War and Peace (214 page)

The commotion among the peoples begins to subside. The waves of the great tempest begin to abate, and eddies begin to be formed about the calmer surface where diplomatists are busy, fancying the calm is their work.

But all at once the quiet sea is convulsed again. The diplomatists imagine that they, their disagreements, are the cause of this fresh disturbance; they look for wars between their sovereigns; the position seems insoluble. But the storm they feel brewing does not come from the quarter where they look for it. It rises again from the same starting point—Paris. The last backwash of the westward movement follows—the backwash which was to solve the seemingly inextricable diplomatic difficulties, and to put an end to the military unrest of the period.

The man who has devastated France comes back to France alone, with no project, and no soldiers. Any policeman can arrest him; but by a strange freak of chance no one does seize him, but all meet with enthusiasm the man they have been cursing but a day before, and will curse again within a month.

That man is needed for the last act winding up the drama.

The act is performed.

The last part is played. The actor is bidden to undress, and wash off his powder and paint; he will be needed no more.

And for several years this man, in solitude on his island, plays his pitiful farce to himself, intrigues and lies, justifying his conduct when a justification is no longer needed, and shows all the world what the thing was men took for power when an unseen hand guided it.

The stage manager, when the drama was over, and the puppet stripped, showed him to us.

“Look what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he but I that moved you?”

But blinded by the force of the movement men for long could not perceive that.

Even more coherence and inevitability is to be seen in the life of Alexander I., the personage who stood at the head of the counter-movement from east westward.

What was needed for the man who, to the exclusion of others, should stand at the head of that movement from the east westward?

There was needed a sense of justice, an interest in the affairs of Europe, but a remote one, not obscured by petty interests, a moral preeminence over his peers—the sovereigns of the time; there was needed a gentle and attractive personal character; there was needed too a personal grievance against Napoleon. And all that is to be seen in Alexander I.; it was all prepared beforehand by the innumerable so-called
chance
circumstances of his previous life, by his education and the liberalism of the beginning of his reign, and the counsellors around, and Austerlitz, and Tilsit, and Erfurt.

During the war in defence of the country this personage is inactive; he is not needed. But as soon as a general European war becomes inevitable, at the given moment, he is in his place, and bringing the European peoples together he leads them to the goal.

The goal is reached. After the last war of 1815 Alexander finds himself at the highest possible pinnacle of human power. How does he use it?

While Napoleon in his exile was drawing up childish and lying schemes of the blessings he would have showered on humanity if he had had the power, Alexander, the pacifier of Europe, the man who, from his youth up, had striven for nothing but the good of the people, the first champion of liberal reforms in his country, now when he seemed to possess the greatest possible power, and consequent possibility of doing good to his people, felt his work was done, and God’s hand was laid upon him, and recognising the nothingness of that semblance of power, turned from it, gave it up to despicable men, and men he despised, and could only say:

“Not to us, not to us, but to Thy Name! I too am a man like all of you; let me live like a man, and think of my soul and of God.”

Just as the sun and every atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and at the same time is only a part of a whole inconceivable to man through its vastness, so every individuality bears within it its own ends and yet bears them so as to serve general ends unfathomable by man.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child dreads bees, and says the object of the bee is to sting people. A poet admires
the bee, sipping honey from the cup of the flower, and says the object of the bee is to sip the nectar of the flower. A beekeeper, noticing that the bee gathers pollen and brings it to the hive, says that the object of the bee is to gather honey. Another beekeeper, who has studied the life of the swarm more closely, says the bee gathers honey to feed the young ones, and to rear a queen, that the object of the bee is the perpetuation of its race. The botanist observes that the bee flying with the pollen fertilises the pistil, and in this he sees the object of the bee. Another, watching the hybridisation of plants, sees that the bee contributes to that end also, and he may say that the bee’s object is that. But the final aim of the bee is not exhausted by one or another, or a third aim, which the human intellect is capable of discovering. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of such aims, the more obvious it becomes that the final aim is beyond its reach.

All that is within the reach of man is the observation of the analogy of the life of the bee with other manifestations of life. And the same is true with the final aims of historical persons and of nations.

Natasha’s marriage to Bezuhov, which took place in 1813, was the last happy event in the family of the old Rostovs. Count Ilya Andreivitch died the same year; and as is always the case, with the death of the father the family was broken up.

The events of the previous year: the burning of Moscow and the flight from that city; the death of Prince Andrey and Natasha’s despair; the death of Petya and the grief of the countess fell like one blow after another on the old count’s head. He seemed not to understand, and to feel himself incapable of understanding, the significance of all these events, and figuratively speaking, bowed his old head to the storm, as though expecting and seeking fresh blows to make an end of him. By turns he seemed scared and distraught, and then unnaturally lively and active.

Natasha’s marriage for a time occupied him on its external side. He arranged dinners and suppers in honour of it, and obviously tried to be cheerful; but his cheerfulness was not infectious as in old days, but, on the contrary, aroused the commiseration of those who knew and liked him.

After Pierre and his wife had left, he collapsed and began to complain of depression. A few days later he fell ill and took to his bed. In spite of the doctor’s assurances, he knew from the first days of his illness that he would never get up again. For a whole fortnight the countess sat in a low chair by his pillow, never taking off her clothes. Every time she gave him his medicine, he mutely kissed her hand, weeping. On the last day, sobbing, he begged forgiveness of his wife, and of his absent son, too, for squandering their property, the chief sin that lay on his conscience. After receiving absolution and the last unction, he quietly died; and next day a crowd of acquaintances, come to pay the last debt of respect to the deceased, filled the Rostovs’ hired lodgings. All those acquaintances, who had so often dined and danced in his house, and had so often laughed at his expense, were saying now with the same inward feeling of contrition and self-reproach, as though seeking to justify themselves: “Yes, whatever he may have been, he was a splendid man. One doesn’t meet such men nowadays … And who has not his weaknesses?…”

It was precisely when the count’s fortunes were so irretrievably embroiled that he could not conceive how, in another year, it would end, that he suddenly died.

