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Scarcely had Pierre laid his head on the pillow before he
felt himself falling asleep, but suddenly, almost with the distinctness
of reality, he heard the boom, boom, boom of firing, the thud
of projectiles, groans and cries, and smelled blood and powder,
and a feeling of horror and dread of death seized him. Filled
with fright he opened his eyes and lifted his head from under
his cloak. All was tranquil in the yard. Only someone's orderly
passed through the gateway, splashing through the mud, and talked
to the innkeeper. Above Pierre's head some pigeons, disturbed
by the movement he had made in sitting up, fluttered under the
dark roof of the penthouse. The whole courtyard was permeated
by a strong peaceful smell of stable yards, delightful to Pierre
at that moment. He could see the clear starry sky between the
dark roofs of two penthouses.
"Thank God, there is no more of that!" he thought,
covering up his head again. "Oh, what a terrible thing is
fear, and how shamefully I yielded to it! But they... they were
steady and calm all the time, to the end..." thought he.
They, in Pierre's mind, were the soldiers, those who had been
at the battery, those who had given him food, and those who had
prayed before the icon. They, those strange men he had not previously
known, stood out clearly and sharply from everyone else.
"To be a soldier, just a soldier!" thought Pierre
as he fell asleep, "to enter communal life completely, to
be imbued by what makes them what they are. But how cast off all
the superfluous, devilish burden of my outer man? There was a
time when I could have done it. I could have run away from my
father, as I wanted to. Or I might have been sent to serve as
a soldier after the duel with Dolokhov." And the memory of
the dinner at the English Club when he had challenged Dolokhov
flashed through Pierre's mind, and then he remembered his benefactor
at Torzhok. And now a picture of a solemn meeting of the lodge
presented itself to his mind. It was taking place at the English
Club and someone near and dear to him sat at the end of the table.
"Yes, that is he! It is my benefactor. But he died!"
thought Pierre. "Yes, he died, and I did not know he was
alive. How sorry I am that he died, and how glad I am that he
is alive again!" On one side of the table sat Anatole, Dolokhov,
Nesvitski, Denisov, and others like them (in his dream the category
to which these men belonged was as clearly defined in his mind
as the category of those he termed they), and he heard those people,
Anatole and Dolokhov, shouting and singing loudly; yet through
their shouting the voice of his benefactor was heard speaking
all the time and the sound of his words was as weighty and uninterrupted
as the booming on the battlefield, but pleasant and comforting.
Pierre did not understand what his benefactor was saying, but
he knew (the categories of thoughts were also quite distinct in
his dream) that he was talking of goodness and the possibility
of being what they were. And they with their simple, kind, firm
faces surrounded his benefactor on all sides. But though they
were kindly they did not look at Pierre and did not know him.
Wishing to speak and to attract their attention, he got up, but
at that moment his legs grew cold and bare. He felt ashamed, and
with one arm covered his legs from which his cloak had in fact
slipped. For a moment as he was rearranging his cloak Pierre opened
his eyes and saw the same penthouse roofs, posts, and yard, but
now they were all bluish, lit up, and glittering with frost or
dew.
"It is dawn," thought Pierre. "But that's not
what I want. I want to hear and understand my benefactor's words."
Again he covered himself up with his cloak, but now neither the
lodge nor his benefactor was there. There were only thoughts clearly
expressed in words, thoughts that someone was uttering or that
he himself was formulating.
Afterwards when he recalled those thoughts Pierre was convinced
that someone outside himself had spoken them, though the impressions
of that day had evoked them. He had never, it seemed to him, been
able to think and express his thoughts like that when awake.
"To endure war is the most difficult subordination of
man's freedom to the law of God," the voice had said. "Simplicity
is submission to the will of God; you cannot escape from Him.
And they are simple. They do not talk, but act. The spoken word
is silver but the unspoken is golden. Man can be master of nothing
while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all.
If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations,
would not know himself. The hardest thing [Pierre went on thinking,
or hearing, in his dream] is to be able in your soul to unite
the meaning of all. To unite all?" he asked himself. "No,
not to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but to harness all these
thoughts together is what we need! Yes, one must harness them,
must harness them!" he repeated to himself with inward rapture,
feeling that these words and they alone expressed what he wanted
to say and solved the question that tormented him.
"Yes, one must harness, it is time to harness."
"Time to harness, time to harness, your excellency! Your
excellency!" some voice was repeating. "We must harness,
it is time to harness...."
It was the voice of the groom, trying to wake him. The sun
shone straight into Pierre's face. He glanced at the dirty innyard
in the middle of which soldiers were watering their lean horses
at the pump while carts were passing out of the gate. Pierre turned
away with repugnance, and closing his eyes quickly fell back on
the carriage seat. "No, I don't want that, I don't want to
see and understand that. I want to understand what was revealing
itself to me in my dream. One second more and I should have understood
it all! But what am I to do? Harness, but how can I harness everything?"
and Pierre felt with horror that the meaning of all he had seen
and thought in the dream had been destroyed.
The groom, the coachman, and the innkeeper told Pierre that
an officer had come with news that the French were already near
Mozhaysk and that our men were leaving it.
Pierre got up and, having told them to harness and overtake
him, went on foot through the town.
The troops were moving on, leaving about ten thousand wounded
behind them. There were wounded in the yards, at the windows of
the houses, and the streets were crowded with them. In the streets,
around carts that were to take some of the wounded away, shouts,
curses, and blows could be heard. Pierre offered the use of his
carriage, which had overtaken him, to a wounded general he knew,
and drove with him to Moscow. On the way Pierre was told of the
death of his brother-in-law Anatole and of that of Prince Andrew.
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