War and Peace (68 page)

“Dear brother, and these woman’s gloves are destined for you too. Give them to the woman whom you shall honour beyond all others. That gift will be a pledge of your purity of heart to her whom you select as a worthy helpmeet in masonry.” After a brief pause, he added: “But beware, dear brother, that these gloves never deck hands that are impure.”

While the grand master uttered the last words it seemed to Pierre that he was embarrassed. Pierre was even more embarrassed; he blushed to the point of tears, as children blush, looking about him uneasily, and an awkward silence followed.

This silence was broken by one of the brothers who, leading Pierre to the rug, began reading out of a manuscript book the interpretation of all the figures delineated upon it: the sun, the moon, the hammer, the balance, the spade, the rough stone and the shaped stone, the past, the three windows, etc. Then Pierre was shown his appointed place, he was shown the signs of the lodge, told the password, and at last permitted to sit down. The grand master began reading the exhortation. The exhortation was very long, and Pierre in his joy, his emotion, and his embarrassment was hardly in a condition to understand what was read. He only grasped the last words of the exhortation, which stuck in his memory.

“In our temples we know of no distinctions,” read the grand master, “but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making any difference that may transgress against equality. Fly to the succour of a brother whoever he may be, exhort him that goeth astray, lift up him that falleth, and cherish not malice nor hatred against a brother. Be thou friendly and courteous. Kindle in all hearts the fire of virtue. Share thy happiness with thy neighbour, and never will envy trouble that pure bliss. Forgive thy enemy, revenge not thyself on him but by doing him good. Fulfilling in this wise the highest law, thou wilt regain traces of the ancient grandeur thou hadst lost,” he concluded, and getting up he embraced Pierre and kissed him.

Pierre looked round with tears of joy in his eyes, not knowing how to answer the congratulations and greetings from acquaintances with which he was surrounded. He did not recognise any acquaintances; in all these men he saw only brothers, and he burned with impatience to get to work with them. The grand master tapped with his hammer, all sat down in their places, and one began reading a sermon on the necessity of meekness.

The grand master proposed that the last duty be performed, and the great dignitary whose duty it was to collect the alms began making the round of all the brothers. Pierre would have liked to give to the list of alms all the money he had in the world, but he feared thereby to sin by pride, and only wrote down the same sum as the others.

The sitting was over, and it seemed to Pierre on returning home that he had come back from a long journey on which he had spent dozens of years, and had become utterly changed, and had renounced his old habits and manner of life.

The day after his initiation at the Lodge, Pierre was sitting at home reading a book, and trying to penetrate to the significance of the square, which symbolised by one of its sides, God, by another the moral, by the third the physical, by the fourth the nature of both mingled. Now and then he broke off from the book and the symbolic square, and in his imagination shaped his new plan of life. On the previous day he had been told at the lodge that the rumour of the duel had reached the Emperor’s ears, and that it would be more judicious for him to withdraw from Petersburg. Pierre proposed going to his estates in the south, and there occupying himself with the care of his peasants. He was joyfully dreaming of this new life when Prince Vassily suddenly walked into his room.

“
My
dear fellow, what have you been about in
Moscow
? What have you been quarrelling over with Ellen, my dear boy? You have been making a mistake,” said Prince Vassily, as he came into the room. “I have heard all about it; I can tell you for a fact that Ellen is as innocent in her conduct towards you as Christ was to the Jews.”

Pierre would have answered, but he interrupted him.

“And why didn’t you come simply and frankly to me as to a friend? I know all about it; I understand it all,” said he. “You have behaved as was proper for a man who valued his honour, too hastily, perhaps, but we won’t go into that. One thing you must think of, the position you are placing her and me in, in the eyes of society and even of the court,” he added, dropping his voice. “She is in Moscow, while you are here. Think of it, my dear boy.” He drew him down by the arm. “It’s simply a misunderstanding; I expect you feel it so yourself. Write a letter with me
now at once, and she’ll come here, and everything will be explained, or else, I tell you plainly, my dear boy, you may very easily have to suffer for it.”

