War and Peace

t midday on the twenty-second of October Pierre was going uphill along
the muddy, slippery road, looking at his feet and at the roughness of
the way. Occasionally he glanced at the familiar crowd around him and
then again at his feet. The former and the latter were alike familiar
and his own. The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran merrily along the side
of the road, sometimes in proof of its agility and self-satisfaction
lifting one hind leg and hopping along on three, and then again going on
all four and rushing to bark at the crows that sat on the carrion. The
dog was merrier and sleeker than it had been in Moscow. All around lay
the flesh of different animals—from men to horses—in various stages of
decomposition; and as the wolves were kept off by the passing men the
dog could eat all it wanted.

It had been raining since morning and had seemed as if at any moment it
might cease and the sky clear, but after a short break it began raining
harder than before. The saturated road no longer absorbed the water,
which ran along 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 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 Karatáev 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 Platón Karatáev was sitting covered up—head and all—with 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 Karatáev was usually free of
his fever and particularly lively. When Pierre reached the fire and
heard Platón’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
Platón.

“Well, how are you?” he asked.

“How am I? If we grumble at sickness, God won’t grant us death,” replied
Platón, 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. Karatáev 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 Karatáev evidently felt as he told
it communicated 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 Nízhni fair with a companion—a 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 Karatáev 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 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!’”

Karatáev 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?” Karatáev 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 form—the authorities I mean—time 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 innocently and in vain? A paper has come from
the Tsar!’ so they began looking for him,” here Karatáev’s lower jaw
trembled, “but God had already forgiven him—he was dead! That’s how it
was, dear fellows!” Karatáev 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
Karatáev’s face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy.