
for my old wife and the children,’ and the old man began to
weep. Now it happened that in the group was the very man
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who had killed the other merchant. ‘Where did it happen,
Daddy?’ he said. ‘When, and in what month?’ He asked all
about it and his heart began to ache. So he comes up to the
old man like this, and falls down at his feet! ‘You are perishing because of me, Daddy,’ he says. ‘It’s quite true, lads,
that this man,’ he says, ‘is being tortured innocently and for
nothing! I,’ he says, ‘did that deed, and I put the knife under your head while you were asleep. Forgive me, Daddy,’ he
says, ‘for Christ’s sake!’’
Karataev paused, smiling joyously as he gazed into the
fire, and he drew the logs together.
‘And the old man said, ‘God will forgive you, we are all
sinners in His sight. I suffer for my own sins,’ and he wept
bitter tears. Well, and what do you think, dear friends?’
Karataev continued, his face brightening more and more
with a rapturous smile as if what he now had to tell contained the chief charm and the whole meaning of his story:
‘What do you think, dear fellows? That murderer confessed
to the authorities. ‘I have taken six lives,’ he says (he was a
great sinner), ‘but what I am most sorry for is this old man.
Don’t let him suffer because of me.’ So he confessed and it
was all written down and the papers sent off in due form.
The place was a long way off, and while they were judging,
what with one thing and another, filling in the papers all
in due formthe authorities I meantime passed. The affair
reached the Tsar. After a while the Tsar’s decree came: to
set the merchant free and give him a compensation that had
been awarded. The paper arrived and they began to look for
the old man. ‘Where is the old man who has been suffering
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innocently and in vain? A paper has come from the Tsar!’
so they began looking for him,’ here Karataev’s lower jaw
trembled, ‘but God had already forgiven himhe was dead!
That’s how it was, dear fellows!’ Karataev concluded and sat
for a long time silent, gazing before him with a smile.
And Pierre’s soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the
story itself but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up Karataev’s face as he told it, and the
mystic significance of that joy.
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Chapter XIV
‘A vos places!’* suddenly cried a voice.
*”To your places.’
A pleasant feeling of excitement and an expectation of
something joyful and solemn was aroused among the soldiers of the convoy and the prisoners. From all sides came
shouts of command, and from the left came smartly dressed
cavalrymen on good horses, passing the prisoners at a trot.
The expression on all faces showed the tension people feel at
the approach of those in authority. The prisoners thronged
together and were pushed off the road. The convoy formed
up.
‘The Emperor! The Emperor! The Marshal! The Duke!’
and hardly had the sleek cavalry passed, before a carriage
drawn by six gray horses rattled by. Pierre caught a glimpse
of a man in a three-cornered hat with a tranquil look on his
handsome, plump, white face. It was one of the marshals.
His eye fell on Pierre’s large and striking figure, and in the
expression with which he frowned and looked away Pierre
thought he detected sympathy and a desire to conceal that
sympathy.
The general in charge of the stores galloped after the
carriage with a red and frightened face, whipping up his
skinny horse. Several officers formed a group and some soldiers crowded round them. Their faces all looked excited
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and worried.
‘What did he say? What did he say?’ Pierre heard them
ask.
While the marshal was passing, the prisoners had huddled together in a crowd, and Pierre saw Karataev whom he
had not yet seen that morning. He sat in his short overcoat
leaning against a birch tree. On his face, besides the look of
joyful emotion it had worn yesterday while telling the tale
of the merchant who suffered innocently, there was now an
expression of quiet solemnity.
Karataev looked at Pierre with his kindly round eyes
now filled with tears, evidently wishing him to come near
that he might say something to him. But Pierre was not sufficiently sure of himself. He made as if he did not notice that
look and moved hastily away.
When the prisoners again went forward Pierre looked
round. Karataev was still sitting at the side of the road under the birch tree and two Frenchmen were talking over his
head. Pierre did not look round again but went limping up
the hill.
From behind, where Karataev had been sitting, came the
sound of a shot. Pierre heard it plainly, but at that moment
he remembered that he had not yet finished reckoning up
how many stages still remained to Smolenska calculation
he had begun before the marshal went by. And he again
started reckoning. Two French soldiers ran past Pierre, one
of whom carried a lowered and smoking gun. They both
looked pale, and in the expression on their facesone of them
glanced timidly at Pierrethere was something resembling
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what he had seen on the face of the young soldier at the execution. Pierre looked at the soldier and remembered that,
two days before, that man had burned his shirt while drying
it at the fire and how they had laughed at him.
Behind him, where Karataev had been sitting, the dog
began to howl. ‘What a stupid beast! Why is it howling?’
thought Pierre.
His comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him,
avoided looking back at the place where the shot had been
fired and the dog was howling, just as Pierre did, but there
was a set look on all their faces.
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Chapter XV
The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal’s baggage train
stopped at the village of Shamshevo. The men crowded together round the campfires. Pierre went up to the fire, ate
some roast horseflesh, lay down with his back to the fire,
and immediately fell asleep. He again slept as he had done
at Mozhaysk after the battle of Borodino.
Again real events mingled with dreams and again someone, he or another, gave expression to his thoughts, and
even to the same thoughts that had been expressed in his
dream at Mozhaysk.
‘Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and
moves and that movement is God. And while there is life
there is joy in consciousness of