Nikolay was with the Russian army in Paris when the news of his father’s death reached him. He at once applied for his discharge, and without waiting for it, obtained leave and went to Moscow. Within a month after the count’s death the financial position had been made perfectly clear, astounding every one by the immense sum of various petty debts, the existence of which no one had suspected. The debts were more than double the assets of the estate.

The friends and relations advised Nikolay to refuse to accept his inheritance. But Nikolay looked on such a refusal as a slur on the honoured memory of his father; and so he would not hear of such a course, and accepted the inheritance with the obligation of paying the debts.

The creditors, who had so long been silent, held in check during the old count’s lifetime by the vague but powerful influence of his easy good-nature, all beset Nikolay at once. There seemed, as so often happens, a sort of rivalry among them, which should get paid first; and the very people, such as Mitenka and others, who held promissory notes, not received in discharge of debts, but as presents, were now the most importunate of the creditors. They would give Nikolay no peace and no respite, and those who had shown pity for the old man, who was responsible for their losses (if they really had lost money by him), were
now ruthless in their persecution of the young heir, who was obviously guiltless as far as they were concerned, and had voluntarily undertaken to pay them.

Not one of the plans that Nikolay resorted to was successful: the estate was sold by auction at half its value, and half the debts remained still unpaid. Nikolay accepted a loan of thirty thousand roubles offered him by his brother-in-law Bezuhov; and paid that portion of the debts that he recognised as genuine obligations. And to avoid being thrown into prison for the remainder, as the creditors threatened, he once more entered the government service.

To return to the army, where at the next promotion he would have been colonel, was out of the question, because his mother now clung to her son as her one hold on life. And so in spite of his disinclination to remain in Moscow, in the midst of a circle of acquaintances who had known him in former days, in spite of his distaste for the civil service, he accepted a civilian post in Moscow, and taking off his beloved uniform, established himself in a little lodging in Sivtsevoy Vrazhok with his mother and Sonya.

Natasha and Pierre were living at this period in Petersburg, and had no very distinct idea of Nikolay’s position. After having borrowed money from his brother-in-law, Nikolay did his utmost to conceal his poverty-stricken position from him. His situation was rendered the more difficult, as with his twelve hundred roubles of salary he had not only to keep himself, Sonya, and his mother, but to keep his mother in such a way that she would not be sensible of their poverty. The countess could not conceive of life being possible without the luxurious surroundings to which she had been accustomed from her childhood; and without any idea of its being difficult for her son, she was continually insisting on having a carriage, which they had not, to send for a friend, or an expensive delicacy for herself, or wine for her son, or money to buy a present, as a surprise for Natasha, for Sonya, or for Nikolay himself.

Sonya kept house, waited on her aunt, read aloud to her, bore with her caprices and her secret dislike, and helped Nikolay to conceal from the old countess their poverty-stricken position. Nikolay felt himself under a debt of gratitude to Sonya that he could never repay, for all she did for his mother; he admired her patience and devotion, but he tried to keep himself aloof from her.

In his heart he seemed to feel a sort of grudge against her for being too perfect, and for there being no fault to find with her. She had all the
good qualities for which people are valued, but little of what would have made him love her. And he felt that the more he valued her the less he loved her. He had taken her at her word when she had written to him giving him his freedom, and now he behaved with her as though what had passed between them had been long, long ago forgotten, and could never under any circumstances be renewed.

Nikolay’s position was becoming worse and worse. His hope of laying by something out of his salary proved to be an idle dream. Far from saving anything, he was even running up some small debts to satisfy his mother’s exigencies. There seemed no means of escape from his position. The idea of marrying a rich heiress, which his female relatives suggested, was repulsive to him. The only other solution of his difficulties—the death of his mother—never entered his head. He desired nothing, and hoped for nothing; and at the bottom of his heart he took a stern and gloomy satisfaction in the unrepining endurance of his position. He tried to avoid his old acquaintances, with their commiseration and their mortifying offers of assistance; shunned every sort of entertainment and amusement; and even at home did nothing but play patience with his mother, pace silently about the room, and smoke pipe after pipe. He seemed studiously to maintain in himself that gloomy temper, which alone enabled him to bear his position.

At the beginning of the winter Princess Marya arrived in Moscow. From the gossip of the town she heard of the position of the Rostovs, and of how “the son was sacrificing himself for his mother,” as the gossips said. “It is just what I expected of him,” Princess Marya said to herself, finding in it a delightful confirmation of her love for him. Remembering her intimate relations with the whole family—almost as one of themselves—she thought it her duty to call on them. But thinking of her relations with Nikolay in Voronezh, she was afraid of doing so. A few weeks after her arrival in Moscow, she did, however, make an effort, and went to see the Rostovs.

Nikolay was the first to meet her, since it was impossible to reach the countess’s room without passing through his room. Instead of the expression of delight Princess Marya had expected to see on his face at the first glance at her, he met her with a look of chilliness, stiffness, and
pride that she had never seen before. Nikolay inquired after her health, conducted her to his mother, and, after staying five minutes, went out of the room.

When Princess Marya left the countess, Nikolay again met her, and with marked formality and stiffness led her to the hall. He made no reply to her remarks about the countess’s health. “What is it to you? Leave me in peace,” his expression seemed to say.