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AFTER HIS INTERVIEW with his wife, Pierre had set off for Petersburg. At the
station of Torzhok there were no horses, or the overseer was unwilling to let
him have them. Pierre had to wait. Without removing his outdoor things, he lay
down on a leather sofa, in front of a round table, put up his big feet in their
thick overboots on this table and sank into thought.
“Shall I bring in the trunks? Make up a bed? Will you take tea?” the valet
kept asking.
Pierre made no reply, for he heard nothing and said nothing. He had been deep
in thought since he left the last station, and still went on thinking of the
same thing—of something so important that he did not notice what was passing
around him. Far from being concerned whether he reached Petersburg sooner or
later, or whether there would or would not be a place for him to rest in at this
station, in comparison with the thoughts that engrossed him now, it was a matter
of utter indifference to him whether he spent a few hours or the rest of his
life at that station.
The overseer and his wife, his valet, and a peasant woman with Torzhok
embroidery for sale, came into the room, offering their services. Without
changing the position of his raised feet, Pierre gazed at them over his
spectacles, and did not understand what they could want and how they all managed
to live, without having solved the questions that absorbed him. These same
questions had possessed his mind ever since that day when he had come back after
the duel from Sokolniky and had spent that first agonising, sleepless night. But
now in the solitude of his journey they seized upon him with special force. Of
whatever he began thinking he came back to the same questions, which he could
not answer, and from which he could not escape. It was as though the chief screw
in his brain upon which his whole life rested were loose. The screw moved no
forwarder, no backwarder, but still it turned, catching on nothing, always in
the same groove, and there was no making it cease turning.
The overseer came in and began humbly begging his excellency to wait only a
couple of hours, after which he would (come what might of it) let his excellency
have the special mail service horses. The overseer was unmistakably lying, with
the sole aim of getting an extra tip from the traveller. “Was that good or bad?”
Pierre wondered. “For me good, for the next traveller bad, and for himself
inevitable because he has nothing to eat; he said that an officer had thrashed
him for it. And the officer thrashed him because he had to travel in haste. And
I shot Dolohov because I considered myself injured. Louis XVI. was executed
because they considered him to be a criminal, and a year later his judges were
killed too for something. What is wrong? What is right? What must one love, what
must one hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death?
What force controls it all?” he asked himself. And there was no answer to one of
these questions, except one illogical reply that was in no way an answer to any
of them. That reply was: “One dies and it's all over. One dies and finds it all
out or ceases asking.” But dying too was terrible.
The Torzhok pedlar woman in a whining voice proffered her wares, especially
some goatskin slippers. “I have hundreds of roubles I don't know what to do
with, and she's standing in her torn cloak looking timidly at me,” thought
Pierre. “And what does she want the money for? As though the money could give
her one hairsbreadth of happiness, of peace of soul. Is there anything in the
world that can make her and me less enslaved to evil and to death? Death, which
ends all, and must come to-day or to-morrow—which beside eternity is the same as
an instant's time.” And again he turned the screw that did not bite in anything,
and the screw still went on turning in the same place.
His servant handed him a half-cut volume of a novel in the form of letters by
Madame Suza. He began reading of the sufferings and the virtuous struggles of a
certain “Amélie de Mansfeld.” “And what did she struggle against her seducer
for?” he thought, “when she loved him. God could not have put in her heart an
impulse that was against His will. My wife—as she was once—didn't struggle, and
perhaps she was right. Nothing has been discovered,” Pierre said to himself
again, “nothing has been invented. We can only know that we know nothing. And
that's the highest degree of human wisdom.”
Everything within himself and around him struck him as confused, meaningless,
and loathsome. But in this very loathing of everything surrounding him Pierre
found a sort of tantalising satisfaction.
“I make bold to beg your excellency to make room the least bit for this
gentleman here,” said the overseer, coming into the room and ushering in after
him another traveller, brought to a standstill from lack of horses. The
traveller was a thickset, square-shouldered, yellow, wrinkled old man, with grey
eyelashes overhanging gleaming eyes of an indefinite grey colour.
Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up and went to lie down on the bed
that had been made ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who,
without looking at Pierre, with an air of surly fatigue was wearily taking off
his outer wraps with the aid of his servant. The traveller, now clothed in a
shabby nankin-covered sheepskin coat with felt highboots on his thin bony legs,
sat down on the sofa, and leaning on its back his close-cropped head, which was
very large and broad across the temples, he glanced at Bezuhov. The stern,
shrewd, and penetrating expression in that glance impressed Pierre. He felt
disposed to speak to the traveller, but by the time he had ready a question
about the road with which to address him, the traveller had closed his eyes, and
folded his wrinkled old hands, on one finger of which there was a large iron
ring with a seal representing the head of Adam. He sat without stirring, either
resting or sunk, as it seemed to Pierre, in profound and calm meditation. The
newcomer's servant was also a yellow old man, covered with wrinkles. He had
neither moustache nor beard, not because he was shaved, but obviously had never
had any. The old servant was active in unpacking a travelling-case, in setting
the tea-table and in bringing in a boiling samovar. When everything was ready,
the traveller opened his eyes, moved to the table, and pouring out a glass of
tea for himself, poured out another for the beardless old man and gave it him.
Pierre began to feel an uneasiness and a sense of the necessity, of the
inevitability of entering into conversation with the traveller.
The servant brought back his empty glass turned upside down with an
unfinished piece of nibbled sugar beside it, and asked if anything were
wanted.
“Nothing. Give me my book,” said the traveller. The servant gave him a book,
which seemed to Pierre to be of a devotional character, and the traveller became
absorbed in its perusal. Pierre looked at him. All at once the stranger laid
down the book, and putting a mark in it, shut it up. Then closing his eyes and
leaning his arms on the back of the sofa, he fell back into his former attitude.
Pierre stared at him, and had not time to look away when the old man opened his
eyes and bent his resolute and stern glance upon Pierre. Pierre felt confused
and tried to turn away from that glance, but the gleaming old eyes drew him
irresistibly to them.
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