Prince Vassily looked significantly at Pierre.

“I have learned from excellent sources that the Dowager Empress is taking a keen interest in the whole affair. You know she is very graciously disposed to Ellen.”

Several times Pierre had prepared himself to speak, but on one hand Prince Vassily would not let him, and on the other hand Pierre himself was loath to begin to speak in the tone of resolute refusal and denial, in which he was firmly resolved to answer his father-in-law. Moreover the words of the masonic precept: “Be thou friendly and courteous,” recurred to his mind. He blinked and blushed, got up and sank back again, trying to force himself to do what was for him the hardest thing in life—to say an unpleasant thing to a man’s face, to say what was not expected by that man, whoever he might be. He was so much in the habit of submitting to that tone of careless authority in which Prince Vassily spoke, that even now he felt incapable of resisting it. But he felt, too, that on what he said now all his future fate would depend; that it would decide whether he continued along the old way of his past life, or advanced along the new path that had been so attractively pointed out to him by the masons, and that he firmly believed would lead him to regeneration in a new life.

“Come, my dear boy,” said Prince Vassily playfully, “simply say ‘yes,’ and I’ll write on my own account to her, and we’ll kill the fatted calf.” But before Prince Vassily had finished uttering his playful words, Pierre not looking at him, but with a fury in his face that made him like his father, whispered, “Prince, I did not invite you here: go, please, go!” He leaped up and opened the door to him. “Go!” he repeated, amazed at himself and enjoying the expression of confusion and terror in the countenance of Prince Vassily.

“What’s the matter with you? are you ill?”

“Go!” the quivering voice repeated once more. And Prince Vassily had to go, without receiving a word of explanation.

A week later Pierre went away to his estates, after taking leave of his new friends, the freemasons, and leaving large sums in their hands for alms. His new brethren gave him letters for Kiev and Odessa, to masons living there, and promised to write to him and guide him in his new activity.

Pierre’s duel with Dolohov was smoothed over, and in spite of the Tsar’s severity in regard to duels at that time, neither the principals nor the seconds suffered for it. But the scandal of the duel, confirmed by Pierre’s rupture with his wife, made a great noise in society. Pierre had been looked upon with patronising condescension when he was an illegitimate son; he had been made much of and extolled for his virtues while he was the wealthiest match in the Russian empire; but after his marriage, when young ladies and their mothers had nothing to hope from him, he had fallen greatly in the opinion of society, especially as he had neither the wit nor the wish to ingratiate himself in public favour. Now the blame of the whole affair was thrown on him; it was said that he was insanely jealous, and subject to the same fits of blood-thirsty fury as his father had been. And when, after Pierre’s departure, Ellen returned to Petersburg, she was received by all her acquaintances not only cordially, but with a shade of deference that was a tribute to her distress. When the conversation touched upon her husband, Ellen assumed an expression of dignity, which her characteristic tact prompted her to adopt, though she had no conception of its significance. That expression suggested that she had resolved to bear her affliction without complaint, and that her husband was a cross God had laid upon her. Prince Vassily expressed his opinion more openly. He shrugged his shoulders when the conversation turned upon Pierre, and pointing to his forehead, said:

“Crackbrained, I always said so.”

“I used to say so even before,” Anna Pavlovna would say of Pierre, “at the time I said at once and before every one” (she insisted on her priority) “that he was an insane young man, corrupted by the dissolute ideas of the age. I used to say so at the time when every one was in such ecstasies over him; and he had only just come home from abroad, and do you remember at one of my
soirées
he thought fit to pose as a sort of Marat? And how has it ended? Even then I was against this marriage, and foretold all that has come to pass.”

