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After his interview with his wife Pierre left for Petersburg.
At the Torzhok 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
Torzhok 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 Sokolniki 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 Dolokhov 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 Torzhok 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 Bezukhov. 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.
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