War and Peace

fter 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.