Anna Pavlovna used still to give
soirées
on her free days as before,
soirées
such as only she had the gift of arranging,
soirées
at which were gathered “the cream of really good society, the flower of the intellectual essence of Petersburg society,” as Anna Pavlovna herself used to say. Besides this fine sifting of the society, Anna Pavlovna’s
soirées
were further
distinguished by some new interesting person, secured by the hostess on every occasion for the entertainment of the company. Moreover, the point on the political thermometer, at which the temperature of loyal court society stood in Petersburg, was nowhere so clearly and unmistakably marked as at these
soirées
.

Towards the end of the year 1806, when all the melancholy details of Napoleon’s destruction of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstadt, and the surrender of the greater number of the Prussian forts, had arrived, when our troops were already entering Prussia, and our second war with Napoleon was beginning, Anna Pavlovna was giving one of her
soirées
. “The cream of really good society” consisted of the fascinating and unhappy Ellen, abandoned by her husband; of Mortemart; of the fascinating Prince Ippolit, who had just come home from Vienna; of two diplomats, of the old aunt; of a young man, always referred to in that society by the designation, “a man of a great deal of merit …”; of a newly appointed maid of honour and her mother, and several other less noteworthy persons.

The novelty Anna Pavlovna was offering her guests for their entertainment that evening was Boris Drubetskoy, who had just arrived as a special messenger from the Prussian army, and was in the suite of a personage of very high rank.

What the political thermometer indicated at that
soirée
was something as follows: All the European rulers and generals may do their utmost to flatter Bonaparte with the object of causing
me
and
us
generally these annoyances and mortifications, but our opinion in regard to Bonaparte can undergo no change. We do not cease giving undisguised expression to our way of thinking on the subject, and can only say to the Prussian king and others: “So much the worse for you.” “
Tu I’as voulu, George Dandin
,” that’s all we can say. This was what the political thermometer indicated at Anna Pavlovna’s
soirée
. When Boris, who was to be offered up to the guests, came into the drawing-room, almost all the company had assembled, and the conversation, guided by Anna Pavlovna, was of our diplomatic relations with Austria, and the hope of an alliance with her.

Boris, fresh, rosy, and manlier looking, walked easily into the drawing-room, wearing the elegant uniform of an adjutant. He was duly conducted to pay his respects to the aunt, and then joined the general circle.

Anna Pavlovna gave him her shrivelled hand to kiss, introduced him
to several persons whom he did not know, and gave him a whispered description of each of them. “Prince Ippolit Kuragin, M. Krug,
chargé d’affaires
from Copenhagen, a profound intellect and simple, M. Shitov, a man of a great deal of merit …” this of the young man always so spoken of.

Thanks to the efforts of Anna Mihalovna, his own tastes and the peculiarities of his reserved character, Boris had succeeded by that time in getting into a very advantageous position in the service. He was an adjutant in the suite of a personage of very high rank, he had received a very important commission in Prussia, and had only just returned thence as a special messenger. He had completely assimilated that unwritten code which had so pleased him at Olmütz, that code in virtue of which a lieutenant may stand infinitely higher than a general, and all that is needed for success in the service is not effort, not work, not gallantry, not perseverance, but simply the art of getting on with those who have the bestowal of promotion, and he often himself marvelled at the rapidity of his own progress, and that others failed to grasp the secret of it. His whole manner of life, all his relations with his old friends, all his plans for the future were completely transformed in consequence of this discovery. He was not well off, but he spent his last copeck to be better dressed than others. He would have deprived himself of many pleasures rather than have allowed himself to drive in an inferior carriage, or to be seen in the streets of Petersburg in an old uniform. He sought the acquaintance and cultivated the friendship only of persons who were in a higher position, and could consequently be of use to him. He loved Petersburg and despised Moscow. His memories of the Rostov household and his childish passion for Natasha were distasteful to him, and he had not once been at the Rostovs’ since he had entered the army. In Anna Pavlovna’s drawing-room, his entry into which he looked upon as an important step upward in the service, he at once took his cue, and let Anna Pavlovna make the most of what interest he had to offer, while himself attentively watching every face and appraising the advantages and possibilities of intimacy with every one of the persons present. He sat on the seat indicated to him beside the fair Ellen and listened to the general conversation.